Across the reigns of Piedras Negras Rulers 1 through 7, the usual practice was to leave sculptures on view where they were dedicated. As the older sculptures remained in place, they took on new meaning with juxtapositions that created, extended, and renewed relationships across time. This took place among monuments within reigns of individual rulers and across generations. This could happen with sculptures in close juxtaposition, across a court, or across the site. Newer sculptures gave currency to the older sculptures, provided new emphases, and shed light on the past, its actors, and its material remains. The continuing presence of older sculptures gave visual, material, and ideological precedent to newer ones. Shared references among them—including citations of motifs and formats—contributed to their historical discourse.
Ruler i, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I (603-639 ce)
The monuments of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I (Ruler 1) set a template for much of the polity’s subsequent sculptural production. Over the course of 150 years, his successors emulated and responded to his stelae and their themes, placement, dedication frequency, and serialization. In the early seventh century, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I erected Stelae 25, 26, and 31 in the South Group Court. Stelae 25 and 26 were in front of Structure R-9, a 9-meter-tall pyramid on a platform on the court’s southeastern side, and Stela 31 was in front of Structures R-3 and R-4, terraced pyramids—9.4 meters and 11 meters tall, respectively—on a shared platform with a megalithic stairway on the court’s southwestern edge (Satterthwaite [1933] 2005a:18-19; [1944] 2005e:184) (figs. 3.9, 3.10, plate 8).1
Stela 25, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s first stela, commemorates the 9.8.15.0.0 (4 June 608 ce) period ending (fig. 3.10). K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I is portrayed on the front, seated in a niche, and the text recounts his accession and the celebration of ceremonial acts—including bloodletting—in the company of deities. Stela 26, his first warrior monument, dated to 9.9.15.0.0 (20 February 628 ce) and erected southwest of Stela 25, portrays him as a standing warrior with an elaborate, feathered mosaic-serpent
Headdress in Teotihuacan style (fig. 3.10). He holds a rectangular shield and a serpent staff; two bound captives—a Sak Tz’i lord and a Palenque courtier—kneel at his feet (Martin and Grube 2008:142-43). Paired in front of Structure R-9, Stelae 25 and 26 show K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I as ceremonial participant and victorious warrior.
Stela 31, another warrior monument, was dated possibly to 9.10.5.0.0 (29 December 637 ce) (Houston, Escobedo, and Webster 2008; see Maler 1901, plate XXV). The Stela 31 fragments together are 4.57 meters tall, and the monument may have measured five meters (Morley 1937-38, 3:64-65), nearly two meters taller than Stela 26—a dramatic increase in size. Stela 31 depicts K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I wearing a feathered mosaic-serpent headdress, holding a serpent staff, and lording over captives.
With Stela 26 on the court’s southeastern side and Stela 31 on the southwestern side, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s warrior stelae were set in physical relation to each other and created a tangible presence of the king-as-warrior. The space of dialogue among his monuments was thus expanded, and an observer could see the two warrior monuments and Stela 25 from the center of the court. The three monuments formed a tableau, for they faced each other and any people in the court. They also formed a series, for they were dedicated on various period endings. The trio
Figure 3.9. Location of Piedras Negras Stelae 25,
26, and 31, of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I (Ruler 1), and Stelae 32-37, of Itzam K’an Ahk I (Ruler 2). Detail, Map of Piedras Negras. Drawing by David Stuart and Ian Graham, after Parris and Proskouriakoff, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 9, pt. 1, Piedras Negras, reproduced courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. With modifications by Kevin Cain, INSIGHT.
Figure 3.10. Piedras Negras Stelae 25 and 26, monuments of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I (Ruler 1), Structure R-9. a. Stela 25, 608 ce. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Peabody ID #59-50-20/74011.1.2. Digital File #97470002. b. Stela 26, 628 ce. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Peabody ID #2004.29.7562. Digital File #98790013.
Conveyed continuity in rulership and cyclical repetition and renewal—both in their content and material presence.
Stela Bt’s placement also demonstrates the importance of siting a stela in relation to earlier monuments, for Stela 31 stood in front of Structures R-3 and R-4, where the polity’s earliest stelae—including Stela 30 from 9.5.0.0.0—also stood (Morley 1937-38, 3:35, 38). Notably, the Stela 31 text records a series of commemorations of period endings from 519 to 637 CE, including 9.4.5.0.0, 9.4.15.0.0 (reconstructed), and 9.5.0.0.0, and ends in the reign of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I, with a possible dedication date of 9.10.5.0.0 (Houston, Escobedo, and Webster 2008). Thus, Stela 31’s hieroglyphic references to the past complement its physical engagement with the past, materialized in its association with earlier monuments. Such placement of monuments near older materials would become a salient pattern at Piedras Negras, for most of the site’s later stelae were installed in front of the funerary building of the previous k’uhul ajaw (Houston, Escobedo, Child, et al. 2000:105). The physical juxtaposition created a visual and material connection to that ancestor.
The dialogue between the material remains of the past and present would become even more pronounced with the sculptures of Itzam K’an Ahk I (K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s son) and beyond. A more distinct pattern of sculptural placement was then codified, for he—and later rulers, in turn—emulated the following patterns established by K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I:
• forms, sculptural types, scenes, compositions, and imagery
• dedicating a monument for every (or nearly every) hotun
• serialization and dedication of stelae of varying but consistent types, including the niche type, warrior type, etc.
• juxtaposing these types, such that over time, the k’uhul ajaw is displayed in multiple roles on multiple monuments
• placement, particularly in the erection of monuments in front of the funerary temple of each of their predecessors.
Later rulers followed most of these patterns. Yet the directionality or orientation of the monuments generally was not copied. Instead, subsequent rulers placed their monuments across from or facing in the direction of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s sculptures. These orientations appear to have functioned to pay reverence to the early monuments and engage them in dialogue.
Ruler 2, Itzam K’an Ahk I (639-686 ce)
Between 642 and 672, Itzam K’an Ahk I (Ruler 2) erected seven stelae in front of Structure R-5, including five with images of the k’uhul ajaw and other figures (Stelae 32-35 and 37), one all-glyphic stela (Stela 36), and one columnar stela (Stela 46), in addition to one panel (Panel 4) (fig. 3.9). The R-5 pyramid is located on the northwest edge of the South Group Court, directly across from Structure R-9 and his father’s stelae (see plate 8).2
Itzam K’an Ahk I’s monuments faced and responded to K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s stelae across the court. Stela 33, Itzam K’an Ahk I’s inaugural stela, celebrated his accession
And first hotun ending in office. Like his father’s niche monument (Stela 25), Stela 33 portrays Itzam K’an Ahk I on an elevated seat, and both Stelae 25 and 33 show the k’uhul ajaw—Yo’nal Ahk I and Itzam K’an Ahk I, respectively—celebrating their first hotun ending in office. However, Stela 33 portrays the younger ruler not frontally but in profile and interacting with his mother. Many of the same elements are found on Stelae 33 and 25, but they are shifted in space (fig. 3.11). Whereas Itzam K’an Ahk I’s body is frontal, his head is turned to his right as he looks toward his mother, and his left arm is raised as an indication of this shift and a response to her presence. This change in representation undoubtedly resulted from the need to include his mother, who likely was the child’s regent (Houston, Escobedo, and Webster 2008; Martin and Grube 2008:143). She appears as both witness and active participant in the ceremony, and their interaction was favored over the image of a frontally facing king.
Stelae 25 and 33 stood across from each other, although they were offset and did not face each other directly. Nonetheless, their similar subject matter and placement connect the monuments and their embodied kings. Furthermore, the presence of Itzam K’an Ahk I’s mother on the monument’s ground line near a potential viewer would have established a relationship between the witnessing mother and a living viewer. The viewer would thereby become situated in the very space of dialogue between Stelae 33 and 25, and the living person’s presence as a witness between them might activate their dialogue.
But it is with Itzam K’an Ahk I’s next sculpture dedication that the dialogue between his stelae and his father’s stelae across the court becomes pronounced, for Itzam K’an Ahk I’s Stela 35 (9.11.10.0.0, or 20 August 662 ce) more directly engages with his father’s Stela 26 (fig. 3.12). Both Stelae 35 and 26 bear images of warrior kings with a towering headdress, rectangular shield, vertical spear or staff, and one or two kneeling captives. The similarities convey an image of continuity, repetition, and renewal over time and across generations. Stela 35 is more or less aligned with Stela 26, creating a more direct connection between them. The two monuments face each other, with K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I remaining on view and upright, as if still alive, looking toward his son. The monuments stood about sixty meters apart and would have been intervisible, each in the y-ichnal of the other. This arrangement was comparable to scenes of witnessing in pictorial narratives.
The similarities and orientations of Stelae 26 and 35 draw people into their dialogue. Yet such lived experience depends on vision, movement, and memory. One has to turn 180 degrees or walk between them, and visual memory would have been crucial in retaining what one saw on each monument. Nonetheless, their similarities would have aided image retention and operated as cues to make links across the monuments.
Five of Itzam K’an Ahk I’s monuments in front of Structure R-5 were figural (Stelae 32-35 and 37) and portrayed him over the course of his life in multiple roles, both ceremonial and bellicose (Clancy 2009:109). As a group, they present an image of continuity, cyclicality, and endurance in his reign, and their multiplicity may have generated movement across the line of stelae. Moreover, Itzam K’an Ahk I’s sculptural series emulated that of his father, which would have further strengthened the parallels among their monuments.
The two sets of stelae formed a tableau, for the monuments face each other, and a person in between could participate in the tableau. But these stelae arrangements
Figure 3.11. Piedras Negras Stelae 33 and 25, with locations, a. Stela 33, ofltzam Kan Ahk 1 (Ruler 2), 642 ce, from Structure R-5. Drawing by Mark Van Stone. Courtesy of Mark Van Stone, b. South Group. Detail, Map of Piedras Negras. Drawing by David Stuart and Ian Graham, after Parris and Proskouriakoff, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 9, pt. 1, Piedras Negras, reproduced courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. With modifications by Kevin Cain, INSIGHT, c. Stela 25, of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk 1 (Ruler 1), 608 ce, from Structure R-9. Illustration by Barbara Page from Maya History by Tatiana Proskouriakoff, edited by Rosemary A. Joyce, Copyright © 1993. By permission of the University of Texas Press.
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Figure 3.12. Piedras Negras Stelae 35 and 26, with locations, a. Stela 35, of Itzam Kan Ahk 1 (Ruler 2), 662 ce. Structure R-5. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Peabody ID #2004.24.2659. Digital File #130910008. b. South Group Court. Detail, Map of Piedras Negras. Drawing by David Stuart and Ian Graham, after Parris and Proskouriakoff, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 9, pt. 1, Piedras Negras, reproduced courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. With modifications by Kevin Cain, INSIGHT, c. Stela 26, of K’inich Yo’nal Ahk 1 (Ruler 1), 628 ce. Structure R-9. Photograph by Teobert Maler. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Peabody ID #2004.29.7562. Digital File #98790013.
Also may have functioned as series in a manner similar to the Yaxchilan lintels described earlier, in which the installation of multiple monuments expanded their chronology and narratives.
The text and image on Itzam K’an Ahk I’s Panel 4, on Structure R-5, produce historical discourse analogous to the interface of the two rulers’ monuments (fig. 3.5). Panel 4’s text, mainly retrospective, recounts the life and death of his father, K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I, who is posthumously portrayed in the image. The text ends approximately one k’atun after his father’s death, with Itzam K’an Ahk I performing a fire ceremony in his father’s funerary building, which may be Structure R-5 (Escobedo and Zamora 1999:217; 2001b:205; Houston, Escobedo, Terry, et al. 2000:10).3 By including events in the lives of father and son and narrating the fire ceremony the son performed for his father, the panel makes explicit cross-generational associations in the service of ancestor veneration and historical discourse.
These narrative links are parallel and complementary to the cross-generational connections produced by physical associations of sculptures, including the placement of Itzam K’an Ahk I’s sculptures in front of his father’ tomb, the continuing presence of Yo’nal Ahk I’s stelae across from his funerary pyramid, and the positioning of father and son’s stelae across from each other.
Needless to say, the reception of these monuments in multiples would not have been a sterile exercise of image or object comparison but instead likely occurred as part of religious performances, processions, and dances between and among monuments. The connections may have been performed through processions between the stelae clusters across the plaza on an east-west axis, analogous to the sun’s path across the sky. Living people’s experience of them further activated the space between them. For instance, ritual participants in a procession between them—perhaps during memorial rites on an anniversary of the father’s birth, accession, or death—could have transformed the intervening space into a site for the performance of ancestral memory and historical discourse.
K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I and Itzam K’an Ahk I dedicated an array of stelae on the platforms of buildings surrounding the South Group Court. The stelae around the court’s edge formed a rough semi-circle and could have been encountered by people moving in a circular progression, either counterclockwise or clockwise. A performer following K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s stelae through time, beginning with Stela 25 on the court’s southeastern side and following the stelae in their dedication order, would move clockwise around the court’s perimeter, eventually arriving at Itzam K’an Ahk I’s stelae on the northwestern side, although those stelae are not arranged chronologically. Alternatively, if the chronology were followed backward in time, the movement would have been counterclockwise. The circular movement in the South Group Court is analogous to the circumambulation of individual stelae.
The only building in the South Group Court that did not have stelae in front was Structure R-7, a range structure on the court’s northeastern edge (fig. 3.13).4 In this building, University of Pennsylvania archaeologists found what Satterthwaite (n. d., 9) called a “stone table throne,” located behind the central entrance of R-7. Its position was analogous to that of Throne 1 in the Acropolis, although the R-7 table was not carved and there was neither a back-screen nor a niche (Satterthwaite, n. d.). If this was a throne room, an enthroned ruler could look upon the court’s stelae or performances of them. Furthermore, the monuments and the ruler would have been in
Each other’s y-ichnal, each witnessing the other. Alternatively, the throne may have been the last stop in a circuit that moved around the court and then ascended the stairs.
Circumambulation and a cross-plaza east-west processional axis could have articulated with other processional forms in the South Group Court, including vertical movement up and down pyramids such as Structure R-9 (fig. 3.14). There is evidence, in fact, for a ceremonial pathway up Structure R-9: four column altars are planted in floors in a line ascending its central axis, including one in the court in front of the building, one in front of the stairway on the basal platform, one in front of the second stairway on an upper terrace, and one in the floor at the back of the shrine.
There is evidence for ceremonial activity during these altars’ dedications and use. Dedicatory caches were discovered under Column Altars 1, 2, and 3 (W Coe 1959:9697; Satterthwaite [1944] 2005e:189, 193, 195), and the altars later were used in burning
Figure 3.13. Piedras Negras South Group Court, with gray arrows marking one potential processional route. Detail, Map of Piedras Negras. Drawing by David Stuart and Ian Graham, after Parris and Proskouriakoff, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 9, pt. 1, Piedras Negras, reproduced courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. With modifications by Kevin Cain, INSIGHT.
Linton Satterthwaite, with additions by author. Courtesy of the Penn Museum, Image #194256.
Ceremonies. Column Altar 4 showed evidence of burning, and Satterthwaite ([1944] 2005e:202) suggests the bad condition of the others above the level of the floor into which they were planted indicates they too were burned. These altars create a ceremonial pathway up the building, analogous to what Rosemary Joyce (1992) suggests for Structure O-13. In such a procession, ritual participants could have made offerings at each altar on the journey up the pyramid, and the altars’ continued presence materialized and made permanent this ceremonial pathway.
Reese-Taylor (2002:143-45) has summarized some of the ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence for diversity in Maya ceremonial processions and has characterized their forms as circumambulation, center-periphery, and mountain shrine processions. Examples of diversity in twentieth-century Maya processional forms come from Zinacantan and Chamula, among other places. Evon Vogt (1976:54; 1998:2325) has described Zinacantan house dedication ceremonies that involve both counterclockwise processions around the house and processions to mountain shrines.
Gossen (1986:229-32, 246-47) mentions processions and performances of various shapes, including counterclockwise circling of the plaza and running across the plaza’s east-west axis for the Chamula Festival of Games, a new year festival of world renewal. The counterclockwise and east-west movements imitated solar circuits and were fundamental for renewing the sun and the community. These performances were the culmination of a longer series of rites that also involved pilgrimages to mountain shrines outside the ceremonial center.
Reese-Taylor has interpreted architectural configurations at Cerros and Tikal as indications of the Classic period Maya performance of multiple types of processions. In addition, she notes that in modern Maya ceremonies, such movement “is punctuated by stops to perform ritual acts at stations, specific locales along the circuit.” Likewise, she imagines performers at Classic Maya sites stopping at buildings during processions for particular rites (Reese-Taylor 2002:145).
The comparable evidence at Piedras Negras suggests that performers in the South Group Court could have integrated multiple processional forms such as circumam-bulation, east-west movement across plazas, and ascent and descent of pyramids. Furthermore, processions involving multiple sculptures and buildings could have happened in tandem with engagement with individual sculptures; the more focused interactions with stelae and altars could have been performed as pauses or nested performances amid more expansive processions in courts and plazas and across the landscape.
World History
