Introduction

Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture

The ancient Maya city of Piedras Negras, located on the Usumacinta River in Guatemala’s Department of the Peten, is a city now shrouded in jungle (map P.1, plate 1). It flourished between the sixth and ninth centuries CE, when a series of sacred kings—with titles of k’uhul ajaw (sacred lord) and k’in ajaw (sun lord)— ruled the polity, the name of which was Yokib (Stuart and Houston 1994:31) (fig. I. l). In addition to constructing a city of towering temples, expansive plazas,

And causeways linking architectural groups nestled in the hilly topography along the Usumacinta River, these k’uhul ajaw erected monumental stone sculptures—including stelae, altars, and panels—carved with images of rulers accompanied by family members, advisers, captives, ancestors, and deities, as well as with hieroglyphic texts.

These monuments were one of the polity’s important forms of political, spiritual, and material expression. They functioned as crucial displays of authority for the k’uhul ajaw. They were also sacred stones that may have held the vital essence of the divine rulers (Stuart 1996), and they remained as visible and material loci for reverence and memory of those rulers after they died. In addition, these stones commemorated time. Their dedications during calendar-period endings would have taken place amid grand festivities; during these rites, people would have activated the monuments by engaging with them, which may have involved unwrapping them, processing around them, and reciting their texts. Finally, they were an integral part of the city’s buildings and other architectural forms.

Yet these sculptures and their physical contexts have been disturbed, and the site now is mostly stripped of its monuments. The Maya destroyed some of the sculptures in the ninth century, and the tropical environment wreaked havoc on many others after the polity’s subsequent demise. By the time Austrian explorer Teobert Maler (1901) photographed the monuments in the 1890s, whole sculpted surfaces had eroded, their bright colors had faded, and the inserted inlays of shell, obsidian, and jade had long fallen off the sculptures. Several decades later, more than a dozen monuments were moved to museums in Guatemala and the United States (Mason 1935). Six decades after that, more than fourteen of the remaining stelae were cut to pieces by looters and taken from the site. The Piedras Negras sculptures, mostly in fragments bearing only a ruler’s face or body, a captive, or hieroglyphs, are now scattered across the globe in museums and private collections (Coggins 1969; J. Lujan

Munoz 1966; Mayer 1980:9-11; Stuart and Graham 2003; see also the epilogue). At Piedras Negras today, little is visible of the Yokib polity’s magnificent monumental sculptures.

This book focuses on the stone monuments installed at Piedras Negras during the Late Classic period (seventh to ninth centuries ce). The book’s overall goals are to examine how the Maya may have used, experienced, and interacted with the sculptures. I explore the objects, their carvings, and their physical, architectural, and archaeological contexts and consider how sculptural forms inspired interaction and movement of viewers, performers, and other ritual participants. These interpretations are set in conversation with the broader context of Late Classic Maya religion, ceremony, and politics.

The sculptures of Piedras Negras have long been important to modern studies of the Classic period Maya; in fact, they have been instrumental to scholars in the crafting of groundbreaking arguments concerning history, iconography, dynastic politics, and inter-polity interactions (e. g., Proskouriakoff 1960). This book endeavors to ask new questions about these and other ancient Maya stone sculptures, particularly concerning how they work both as physical things and as powerful, ritually animated entities that humans experience. I focus on how sculptures’ forms, compositions, and contexts invited engagement of human bodies, and I also consider how sculptures both reflected and shaped the physical contexts they inhabited. Individual sculptures, juxtapositions, groupings, and site planning are included in this investigation.

Particular deployments of figures and texts encouraged more intimate and kinetic interaction with sacred monuments and the divine figures they embodied, so that, in interacting with monuments, people interacted with the divine. For example, most Piedras Negras sculptures guide movement counterclockwise, a traditional Meso-american form of ceremonial procession, which turns looking and reading into a kinetic and religious experience. In moving around monuments, people activated the space around the sculptures, the sculptural bodies, and their own bodies.

The appearance of the carved images of rulers and other personages on sculptures also may have encouraged engagement and connections with those depicted. These could entail respect, worship, witnessing, or fear of the rulers, next to whose monumental forms a viewer would be physically overshadowed. In contrast, the physical dimensions and positioning of the subsidiary figures portrayed were closer to those of a person standing near a monument; they may have had mediating and didactic roles, showing ways of interacting with the more distant, powerful ruler.

Over time, sculptors increased the depth of relief in the stone forms and used various design techniques to create three-dimensional illusions and show the interaction between rulers and other people depicted. I contend that it was more than playfulness, artistic experimentation, or skill in creating exceptional illusions and narratives that was at stake. Instead, these strategies and techniques may have been essential to making objects that could retain rulers’ divine essences and at the same time make manifest the living qualities of animate sculptures. This book discusses theories of sculptural animation and the processes and rites through which these stones, whether because of the rock’s inherent qualities or through the work of people and divine forces, became sacred or powerful—or more sacred or powerful.

Also of import is how the placement and content of the sculptures’ carvings intersected with architectural forms, such that these objects inspired engagement with buildings and processional pathways and their ceremonially and socially charged spaces. Likewise, the structures of the built environment provided varying perspectives and pathways for the dynamic viewing and experience of sculptures. The inquiries of this book, therefore, also address the built environment of Piedras Negras and people’s use of and movement across its varied spaces.

This book considers sculptures not just at the moment of their creation but also in later years and centuries and investigates how the monuments changed as they persisted through time. Some remained in place and undamaged but underwent transformation because the historical and physical context around them changed. Others were physically altered—whether moved, broken, reset, or buried.

Evidence suggests that older sculptures were perceived to be powerful entities, and interaction with them was analogous to other practices of ancestor veneration. At Piedras Negras, sculptures of living rulers emulated monuments made by their predecessors. By emulation, I mean the practice of making monuments that resembled those of predecessors in order to establish a correspondence between the older and newer monuments—and, thereby, the past and present rulers. At Piedras Negras, sculptural emulation took place by imitating forms, compositions, motifs, costumes, or stylistic attributes. These were not exact replicas but created resemblance through visual references. At Piedras Negras, the newer sculptures were also oriented toward those of their ancestors. As discussed in chapter 3, these associations established correspondence among the monuments and spurred physical and conceptual dialogues among sculptures and the generations of rulers they embodied.

The ancestors’ monuments appear to have remained active—witnessing and providing validation for the living ruler and newer generations. Relationships between the sculptures, in concert with architectural and spatial layouts, indicate that people followed and activated the connections among these sculptures through processions and dances. Moreover, people in Late Classic Piedras Negras used these monuments to display and frame history and historical discourse, usually to demonstrate a reigning ruler’s authority, but at times to return personages from earlier times to the polity’s visible historical narratives.

Chapters 3 and 4 and the epilogue look to Maya sculptures over time, to follow the movements of objects, how they change, and how they participate in social interactions and accumulate histories from those interactions. Studying how Maya sculptures change over time articulates with studies of the life histories or biographies of objects as they move through time and as various humans interact with them (e. g., Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986). Such studies look at both objects that change and the people involved in the changes. Crucial to the analysis is the consideration that objects can accumulate histories, such that “the present significance of an object derives from the persons and events to which it is connected,” as Christopher Gosden and Yvonne Marshall (1999:170) have discussed. This book explores, therefore, not only how Maya sculptures change over time but also how they retain or accumulate histories that become integral to them. These accumulated histories may be known through memory or associated written or oral histories, or they may be materially manifest in the thing. Nevertheless, as explored in the epilogue, objects may lose histories as well.

The book deliberately takes on a relatively small subset of material, the sculpture of one Maya site over a relatively short period—only two centuries. The intention, however, is not only to shed light on the sculptures but also to test an approach through which modern researchers might address what inevitably are elusive questions about ancient experience. Granted, we cannot know how ancient Maya people actually perceived or experienced monuments or space, for experience is subjective, variable, and ephemeral. Nevertheless, we have a wide range of materials that help us reconstruct aspects of the viewing environment and experience. The sculptures themselves and their physical contexts provide some indication of how they invited interaction, and other material evidence reveals aspects of their treatment after they were made.

The sculptures’ formal and physical characteristics, including the format and composition of their carved images and texts, give clues about how people had to move in order to see or read them. Their physical contexts, both the natural landscapes and built environments that surrounded them, allow us to explore questions of vistas and visibility and to gauge how sculptures relate to or integrate with physical and social spaces. Furthermore, examination of the spatial relations among sculptures and to buildings, the landscape, and the site-plan offer indications of routes of movement, procession, and performance.

Hieroglyphic texts are also useful in providing narrations of sculptural dedications and the people who conducted them. Likewise, images portraying the ceremonial dedications of sculptures shed light on our understanding of ancient physical and conceptual interaction with them. Images and texts from a variety of media also help illuminate the sculptures’ social context in regard to Maya rulers, ancestors, and ancestor veneration. These areas of inquiry are especially important because Maya sculptures more often than not portray or embody rulers, and the sculptures usually remained on view when the rulers died, inevitably changing the monuments’ meaning and people’s experience of them.

Archaeological excavations provide additional material evidence of how the Maya treated sculptures and employed buildings. Although these, too, are subject to interpretation, the physical indices of human presence, contact, and action from the archaeological record offer glimpses into how people responded to monuments and buildings. Examination of material evidence also allows consideration of the life histories of these monuments.

Together, the investigation of images, texts, the sculptures’ visibility, architectural spaces, and the archaeological record also are useful in considering the potential social contexts of ancient Maya gatherings and performances. The built environment suggests a range of possible arenas in which sculptures were dedicated, circumambulated, or otherwise used and experienced. Colonial and modern Maya ethnographies shed further light on these inquiries because they include accounts of ceremonies and other activities analogous to what we see in the ancient material; these similarities may be the result of continuity of belief and practice, albeit with change and innovation. Although these accounts are subject to interpretation as well, their details of participants, actions, and motivations offer possibilities for filling in color, sound, motion, and other aspects of ancient ceremonies, thereby supplementing what survives from the ancient past.