Dumbarton Oaks duet.

Hammond, Norman

WILLIAM L. FASH & LEONARDO LOPEZ LUJAN (ed.). The art of urbanism: how Mesoamerican kingdoms represented themselves in architecture and imagery, viii+480 pages, 253 b&w & colour illustrations. 2009. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; 978-0-88402-344-9 hardback 36.95 [pounds sterling], 45 [euro] & $49.95.

JULIA GUERNSEY, JOHN E. CLARK & BARBARA ARROYO (ed.). The place of stone monuments: context, use, and meaning in Mesoamerica's Preclassic transition, xx+358 pages, 291 illustrations, 5 tables. 2010. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; 978-0-88402-364-7 hardback 44.95 [pounds sterling], 54 [euro] & $59.95.

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'Dumbarton Oaks' means different things to different people: to the historian, the famous Conversations of 1944 held there that resulted in the United Nations Charter; to the musician, Stravinsky's 'Dumbarton Oaks' Concerto in E-flat, premiered there in 1938; to the gardener, its Georgetown acres are one of the finest created landscapes in America; and to scholars it represents some of the best work in the disparate fields of Byzantine studies, garden history, and Pre-Columbian art.

Dumbarton Oaks is a Federal-era mansion in Washington, D.C., housing three research centres founded by Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss and for the past seven decades owned by Harvard University. Mr Bliss collected Pre-Columbian art, Mrs Bliss rare books on garden history, and both of them Byzantine art, when these were not fashionable fields of study. Each centre runs an annual symposium, many of them seminal: while Dumbarton Oaks was closed for renovation, including the construction of a superb new library building, the Pre-Columbian symposia were held in Peru in 2004, Mexico (2005), the Library of Congress (2006) and Guatemala (2007). These two books reflect the 2005 and 2007 meetings.

The art of urbanism

Befitting a symposium held in Mexico City on the site of the Aztec Great Temple, this volume concentrates on ritual public architecture in prehispanic central Mexico: only five of the 13 chapters deal with other topics--three on lowland Maya sites and one each on San Lorenzo and El Tajin, on the Gulf Coast. Fash and Lopez Lujan introduce the theme of 'how the royal courts of several very powerful, iconic Mesoamerican centers represented their kingdoms in architectural, iconographic, and cosmological terms' and note that current archaeological knowledge 'permits us to address the question of how ancient Mesoamerican cities defined themselves...through their built environment' (p. 1). Two emic concepts were key: altepetl, 'watery hill', the native concept of a polity in its landscape, centred on a sacred mountain; and Tollan, 'place of reeds', literally meaning verdant wetlands, metaphorically a civilised place, and especially one reflecting a glorious past. Thus Toltec Tula and Teotihuacan were both Tollans, and the concept existed among the Maya, recorded epigraphically at Tikal and Copan, though whether it was autochthonous or imported is a matter of debate.

Two chapters on the Olmec describe contrasting sites: San Lorenzo is the oldest large Olmec centre (although the temporal placement of its striking bur unstratified sculptures remains unclear), an archetypal altepetl amid the coastal swamplands (perhaps drier and more cultivable three millennia ago). Olmec imagery documents the emergent Mesoamerican cosmology of complementary earth and sky envisioned as a saurian chimaera: Anne Cyphers and Anna Di Castro note it on ceramics c.1300 BC, and on stone monuments; pottery figurines have supernatural elements deriving from the cosmic monster and may also represent ball-game players, participants in a rite that survives in Mexico to this day.

While San Lorenzo is a low, broad hill in wetlands, Chalcatzingo in the highlands of Morelos is a contrasting form of altepetl, a double sacred mountain with both rock art and freestanding sculpture in the terraced ceremonial precinct at its base dating around 900-500 BC. The best-known rock carving, 'El Rey', shows a seated figure within an ophidian 'sky-mountain cave', a portal to the under/Otherworld, from which emerge scrolls of mist to join the rain falling without. David Grove and Susan Gillespie note that he, or she, has been identified as a ruler, a deity or a conflation, and suggest instead an 'ancestral spirit'. Some of the other carvings are more obscure in their import, but overall Chalcatzingo's 'people of the mountain' cemented their relationship with their environment in both artistic and architectural creativity.

Joyce Marcus examines the slightly later mid-millennial rise of Monte Alban in Oaxaca, a strategic hilltop where three valleys join, which became a grand plaza enclosed by impressive ceremonial buildings. She argues that its Zapotec rulers saw it 'as the capital of a militaristic, expansionist state early in its history, but later as more of a religious and elite center' (p. 77) with abundant dynastic art, as, presumably, the focus of economic life shifted into the valley below under a pax zapoteca which lasted for several centuries. Marcus argues also for a master plan under which symmetry, or the appearance of it, was sought in the last centuries BC, and replicated on a smaller scale at San Jose Mogote, the earlier primate site in the Valley of Oaxaca.

In the Maya lowlands the small city of San Bartolo has Late Preclassic murals of the first century BC: they show a developed Maya art style depicting coherent narrative scenes, involving on the north wall the maize god and on the west wall veneration of the Principal Bird Deity by penis-perforation and animal sacrifice. Clear relationships exist with Olmec imagery, and with Preclassic architectural sculpture. Ending the western wall is the enthronement of a ruler (with an Ahaw glyph in an accompanying text) seated on a scaffold throne, being presented with the headdress of authority: parallels with the accession stelae of Piedras Negras nine centuries later are striking. William Saturno has penetrated further into the Pinturas pyramid at San Bartolo and found both earlier examples of mural art, and a text in Maya hieroglyphic script which again includes an early version of Ahaw, and thus takes both Maya literacy and defined rulership back to the fourth century BC. The origins of both writing and rulership must now be sought in the Middle Preclassic before 400 BC, perhaps several centuries earlier.

San Bartolo lies isolated and enveloped in the Peten rainforest: in contrast, Cholula, the subject of Gabriela Urunuela, Patricia Plunket and Amparo Robles's chapter, is covered by the colonial and modern city in the Puebla basin east of Mexico City. Founded 3000 years ago, it had by the time of the Spanish conquest become a major pilgrimage focus (compared by Gabriel de Rojas in 1581 with Rome and Mecca) with one of the largest pyramids ever raised in the New World. Cholula has been under-investigated, and sadly under-reported, in comparison with Teotihuacan, but gives us clear evidence that the latter was not the sole metropolis of Classic period central Mexico. The late Ignacio Marquina made a brave job of reconstructing what the Great Pyramid and its purlieus might have looked like based on decades of sporadic tunnelling and excavation: the present authors now suggest at least eight major construction stages for the pyramid instead of Marquina's five, beginning around the first century AD or slightly earlier and continuing for 1500 years. The universal Mesoamerican cosmic model of four world quarters and a centre seems to have informed its design, embellished with architectural sculpture and murals: the authors see it as an attempt to integrate diverse communities into one of America's first cities.

The next two papers deal with Teotihuacan: Zoltan Paulinyi argues for the presence of a Mountain God on two mural panels now in Denver and Brussels, looted before 1950, and in so doing casts doubt on the very existence of the 'Great Goddess', whom he regards as a scholarly syncretism of an array of deities. William and Barbara Fash and Alexandre Tokovinine discuss the 'House of New Fire', retrodicting Aztec ideas to explore how later cultures sought gilt by association with Teotihuacan, and also how the distant Maya related to the city. They argue that the Adosada platform attached to the front of the Pyramid of the Sun was the Wite' Naah mentioned on monuments (for example, at Copan, Tikal and Yaxchilan), where Classic Maya lords came to have their rulership validated in the centuries before the great city fell. They note the arguments that the Moon Pyramid was Teotihuacan's 'water mountain', and in the next paper Barbara Fash contends that 'early Maya rulers used water management as a key component of their core belief systems and basis for political hierarchy' (p. 246). Water is politically important in the Maya lowlands, despite their tropical location--the seasonal distribution of rainfall makes provision, storage, and in larger communities management, vital. Fash notes that water could be controlled from the level of the local residential cluster centred on a waterhole--as in the Maya highlands, where Zinacantan is the classic study--to major reservoirs like those surrounding the royal core of Tikal, and that iconography reflects the elite's channelling of water control and administration as a source of power.

Rex Koontz tackles El Tajin on the Gulf Coast, possibly intermediary between Yucatin and the highlands (or, specifically, between Chichen Itza and Tula) in the Terminal Classic, but so little published, apart from its sculptures, that accurate assessment is difficult. Koontz sticks to the sculptures, noting both a 'flowering mountain' and a drainage system that allowed deliberate flooding of the Great Xicalcoliuhqui walled enclosure: Tajin seems to have shared broader Mesoamerican concepts of landscape symbolism. Among the familiar carvings, Koontz recognises a figure he dubs 'the flying impersonator' who 'represented an elite administrative class' and was 'a key participant in ballgame decapitation sacrifice', and argues that the function of Tajin's complex narratives was to consolidate social identities into single compositions, also placing them within a broader cosmology.

Tula, the principal central highland site (apart from Cholula) for the period between Teotihuacan and Aztec Tenochtitlan, has by contrast been well-published in recent decades, and the late Alba Guadalupe Mastache, Dan Healan and Robert Cobean describe four centuries of the city's history. They argue that in Tula Grande, familiar from its massive atlantid warrior-statues, Pyramid C on the east side of the plaza was 'almost certainly the principal structure, the axis mundi' on which the site was focused; it was damaged by Aztec relic-mining, but its plan and an adosada platform on its front recall Teotihuacan, as does the presence of two principal but unequal pyramids. A new carved pillar segment from Pyramid B bears images of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, resembling those of later Aztec kings but suggesting that Toltec iconography already encodes these pervasive Mesoamerican narratives. There is an extensive discussion of recent work in Tula Chico, the northern and older monumental focus of the site between AD 650 and 850: the sequence of shifting alignments of its urban grid shows that there is even more to Tula than has so far met the eye.

Tula has been linked with Chichen Itza in legend, iconography, and imaginative interpretation for some decades. The myth of Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin decamping seawards towards Yucatan, the emphasis on Feathered Serpent imagery at Chichen, the numerous warrior images at both sites, aud, perhaps, the striking architectural parallels between Tula Pyramid B and its frontal gallery with the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen (albeit some similarities were caused by reconstruction) all underwrote a model of Toltec invasion of Yucatan and the establishment of a client kingdom. Recently the chronologies have clashed, with the rise of Chichen apparently antedating its supposed progenitor, but the resemblances remain, as does the lack of any similar Maya site. William Ringle and George Bey look at 'how foreignness was incorporated and manifested at Chichen Itza ... mediated by ... new forms of military organization' (pp. 328-9). Many of the offerings recovered from the Sacred Cenote are warrior-associated, as are murals and architectural sculpture. Where such buildings can be dated, it seems that their 'Modified Florescent' style began around AD 880, while the Puuc style at Chichen may begin in the mid-seventh century and still be going strong until the 880s, and even later at Uxmal.

A complex model of symmetry and complementarity among the warriors on sculptured piers breathes new life into what had seemed a set of identikit images. Ringle and Bey associate this with a concomitant increase in the complexity of the site's overall iconography, with an 'increased number of emblems from elsewhere in Mesoamerica and the reorganization of public space' (p. 374) reflecting a leadership shift from a ruler and his nobles (the 'divine kingship' of much Maya scholarship) to one in which the nobility were organised in military orders of Eagles and Jaguars.

The next two chapters return to the central highland Postclassic: Leonardo Lopez Lujan and his father, Alfredo Lopez Austin, examine the relationship between Tula and the later Mexica (Aztecs) of Tenochtitlan. The latter raided Tula for objects which were installed as venerated relics in the Mexica capital, transformed 'first into the successor of the legendary Tula, and later in the new projection of the an ecumenical Tollan' (p. 411); the real Tula was discarded as a now-superfluous model for Mexica validation and aggrandisement. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma contributes an essay on the configuration of the Tenochtitlan sacred precinct, where he long directed excavations at the Templo Mayor site and oversaw the development of its impressive museum, bringing the Mexica back into the heart of Mexico City. The twin temple-pyramids of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli echo, he notes, two conjoined mountains--something seen two millennia earlier at Chalcatzingo.

Finally, a coda by David Carrasco draws out three themes: the symbolism of the community centre as an imitation or renovation of an archetype; the integration of such centres with their peopled peripheries and economic support zones; and the construction and management of a symbolism of the natural landscape, especially of mountains, water, and their synergism.

The place of stone monuments

The place of stone monuments is in many ways a complementary volume: where the emphasis of The art of urbanism is on structure and symbolism in the emergent Mesoamerican urban fabric, most of the art considered being an integral part of the architecture it adorns, and with an inclination towards the Classic-Postclassic, Julia Guernsey and her colleagues focus firmly on the Preclassic. There is some overlap in regional coverage, with essays on Olmec sites at La Venta and Tres Zapotes on the Gulf Coast, but the emphasis has Morelos and Guerrero in western central Mexico, and the Pacific coast and highlands of Guatemala, receiving the most attention. The editors outline the overall theme, enlarging on areas not otherwise covered such as Oaxaca and the Preclassic Maya lowlands (though omitting an important discovery, Cival Stela 2), explaining why San Lorenzo's uncontexted Olmec monuments were not included, and advancing several original ideas.

Gerardo Gutierrez and Mary Pye look at nahual transformations in Guerrero-Morelos, concentrating on human-feline transformation figurines, particularly one from near San Pedro Aytec on which there are two personages: transformation is symbolised by inverting the figure to expose the second face and torso, carved on the lower reverse of the first.

Guadalupe Martinez Donjuan gives a succinct account of Teopantecuanitlan in Guerrero, its sunken patio containing a 'symbolic ballcourt' and bordered by sculptures of supernaturals interpreted as paired bird and jaguar masks, an early version of a Mesoamerican trope. These T-shaped slabs of 1000-700 BC she proposes as gnomons tracing the path of the sun and monitoring the agricultural calendar. An earlier phase included stone-cored jaguar sculptures cloaked in modelled clay: had the site not been carefully excavated, we might have had nothing but plain monoliths. The technical progression from modelled clay to carved stone images is important to understanding emergent Mesoamerican style. Martinez draws parallels from discoveries at Ojo de Agua (Chiapas), much later sculptures at Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza, and Zazacatla, Morelos, the subject of the next chapter.

Here, Giselle Canto Aguilar and Victor M. Castro Mendoza report recent discoveries at a riverside centre of 800-600 BC coeval with and similar in several ways to both nearby Teopanticuanitlan and the well-published Chacatzingo. Structure 1 is a lajas dry-walled building of imported blue-grey slabs laid horizontally and diagonally, retaining an earthen core and enshrining a pair of seated niched figures in Olmec style, each from a different rock source and flanking a central monolith. The authors see Structure 1 (and the larger Structure 1-A which succeeds and incorporates it) as part of a three-dimensional model of the cosmos and a sacred mountain, the niches being cave-entrances into it: there are clear parallels with the 'thrones' of La Venta and San Lorenzo on the Gulf Coast as well as with the cliff sculptures of Chalcatzingo, and closer to hand the cave art of Oxtotitlan, all developing a Middle Preclassic narrative of rulership.

Christopher Pool reports on his work at Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, also in terms of Middle Preclassic political place-making. He argues that carving and placing stone monuments in the culturally-modified landscape were consistent ideological acts; he also usefully reassesses the chronology of Tres Zapotes sculptures, contributing new insights on the dating of stelae, including both the mask panel and text of TZ Stela C.

Rebecca Gonzalez Lauck deals with the important Olmec centre of La Venta further east, where she has worked for over two decades. The site was ravaged by Mexico's oil giant PEMEX, and Gonzalez valiantly tries to reconstruct what was until half a century ago a pristine sacred landscape adorned with multiple sculptures, including colossal heads more sophisticated in design than those of Tres Zapotes (and comparable with those of San Lorenzo). La Venta also has large celtiform stelae, and Gonzalez suggests that Olmec carved celts were souvenirs, 'which might explain their presence in the far reaches of ancient Mesoamerica' (p. 136); her review of sculptural pairs, triads and ensembles in context--recognising that where they were found was only their final, not necessarily their initial disposition--is much more convincing, and a real contribution to the debate on landscape cosmology.

Michael Love takes a similar politico-ideological tack with Preclassic sculptures on the Pacific coast of Guatemala from around 900 BC, arguably the beginning of the Maya monumental tradition but with clear links west to the Gulf Coast. He notes the diversity of materials--a striking example is La Blanca Monument 3, a rammed-earth and day quatrefoil basin 'symbolic of a portal to the supernatural' dating to c. 800 BC--, the concentration of Middle Preclassic monuments in major centres, and the contrasting Late Preclassic diaspora into smaller sites, including domestic contexts, with a wide variety of forms and themes. Sculpture was socially diverse, made by rulers' attached specialists and by vernacular artisans to serve widespread religious precepts that included the veneration of natural forces and ancestors.

Christa Schieber de Lavarreda and Migud Orrego Corzo discuss the fascinating Pacific piedmont site of Takalik Abaj, where a complex sacred landscape ascends in tiered terraces spread with cobble-faced platforms. Those on Terraces 2 and 3 are bordered by a multiplicity of sculptures in a dizzying variety of formats, mixing Olmec and early Maya pieces with Pacific Coast potbelly figures; as at La Venta, the locations of monuments are those of final use, during Takalik Abaj's floruit in 200 BC-AD 200. Stylistic links run from La Venta to Kaminaljuyu, and in time from Olmec colossal heads to Classic Maya royal stelae, but there is a striking mutual absence of influence with neighbouring Izapa. Many of the 326 known monuments (140 of them carved) were deconsecrated or desecrated, reused in construction, revenerated as 'old stones' bereft of their original meaning, and in some cases still venerated today. The site also had an early ballcourt, built c. 700 BC and buried three centuries later. Discoveries continue: the striking and important Altar 48 (fig. 8.16) was found only after this paper had first been presented.

Julia Guernsey continues the Pacific Coast theme, discussing both Izapa and potbellies in the context of the relationships between water and rain gods and between public and domestic rituals, although rightly concluding that the function of potbellies remains enigmatic. Federico Fahsen provides an efficient overview of sculpture in the northern highlands of Verapaz and Quiche: El Porton and La Lagunita are the major sites, and past projects provide excellent data. Fahsen argues that El Porton Monument 1 dates to c. 200 rather than 400 BC, and for population replacement as the main cause of monumental changes (whereas at Takalik Abaj a change of control but a continuing population were proposed).

Between the Pacific Coast and the northern highlands lies the central valley of Guatemala, where Kaminaljuyu was the principal Preclassic monumental centre. A fascinating contribution by Travis Doering and Lori Collins shows how 3-D laser scanning can recover almost-obliterated detail, here from KJ Monument 65. This large slab was carved, probably at different times, on both sides: one has three enthroned lords each flanked by two kneeling men with what look like bound wrists, although the authors take up Guernsey's suggestion that this is not so, and that obeisance of noble subordinates--with elaborate individualised headdresses--rather than presentation of captives is shown. The other side has four figures, including a sky-borne ancestor, and text, but is eroded and marred by later attempts to split the slab, perhaps to make smaller stelae from it.

The final chapter by David Stuart deals with the neglected problem of plain stelae in the Maya lowlands: many scholars have suggested that they were painted, although evidence from coevally-buried (thus protected) plain monuments such as Cuello Stela 1 suggests not. Stuart argues that 'stoneness' was what mattered, and that the celtiform shape of many stelae links them with polished stone axes or jades like the Leiden Plate; the hieroglyph for these 'shiners' may be read as LEM, 'flash, shine, lightning bolt'. The use of some stelae as vehicles for royal texts and images was thus epiphenomenal to their materiality as links between earth, man, and cosmos.

Both volumes have excellent bibliographies: Fash and Lujan's follows each chapter, Guernsey et al.'s is unified at the end; I find the latter the more useful. Some papers use calibrated, others uncalibrated radiocarbon dates: the editors should have imposed uniformity to avoid the confusion that in the past has often arisen when the two are compared as equals; but overall these are splendid additions to Dumbarton Oaks' distinguished roster of publications.

Norman Hammond, Department of Archeology, Boston University, USA (Email: ndch@bu.edu)