A consideration of Maya sculptures over time—and not just at the moment of their creation—is a central concern of this chapter, for the stone monuments inevitably were transformed as the rulers they embodied died and became divine ancestors and as newer sculptures were erected in relation to old ones. Many stelae were physically changed: their eyes, noses, mouths, or any combination of the three were pecked out or broken off. These actions appear to have been relatively careful and reverential (fig. 3.1). Houston, Stuart, and Taube (Houston and Stuart 1998:88; Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006:76) suggest the pecking out of eyes on Maya sculptures prevented the sculptures from seeing by destroying “the field-of-view of a person and the vigilant gaze of a god-king.” These facial modifications, in fact, are among the evidence they marshal to contend that ancient stelae were not inert things but living embodiments of rulers. In a related argument, Bryan Just (2005:78) has observed that on Copan stelae, the noses were often destroyed; he interprets this act as the destruction of a monument’s ability to breathe and the deactivation of its role as a “vessel for the vital essence of the depicted.” Nevertheless, Just (2005:78) suggests these monuments still had a social role, potentially as “memorials to their stone protagonists, the legitimacy of the ruling lineage, and the history of the city.”
These facial modifications did not destroy the monuments, but they did signal changed circumstances. This is analogous to how Jas Elsner (2003) theorizes the destruction and fragmentation of monuments and buildings in ancient Rome and in England during the Protestant Reformation. Elsner argues that visible evidence
Figure 3.1. Rulers’ faces on Piedras Negras Stelae 26, 35, 8, and 14. a. Stela 26, detail of photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Peabody ID #2004.29.7562. Digital File #98790013. b. Stela 35. Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Inventory #60333 or Sammlung Ludwig #SL/XXXIII. Detail of photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Koln, rba_c023101. c. Stela 8, detail of photograph with combined images from Teobert Maler (1901) and Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 9, pt. 1, p. 43,
Stuart and Graham (2003), Peabody Museum Press. d. Stela 14. Penn Museum Object #L-16-382. Detail of photograph by Night Fire Films. Courtesy of Night Fire Films and the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes de Guatemala.
Of defacement, fragmentation, or recarving can signify or spur memory because viewing them inspires or produces “ ‘two-directional’ interpretation,” in which the material form points to the previous and current states of the monument—unaltered and altered—and to the historical, social, and cultural contexts surrounding both iterations. At Piedras Negras, the marks from the pecking of sculptures’ faces could have inspired two-directional interpretation and contemplation of the associated transformation of a ruler into an ancestor.
But despite these changes, at Piedras Negras it is clear that the monuments continued to be vital, current, and relevant. Indeed, they were left visible and became loci for communication with personages from the past: newer sculptures, by repeating motifs and forms from older sculptures, emulated those monuments and were oriented toward them. I contend that these relationships promoted dialogue between the monuments and stimulated the viewing of multiple sculptures together.
Such dialogues among sculptures correlate with what we know of Classic Maya ancestor veneration and how the Maya invoked tradition and links to the past for religious, political, and economic purposes, a topic Patricia McAnany (1995) has
Discussed. Classic period Maya rulers made connections to ancestors in a variety of ways. For instance, rulers used stone sculpture to create and display their familial pedigrees and associations with ancestors. In fact, hieroglyphic texts frequently included rulers’ parentage statements and juxtaposed persons and events from different moments in time. Maya rulers also chose certain dates for events and ceremonies precisely because they were anniversaries of events in predecessors’ biographies, and some ceremonies were explicitly dedicated to ancestors (Fitzsimmons 1998).
Piedras Negras rulers also made material connections with ancestors by erecting stelae at their predecessors’ funerary pyramids. The ancestor’s tomb became the seed of the new reign, and the new ruler’s sculptures sprouted from the ancestor’s burial hill. The funerary pyramid was a place where the ancestor’s presence would have been palpable, for supplicants evoked the ancestor’s memory through ceremonies, offerings, and burning at his tomb (Escobedo 2004; Fitzsimmons 1998, 2009:14269; Houston, Escobedo, Scherer, et al. 2003; Stuart 1998a:396-99).
In addition, upon their inaugurations, Classic period rulers often took names of their ancestors. Robert Carlsen and Martin Prechtel (1991:26-29) describe an analogous custom of the twentieth-century K’iche’ and Tz’utujil Maya of naming a grandchild after a grandparent, and they explain that the repeating of names relates to the rebirth or regeneration of an ancestor’s life essence in a descendant. Susan Gillespie (2002:68, 71-72) hypothesizes that Classic period Maya naming patterns indicate a comparable belief in the regeneration of the soul. Emulation of sculptural forms and images at Piedras Negras was another means of making and displaying associations across generations, and the affinities among monuments may also have implied the regeneration of souls.
The Classic Maya of the southern lowlands also made contact with ancestors by making them visible through representation. McAnany (1995:39-47, 1998), Houston and Stuart (1996), O’Neil (2005:129-82), Tate (1992:59-62, 66-67), and Taube (2004a), among others, have explored the various ways the Maya portrayed ancestors on stone sculptures. At some sites, ancestors’ images appear on sculptures in association with reigning rulers for occasions such as accessions or celebrations of period endings. Ancestors were shown either in a transformed state, often with aspects of a particular deity, or as if alive. In either case, the ancestor’s presence offered legitimacy and validation for the living ruler. On Early Classic sculptures from the Tikal region such as Tikal Stela 31, for example, an ancestor could appear as a downward-facing disembodied head—with or without a torso, and wreathed in volutes symbolizing smoke—that floats above a living ruler. Alternatively, ancestors were portrayed in cartouches signaling supernatural locations or passageways to and from other realms. At Yaxchilan, such cartouches frequently were in the upper register of stelae, which correlated with a celestial realm above the terrestrial realm and the reigning ruler (Tate 1992:98-101) (fig. 3.2).
Ancestors also were depicted in scenes as if alive and interacting with living people. These images usually portray a ruler with his parents or an earlier ruler and involve the transfer of power from one generation to another. The dynasty founder K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, for example, appears on Copan’s Altar Q more than three hundred years after his death. In the scene, he hands a fiery scepter or burning dart to the sixteenth ruler—Yax Pasaj—upon his accession; images of the fourteen men who ruled Copan in the interim surround them and extend to the altar’s
Figure 3.2. Yaxchilan Stela 10, temple side, upper portion, with the deceased parents of Bird Jaguar IV in cartouches. Detail of drawing by Carolyn Tate. Courtesy of Carolyn Tate.
Figure 3.3. West side of Copan Altar Q, limestone.
At center are the ancestor K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ and the reigning ruler Yax Pasaj. Photograph K7350 © Justin Kerr.
Other three sides (Taube 2000:274, 2004b:266-68) (fig. 3.3). Similarly, at Palenque, K’inich Janaab Pakal was posthumously portrayed on multiple monuments. He is shown participating in ceremonies with his successors up to fifty-three years after his death (M. Miller and Martin 2004:232; Stuart 2007a:227-29) (fig. 3.4). Because of the power of and respect for ancestors, living rulers depended on visible connections with esteemed ancestors to validate their own rule.
Piedras Negras does have posthumous depictions of ancestors on Panels 2, 3, 4, and 15, but these were historical scenes that portrayed events and actors from the past; thus they are comparable to a modern history painting (fig. 3.5). Yaxchilan has
Figure 3.4. Upper portion of Palenque Palace Tablet, limestone. At left, the ancestor K’inich Janaab Pakal hands a headdress to the acceding ruler, K’inich K’an Joy Chitam. Drawing by Linda Schele, © David Schele, courtesy Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., Www. famsi. org.
Figure 3.5. Posthumous depiction of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I (Ruler 1) on Piedras Negras Panel 4, limestone,
706 CE, from Structure R-5. It is a monument of his son, Itzam K’an Ahk I (Ruler 2). Photograph by author. Courtesy of the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes de Guatemala and the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnologia de Guatemala.
Analogous depictions of historical scenes; most come from the reign of Bird Jaguar IV and create a visible history of his ancestors (P. Mathews 1988:135, 155; Noble Bardsley 1994: 91; O’Neil 2005:157-82; Proskouria-koff 1963:163-64; Schele and Freidel 1990:272-76; Tate 1992:125-28, 133). Some at Yaxchilan lack explicit markers of having been created years after their given dates; the intent may have been to present them as legitimate documents or relics that were created in the past and carried authority from the past (O’Neil 2011). In contrast, the texts on the Piedras Negras panels cover long spans of time and recount events in the past but conclude in the present with living rulers performing rites at their ancestors’ funerary pyramids.
The performance of ceremonies to commemorate ancestors is a repeating theme at Piedras Negras (Fitzsimmons 1998). These ceremonies were portrayed in images and narrated in texts, and they are recognizable in the archaeological record. Piedras Negras Stela 40 shows one of these ceremonies (fig. 3.6). Dedicated in 9.15.15.0.0.0 (31 May 746 ce), Stela 40 shows Itzam K’an Ahk II making an offering of pom, or copal incense, into a hole in the earth to an ancestor in a tomb below (Hammond 1981). The ancestor appears in the form of a mummy bundle and is named as female; she may be Itzam K’an Ahk II’s mother (Stone 1989:168; Stuart, Houston, and Robertson 1999:209). The Stela 40 text makes reference to offerings to an ancestor as well (Schele and Grube 1995:105). The rites depicted in the image and narrated in the text on Stela 40 are analogous to the ones recorded on the Piedras Negras panels. These various pictorial and textual narratives are further indications of the importance of making ceremonial contact with ancestors and their material remains.
Piedras Negras has no depictions of ancestors interacting with living rulers in the manner seen at Tikal, Copan, and Palenque. The arrangements of stelae nevertheless created analogous displays of relationships among successors and their predecessors. The ancestors are physically embodied by their stelae, and in this form, they remained on view and available for interaction with other sculptures and living people. Newer stelae were juxtaposed with or oriented toward the ancestral stelae to produce cross-generational dialogue. Facing each other across physical spaces, across generations, and across time, the stelae functioned as tableaux
Figure 3.6. Piedras Negras Stela 40, limestone. Photograph by author. Courtesy of the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes de Guatemala and the Museo Nacional de Arqueologla y Etnologla de Guatemala.
Of enlivened sculptures looking toward each other, which made the ancestors and descendants materially and spiritually co-present to serve as witnesses to each other across time and space.
Words such as “emulation,” used to describe the practice of making monuments resemble those of predecessors’ through the copying of motifs, forms, or stylistic features, may imply a secular, formalistic art historical approach grounded only in production and intention. But looking at sources and influences among sculptures is only a starting point for an analysis of how visual references to other monuments may have functioned—both in stimulating viewing experiences and affecting later sculptural production. By considering the physical objects and their interrelation, we may explore possible roles of viewers in generating meaning through their interaction with objects. Indeed, the modeling of stelae after others may have had significant cultural resonance and implications for the Late Classic Maya at Piedras Negras. For instance, as described earlier, emulation or replication in images may have been another form of conveying intangible concepts of rebirth and regeneration across generations of rulers.
But even with such displays of connections, there was recognition of difference amid the sameness. First, none of the stelae were exactly the same; there were modifications and innovations with each new stela. Second, the new stelae did not replace those of the ancestors but remained in relationships with them, and each ascendant generation remained present to interact with or witness later generations. This conception of difference amid sameness is comparable to Classic period Maya rulers’ names as well, for they continued to use their pre-accession or personal names in tandem with the regnal names they adopted from their ancestors. In short, rulers and ancestors were shown to be alike but distinct, parallel, and co-present. Ancestors may have lived in the past but could occupy the present to witness their descendants. The persistence of their stelae may have been another material expression of their continuing presence.
World History
