Maya matters.

Hammond, Norman

JON C. LOHSE & FRED VALDEZ, JR. (ed.). Ancient Maya Commoners. x+300 pages, 55 figures, 7 tables. 2004. Austin (TX): University of Texas Press; 0-292-70571-9 hardback $45.

JAMES E. BRADY & KEITH M. PRUFER. (ed.). In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican ritual cave use. viii+438 pages, 145 illustrations. 2005. Austin (TX): University of Texas Press; 0-292-7058-67 hardback $60.

JOHN M. WEEKS, JANE A. HILL & CHARLES GOLDEN (ed.). Piedras Negras Archaeolology, 1931-1939. Piedras Negras Preliminary Papers & Piedras Negras Archaeology: Architecture. xiii+425 pages, 200 illustrations, 84 tables. 2005. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; 1-931707-75-8 hardback $75.

GABRIELLE VAIL & ANTHONY AVENI (ed.). The Madrid Codex: new approaches to undemanding an Ancient Maya manuscript, xxvi+426 pages, 95 illustrations, 11 colour plates. 2004. Boulder (Colorado): University Press of Colorado; 0-87081-786-8 hardback $55.

KARL A. TAUBE. Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks (Pre-Colombian Art at Dumbarton Oaks 2). xviii+228 pages, 88 figures, 39 colour plates. 2004. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; 0-88402-275-7 hardback $65.

Maya archaeology is booming: not only have a series of recent major international exhibitions brought Maya treasures to a wide audience, from the Palazzo Grassi in Venice to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, each accompanied by scholarly catalogues encapsulating the latest scholarship, but fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras has added to, and in some respects profoundly changed, our knowledge and perception of this most fascinating and accomplished of Pre-Columbian cultures. Some of the greatest changes have been in our understanding of the Preclassic, the first phase of Maya civilisation, with the recognition of a distinctively Maya art style emergent from around 400 BC onwards and the realisation that the roots of this transformation from simple in complex society lie in the later Middle Preclassic between 700 and 400 BC. In parallel, the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing (now known to begin not long after 400 BC, if not earlier) has progressed apace, bringing forgotten dynasties in life and making rulers like Pakal of Palenque (AD 603-83) better-known than King Arthur.

Fieldwork in major cities (such as Piedras Negras, with its century of episodic exploration), in rural settlements with a population of scores rather than thousands, and in caves and other ritual locations has fleshed out our understanding of ancient Maya economy and society. The five books reviewed below illustrate different aspects of these advances: Ancient Maya Commoners looks to the grass roots, In the Maw of the Earth Monster in the use that these commoners, and perhaps their rulers on occasion, made of caves as entrances to the Otherworld, and Piedras Negras Archaeology 1931-1939 to the resurrection of dormant data on one of the most important western Maya kingdoms. The Madrid Codex offers a new and nuanced understanding of one of the few surviving Maya hieroglyphic books, a porthole into the ancient Maya mind and a poignant reminder of how much was in a world now lost. Finally, Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks opens another window into past ideas, in the description and analysis of the creativity of a society, which bordered the Preclassic Maya on the west and without doubt played a major part in the oikumene of the first millennium BC in which they both participated.

Maya commoners

Over a century ago, Edward Thompson, one of the pioneers of Maya archaeology (best known for his dredging operations in the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza), investigated a series of small mounds at Labna in Yucatan, concluding that they were, from their form, abundance and similarity to the substructures of contemporary Maya dwellings, the remains of houses. He studied their domestic equipment, notably the metates used to grind corn, but concluded that 'Of the home lift of the humble dwellers there is much yet to be learned' (1892: 265). Thereafter, the humbler Maya were neglected in favour of the monuments left by their ruling elites (although the study of Uaxactun in the 1930s caused a passing flash of interest) until the late Gordon R. Willey launched his Belize Valley Project in 1953 with an explicit focus on rural settlement patterns.

In the ensuing half-century there has been almost more attention paid to the remains left by the 90 or so per cent Maya commoners than to their rulers, until the recent torrent of decipherments of Maya hieroglyphs dragged the latter from prehistory into history of a sort. Settlement archaeology had the advantages of yielding a lot of information for a relatively modest outlay, of being fairly easy to do (though harder to do well) with a crew of newly-trained students, and of not involving the excavation and consequent restoration of large structures, which required strong nerves and a budget to match.

Ancient Maya Commoners reports on a number of projects on non-elite Maya of the Preclassic to Postclassic periods, at sites ranging from the Pacific coast of Guatemala north into the lowlands of the Paten and Belize (but with virtually no mention of Yucatan, and only passing reference to the 'Maya Pompeii' of Ceren in El Salvador, where commoner households have been fossilised under a blanket of volcanic ash); the book resulted from a 1999 American Anthropological Association symposium, though some of the best contributions--notably a broad survey by Nancy Goulin of how we might understand commoner households from their relict structures and spaces, and a valedictory retrospective by Evun Z. Vogt, Jr., on his influential Chiapas Project and Maya life in Zinacantan half a century ago--were solicited afterwards. The editors provide a brief but useful introduction, and Joyce Marcus a summary conclusion contrasting stereotypes about Maya commoners with the revealed reality.

Most of the chapters are succinct accounts of fieldwork, with useful bibliographies. Terry Powis shows that in the Preclassic at Lamanai there was little variability in pottery suites between commoner and elite households (as defined by dwelling size and elaboration, the usual method in the absence of anything more explicitly useful). Barbara Arroyo documents shifts in house form through time on the Pacific coast, with a good summary of several recent projects, while Nicholas Dunning emphasises that most Maya homesteads were farmsteads and Jon Lohse demonstrates the variety of these within the purlieus of the Late Classic centre of Dos Hombres in north-eastern Belize. Jason Yaeger and Cynthia Robin do the same with two sites close to Xunantunich in the Belize Valley, while Takeshi Inomata goes into the question of mobility between loci, based on his work at the violently-destroyed city of Aguateca in the Petexbatun. Marilyn Masson and Carlos Peraza Lope look at Postclassic society, emphasising how elites 'elevated themselves through a bottleneck of privileged knowledge and information' (p. 215), allowing them to demand tribute and support from their commoner neighbours or subjects.

Maya commoners themselves were a kind of default category: from Spanish sources we are aware that the nobility, the almehenob able to trace their genealogies bilaterally, were a self-recognised elite, with all others being mazehualob. Within both dames there were economic and social gradations, however, as Inomata, Masson and Peraza Lope, and Marcus emphasise. The acquisition of material goods, through commerce perhaps more than successful farming, could blur, in the partial record of archaeology, distinctions once clear within the living society: the emergence of a merchant class in the Postclassic, as royal control of economic aspects slipped away, or the simple burgeoning of a market-based economy, could equally have underpinned what appears to us as a Maya middle dam. Formal dames, emically defined elites in historical records (and thus dimly beginning to emerge from the Classic texts) are, as Masson and Peraza Lope note 'a fundamentally different category than economic status groups that are materially expressed in the archaeological record' (p. 198). The upward osmosis of social entrepreneurs is universal, as notable in the contemporary rise of figures like David Frost as in the novels of Anthony Powell. The Maya must have had such people, but we will never know their names or how they rose.

Mesoamerican ritual caves

Until fairly recently, caves were considered a marginal feature of the Mesoamerican cultural landscape, in spite of the various origin myths in which ancestors emerged from them. A pioneering essay by Eric Thompson (1959) suggesting their ritual importance in Maya culture was undervalued, and it was only with Doris Heyden's (1975) paper on the partly-artificial cavern beneath the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan and the republication of Thompson's piece in revised form that same year as an introduction to the reprinting of Henry Mercers neglected monograph on the hill-caves of Yucatan that both Mayanists and Central Mexican specialists woke up to the significance that caves had and have for the native peoples of Mesoamerica.

Since then there have been numerous studies by numerous scholars. Most prominent amongst them is Jim Brady, who, with Keith Prufer, was among the organisers of and participants in two symposia, in 1994 and 1997: this volume is the outcome, divided into sections on Central Mexico (three papers), Oaxaca (two), and the Maya Area (nine). Brady and Prufer introduce and conclude the volume. Each paper has a separate bibliography, with some redundancy: a unified list of references would have been useful. The editors have, helpfully, included two papers previously published but difficult to find: Doris Heyden's 1976 'Los ritos de paso en las Cuevas' and Jarslaw Petryshyn's 1969 'Ein Lakandonischer Gottesdienst ...', both here in English translation, and Petryshyn's ably edited and annotated by Pierre Robert Colas. Given the rarity of Thompson's 1959 paper, it would have been good to have the original of that here, too. The introduction notes the initial phase of exploration prior to World War I and subsequent lapse of interest until Thompson's 1959 essay launched an era of interpretation and synthesis, followed by the establishment of 'a self-conscious subdiscipline focused on cave utilization ... in the Maya area' (p. 1) after 1985. Most important studies are listed, although David Pendergast's monographs on a series of earlier cave investigations in the Maya Mountains are not.

One signal advance encapsulated in this book is the integration of ethnographic with archaeological evidence: the papers by Heyden, Sandstrom (his account of a Nahua-Otomi pilgrimage to a mountaintop cave shrine in northern Veracruz), Adams and Brady (on pilgrimage networks of the Q'eqchi' in highland Guatemala) and Petryshyn show the value of anthropological data in illuminating archaeological context. One point worth noting is that caves are and always were integrated into sacred landscapes and 'must clearly be considered part of the same settlement system as the open residential and ceremonial sites their users also frequented' (Hammond 1981: 177). A paper by Vogt and Stuart corroborates this; the latter also notes that the commonly-used glyph T598/599 reads as ch'een, a cave or subterranean water-source. This duality is illustrated by Rissolo's chapter on the collection of zuhuy ha, 'virgin water' from the Yalahau caves in north-eastern Yucatan, and by Brown's demonstration that sinkholes or cenotes at the Postclassic city of Mayapan were both deliberately included within and excluded from the area defined by the boundary wall; the extramural cenote is locally of had repute even today.

Of the archaeological papers, the two on Oaxaca add to our factual knowledge but not greatly to our understanding, although Rincon Mautner's account of the great Puente Natural tunnel and its images is fascinating. Given Prufer's focus in Belize, the three chapters on cave research in the Maya Mountains--one of the most important areas of karst caverns in the Americas--are expected, but welcome in their careful detail. The setting of upright stones, sometimes imported, inside caves reported by Awe, Griffith and Gibbs, and the construction of artificial platforms at Mayehal Xheton (noted by Prufer) and Naj Tunich (where Stone suggests the detectability of cognitive maps, similar to those Moyes proposes for Actun Tunichil Muknal) show how the built environment of the Preclassic and Classic Maya penetrated and domesticated the wild natural world of the caves, domus entering agrios. We know that deity figures were created both in deep caves--they were drawn on the walls of Naj Tunich--and in the atria of rock shelters, like the Chaak at La Pailita in the northwestern Peten, now tragically destroyed. These caves were temples--the La Pailita figure brings to mind the supersized ruler effigy inside Yaxchilan Structure 33--and this book emphasises both that the Maya did not have our distinction between the natural and the built environment, and the importance of chthonic forces in Maya religion. It is a pity that the ideas generated by cave studies, notably of cave art, in other parts of the world receive no attention: Lemi-Gourhan's or Lewis-Williams' ideas might have provoked useful thought and discussion among Mesoamericanists.

Piedras Negras

Piedras Negras, the 'place of the black stones' from the rocks along the Usumacinta River canyon where this important Maya city lies, was named by Ludovic Chambon in 1892. Two years later it was brought to the attention of the great Austrian explorer of Maya ruins, Teobert Maler, whose initial reconnaissance and photographs were followed up by Sylvanus Morley after World War I. While the site's buildings were only modestly impressive, the long series of carved stelae was spectacular, and, unusually, dedicated at hotun (five-year) intervals rather than the 20-year katun spacing favoured by most Maya dynasties. This provided a much more detailed set of records for what we now know as the Aac or Turtle dynasty, and in 1960 Tatiana Proskouriakoff, in what may have been the single most influential paper in Maya archaeology of the last century, was able to construe the patterns of dates on the Piedras Negras monuments to suggest that they recorded real history, and not the cosmic speculations mooted by Eric Thompson and Morley.

Proskouriakoff was paying attention to the monuments because she had worked at the site in the 1930s, as part of a team from the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Launched by J. Alden Mason in the hope of bringing hack monuments for the museum's galleries, and directed for most of the time by Linton Satterthwaite, Jr., the project explored mainly the monumental architecture of Piedras Negras, including a spectacular set of royal pib na sweathaths. While aspects of the work were reported in journal articles and dissertations (notably that by William R. Coe [1959] on caches and burials), the substantive excavation reports were published in only an extremely limited edition of five Preliminary Reports (an edition of 20 copies!) and Piedras Negras Architecture (six fascicles, one left unpublished).

These are among the greatest rarities in the twentieth-century Maya bibliography: the present volume finally brings them all together between elegant hard covers; appendices include three unpublished papers by Frank Cresson, Jr., on ceramics and thrones, and a useful list of project personnel for 1931-1939. The succinct introduction, excellent bibliography and exemplary index make this a truly useful volume, which will (alongside the reports on the recent work by Hector Escobedo and Stephen Houston) finally allow Piedras Negras to be assessed alongside other Maya dries of similar Classic period stature (and one hopes that the Mexican authorities will be sparked into producing something similar for Piedras Negras' upstream neighbour and rival, Yaxchilan, where important investigations languish unpublished). Finally, it is a pleasure to note that the book was published to celebrate Jeremy A. Sabloff's decade as Director of the University Museum: I gather that when asked about a suitable commemorative gift, this was his suggestion.

The Madrid Codex

Three prehispanic Maya codices, or screenfold books written on hark-paper with a thin stucco surface, have been known since the nineteenth century to have survived the Spanish holocaust of Postclassic Maya intellectual culture. They are named after Dresden, Paris and Madrid, the cities where they accidentally ended up and are now preserved. A fourth codex, known as the Grolier, from the bibliophiles' dub in New York where it was first revealed a generation ago but now in Mexico City, was first condemned as a fake, then plausibly argued to be genuine, and is now again under suspicion. The champion of the Grolier Codex, Professor Michad Coe of Yale, also, ironically, became one of the first to doubt the prehispanic date of the Madrid Codex, arguing that a piece of paper with Spanish writing incorporated into the document's structure showed it to be a post-Conquest redaction of pre-Columbian data, written in the Peten refuge of the Itza at Tayasal.

The present volume is in many ways a response to that attack, although after the detailed studies of the Dresden Codex by Eric Thompson (1972) and the Paris Codex by Bruce Love (1994), the Madrid was due for serious scrutiny in its turn. Unlike those two studies, this one is a barrage of scholarship from leading scholars in everything from iconography to archaeoastronomy: Gabrielle Vail, especially, Victoria Bricker and Anthony Aveni, who organised the two Tulane symposia reported here, deserve our gratitude. Harvey Bricker briskly demolishes Coe's case, showing that the paper was a later patch (and that Coe, working from a facsimile, had ignored Ferdinand Anders' prior observation of this point); John Chuchiak then shows that the patch itself is part of a Papal Bull of the Santa Cruzada, probably written by one Gregorio de Aguilar and applied to the codex in or around Chancenote in north-eastern Yucatan between 1575 and 1610 in an act of syncretic sacralisation. The codex itself may have been given to King Philip III in Estremadura in 1619. Merideth Paxton reconsiders the Tayasal provenance in the light of the post-Contact material culture there and that illustrated in the Madrid Codex, and concludes that the evidence points to a prehispanic Yucatecan origin.

A series of papers by Vail, Aveni and others consider the calendrics encoded in the Madrid document, arguing that the almanacs fit a 52-year Calendar Round rather than shorter repeating cycles; although these include information dating from as far back as the eighth century, they can be fitted to specific dates within the latter part of the fifteenth century by using the seasonal rain and maize-planting information that anchors the time-span of each almanac. Some of the almanacs can also be correlated with those of the Borgia Group of Central Mexican codices, notably the Borgia and Vaticanus B in the Vatican and the Codex Fejevary-Mayer in Liverpool, demonstrating not only Maya absorption of highland calendric practices, but the extent to which Late Postclassic Mesoamerica was an intellectual oikumene.

This fascinating set of parallels between highland and lowland civilizations is summarized by John Pohl, who also notes that the Mixtec genealogical codices of Oaxaca (exemplified by the Codex Zouche-Nuttall in the British Museum) constitute a coeval, geographically adjacent, but distinctive tradition to that of Puebla-Tlaxcala where the Borgia codices originated. Observing the striking artistic parallels at Chichen Itza and Tula in the ninth to eleventh centuries to those between Mayapan and the Mixteca-Puebla zone in the thirteenth and fourteenth, Pohl argues that the extended contacts between Central Mexico and the Maya Area owe more to merchants than to militarism. The Madrid Codex, on the basis of the impressive scholarship in every chapter of this book, now takes its place as a crucial document of this cultural ferment and fusion.

Olmec art

Dumbarton Oaks, the Washington D.C. mansion of Robert Woods Bliss, Jr., saw both the birth of the United Nations and the premiere of a famous work by Stravinsky; today, however, it is noted for Bliss's legacy to Harvard, the tripartite research library and collections in Byzantine Studies, Garden History, and Pre-Columbian Studies. His Pre-Columbian collection, built up over half a century from 1914 on, includes chefs d'oeuvre from most of the high cultures of the Americas, all lacking archaeological context and most acquired on the art market before looting and smuggling became unacceptable; similar purchases have, however, been made since.

Bliss had a connoisseur's eye, and was one of the first to appreciate Olmec art. The Olmec, sometimes dubbed 'America's first civilisation', flourished along the Gulf Coast of Mexico in the first half of the first millennium BC, with San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan and La Venta among the best-known rites, remarked for their massive sculptures and especially for the series of colossal heads plausibly identified as ruler portraits. The Olmec also had portable art, including highly-decorated pottery vessels and carved jades, on which a separate though overlapping iconography presented a coherent, albeit imperfectly understood, world-view. Karl Tanbe reviews what we know of Olmec ideas in describing the 40 jade pieces at Dumbarton Oaks, seeing adaptation of two basic forms--the celt and the fetishised maize cob--as the basis of much of what he identifies as an imagery of abundance and wealth. While this imagery is not confined to the Gulf Coast Olmec, but uses elements found in several other areas of southern Mesoamerica from Guerrero eastwards to the Maya Area, its most spectacular manifestations are from (or reputedly from) the Gulf Coast region. This Middle Preclassic iconography underlies subsequent developments in the Late Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic periods: a notable recent discovery; the Maya murals of the first century BC from San Bartolo (in the study of which Taube has assisted) show how rapidly it developed into a distinctively Maya style. In this catalogue misonne, Taube examines each piece with a scholar's eye: his descriptions are clear and informative, although his editors have not noticed several confusing errors (and various misspellings). Thus Figures 11f and 12f are identical--but with different captions--and it looks as though Figure 65 (c) VIII and XIII have got mixed up. On page 153 the left earlobe of the figure (not the right as stated) is damaged--or has the picture been reversed? The (now-destroyed) rock-earring at Xoc in Chiapas is not a 'stela' (p. 44), and the scholar Kent Reilly is misnamed 'Frank Reilly' (p. 72). In the appendix, the recent and important discovery of the source of the blue jade prized by the Olmec and Middle Preclassic Maya is not credited, as it should be, to the French geologist Francois Gendron (2002) in 1996, but to a later American team with which Taube has worked.

Overall, these books illustrate the continuing ferment in an area of Mesoamerican archaeology which has ceased to be insular and introspective and which has for many years now plugged itself into a wider realm of scholarship. The sheer quantity of information makes it difficult for any one person to excel in the whole of Mesoamerica any longer: scholars tend to concentrate on the Maya Area, Oaxaca, Central Mexico, or the Gulf Coast, often on a particular period--Preclassic, Classic, or Postclassic- and on a theme such as settlement pattern, subsistence economy, iconography, epigraphy, or artefact studies. Each of these volumes has something to offer to those in other chambers of the mansion of Mesoamerican scholarship.

References

Coe, W.R. 1959. Piedras Negras archaeology; artifacts, caches, and burials. Philadelphia (PA): University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.

GENDRON, F., D.C. SMITH & A. GENDRON-BADOU. 2002. Discovery of Jadeite-Jade in Guatemala confirmed by non-destructive Raman Spectroscopy. Journal of Archaeological Science 29: 837-51.

HAMMOND, N. 1981. Settlement Patterns in Belize, in W. Ashmore (ed.) Lowland Maya settlement patterns: 157-86. Albuquerque (NM): University of New Mexico Press.

HEYDEN, D. 1975. An interpretation of the cave underneath the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico. American Antiquity 40: 131-47.

LOVE, B. 1994. The Paris codex: handbook for a Maya Priest. Austin (TX): University of Texas Press.

PROSKOURIAKOFF, T. 1960. Historical implications of a pattern of dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. American Antiquity 25: 454-75.

THOMPSON, E.H. 1892. The Ancient Structures of Yucatan not communal dwellings. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 8 (2): 262-9.

THOMPSON, J.E.S. 1959. The role of caves in Maya culture, in W. Bierhenke et al. (ed.) Amerikanische Miszellen: Festband Franz Termer. Mittelungen aus dem Museum for Volkerkunde in Hamburg 25: 122-9.

--1972. The Dresden Codex, a Maya Hieroglyphic Book. Philadelphia (PA): American Philosophical Society.

Norman Hammond, Department of Archaeology, Boston University, 675, Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215-1406, USA (Email: ndch@bu.edu)