The archaeological site and sculptures of Piedras Negras have played an important role in scholarship on the Classic period Maya civilization. But modern understandings of this civilization, crafted in part from scholarship at Piedras Negras, have varied over the past century. By studying the differing interpretations of the site and its sculptures, we may delve not only into the accumulated knowledge about the place and its histories but also into the changing approaches to the study of the Classic period Maya.
In ruins by the ninth or tenth century ce, Piedras Negras lay abandoned for many centuries. The remains of nineteenth-century pilgrimages to the ruins by Lacandon Maya people who lived in the region are the first evidence of visitors after the Late Classic. They burned copal offerings in ceramic vessels called u lakil k’uh (called “god-pots” in English), which they left in the ruined buildings and on plazas at Piedras Negras as well as at Yaxchilan (Houston et al. 2001:84-85; Satterthwaite 1946:16-18; Stuart and Graham 2003:6).
Outsiders began to move through the region in the nineteenth century for exploration and exploitation of the jungle’s natural and cultural resources, including lumber and chicle.1 Morley (1937-38, 3:1-2) credits Emiliano Palma of Tenosique, Tabasco, who was involved in the mahogany trade, as the discoverer of the Piedras Negras ruins, stating that Palma alerted the Austrian explorer and photographer Teobert Maler to their existence in 1895. However, David Stuart and Ian Graham (2003:6-7) contradict Morley’s statement, mentioning that Juan Galindo may have made reference to the ruins decades before, in an 1833 report on the Usumacinta and Pasion rivers, and that a French tourist, Louis Chambon, visited the ruins in 1889 with a guide. In addition, they correct Morley’s account of Maler’s first visit, noting that it was not Palma but Don Transito Mejenes, a lumber agent, who showed Maler the ruins.
Maler undertook the first major documentation of the site, its buildings, and its monumental stone sculptures. Over the course of four trips from 1895 to 1899, he found and photographed Stelae 1-37, Altars 1-5, and Panels 1-2 and 4-7 (Morley 1937-38, 3:2). Maler published the photographs in his Researches in the Central Portion of the Usumatsintla Valley (1901), in which he also described the sculptures, the site layout, and the locations of the sculptures in relation to architecture.
Maler’s publication made the sculptures of Piedras Negras and other sites in the region known to a larger audience outside the Peten. In addition, his black-and-white photographs remain an essential source for the study of the sculptures, and they are the only surviving record of some sculptures that subsequently were looted
Or destroyed. Maler’s actions, nevertheless, damaged some sculptures, for he turned them over to photograph their carved surfaces and left them exposed to erosion (Mason 1934:2).
The Piedras Negras sculptures appeared in only a few publications in the first decades of the twentieth century. These included Herbert J. Spinden’s A Study of Maya Art: Its Subject Matter and Historical Development (1913), in which Spinden discussed the Piedras Negras sculptures and other Maya objects in terms of iconography and meaning. Spinden (1913:25, 56, 155, 190) made discerning observations about the sculptures and their carvings. He suggested that Maya sculptures portrayed human rulers and that the inscriptions contained historical ac-counts,2 but this hypothesis gained little traction, and scholars such as Morley and J. Eric S. Thompson explicitly denied this possibility for decades. In a later publication, Spinden identified images of warriors and miserable, bound captives in Piedras Negras sculptures such as Stela 12 and described these monuments as “memorials of conquest” (Spinden [1916] 1977:442; see also Spinden 1913:190-91) (fig. 1.1). Both Morley and Thompson rejected those interpretations as well.
Spinden’s focus was on iconography and meaning, but other early twentieth-century writers concentrated on form and aesthetics in interpreting and evaluating ancient Maya sculpture. In his 1918 Burlington Magazine essay on American archaeology, British art critic Roger Fry (1918:155, 157) advocated for looking at ancient American objects, including Piedras Negras Stela 26 and other Maya works, “seriously as works of art.” His description of these monuments as sculpture of aesthetic interest aligns with a trend Elizabeth Boone (1993:33142) characterizes as the aestheticization of pre-Columbian art. Boone presents a broad picture of the various ways that critics, collectors, curators, and modern artists transformed and aestheticized pre-Columbian objects in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Figure 1.1. Front, Piedras Negras Stela 12, limestone, 795 CE. Drawing by David Stuart, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 9, pt. 1, Piedras Negras, reproduced courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Fry (1918:155, 157) also wrote of his judgment of the superiority of Maya art and civilization to that of the later Aztec civilization, which he said had adopted “the general scheme” of the Maya civilization but was “less civilized” and “more warlike” He compared this change to that of Greece and Rome, the implication being that the earlier Maya civilization was more civilized and artistically superior, analogous to how ancient Greece was imagined, in contrast with the more barbarous and less artistically refined Roman Empire. This was a trope that authors would continue to use for decades.
After Maler’s visits to Piedras Negras, exploration of the ruins continued but was minimal, especially because of the site’s remoteness. Morley visited in 1914, and in 1921, a Carnegie Institute of Washington expedition consisting of Morley, Oliver Ricketson, and A. K. Rutherford visited Piedras Negras and discovered Stelae 38, 39, and 40 (Mason 1934:6; Morley 1937-38, 3:2; Stuart and Graham 2003:7). Morley published his photographs and drawings in The Inscriptions of Peten, his masterpiece of documentation and analysis of multiple sites in the Peten (Morley 1937-38). In this work, Morley established a chronology for the Piedras Negras sculptures that formed the basis for later epigraphic and historical study and that has held up to this day, albeit with some adjustments.
Spanish-language sources about Piedras Negras at this time were fewer, but some attention was devoted to the site. Jose Villacorta Calderon (1928, 1933), for example, wrote a couple of articles about Piedras Negras and its stelae. And in 1931, a Guatemalan law declared Piedras Negras and other archaeological sites to be “national monuments” of Guatemala (J. Lujan Munoz 1966:20).3
The first major archaeological excavations at Piedras Negras took place from 1931 to 1939. The project was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (now called the “Penn Museum”) and was directed by J. Alden Mason and Linton Satterthwaite (Mason 1935:546; Mason [1933] 2005:11). The project team conducted excavation and documentation and produced a map by Fred Parris, architectural analyses by Satterthwaite, architectural reconstructions by Tatiana Proskouriakoff, description of ceramics by Mary Butler, and documentation of excavations by Mason, Satterthwaite, Frank Cresson, and others (e. g., Butler [1935] 2005; Satterthwaite [1935] 2005b, [1936] 2005c, [1943] 2005d, [1944] 2005e, [1952] 2005f).
The Pennsylvania team also made the site and its sculptures known to an even wider audience through publication of articles in the University Museum Bulletin and the National Geographic Magazine (e. g., Baker 1936; Mason 1931, 1935; Satterthwaite 1946). Several student theses arose from this project. William S. Godfrey, Jr., joined the Penn field project in 1936, 1937, and 1939 and wrote his Harvard College undergraduate thesis in 1940 on the Piedras Negras stelae (Godfrey 1940; Weeks, Hill, and Golden 2005:386). Later, William R. Coe (1959) wrote his doctoral thesis for the University of Pennsylvania on the burials and caches of Piedras Negras, based on his analysis of the excavation notes and artifacts collected in the 1930s. Several decades later, George Holley (1983) wrote his doctoral thesis for Southern Illinois University on the site’s ceramics.
The Penn Museum project also moved monuments from the site, a topic discussed further in this book’s epilogue. It sent half to Guatemala City and half to Philadelphia (Mason 1934:2, 1935:545, 552, 568; Villacorta 1933:10-18). Some of the
Sculptures destined for the Penn Museum in Philadelphia were exhibited in New York and Chicago. For example, Panel 3 was displayed in two exhibitions in 1933: “American Sources of Modern Art” at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City and “A Century of Progress International Exposition” in Chicago (Cahill 1933; Mason 1935).
In the MOMA exhibition and catalog, the Piedras Negras sculptures were juxtaposed with works from other ancient American civilizations and with works of modern American art. Like Fry, Holger Cahill (1933), exhibition curator and acting director of MOMA, explicitly characterized the Maya sculptures as works of “art” and as evidence of the advanced level of the ancient Maya civilization and its artistic production. Cahill (1933:8-9) affirmed that the qualities of Piedras Negras Panel 3 demonstrated that ancient American art was not “primitive” but instead could be considered “art of high civilizations” (plate 5). He focused on the sculpture’s formal and aesthetic qualities, which offered an avenue for appreciating it. Moreover, Cahill criticized nineteenth-century archaeologists for not appreciating the aesthetics of these works or demonstrating their “art quality” to the public (Cahill 1933:6).
But even writers who typically addressed archaeological questions or ones relating to religious and cultural meaning or background highlighted the aesthetic characteristics and technical achievement of sculptures such as Piedras Negras Panel 3. Several were effusive about its formal and technical mastery and spoke of the panel in superlatives. J. Alden Mason, archaeologist and curator at the Penn Museum, stated that “Even when first seen, fragmentary and covered with dirt, it was recognized to be the finest known specimen of Maya art, which is tantamount to saying the finest known piece of aboriginal American art” (Mason 1935:548).
In the context of a continuing desire to situate the Maya among other world civilizations, a number of writers compared Maya sculptures to Classical Greek sculpture.4 Mason (1931:6) described Panel 3’s figural poses as “most naturalistic and Grecian in quality.” And according to Morley (1937-38, 3:229), “In balance of composition, harmony of design, interest of subject matter, brilliance of execution, it represents the supreme achievement of the American aborigine in the field of sculpture, the masterpiece of some early Maya Phidias or Praxiteles.”
These writers privileged the naturalism of ancient Maya designs, particularly in the rendering of human forms. For Mason, Morley, and Cahill, the naturalism of Maya art was in line with Classical Greek art and contrasted with what Cahill described as Aztec artists’ “tendency to the fierce, the macabre, and the terrible,” although Cahill found other qualities—such as intensity and passion—to appreciate in Aztec sculpture (Cahill 1933:13). These descriptions perpetuated the trope that the Maya were “the Greeks of the New World,” which Morley (1922:109) may have borrowed from Fry (Mary Miller, personal communication, 2010).
This emphasis on aesthetics was coupled with the suppression of evidence of warfare in order to stress the notion of the peaceful Maya, both in contrast to understandings of the Aztec civilization and akin to how Classical Greece was imagined. These ideas contributed to what would become the reigning understanding of the ancient Maya throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This model, championed especially by Morley and Thompson, espoused the idea of a peaceful Maya civilization obsessed with time and astronomy (e. g., Morley 1922:125; Thompson 1960:64; see also M. Miller 1986:7; 1993:355-56; Webster 1993). As Morley (1922:125) wrote in
1922, “the Maya inscriptions have been found to deal exclusively with the counting of time in one way or another. No grandiloquent record of earthly glory these. No bombastic chronicles of kingly pomp and pageantry, like most of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian inscriptions. On the contrary, the Maya priests would seem to have been concerned with more substantial matters, such as the observation and record of astronomical phenomena"
This idea of the Maya as a peaceful civilization preoccupied with astronomy and time would persist for decades. For instance, in The Ancient Maya, Morley (1946:209) described a “professional priesthood” for the “Old Empire” Maya, whose religion was “built around the increasing importance of astronomical manifestations and the development of the calendar, chronology, and associated deities"
World History
