The importance of objects buried in Structure O-13 comes into further focus through a closer examination of caches buried in the building, and they, in turn, shed more light on the reuse of Panel 12. The cached materials were deposited as offerings to the building and associated ancestors. As with other Classic Maya caches, they were located in significant places on the pyramid and in the shrine, particularly on the building’s central axis and beneath the shrine’s doorways, piers, and walls. In fact, their placement follows the structures of the building, its center, and its entrances. The presence, quantity, and placement of the caches, added to evidence that burning occurred in the shrine, indicate that this shrine was a highly charged ceremonial space. In addition, Miscellaneous Sculptured Stone 1 (MSS 1), a broken altar with a text commemorating K’inich Yo’nal Ahk I’s death, was cached in the O-13 shrine. The evidence suggests that the act of caching objects in the shrine functioned in multiple ways, including the shaping of historical discourse, ancestor veneration, and the sanctification of the structure.
There is ample evidence that Structure O-13 was a place of frequent and intense ceremonial activity, for the University of Pennsylvania project found numerous caches buried in the building and fire-blackening on all phases of the temple floors. William Coe (1959:79) identified fifty-six caches. The Piedras Negras Archaeological Project found one more, for a total of fifty-seven, not counting Burial 13, Itzam K’an Ahk II’s tomb (Escobedo 2004:278; Escobedo and Alvarado 1998:8; Hruby 1998:376-79). The caches contained a variety of items including flint and obsidian eccentrics, blades, and flakes; shells, stingray spines, jadeite, and other materials. Most were inside ceramic vessels, and their contents were
Similar to other caches at the site (W Coe 1959:81-88). Coe (1959:80) noted the “unprecedented cache deposition beneath the floors of the temple” and connected this to the “rapid erection of monuments,” although only three caches were beneath monuments; the rest were associated with parts of the building. Unfortunately, neither the excavations nor the excavation records were very careful, and there is little information regarding details of placement or stratigraphy for many caches (W Coe 1959:80). Nevertheless, Mason’s field notes and Coe’s analyses of the notes and artifacts contain information useful in reconstructing their basic forms and placements.
The caches were in various positions throughout the pyramid, though most were on its central axis. Three were at the pyramid’s base (in association with monumental sculptures), others were at the top of the stairway, and the majority were in and around the temple’s superstructure. The superstructure caches were buried under the shrine’s doorways, the east pier, the rear wall, and the floors of the shrine’s rooms. Some were in the front gallery and middle rooms, though the highest concentration and diversity of offerings were in the rear room; these were deposited before the last floor was sealed (W Coe 1959:81-88; Mason, n. d.a., 27/42-43).
Located on the pyramid’s central axis, at the structure’s entrances and interstices, and beneath construction elements, the caches sanctified the space, supported construction elements, and marked its ingresses. Their positions are analogous to what Shirley Boteler Mock (1998:6) summarizes as the most common places for ancient dedication and termination caches: “interstices of structures,” including stairways, axial centers, boundaries, doorways, and corners, which she characterizes as “lim-inal sites, places of transition, where contact with the Otherworld, and thus with power, was strongest.”
Structure O-13’s largest cache, found on the pyramid’s central axis, was O-13-57 (Escobedo and Alvarado 1998:7-8; Escobedo and Houston 1998:411-12; Hruby 1998:376-78). But the preponderance of cache deposition was in the O-13 shrine on the temple’s summit, where the University of Pennsylvania project uncovered numerous offerings beneath the rear room’s floor alone; they divided these into thirty-one caches numbered O-13-23 to O-13-53, although this separation was somewhat arbitrary (W Coe 1959:82-90). Mason’s field notes describe the highest concentration of offerings as being under the rear room’s floor, and he observed that the materials and soil under this floor were mixed with charcoal and soot and that the objects were calcined. The soot and calcination indicate they had been burned, and the burning was most intense in the rear room, the primary location for offering (Mason, n. d.a., 27/38, 27/42-43). There also was evidence of burning on the latest shrine floor. This burning again was concentrated in the rear room, indicating that it was a focused ceremonial activity and not a full torching of the building. In addition, burning on the floors of earlier phases indicates a lengthy span of ceremonial practice in this shrine, both during K’inich Yat Ahk Il’s reign and before, probably during the reigns of Yo’nal Ahk III and Ha’ K’in Xook.
The caches on the pyramid’s central axis and around the shrine would have sanctified and activated the building at the time of its construction and dedication. Rosemary Joyce (1992:499-501) highlights the presence of bloodletting instruments—such as stingray spines; obsidian flakes, blades, and blade fragments; and a shark tooth—in the building’s caches. She argues that the buried caches and bloodletting implements form a ceremonial pathway up the pyramid stairs that culminates in the shrine’s interior, and she suggests that “the ritual act of bloodletting implied by its instruments was the means of actively inaugurating movement through the sacred space of the temple.” Furthermore, because of the high concentration of caches in the rear room, she refers to this innermost room as the “peak of activity” and designates the MSS 1 altar “the focus of cache activity in this room” (R. Joyce 1992:499).
The 1997 and 1998 discoveries of Burial 13 and the rich O-13-57 cache at the pyramid’s base allow us to expand Joyce’s model. Their presence indicates that it was not only the shrine at the summit but also the base of the pyramid that served as anchors for this ceremonial pathway, and one or the other would have been the starting point and destination for processions along the pyramid’s central axis.
These caches, which held the material remains of ceremonies, made the O-13 ceremonial pathway material and permanent. But the memory of their presence and the indices of other ceremonial practices also may have functioned didactically by guiding ritual participants to ascend the stairway and enter the shrine to perform similar offerings. In fact, the archaeological record shows that after these interments, people did move up the stairs to perform ceremonies. Burial 13, at the base of the stairs, was reentered and burned (Escobedo 2004:278), and the floors and walls of the shrine at the pyramid’s summit were blackened with soot from fire ceremonies (Mason, n. d.a., 27/37; Satterthwaite [1933] 2005a:23). These are clear indices of humans activating the pathway up the pyramid with both movement and fire.
Yet, as noted earlier, Structure O-13 was not the first at Piedras Negras with a ceremonial pathway up the building, for the configurations of Structures R-9, R-5, and K-5 indicate that they, too, had ceremonial pathways that were both materialized in buried caches and visible altars and activated through continued ceremonial performance. Moreover, the caches buried in these buildings contained the same selection of materials as in Structure O-13, which suggests that both the contents and their placement followed a pattern. Indeed, Coe observed that for structural caches, “the pattern is obviously early and persistent” and that “votive deposits, once instituted in a typical form, tended to retain that form. Items seen in early offerings were maintained; what seems to be change is really addition” (W Coe 1959:104-106).
The conservatism of cache content and placement and the ongoing creation and use of ceremonial pathways ascending multiple rulers’ temples are analogous to the continuities in monumental sculpture at Piedras Negras, particularly in the repetition and emulation of stela, altar, and panel forms, imagery, and placement, described in chapter 3. Continuing the tradition of cache dedications and ceremonial rites was thus an additional way that Late Classic Piedras Negras rulers established and maintained links with their ancestors. Contrasting with connections displayed through monumental stone sculptures, however, the caching rites were ephemeral performances, and the cached items, when buried, were rendered invisible. Yet the inter-generational continuities are still analogous, for the similarities in both cases resulted from the performance of dedication ceremonies according to tradition. The significance of the continuities, therefore, both for the displayed sculptures and the cached items, lay not merely in the displayed products but in the acts of dedicating them during rites performed in the tradition of their ancestors. Through these practices, rulers both displayed and experienced connections with their ancestors.
Figure 4.12. Piedras Negras Miscellaneous Sculptured Stone 1, limestone, ca. 639 ce.
Figure 4.13. Artifacts recovered from excavations in and in front of Piedras Negras Structures J-3 and J-4. At top right is the portable altar that was cached with Stela 8. Courtesy of the Penn Museum, Image #20232.
A. Photograph by author. Courtesy of the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes de Guatemala and the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnologia de Guatemala.
World History
