While individual monuments at Piedras Negras reflected and shaped the spaces they occupied, they were neither isolated in space nor frozen in time. Each ruler dedicated stelae for multiple hotun and k’atun endings during his lifetime, and the stelae remained standing after a ruler died and his successors acceded to power. Over time, sculptures of previous rulers stayed current and vital, and newer sculptures of later dynasts emulated and were physically oriented toward their predecessors’ monuments. These orientations created relationships among sculptures and affected what the sculptures were, how they functioned, and how people experienced them. When multiple sculptures were clustered together, their relationships changed over time and produced new meanings beyond what individual sculptures may have conveyed. This chapter continues the discussions initiated in chapter 2 about sculptural activation and viewer experience, here focusing on relationships among sculptures and people’s experience of them in multiples.
As discussed earlier, Stuart and Houston have argued that the Classic period Maya may have thought of stelae as holding the divine essence of rulers (Stuart 1996; Houston and Stuart 1998). Adding to their hypotheses, I contend that when these sculptures were placed across from each other and in other physical orientations, they were perceived to engage with one another, with older sculptures witnessing and validating the presence and ceremonial performances of living successors and their sculptural embodiments. These associations across sculptures and generations of rulers also commemorated the past and emphasized connections among people and moments in time.
The physical relationships among sculptures also affected how people experienced them. Interrelated monuments created tableaux into which people could be situated. In addition, the site’s layout suggests that people activated the implied relationships between stelae by moving among them, in procession or otherwise, both within architectural groups and along pathways connecting the South, East, and West Plazas. Adding to chapter 2’s analyses, I propose that the viewing of Piedras Negras sculptures was demonstrably kinetic and involved individual and multiple sculptures, buildings, plazas, causeways, and other elements of the built environment.
People experiencing monuments in multiples could produce expanded narratives of memory and history with them. Most Piedras Negras stela texts are comparable in content and form, for they usually commemorate hotun endings and narrate events in their respective patrons’ lives. The stelae’s visual and physical associations established an environment in which comparable textual structures, chronologies, and narratives could be overlaid, allowing the suggestion of correlations between rulers
From different generations. These cross-sculptural narratives are analogous to texts on single sculptures—such as Altar 1—that juxtapose multiple calendrical period endings and the rulers who commemorated them.
At a more basic level, multiple monuments establish a series. With the dedication of multiple stelae in visual and physical relationships within and across reigns, the Piedras Negras Maya serialized each ruler’s image and presence. Each ruler dedicated his stelae during religious ceremonies on successive calendar endings, leading not to simple repetition but to an essential and meaningful serialization, in which the multiplicity and variation of monuments installed in physical relation to one another became an important part of their meaning. Juxtaposed with other stelae from the same ruler, they suggested renewal and continuity.
Over time, these groupings of a single ruler became parallel to—and subsumed within—the longer-term serialization of successive rulers’ monument sets. These were clustered according to reign and thereby materially displayed the continuity and cyclicality of rulership over the centuries. The repetition and clustering showed each ruler’s reign to be part of a larger structure of birth, death, and regeneration. Meaning thus was conveyed not only in the content of the carved texts or images but also in the monuments’ materiality, particularly in their multiplicity, clustering, and orientation, which together conveyed repetition, continuity, and renewal, regardless of—but actually in concert with—their images and texts. This chapter, then, addresses the materiality of the monuments in tandem with their narrations as a means to explore the relationships among monuments and rulers in the physical spaces of Late Classic Piedras Negras.
World History
