Among the cached items interred in the floor of the temple’s innermost rear room was Miscellaneous Sculptured Stone 1 (MSS 1), a portable stone altar measuring 13 centimeters high and 25 centimeters in diameter (fig. 4.12). The altar was broken, and only half of it was buried in the shrine’s floor. It was found slightly off the building’s central axis and near the rear wall (W. Coe 1959:86; Morley 1937-38, 3:108). This was the place with the most caches and the highest concentration of burning, both during caching rites and later use. Unfortunately, the excavation notes are unclear as to the altar’s specific archaeological context, for the excavations were done quickly. Morley, following Mason’s suggestion, published MSS 1’s context as being below the floor, and Coe assigned it a cache number (O-13-34).9
The MSS 1 altar shares similarities with other small cylindrical stone altars that were cached with stelae, placed on central axes in rear rooms, or buried on central axes at Piedras Negras. A comparison with these altars may be useful here. Satter-thwaite divided these altars, of various sizes and shapes, into portable altars, drumshaped stones, and column altars, but all were made for intimate offerings. Small altars (Satterthwaite’s drum-shaped stones) without tenons and similar to MSS 1 in size were cached in the cists of three stelae—Stelae 8, 9, and 11—during the reigns of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II and Itzam K’an Ahk II (W Coe 1959:38; Satterthwaite [1933] 2005a:25; [1936] 2005c:150) (figs. 4.13, 4.14).
The column altars were taller and had tenons that were planted in floors. Structure R-9’s Column Altar 4, for example, measured 48 centimeters in height, with 30 centimeters exposed above the floor into which it was planted (Satterthwaite [1944] 2005e:202). Many were installed on pyramids’ central axes; they could be set in the plazas in front of a pyramid, on a terrace, in front of the shrine’s central door, or in a niche at the back of the shrine. On Structure R-9, for example, a line of altars was installed along the central axis and culminated in the shrine (Satterthwaite [1944] 2005e:189, 193, 195). On Structure K-5, altars from three building phases were placed on the central axis of three successive shrines. When each building phase was buried during the construction of the next phase, the altars were buried—along with their respective buildings—in the locations where they had been used (W. Coe 1959:93-94; Satterthwaite [1933] 2005a:24) (fig. 4.15).
It is clear these column altars were used in ceremonies, for there is evidence of localized burning on and around them. The altars in Structure K-5 were blackened, as were the floors around them (W Coe 1959:93-94; Satterthwaite [1933] 2005a:24).10 Mason notes that the K-5-2 altar was blackened and calcined mostly in the front, “indicating that fires, doubtless of a ceremonial nature, had been built at the front.” The K-5-3 altar was blackened on all sides, and the floor around it was blackened as well; for this reason Mason suggests fires were built around it (Mason, n. d.b., 27, 42, 48). In addition, the niche of the K-5-1 altar contained ashy fill from fires and broken ceramic sherds of good-quality thin black ware (Mason, n. d.b., 10-12a). These were the remains of ceremonies performed in this shrine.
These column altars were used to make and receive offerings. Houston (personal communication, 2005) hypothesizes that column altars were used for offerings to ancestors because of their association with funerary pyramids, but they are present
Figure 4.14. Piedras Negras Stela 9, with cached cylindrical stone altar visible after excavation, in situ. Altar is at lower right, next to the stela base. Courtesy of the Penn Museum, Image #15774.
On other buildings and may have been used in other kinds of offerings as well.11 The lighting of fires on and around the altars constitutes another kind of engagement with carved stones at Piedras Negras. In the case of these column altars, their importance lay in the practice of offering and ceremonial performance. Subsequently, they may have been valued even more because they had been used for ceremonies and offerings. As visible objects, they were tangible loci of connections to the divine; when buried, they may have continued to perform the offerings that were materialized in the altars’ burned and broken physical states.
MSS 1 is similar to the column altars because of its cylindrical shape and relatively small diameter. But it differs from them in several ways, including its shorter height
Figure 4.15. Column altar in niche, from Piedras Negras. Photograph ca. 1935, courtesy of the Penn Museum, Image #175887.
And lack of a tenon for planting in the ground. MSS 1 also has a text carved around its periphery (fig. 4.12). This fragmentary text records a Long Count date beginning with 9.10.6 that has been reconstructed to 9.10.6.2.1 (3 February 639 ce), K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s death date (Fitzsimmons 1998:271-72; Thompson 1944:81).12 Itzam K’an Ahk I probably commissioned this altar in commemoration of his father’s death, and the altar undoubtedly was a locus for offerings to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I. Its text once would have wrapped around the small altar in a counterclockwise circle, comparable to most monumental stelae and altars at Piedras Negras.
When first created, MSS 1 may have been placed on a pyramid’s central axis in a location analogous to those of the column altars in Structures R-9 or K-5. It would not have been set into a floor, though it could have been placed on a floor, bench, or niche. In fact, I hypothesize it was used in the shrine of Structure R-5 for offering to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I.
Itzam K’an Ahk I also commemorated his father’s death on Panel 4, with a text recounting events in K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s life, his death, and a fire ceremony Itzam K’an Ahk I performed in his father’s tomb in 658 ce, nearly a k’atun after his death (see fig. 3.5). As mentioned above, Panel 4 was placed on Structure R-5, the probable location of his father’s tomb (Houston, Escobedo, Terry, et al. 2000:10). If MSS 1 was used on Structure R-5, it is plausible that the censing rite narrated on Panel 4 took place not only in K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s tomb but also on this altar.
Regardless of where it was before, the MSS 1 altar’s final deposition was in the floor of the O-13 shrine amid an array of other cached items (W Coe 1959:80-86; Satterthwaite [1933] 2005a:23). Because it was dedicated to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s memory, the motivation for caching MSS 1 may have related to his veneration. If so, the MSS 1 altar’s transfer to and deposition in the O-13 shrine created and maintained physical and spiritual links with K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I, one of the polity’s early dynasts. This was congruent with other connections made to the polity’s past on Structure O-13, including the stela forms and orientations, the panels’ narrations, and the reuse of older sculptures.
The link to the past embodied in MSS 1 and its burial also worked in tandem with Panel 2, a visible sculpture installed on Structure O-13. The panel implicitly evoked K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I, for the seventh-century ko’haw helmet ceremony it narrated took place one k’atun after his death. Panel 2’s implicit—yet displayed—commemoration of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s death and MSS 1’s explicit—yet buried—commemoration of his death suggest that Structure O-13 was dedicated not only to Itzam K’an Ahk II and his funerary pyramid but also to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I. Structure O-13 thus was a place for commemoration of the longer history of the polity, both as narrated on its sculptures and as embodied in materials incorporated into the structure.
It was at the center of the shrine’s innermost room, a highly sacred location at one end of the ritual pathway that R. Joyce (1992) demarcated, where the eighth-century Maya buried the MSS 1 altar more than a century after it was made. The ceremonial pathway would have reached from Itzam K’an Ahk II’s tomb at the base of the O-13 pyramid to the shrine at its summit, where various ancestors, including Yat Ahk I, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I, Itzam K’an Ahk I, and Itzam K’an Ahk II were present through sculptures associated with them. Yo’nal Ahk III and Ha’ K’in Xook were present as well, for their stelae remained on the pyramid.
In its final location, MSS 1 also was an offering to the temple, akin to other foundational or dedicatory caches (see Mock 1998:10). Indeed, burying the MSS 1 altar at the center of Structure O-13 may have been part of building foundation rituals. The Classic period Maya of other polities also buried sculptures on the central axes of temples. These include Tikal Stelae 26 and 31, Pomona Stela 7, and Uaxac-tun Stela 26, among others (W. Coe 1990:475, 498; Coggins 1976:188; Garda Moll 2005:57, 127-28, 145; O’Neil 2009:125-28; 2005, chap. 5; Smith 1950:23-25, 86). These interred monuments appear to have seeded the new structures built over them.
Like the burial of MSS 1, Panel 12’s burial also may have been an offering to the building, for at least half was reused in one of the corner jambs, perhaps as a literal and symbolic support for the building and the sacred space it framed—or, as Miller (1991:10) has suggested, a metaphorical cornerstone or support. Also, centers and corners were principal loci of offerings made to dedicate houses in twentieth-century Zinacantan (Vogt 1998:21-25). Moreover, the fact that these buried sculptures came from the dynasty’s ancestors likely made them into even more powerful objects for caching and offering. The potency of the MSS 1 altar in the foundation may have been especially intense, both because of its connections to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I and Itzam K’an Ahk I—sacred ancestors by the time O-13 was built—and because of the potency the altar had accrued from ceremonies performed there.
Although I have argued in this book that visibility was an important aspect of the creation and experience of Piedras Negras sculptures, things that were not visible could still have salient presence and agency, whether through their interactions with other sculptures, when one sculpture was privileged and another was suppressed as part of reshaping a historical narrative, or in situations in which sculptures were perceived to perform through their materiality and outside of human agency and perception. Indeed, although the Piedras Negras Maya engaged with what was carved on stone sculptures, these carvings were only one aspect of their relevance. Ceremonial interaction also was fundamental. The effect of modifications imparted to the objects through ceremony may have allowed their power to endure beyond the ephemeral rite, and the ceremonies were made permanent through the materiality of their residue.
In contrast to the complex visible text and imagery on Panels 2 and 3, then, are the invisible yet present and palpable carved stones—Panel 12 and MSS 1—buried in the O-13 shrine, their presence providing different kinds of contact with the past. The broken sculptures interred in Structure O-13 continued to have material and conceptual meaning and relevance beyond their breakage and interment and were part of the physical and conceptual makeup of the building and of memory—and remembrances—of ancestors, events, buildings, and sculptures.
World History
