One concern of this book is to re-create glimpses of human reception or experience of these sculptures. But in order to address such questions, we must try to determine who their audiences were. There would have been multiple audiences with varying degrees of access to the monuments. Undoubtedly there were multiple and varied occasions of viewing and also performance, including dedications amid grand festivities and smaller rites attended by few people.
Each person’s background, level of literacy, and position in society would have influenced his or her reception of the sculptures. The question remains, who understood what of the sculptures’ texts and images? Houston and Stuart have suggested that during the Late Classic, literacy rates were relatively low.17 Nevertheless, there would have been other degrees of literacy, with some people recognizing only names, numbers, or dates, and others recognizing verbs as well as more complex meanings (Houston and Stuart 1992:591-92).
Performance or recitation may have made these texts, monuments, and histories more accessible. Cecil Brown (1991:490) has suggested that Maya monuments in public locations were “not to be read by the public but to be read to the public.” Houston and Stuart (Houston 1994:30; Houston and Stuart 1992:590-91) also emphasize models of public reading, recitation, and performance that contrast with modern notions of personal, silent reading (see also King 1994). Moreover, Houston (1997:299-301) proposes that the alternation of incompletive and completive endings on verbs in the inscriptions is suggestive of performance discourse, that “Maya texts employ shifts in aspect and deixis to grip the listener, heighten drama, and authenticate narrative through the bridging of present with past story worlds.”
We do not have written records of who had access to what parts of Maya cities, but we can use various kinds of evidence to reconstruct who might have been able to see or interact with the monuments. One strategy is to examine the spaces where the monuments stood, whether set in large, open plazas or in smaller, less accessible throne rooms or shrines, and to consider the size of these spaces and potential access to them. Portrayals that the Maya themselves made of gatherings and performances in those places can be considered in tandem with information about social structure that has been reconstructed from hieroglyphic inscriptions and ethnohistoric and ethnographic analogy. Also essential is archaeological evidence for the performance of ceremonial rites and other activities in plazas, terraces, pyramids, stairways, and shrines.
Mary Ellen Miller (1986), William Fash (1998:240-42), and Takeshi Inomata (2006a:197-98) have addressed the topic of differential sizes of spaces and access to them at Classic Maya sites such as Copan, particularly its Great Plaza versus the East Court of its Acropolis. Fash (1998:240-42) also considered the potential standing capacity for plazas and the possibility that stairways were used for seating and as stages. Following this line of inquiry, Inomata (2006b:812-14) calculated plaza sizes
In relation to the amount of space required per person to determine how many people could fit in plazas at Copan, Tikal, and Aguateca. Houston has addressed these issues for Piedras Negras, analyzed as a series of gradations of more open and closed spaces in the palace architecture. For instance, he describes how palaces such as the Piedras Negras Acropolis may reflect “minute gradations of open and closed space, leading to ever more restricted locations within the inner precincts of royal life" He ties these “open” and “closed” features to “the most important resource at court: access to the ruler” (Houston 2004:271).
Sculpted and painted depictions give an idea of what took place in, or at the edges of, ancient plazas. For example, the paintings of Bonampak Structure 1 portray elaborate dances and captive presentations on stairways. They do not show audience members, but based on the architectural forms depicted relative to the site’s actual architecture, we can hypothesize that large audiences would have gathered in Bonampak’s main plaza to witness and participate in such dances.
Evidence from colonial period and contemporary Maya performances and ceremonies augment the ancient material and pictorial evidence. Inomata (2006a:193-95) summarizes several colonial period accounts of performances and dances that took place in the plazas of Maya towns. He cites Landa’s description of a sixteenth-century Yucatec dance involving eight hundred men who danced during an entire day and even more people who supported the dancers by bringing them food and drink (Inomata 2006a: 193, citing Tozzer 1941:94). People from other places attended such dances, which also were important for diplomacy among towns. For instance, Inomata (2006a:193) makes reference to a description from the Relacion de Campocolche that describes a gathering of fifteen hundred people, including people who had traveled from other places. Maya communities in Guatemala and Mexico, including San Juan Chamula and San Lorenzo Zinacantan, continue to gather in town plazas for elaborate dances.
At Piedras Negras, large public performances would have taken place in the plazas, on the stairways and platforms of pyramids, on the wide stairway between the East and West Group Plazas, and on the megalithic stairway of the Acropolis facade. The plazas were grand, open spaces where many people—perhaps the whole city’s population—could gather for ceremonies and other performances (Houston, Escobedo, Child, et al. 2003:234; see also Inomata 2006b).18
Tabletop altars were installed in the expansive West Group Plaza and the East Group Plaza, where large groups of people may have gathered and even approached the altars. Stelae were installed in courts and plazas, on small platforms or taller terraces edging plazas, and on top of pyramids overlooking the large plazas. Stelae on high terraces, such as K’inich Yo’nal Ahk II’s stelae on the J-1 platform, and on top of pyramids, such as K’inich Yat Ahk II’s Stela 12 on Structure O-13, would have been less accessible but still visible to people standing in the plazas. From the plaza, one could see the front of these stelae with their looming, colored images of kings, though their details, backs, and texts would not have been discernible from that distance or viewpoint.
Apart from the question of who could see these monuments is the question of who could approach them. The images of witnesses on stelae—such as a ruler’s mother or wife or titled elite courtiers or visitors—looking up at a ruler performing a ceremony give us an idea of who could draw near the king, and they probably were the ones privileged enough to approach stelae as well. Yet captives who were presented
On stairways and terraces also may have come close to the monuments and their displays of earlier prisoners.
Besides stelae, other monuments were located in inaccessible places. Carved panels were found on stairways or at shrines. Because they were high on buildings and because their texts and images were smaller, they required close-up viewing most likely reserved for a small subset of the population, perhaps only the ruler, his family, courtiers, and esteemed visitors. Thrones likewise were installed in small, secluded spaces where only a few people could convene.
Images of royal court scenes in small throne rooms give indications of who had access to the throne room. Piedras Negras Panel 3, for example, shows an enthroned ruler in the company of a small group of people, including his heir, members of the court, and visitors from Yaxchilan, all gathered in an intimate space (plate 5). A number of Classic period painted vessels portray similar scenes of gatherings in small rooms, showing only a limited number of people near the k’uhul ajaw. Sarah Jackson (2009) demonstrates that such images on vessels convey the importance of proximity to the k’uhul ajaw, for those persons with elite titles generally are shown closest to him. They would have been the people who could witness a k’uhul ajaw’s ceremonial performance or present him with gifts or tribute.
Although we know there were curtains in palaces, depictions of court scenes show the curtains tied up, perhaps allowing people outside the rooms to see glimpses of the gatherings. Inomata (2006a:203) has investigated sight lines into such courtly spaces; he cites the vista from a causeway into the throne room of Aguateca Structure M7-22, which allowed visibility into the throne room even “to those who were not allowed into the Palace Group.” Certainly there were times when vision was restricted, when curtains were drawn while more restricted rites took place. But the possibility of sounds or smoke traveling beyond those curtains and people outside hearing or seeing them is certainly plausible. The fact of glimpsing or hearing may have made these ceremonies and the people who participated in them appear all the more powerful to those excluded from these spaces and ceremonies.
The performances at Piedras Negras imagined in this book, both the more secluded and the more public ones, would have been important occasions with several purposes. Indeed, considering performance is essential because the monuments function as records of actual presentations, witnessing, and performance, and they were permanent commemorations of ephemeral yet critical events. The images on them, therefore, evoke ceremonial rites and dances, and the objects themselves were physical indices of those performances. Later performances would have taken place in dialogue with the images of and objects from the earlier performances.
One purpose of performance in Maya cities would have been to create and sustain social memory and community identity through commemorative ceremonies, analogous to Paul Connerton’s theorization of the role of commemorative ceremonies in the shaping of communal memory and historical narratives (Connerton 1989:4-5, 45, 61, 70). Performances of the objects and spaces at Piedras Negras thus not only accomplished religious functions but also participated in the formation and sustenance of communal memory and identity.
Performances at Piedras Negras also may have served as displays of power. William Ringle (1999:199-200), following Victor Turner ([1969] 1995, 1974), writes of Late Preclassic Maya communal rituals as occasions for social cohesion as well as for
The display and delineation of power and hierarchy. Inomata (2006a:210-21) likewise has argued that performances in Late Classic Maya polities were performances of power, particularly “to define and maintain asymmetrical power relations.” According to Inomata, the performances involving displays for the larger community were “opportunities for elites to assert their images as moral leaders of the community,” and more restricted rites defined and affirmed “social categories and ranks through the right and duty of participation.” Matthew Looper (2009:7-9), however, urges consideration of “local definitions of power” that “may be linked to more dispersed notions of agency” as well as “locally defined sources of strength,” to which dance, as well as “dreams, trance, or ritual purity,” may provide access.
The importance of movement during performance may also be thought of in relation to Maya conceptions of the circulation of ch’ulel, or life force, through people, animals, and plants, as well as through monuments and buildings. Ringle (1999), for example, has compared the movement of people during ritual processions in Late Preclassic Maya site centers to the circulation of ch’ulel in the blood. He further proposes that it is the motion of processions that is efficacious, because it both re-creates the circulation of ch’ulel through the universe and enacts its circulation through the site (Ringle 1999:187-88, 200). Following Ringle’s model, performances at Piedras Negras may not have been simply about display or power but instead about the activation of energy through humans, animated objects, and the landscape. The monuments of Piedras Negras indeed inspire motion. The enacting of motion and the movement of ch’ulel may have been especially crucial during the renewal rites and performances held at period endings.
Finally, these monuments may have themselves been active simply through their presence and what they materialized. Indeed, one thread of this book is the investigation of the materiality of the monuments, their carvings, and their contexts. I am working with a definition of materiality that involves close attention to material qualities of things as well as to the values people attribute to materials, or as Nicholas Saunders (2001:223) concisely explains, of “matter contextualized by aesthetics and ideology.” Key to theorizations of materiality is the consideration of subject-object relations and how these may change or, as Christopher Tilley (2007:18) writes, what material “properties mean in different social and historical contexts and how they are experienced.”
In my examination of the materiality of ancient Maya sculptures, I strive to explore not only what values people gave to the material qualities of these objects but also how these objects made meaning and acted through their material qualities, whether in concert with or apart from their carved and painted images. Some aspects of monuments could not be seen, whether because they were wrapped in cloth or out of sight on the tops of pyramids, but apparently they remained meaningful (Stephen Houston, personal communication, 2009; Stuart 1996:156-60). They may have been revealed on certain occasions, such as dedications, festivals, or anniversaries, and their revelation could have been part of the performance. Alternatively, their intended audience may have been gods and ancestors (see Houston, Escobedo, and Webster 2008). Even so, their meaning and potency may have resided not in their content or its legibility but in the very presence and imputed agency of the objects and their material qualities.
World History
