Some studies of Classic period Maya cities, including Piedras Negras, have investigated site planning and architectural and sculptural alignments and vistas in relation to questions of cosmology, performance, and processions. Examining relationships among sculptures, buildings, and the natural environment is indeed crucial to the effort to reconstruct and conceptualize possible uses and experiences of sculptures and their ambient space.
Although I wrote most of this book without knowing about Horst Hartung’s work on the alignment of Piedras Negras sculptures, I subsequently discovered his 1980 and 1984 essays in which he examined the placement of Piedras Negras sculptures in relation to the site plan. Hartung found alignments among the monuments, which he then associated with Proskouriakoff’s discoveries of historical records at Piedras Negras. As I have done, Hartung sought correlations between the images and texts on monuments and their physical orientations, and he argued for direct alignments among stelae in different parts of the site. His is an important contribution because of the attempt to think about monuments spatially and connect spatial alignments to the historical accounts of the Piedras Negras dynasts (Hartung 1980:212).
However, the principal problem with his argument is that he relied on the site map and drew lines between sculptures in the form of dots on the flat plane of the twentieth-century map. Indeed, it appears that he did not consider exactly which directions the stelae carvings face or how this relates to patterns of movement, lines of vision, or barriers between them in the form of landscape or buildings.
The lines on his maps show some connections that may indeed correspond to those of lived experience. One acceptable proposition may be the line drawn across
Several rulers’ stelae in the West Group: Ruler 2’s Stela 38, Ruler 3’s Stelae 1-8, and Ruler 4’s Stela 11 (Hartung 1984:225). Nevertheless, I question whether many of the other claimed connections were functional or relevant to ancient sculptors and viewers. For instance, he connected monument alignments with building doorways and posited that they were meaningful. One example is a line crossing Stelae 26 and 31 and the central doorway of Structure R-9 in the South Group (Hartung 1980:213). But he did not take into account the direction the monuments face, nor did he consider differences in elevation of the stelae and the building or its doorway.7
In contrast, the sculptural alignments discussed in this book (detailed in chapter 3) take into account where the stelae face and how humans would have experienced them in the physical environment of the city. Some of the stelae are in physical or visual alignment. Others are linked by processional causeways; performances along them created ligatures among the monuments that were significant and meaningful in the ancient past.
My studies of these processional causeways rely on work from the late 1990s by the PNAP, specifically a report by Tomas Barrientos (1997), who makes note of the causeway linking the South Group Court to the East Group Plaza. Barrientos’s excavations in the East Group Plaza and subsequent PNAP excavations in the West Group Plaza demonstrated that the creation and elaboration of these causeways, which were made up of wide, unobstructed pathways and grand stone stairways, were part of a substantial reconfiguration of the site in the late seventh and early eighth centuries ce that Houston and Escobedo call the “Great Shift” (Houston 2004:274-76; Houston and Escobedo 2001:613-14). The excavations and extensive analysis of the data collected by the PNAP provide the tools to allow us to consider the development and use of the causeways in relation to changing patterns in the use and experience of sculptures over time.
Rosemary Joyce (1992) has also examined the topic of processions and rituals at Piedras Negras, particularly at Structure O-13, where, she argues, buried caches create a ceremonial pathway up the pyramid’s stairway that culminates in the back room of the shrine. In chapters 3 and 4, I further expand on Joyce’s model, using data from the archaeological excavations of the 1930s and the late 1990s. In addition, I examine other Piedras Negras pyramids for comparable ceremonial pathways and consider the vertical pathways in conjunction with the processional causeways that link architectural groups and sculptures.
Finally, Adam Herring (2005:188, 196-98, 202-204) also has studied the sculpture of Piedras Negras in relation to pathways and what he calls “major routes of movement” through the site, considering in particular how a human body would move through the landscape and built environment and the vistas that arise with this movement, primarily for Structure O-13 and the East Group Plaza. Some of my analyses of sculptural placement in chapter 3 echo Herring’s observations and also address how the content of the carvings articulates with those routes. I further examine how such pathways integrate with the performances that individual sculptures and the physical relationships among them inspire, arguing that the sculptures’ forms, carvings, placement, and their performance come together and are integrated in these objects and human experience of them.
Complementing this line of inquiry are studies of performance and dance in relation to architecture elsewhere in the Maya region. For example, in their analysis of
Cerros Structure 5C-2nd, Linda Schele and David Freidel (1990) proposed a specific route for a ruler or another performer to move on the temple’s stairs, terraces, and superstructure during a procession or dance; they posited an audience watching from the plaza below. Furthermore, because the walls of the superstructure require someone to move in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction to enter or leave the inner sanctum, they hypothesized that a performance involving movement in or out of this shrine was related to the sun’s apparent movement (Schele and Freidel 1990:105-11).
In addition, Kathryn Reese-Taylor (2002) examined site plans and architectural forms at Cerros, Uaxactun, and Tikal and posited various shapes of performance, including counterclockwise circumambulation of architectural complexes at these sites. She compared these shapes to the diversity of processional forms and ritual circuits of Maya dancers in multiple communities in the twentieth century.
Another related approach is that of Mary Miller (2002), who has addressed the viewers’ potential experience of rooms with painted murals in Bonampak Structure 1. By considering the paintings in relation to architecture and to hypothetical human bodies in those spaces, she considers what a person would see while moving through the space. In addition, she addresses how people might have viewed other people interacting with the paintings in the architectural space, and the possible social implications of those vistas.
Also noteworthy is Looper’s recent book, To Be Like Gods: Dance in Maya Civilization (2009), which includes several case studies of how dance and performance activated ancient Maya sculpture and architecture. Looper also offers productive, interdisciplinary investigations of ancient Maya representations and conceptions of dance. Looper’s work builds on other analyses of Maya performance, procession, and dance (e. g., Grube 1992a; Houston 2006; Inomata 2006; Looper 2001), in addition to anthropological and art historical studies of religion, ritual, and performance. These investigations, as well the current book, delve into the interrelation of human bodies with monuments, buildings, and landscapes. Such studies, concerned with human perception of objects, buildings, and space, draw implicitly or explicitly from phenomenology as it applies to the study of objects and landscapes (e. g., Looper 2009:153-54; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2003; Potts 2000).
At the same time, the spaces and places of these interactions and experiences need not be considered static or without meaning or memory. One model is Christopher Tilley’s study of the phenomenology of landscape in Neolithic southern Wales and England. Tilley (1994) proposes a consideration of “space as a medium rather than a container for action, something that is involved in action and cannot be divorced from it. As such, space does not and cannot exist apart from the events and activities within which it is implicated” (Tilley 1994:11). Similarly, Travis Stanton and Aline Magnoni (2008) have examined how Classic period Maya people used, reused, and transformed places over time. They emphasize the association among ancestors, rituals, and place in the creation and maintenance of group identity. They further contend that rituals of group identity cannot be “easily disassociated from the place” (2008:14), for the memories of these rites and other actions affect how a place is perceived and add layers of meaning to that place.
Along these lines, I examine how memory was mapped onto the landscape and across the causeways that connected the Piedras Negras architectural groups and
Monumental sculptures. The arrangement of sculptures in those groups required people to walk along the causeways to see and connect the monuments and the historical narratives inscribed on and embodied by them. But the human traversal of the causeways, plazas, and buildings in those architectural groups changed the meaning of those places, transforming them into routes of memory and performance and influencing the later creation of sculptures and buildings.
World History
