Maya Decipherment

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

What a puzzle is the aardvark, at least to early Dutch settlers in South Africa. For them, the best word for the creature was aardvarken, from terms in their language for “earth” (aarde) and “pig” (varken), logical in light of the animal’s burrowing habits in search of ants and termites (Figure 1; Cresswell 2021). To the Dutch, as with many people, the unfamiliar could be named by likening it to the familar. Local knowledge (from Europe, of pigs) went global (to South Africa, of an animal subsisting on ants and termites) under conditions of imperial or mercantile expansion (Ogilvie 2006:209, 222; Ritvo 1987:244). In the same way, conquistadores and settlers in the Americas found counterparts to their léon (puma), piña, “pine-cone” (pineapple), and the níspero, “medlar fruit” (sapodilla), often based on deep circum-Mediterranean models (Rojas 2007:137). To assign names was to assert control, as an Adamic privilege that applied words to new things (Borkfelt 2011:118). But mostly it concerned a search for an intelligible frame of reference. The local Khoisan term for aardvark, gi, would have been perfectly serviceable, even nicely monosyllabic (Bleek 1956:279). For whatever reason, the Dutch created another word.

 

Sometimes people go to the animal. Big game hunters, bagging tigers and other ferocious creatures, come especially to mind (Ritvo 1987:269–288). At other moments the animal goes to people, for the most part unwillingly. The aardvark was never going to become a favorite pet in Europe, as did indeed happen with certain birds from distant lands (Plumb 2015:7, 22). The quadruped’s nocturnal movements, sharp claws, solitary nature, and incorrigible digging made that unlikely. Yet exotic or novel creatures could be assembled by rulers or, at later date, by entrepeneurs in a “symbolism of conquest and acquisition” (Ritvo 1987:207, 225). Rare animals might acquire celebrity status and even personal names (for how names might be classified, see Zelinsky 2002:253–58). In 19th-century England, Sally the chimpanzee, Obaysch the hippopotamus, and Chunee the elephant had their fan base, although the beasts could prove mettlesome to handlers. Chunee, increasingly excitable and thought to be a danger, died hard after being dosed with arsenic, shot with repeated rifle volleys, and, as the coups de grâce, savaged by vigorous thrusts of a keeper’s sword (Ritvo 1987:226–28). Other less famous animals might turn “on children who teased” them or gain a clouded reputation by fighting “aggressive neighborhood dogs” (Ritvo 1987:225). The process of acquiring these creatures was itself complex and many-staged, not just engaging merchants or imperial agents but “explorers, military officers…professional hunters and collectors” (Ritvo 1987:246). Trophies could be collected, live animals too, although they would be harder to transport.

Historical and archaeofaunal evidence shows that “charismatic” animals could be transported and kept in Mesoamerica, often as a resource for sacrifice. Presumably, they also exemplified the reach of empire and far-flung trade. In a few cases, other animals might have reminded immigrants of distant homelands. These include, perhaps, a spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) found at Teotihuacan, where none occur naturally (Sugiyama et al. 2022:4, 12). Dating to ca. 250 to 300 CE, one specimen was captured at about 3 ya, kept for 2 years in an urban sector linked to the Maya (who certainly knew the species well), nurtured on human foods, mostly of maize, and then trussed like a person for sacrifice, hands behind its back. This treatment might have reflected the perceived nature of monkeys as inherent paradoxes, like people yet markedly different from them. Other “wild” animals in the city were fed rabbits or hares, dogs, and, according to a suggestion from Aztec evidence, even human flesh, or they were taxidermied for display (Sugyima, Somerville, and Schoeninger 2015:5, 7, 9–10, fig. 3). Distinct damage to the bone suggests that some were tethered by cords. At Copan, Honduras, most large felids were taken wild, but several appear to have eaten foods supplied by people (Sugiyama, Fash, and France 2018:18).

Later “zoos,” if that is quite the right word for them, were kept by Aztec emperors close to the great plaza at Tenochtitlan, near the palace of the last ruler, Moteuczoma II (Houston and Newman 2021). The Nuremberg woodcut of 1524, among the few to portray this Dom[us] a[n]i[m]aliu[m], “House of the Animals,” displays individual cages for birds and animals, many of them probably for sacrifice but, just as likely, intended for pleasurable viewing by Aztec rulers and courtiers (Blanco et al. 2009:34–35; for the Nuremberg map of Tenochtitlan, see Boone 2011; Mundy 1998). That the creatures discharged only one function seems improbable. Possibly, some were kept for medicinal purposes, rather like rare animals in other parts of the world (Alves and Rosa 2005). Further, the act of keeping “wild” animals transformed them by means of new foods and sometimes clothing. The result was a set of beings closer to humans than not (Newman 2025). 

The new and the unexpected might include charismatic creatures like horses. Elsewhere, far from the Aztec and Maya, the size, speed, and ridability of these animals fascinated those seeing them for the first time. In dynastic Egypt, texts and images record horses just before, during, and after the Hyksos invasions of the Second Intermediate Period, 1759 to c. 1539 BCE (Figure 2; Collombert 2022:29, fig. 72; Delpeut and Köpp-Junk 2025:123, 126–27; Goldwasser 2017:48, 49; Vernus 2009:12–13). Lexically, the animals triggered several responses. An older term, ḥtr, “the yoked ones,” came to suffice for the new arrival, appearing first in royal texts, probably referring to beasts in prestigious chariots rather than to mundane teams of oxen (Goldwasser 2017:51; see also Vernus 2009:28–29, 36–38, for jḥ, and comments on the cultural stigmatization in Egypt of sitting directly on a horse; n.b., the horse in Figure 2, harnessed but unsaddled). A foreign loanword, ssmt or ssm, probably derived from Mesopotamian languages, and there was also ỉbr, “stallion,” from Canaanite (Goldwasser 2017:53, 55).

 

Naming new kinds of animal could thus have several maneuvers: (1) a native term could be recruited to label the newcomer; (2) a compound word innovated to describe some detail of the creature; (3) an entirely new coinage devised, or (4) a loanword imported or translated into a local language (Goldwasser 2017:58). The Maya were no different. In colonial Yukateko, horses were called tzimin after the term for “tapir,” a label also found in present-day Chontal (Tapirus bairdii; Barrera Vásquez, Ramón Bastarrachea, and Brito Sansores 1980:862; Ciudad Real 2001:165; Keller and Luciano Gerónimo 1997:257, 323; Tozzer 1941:203). This was hardly a far-fetched response. Both are large beasts that munch on plants…although try riding on a tapir! (A Classic fantasy, the domain of wondrous, godly behavior, was to be carried by an animal, either a deer or a peccary; e.g. K1182 [a goddess on a deer], K1191, K8622 [God D on a peccary and deer, possibly fused respectively to the Hero Twins, to judge from the spots and jaguar pelage], As a word, tzimin clusters in the more northerly Mayan languages, and it may well have come from Yukateko (Kaufman, with Justeson n.d.:569).

To the south, in glyphic texts, tihl for “tapir” is well-attested, often in homophones for kindling fire, til (Grube 2000:94–95; Kaufman and Norman 1084:132). A slightly non-descript version of this animal on an unprovenanced vase in a private collection in Australia has both a glyphic caption (ti-la, tihl), and a small ti syllable appended to its forehead to clinch the identification (Houston and Scherer 2020:fig. 11). The attributive overkill implies a concern that the creature will not be recognized Another option invokes a lexical analogy between the horse and another large, local beast, the “deer,” chij, as indeed occurs in Ch’orti’ (Hull 2016:98). Notably, this usage occurs in a region where the tapir, an endangered species, is rare to non-existent. (Found in several ecosystems, the tapir still prefers extensive moist forests with succulent secondary growth. Of late, the Ch’orti’ zone has anything but.) The Nahuatl language also linked deer to horses, but with the added nuance that the two animals tended to be morally wayward and innately non-Christian (Brylak 2019:371). Many Classic Maya animals probably had similar valences, if now faint. In myth, the deer was prone to stealing brides from the older, sickly, deer-like god of hunting (K1182, K1559, K2794, K4012, K8927, in the Kerr Database, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.).

Among the Maya, the original referent, the tapir, seems to have become detached from the word itself. Egyptians took loan words and massaged them phonologically for use in their own language. So too did the Maya, leading to Ch’ol cawayu’ from Spanish “caballo” (Aulie and Woodward de Aulie 1978:173). Another Lowland language, Tzeltal, employs kawayú, although, nodding to the outside world, it reciprocates by calling “elephants” muk’ul cemen, “big tapir,” the second word corresponding to Tzotzil tzemen (Hunn 1977:74, 146, 225, 230–31; Laughlin 1975:91). “Horse” in Tzotzil, ka’, clearly abbreviates the Spanish label (Laughlin 1975:163), and, when not using the word “deer,” chij, for “horse” or other large herbivores, the colonial precursor of that language went right to “caballo” (Laughlin 1988, I:95, 105, 132, 175, 190, 202). Another language of the colonial period, Ch’olti’, lumped horses with all manner of domesticated animals (alac), yet providing no specific term for this animal (Ringle n.d.). Admittedly, and lamentably, the lone source for that key language is sparse. 

To a more common animal: not the tapir but the dog, Canis lupus familiaris. There are grounds for believing that similar struggles took place in labeling them, especially in view of their many varieties. In the glyphs, two names are ok (now read ook, the appended ki establishing vowel length) and the extremely rare tzul, both identified long ago by Yuri Knorosov; these are supplemented by the tz’i’, dog,” decoded in the mid 1980s by David Stuart (Knorosov 1955:#64, 168, 169; 1956:212, fig. 32; Stuart 1987:8–10, fig. 13). What distinguishes the more common ook and tz’i’ is unclear. They may represent different breeds or, like words for “horse” in Mayan languages, the labels simply originate in different languages and then diffuse to others. Plausibly, ook transferred anciently from Mixe-Zoquean languages, with meanings that extended to “fox” or “coyote” (Wichmann 1999:306).

In Maya art, depictions of ook versus tz’i’ are hard to differentiate, but the former seem slightly more hairy, with stiff bristles like peccary, as delimited by sets of discontinuous parallel lines (Figure 3). A spot on the cheek may characterize both ook and tz’i’. Whiskers sprout from both, along with tufts of sagittal hair. Tz’i’ may be more short-haired, an advantage for hunting dogs. This helps them run through understory or vegetation, avoid heat-stroke, or poke into the burrows of paca, a prey ready to blind them with sharp claws: the Maya hunting dog is, in my experience, stout-hearted to the point of recklessness (for a spotted, short-haired, furrow-browed tz’i’, looking up to be scratched under the chin, see Tonina Monument 89; Stuart 2014). The ook sign, most common when recording the Maya day of that name, seems to have a simple, rounded ear (Thompson 1950:47, 52, 78–80, fig. 8). [Note 1] Like many references to animals, its ear (or, with other signs, the eye) can be isolated to cue the whole, with this being a special “earmark” (so to speak) of ook‘s occurence in the Dresden Codex. In part, the meaning may be sensorial. It alludes, possibly, to what gives creatures powers of perception beyond human capacity. To intriguing extent, it also fits with how children learn to identify animals. They begin with body parts and only later start to perceive wholes (Davidoff and Roberson 2002:230–31). In other words, a developmental proclivity stretches out to embrace a graphic one. But with ook, this pars pro toto fails to take place, evidently, when the animal is stressed, as opposed to merely the day name. Curiously, that name shifts, in a well-known tabulation by Eric Thompson, to tzih/tz’i/tzi in some Highland Mayan languages, blurring what appears to be a real distinction in Classic texts and imagery (Thompson 1950:table 3).

 

 

Not a few dogs also have marks of their short, violent, and, yes, miserable lives in the tropics. Most have frayed ears, cut into three parts, either from dogfights or skin infections like ulcerative leishmaniasis, or perhaps to indicate the corrugated cartilage of the outer ear, the pinna, which helps to funnel sound (Figure 4). Thompson, by the adventurous reasoning for which he was known, felt the torn ear recalled the “syphilitic sores” of a Mexican dog deity (Thompson 1950:79). Dogs accompanied people out of Beringia, but breeds may only have diverged with the spread of agriculture and more settled population that found uses for dog as “meat…or for protection and companionship” (Manin et al. 2025:8). were clearly ubiquitous at Maya cities. Ceibal counts dogs among its most numerous remains of mammals, the deer being its only competitor (Sharpe et al. 2020:32). The variety of dog bones at Ceibal and elsewhere indicates “a number of different morphotypes, or perhaps even breeds, present,” including two Preclassic dogs that may have come from Highland Guatemala (Sharpe et al. 2020:32). A royal tomb from the Early Classic at El Zotz, Guatemala, contained small clappers of shell and dog canines, for which a minimum count (and probably an undercount) was about 30 animals butchered to make these musical instruments for the royal body (Newman et al. 2015:169, 177). Doubtless, of course, their flesh was consumed too, as was also true at Ceibal, although some of the evidence for this, such as cutmarks, is limited (Sharpe et al. 2020:32). The clappers contained 117 surviving canines, four for each animal, but the number of animals might have been greater if these can be distinguished by upper or lower jaw.

 

It is unsurprising that other breeds materialize, especially the Mexican hairless, the Xoloitzcuintle (Figure 5). The breed is typified by “sparse or absent hair coat along with a severe oligodontia [congential absence of certain dentition] and abnormally shaped teeth,” with genetic confirmation of its presence in Central Mexico by the period of Teotihuacan expansion, ca. 4th to 6th century CE, leading over the centuries to “a large and stable population” (Manin et al. 2018:129, 135). The Peruvian Hairless has an uncertain and perhaps tenuous genetic relation to the Mexican variety (Manin et al. 2018:134). More certain is the presence of this breed in a ritual deposit at the Highland Maya site of Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala; dating between 100 BCE to 250 CE, these come from several layers assignable to the Late Preclassic/Early Classic transition(Sharpe et al. 2021:230, 237). At Kaminaljuyu, several dog figurines appear also to have the distinctive sagittal tufting or “mohawk” of this dog (Sharpe et al. 2021:237–38, fig. 10). One such dog may also have been recovered in a Late Classic context at Copan, Honduras, another at Colha, Belize, with the added observation from Mary Pohl that such creatures were better for hunting, doing less damage to prey because of their deficient dentition (Collins 2002:156, citing Pohl; Sharpe et al. 2021:237). At Kaminaljuyu, several dog figurines appear also to have the distinctive sagittal tufting or “mohawk” of this dog, at least in some animals: many are utterly smooth (Sharpe et al. 2021:237–38, fig. 10). The data are still slim, but it seems likely that the breed appears relatively late in archaeological evidence, and with a likely early-to-mid first millennium introduction to the Maya region, possibly passing through Highland Guatemala and, in Mexico, from times and regions linked to Teotihuacan. At the least, this was a time of contact and flux, whatever the precise agents of transmission.

 

 

The Classic Maya may well have depicted and mentioned hairless dogs. A key morsel of evidence comes from Caracol, Belize, where a compelling case has been made by colleagues that several royal names contain the head of an animal with sagittal crest and three-part folded ears (Figure 6; Helmke and Vepretskii 2022:5–7; Vepretskii 2020). The proposed translation of this creature’s glyphs is tz’utz’, “pizote” or “coatimundi,” Nasua narica, an inquisitive, active creature with a long, expressive, striped tail, an elongated, agile, and flat-ended snout, plush fur, white-rimmed eyes, and flat forehead. There is logic to this reading. This term for pizotes is almost pan-Mayan, and the syllables with this creature, when recorded on Late Classic period vases, undoubtedly include tz’u, tz’i, and, in one instance, an added hi (for “coati” reading, tz’utz’, see Grube and Nahm 1994:703, 708)

The challenge is that this does not resemble the creature consistently labeled with such glyphs. Coati are seldom shown in Maya imagery, and a lone example from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, appears as part of a veritable menagerie of lightly fired clay heads: there is a large toad or frog (all are flat-bottomed, solid, built up by additive modeling of clay slabs, their folds still visble at the base of the frog), a probable deer, and, in the middle, a creature with a long nose rounded at the end (Figure 7). At Piedras Negras, this is credibly a coati, with the less secure identification of a tapir. On the vases, in contrast, the creatures are almost certainly a dog, if a variety with scant hair, sagittal crest, wrinkled face, and plainly visible furrows of snout-skin. One breed fits: the Mexican hairless, known to be present in the Maya region at this time. It has similar, highly focused eruptions of hair, on head and top of the tail, pronounced wrinkles that corrugate the snout, and ear with deep pinnae or flap pouches. The last are more likely, because of its consistent appearance, to be specific to the breed, not the result of fighting or disease.

 

 

What to make of its glyphic name? The first possibility, that it assigns “coati” to a dog, would bring to mind the Maya tendency of calling a horse a “tapir” or “deer.” A novel application but, in this case, hard to understand: the Maya already had dogs, knew what they looked like, and the coati does not resemble a canine beyond the fact that it is a mammalian quadruped with a tail. Another, perhaps stronger view is the term may not consist of a single morpheme (i.e., tz’utz’), but a combination of them, somewhat like the lexical responses to novel animals in Egypt. The glyphs contain tz’i, which spells out “dog,” tz’i’, lacking only the final glottal. An alternative name might have been spelled out more fully, with attached hi syllable, by the animal that “speaks” ([Y]AL-ji-ya) of “not much tribute” (Figure 6c; see Thompson 1950:table 3, for a tzih from K’iche’ Maya, ca. 1722; perhaps the variant on the Classic Maya vase is dialectal). The first one, however, might refer to a “smooth dog,” tz’u[b]-tz’i’, with phonological elision of the /b/ during rapid speech and word-compounding (for tz’ub, see, in Ch’orti’, Hull 2016:460; cognate with tz’ab in Ch’ol, Hopkins, Josserand, and Cruz Guzmán 2010:245). A more speculative view might relate this to another, widespread term for “suck,” tz’u’, conceivably a comment on the malformed dentition and masticating behavior of the hairless dog (Hopkins, Josserand, and Cruz Guzmán 2010:250; Hull 2016:462; Laughlin 1974:104; Ringle n.d.:#3018; Ch’orti’, recorded by Charles Wisdom in the second quarter of the 20th century, refers to tz’up[b] as the act of “lapping,” Wisdom 1950:740).

The ancient Maya confronted no aardvarks, but they were beset with the problem of naming and showing unfamiliar beasts. There is a robust likelihood that one of them was the hairless dog, a “smooth” or “sucking canine,” which does not clearly come to the Maya Lowlands until the Classic period, and from foreign locales, either the Maya Highlands or central Mexico. Possibly, its ultimate origin was Western Mexico, where fat, small, hairless dogs provided delicious fare (Baus Czitrom 1998:47, chewing on a corn cob, 84, with deep wrinkles, but no Colima examples appear to have sagittal crests; Blanco et al. 2008:132; Butterwick 2004:65 67, pls. 21, 22; for wrinkles aplenty, LACMA, M.86.296.152). By Late Classic times, when most were displayed and cited in glyphs, they would have admixed with other breeds yet still, it appears, been managed as part of the Maya bestiary.

[Note 1]   The probable day name “Dog” on a late, Maya-Mexican hybrid bowl of alabaster shows the attributes of the hairless dog described below (split ear, sagittal hair), not the more familiar ook of Maya day names (K319). For the maker of this bowl, whatever their cultural or linguistic affiliation, the basic referent was a creature linked to parts of Mexico.

 

Acknowledgments

This essay coalesced during my appointment as the Inaugural Barbara Tedlock Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, where its President, Morris Foster, kindly hosted me. As I wrote this, to set the mood, caged dogs howled in a nearby residence a short distance away. My thanks go to Sarah Newman for discussions about dogs and to Sergey Vepretskii for sharing a powerpoint from his 2020 presentation. Other postings in the “Maya Creatures” series include Maya Musk, Dragons, Mosquitoes, Teeth, Foxes, Dogs, and Woodpeckers.

References

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Barrera Vásquez, Alfredo, Juan Ramón Bastarrachea, and William Brito Sansores. 1980. Diccionario Maya Cordemex. Mérida, Yucatan: Ediciones Cordemex.

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Blanco Padilla, Alicia, Christopher Götz, Gabriel Mestre, Bernardo Rodríguez Galicia, and Raúl Valadez Azúa. 2008. El xoloitzcuintle prehispánico y el estándar actual de la raza. AMMVEPE 19(5):131–38.

Blanco, Alicia, Gilberto Pérez, Bernardo Rodríguez, Nawa Sugiyama, Fabiola Torres, and Raúl Valadez. 2009. El zoológico de Moctezuma ¿Mito o realidad? AMMVEPE 20(2):28–39.

Bleek, Dorothea F. 1956. A Bushman Dictionary. American Oriental Series 41. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

Boone, Elizabeth H. 2011. This New World Now Revealed: Hernán Cortés and the Presentation of Mexico to Europe. Word & Image 27(1):31–46.

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Brylak, Agnieszka. 2019. Some of Them Just Die Like Horses: Contact-Induced Changes in Peripheral Nahuatl of the Sixteenth-Century Petitions from Santiago de Guatemala. Journal of Language Contact 12(2):344–77. https://doi.org/10.1163/19552629-01202004

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Collins, Lisa M. 2002. The Zooarchaeology of the Copan Valley: Social Status and the Search for a Maya Slave Class. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.

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Stephen Houston (Brown University)

Wood is, to some creatures, a toothsome meal. Its fibrous tissues go back to the beginnings of the Silurian Period (ca. 443–420 mya), when trees, newly stiff and sturdy, could ascend to greater heights and enhance their photosynthesis (A. Martin 2023:123–24). Plant roots, equally tough, could push deeper to absorb more water and nutrients. From this came new soil, churned from bedrock, and the first clear evidence of creatures with an appetite for plants. In fact, some wags have suggested that geological periods should be known by their dominant beetle: 40% of insects and a quarter of all known animals belong to that category, of which about 5,000 present-day species consume fibers from vegetation (A. Martin 2023:126, 131). In voracious competition, chewing away at wood, are many roaches, termites, bees, ants, and wasps.

But the consumers often become the consumed. Dinosaurs appear to have gorged on rotten wood for the tasty insects inside, just as woodpeckers, their far descendants, do today in a more fastidious way (Chin et al. 2017; A. Martin 2023:134–35). Seeking wood softened by fungi, teaming with morsels, such birds can be heard tap-tapping, staccato-like, often in dying or dead trees called “snags” (A. Martin 2023:136, 137, 137–39). They claw at bark with their feet, plucking and pinching insects with forked tongues and beaks. Where the birds forage, however, tends to vary by gender. In some species, but not all, males work high on trees, females on lower trunks and branches (A. Martin 2023:137–39). This division of labor offers real benefits to a bonded pair of woodpeckers, preventing squabbles over snags and reducing female exposure to raptors. Comity is preserved, future eggs will be laid. Yet, because of the effort, nest-making needs both genders, as part of the cooperative parenting common to the birds. The hollows take a few years to carve out, the oozing sap around them a deterrent to snakes (A. Martin 2023:136). By tapping on snags, woodpeckers can also communicate with others of their kind: “(for mates) come here soon, (for competitors) stay away, this tree is mine” (Imbau and Desrochers 2002:224–25).

The Maya region flutters with woodpeckers. For the southern Maya Lowlands, of species attested today, there are the Smoky-brown (Picoides fumigatus), Ladder-backed (Picoides scalaris), Yucatan (Melanerpes pygmaeus), Golden-fronted (Melanerpes aurifrons), Black-cheeked (Melanerpes pucherani), Acorn (Melanerpes formicivorus), Golden-olive (Colaptes rubiginosus), Chestnut-colored (Celeus castaneus), and the back-crested, red-headed Lineated (Dryocopus lineatus) and Pale-billed woodpeckers (Campephilus guatemalensis). At this point, the Lineated is found across wide regions and is probably the most abundant (Viallely and Dyer 2018:264, 266, 268, 272, 274).

Mayan languages have many names for woodpeckers. Sundry Highland languages speak of kule’ch, with variants of that word, piich‘, tuktuk, and the areally diffused ch’eje (Kaufman 2003:601, 602, 620). Ch’ol presents ch’ejku’, one of which lacks a head-crest, as well as tzelel, from a word for that distinctive feature, as well as xpi’, sounding much like a woodpecker’s cry (Hopkins et al. 2011:239; Hull and Fergus 2011:57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 76, 77, 78, 80). Ch’orti’ offers ch’aku-ch’aku and wek-wek (Hull 2016:116, 485 [the Golden-fronted]; Wisdom 1950:715). For its part, Tzeltal banks a lexical cornucupia. Speakers identify the k’ojk’ojte’, also the Golden-fronted woodpecker, from a word for “strike,” k’oj (Gómez López 2017:309, 310), but there are the ch’ekch’ek, h~jerketet, and xch’ejun ch’ijote, linked to a term for “peck” (Hunn 1977:170; Polian 219, 223, 253, 288, 561, 576, 589); then the k’orochoch, tuktuk mut, tuntsel, t’oromte’ mut, ts’ijtil, from a word for chipping or breaking off, usually applied to smaller birds. Crucially for Mayan glyphs, Tzeltal refers to some woodpeckers as ti’ or ti’ti’ mut, from mut, “bird.” That last descriptive, perhaps a loan, is further attested in Tojolabal, a distantly related language spoken nearby (Guerro Martínez 2017:186). Why so many words in Tzeltal? It is probably not from a local fixation on wood-boring birds. An ethnobiologist, Eugene Hunn, paid particular attention to that language, and it shows in the lexical bounty; similar troves probably exist in other Mayan tongues. Tzeltal’s precursor, Tzendal, refers to tuncelec [tunkelek] (Ara 1986:183), and its close kin Tzotzil attaches ti’, tunsarek, and bah-te’ to several sorts of woodpecker, the bah- arising from a term for “knocking,” the –te’ for anything woody or vegetal. To judge from dictionary entries, Tzotzil comments to close degree on how woodpeckers jump, creep, and shinny (Laughlin 1975:77, 216, 256, 536).

In a different group of languages, Yukatek employs ch’ahum, ch’ehot, ch’ohom, ch’uhut, ch’uhun or kolomte’, the first identifying a woodpecker with a “crest and red head” (Barrera Vásquez et al. 1980:122, 142, 334). In his celebrated Relación, Bishop Diego de Landa went on at length about the birds, “of many colors and great beauty” (de muchos colores y hermosura), and their feeding behavior and noise-making “heard a good way off” (se oye buena pieza, Landa 1978:133; Tozzer 1941:201, 201fn1108). His absorption is suprising, in that colorful woodpeckers occur throughout Iberia, in species he must have seen (Piacentini and Chiatante 2022:98). A language related to Yukatek, Lacandon, labels the Chestnut-colored woodpecker an Ajäj or jäjä, the Golden-fronted a ch’om, an obvious cognate with Yukatek ch’ohom; it also refers to the Pale-billed woodpecker as tunseh (Zalaquett Rock et al. 2024:tabla 1), as well as the ch’urum and tuunser, the latter for larger woodpeckers (Hofling 2014:127, 423).

The reduplication of sounds suggests a likely onomatopoeic origin for some of these words, echoing the repeated strikes of beaks on bark or rotten wood (see also Zalaquett Rock et al. 2024:240). For most Mayan languages, such precise, tireless blows and drumming characterize woodpeckers in general. One often hears the birds before they come into view. Indeed, their perceived calls led directly to some names: wek-wek in Ch’orti’ (Hull and Fergus 2017:616), but also Lacandon perceptions of woodpecker calls, ch’orr ch’orr ch’orr, or, when pecking, p’u p’u p’u (Hofling 2014:124, 279, 476). A sonic world opens up. The names of woodpeckers tend to begin with plosive and affricate consonants (ch’, t’, t, k’), alluding to the impact of remorseless beaks on rotten bark. The tun in Lacandon (tunseh), Tzeltal (tuntsel), and Tzendal (tunkelek) thuds with the hollow sound of struck wood, rather like the Yukatek word for a wooden “drum,” tunk’ul or t’unkul (Barrera Vásquez et al. 1980:823, 845).

With such birds came stories. To the Lacandon, at least by one report, woodpeckers were created when God threw a piece of sand against a tree (Zalaquett Rock et al. 2024:231). The grain lodged in the bark and sprouted the bird. Mostly, woodpeckers augured no good at all, regardless of language, from foretelling an accident to warning about the approach of evil (Hunn 1977:170; Villa Rojas 1990:321). The Ch’orti’ “particularly loathed” the Golden-fronted woodpecker, which committed the further offense of feasting voraciously on young corn (Hull and Fergus 2017:615). This is the bird of sorcerers among the Ch’orti’, Tzutujil, and probably other groups as well (Fergus and Hull 2010:10; Hull and Fergus 2017:616). If the bird were seen and heard on a road, the traveler might turn right around and head home, depending on which side the woodpecker had made his ruckus (Girard 1949:333–34; Fergus and Hull 2010:10fn6). For such a vile bird it seems strange, then, that Ch’orti’ Maya also consumed them in the first half of the 20th century (Wisdom 1940:74fn20). Among the Tzotzil too: “[h]airy woodpeckers and woodcreepers are thought to be the messengers of witches, but if they are killed they can be roasted and eaten” (Laughlin 1975:337). Ch’ol speakers appear to see the woodpecker as a mix of good and bad, a poor omen whose seasonal calls, ti’ti’ti’, nonetheless heralded the arrival of rain and future crops (Hull and Fergus 2011:47, 49). In an apparent confusion of prey with predator, the xch’ejun can, to some Tzeltal, turn into a snake, perhaps because serpents sometimes lurk in woodpecker nests. The transformation underscores the bird’s sinister mystique.

Such an abundance of words and fables would indicate some roots back in the Classic period. But images and glyphs of woodpeckers are rare. There are almost as many references, both visual and textual, to the great curassow, the “faisán” with flamboyantly curled crest (Crax rubra), sometimes seen on low branches and aggressive when cornered; when calling mates, the males boom out at almost subsonic register (Figure 1). They are said to make good eating, especially in stews, which partly accounts for their rarity today. Its names in Mayan languages, kox, k’anbul, ah tab (Yukatek, Barrera Vásquez 1980:340, 376, 749), káamb’ur and piich’ (Lacandon, Hofling 2014:204, 264), ah kox (Ch’orti’, Wisdom 1950:445; cf. canbul in Ch’olti’, Ringle n.d.:#466), ‘ub or j’is (Tzotzil, Laughlin 1988:157, 208), do not seem to match the syllabic prefix nu that prefixes their heads in two spellings, one on a carved bone in an apparent Emblem glyph (nu-‘Curassow’ AJAW), the other on Yaxchilan Stela 8 (AJ-nu-‘Curassow’). Curiously, it is the wing of this bird, a synecdoche for the creature itself, or an avian close to it, that is likely attested as a logograph KOOX?-xa (Hruby et al. 2022:159, fig. 10). A lone entry in Lacandon Maya hints that, for the curassow spellings in glyphs, a female bird was intended, nuu(k)-k’áamb’ur (Hofling 2014:242), from a common term in Lowland Mayan languages for “large,” nuk (see Ch’ol nuk~ñuj, Hopkins et al. 2010:161, 165). If this is correct, the bird head could have been read K’AM[~N?]BUL, and, on Yaxchilan Stela 8, aj-nu(k)-k’ambul, “he of the female curassow” or possibly it corresponded to a kind of k’ambul that was larger than most. By a common process in phonology, the k at the end of nuk assimilated to the initial k’ of k’ambul.

 

For woodpeckers, though, the record is lean. In the Gallery of the Monkeys, Initial Series Group at Chichen Itza, Mexico, the birds are shown jeweled, dancing with defecating monkeys (Figure 2, Taube et al. 2020:97, fig. 77). One interpretation is that the quintessential thieves of cacao pods, spider monkeys, have been assailed by guardians of (or competitors for?) such groves, inducing the monkeys to excrete processed, grindable seeds from their bottoms (Taube et al. 2020:99). In the absence of further examples, this stimulating idea remains open to further testing. What can be stressed is that, along with most “humanimals”—creatures wearing clothing and embedded within mythic time, story, and explanatory parable—the woodpecker is more than half-human: his crested and beaked head, tail and wing feathers alone mark him as a bird (for “humanimals,” see Houston and Scherer 2020).

 

 

A similar set of quasi-birds/quasi-humans, occurs on a carved vase from the Chocholá area of Yucatan, doubtless part of the kingdom centered on Oxkintok (Figure 3; García Campillo 1992). It displays a woodpecker to the left, his body marked with short tandem lines that appear to cue the concept of “red” (Stone and Zender 2011:125): thus, a red woodpecker, his beak evidently pincering a grub or other morsel from bark. Note 1. As we shall see, that focus on food appears to be a key trait of the bird, as it is for avians like hummingbirds, whose thin beaks usually pierce stylized flowers. Other food (‘ib?, “bean”) and drink (ch’aj, “pinole”) are mentioned in the captions on the Chocholá vase, perhaps also cuing festivals or time of day (1-K’IN in each text). Note 2. The main figure to the left is probably a white heron, SAK-*’i-chi, the latter a word documented in Tzeltal and attested within a text from Temple XIX at Palenque, Mexico (Stuart 2005:115; see also Hunn 1977:140). The heron, his body dripping, perhaps, with water, appears to be doing most of the speaking…or chirping, as indicated by the che-he-na, “says,” expression in his caption. The social asymmetry of a human encounter maps onto birds. The woodpecker’s mouth is full in any case. The heron holds one piece of food in his hand, perhaps in exchange for a sip of pinole from the woodpecker. But this is not food one would think suitable for such birds, highlighting their anomaly here.

 

 

 

The earliest depiction of a woodpecker, from an Early Classic bowl at Caracol, Belize, takes us squarely to their behavior (Figure 4). It also accounts for the origin of a Maya syllable, ju, and confirms another term for woodpecker, ti’. Discovered in 2014, within a chamber in Structure C47, the bowl accompanied a multiple interment (Chase and Chase 2014:26–27; Chase and Chase 2018:8–9, fig. 5). The ceramic appears to have come from, or it refers to, a lord of the city of Bi(h?)tal, a place I identified some time ago in the inscriptions of Naranjo. Its precise location unknown, Bital probably lay somewhere between Caracol and Naranjo, and was the victim of a violent burning by Naranjo in AD 693 (S. Martin and Grube 2008:76). The drinking bowl predates all of that conflict by well over 150 years. The cartouche in question (there are several around the bowl) displays a back-crested woodpecker, no color markings visible, prefixed by a bi syllable and postfixed by a ka and probable la. Whatever is being spelled here remains opaque, but it presumably records either a drink recipe or the name of the person who owned the bowl.

 

 

But the imagery is clear enough. The bird with slight texturing around its eyes and a ti sign on its beak pecks and grips a stylized object that is identical to the ju syllable found across Maya writing (Figure 5). Usually found with vultures, the ti can be traced back by various iconographic steps to archaic versions of a stylized fly (Mora Marín and Glenn Mora 2022; and personal communication, David Stuart, 2024, who noted this independently). But its use here is not to emphasize the buzzing insects around vultures, tearing at carrion. Rather, it spells a well-known term for “woodpecker,” ti’. The image is saturated with encoded meaning and glyphic elaborations that may not actually have been read. The hollowed, voluted form to the right, with trilobate cavity, shows two variants of the TE’ or “wood” sign, one extending to far earlier images, the latter, with two thin lines and circles, carrying through to the Late Classic period. (They may also pin down cortex/bark or surface texture vs. heartwood.) The woodpecker appears to be either pecking for food or offering it, perhaps, to its young inside a nest. To striking extent, a primordial gourd tree on an Early Classic mirror back, unprovenanced but surely from northern Guatemala, presents plant growth with similar markings along with the trilobate hollow at its base and a sylized insect much like the ju syllable (cf. a glyph on K555, probably distinct from the ATIK logogram; S. Martin 2008:fig. 7b). The reason for the sign is not hard to find. Juk is a term in Ch’ol for “tick-like animal” or “mite,” with jukte’ refering to a “wood-boring beetle,” or merely a “kind of fly” in Tzeltal, perhaps going back to a “Central Mayan” (early and areal) label for “grub,” “worm” or “chigger,” *jut (Hopkins et al. 2011:89; Kaufman 2017:82; Polian 2018:311). Perhaps the conflated ta sign reflects an original reading of jut, the syllable reinforcing the final /t/ in that word. In much the same way, the Maya YAX sign usually contains an infixed xa syllable to buttress its final consonant.

 

 

Almost all Maya syllables derive from words in which final consonants or semi-vowels are lopped off, leaving a consonant-vowel nucleus. This would appear to be another. The stylization, however, bears comment, for this is common with many bees or other bugs in Maya imagery, if contrasting with other depictions of insects (Houston, in press). Usually, those appear as multi-eyed bony creatures, probably as a gesture to their hard, exoskeletal exteriors (e.g., Rossi and Newman 2025:35, 37). The ju syllable stems from another view, of things too small to see, their details barely discernible, and thus inclined to graphic abstraction. How would the eye have imagined small life forms prior to van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope? Stylization might fill the gaps. As with many such glyphs, the insects are conceived, most likely, in terms of mythic prototypes (Houston and S. Martin 2012). Here, a primordial tree, on which the Principal Bird Deity sometimes perched, was riddled with bugs delectable to woodpeckers.

 

Note 1. On incised bones from Burial 116, Tikal, fish grasped by Chahk also display these lines. The striations may specify local red fish such as róbalo or blanco, a delicious cichlid (Petenia splendida), well worth taking. Some specimens from the area exhibit quite literal vertical stripes, hinting at a reference to both color and actual marks on fish scales. The doubled lines may also occur on some xib, “youth,” heads, with a possible nod to chak ch’ok or chak xib, “great youth” (Houston 2018:39–42). A rare example of the syllable lu, long held to come from a term for “catfish,” lu’ (Barrera Vásquez et al. 1980:463), has two vertical stripes, perhaps a version with vivid coloring (Helmke et al. 2017:fig. 5b, as drawn below by Christophe Helmke). Alternatively, since the signs spell the word for atole, ul, it may refer to a colored gruel, perhaps flavored with annatto, an orange-red condiment.

Note 2. For the “bean” reading, see Tokovinine 2014, which offers a reasonable proposal that may still need further thought. The prefixes ya and seemingly hi are also found on this glyph in association with a mythic meal involving “God D” and a hummingbird; the context is a vessel from Tikal Burial 196, Miscellaneous Text 176, K8008 in the Kerr database of vase images. At least in these settings, the prefixes suggest a reading other than ‘ib or, as an alternative, a more complex spelling involving several morphemes, even ya-hi-‘IB.

 

Acknowledgments   Sarah Newman, always informative about creatures large and small, mentioned a useful reference that got me thinking about dinosaurs. Over several emails, Simon Martin discussed curassows, David Stuart encouraged me to work up the results here, and Arlen Chase allowed use of an image from Caracol, Belize, sending along the relevant field report as well. I would not have known of the Sotheby’s mirror back without Simon, who first alerted me to this spectacular sale of loot; Donald Hales identified the class of artifact. The present essay was composed during my appointment as the Inaugural Barbara Tedlock Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe. For other postings in the “Maya Creatures” series, see Maya Musk, Dragons, Mosquitoes, Teeth, Fox, and Dogs.

 

References

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Barrera Vásquez, Alfredo, Juan Ramón Bastarrachea, and William Brito Sansores. 1980. Diccionario Maya Cordemex. Mérida, Yucatan: Ediciones Cordemex.

Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase. 2014. Ancient Social Integration in a Maya Neighborhood: Investigation of Adjacent Residential Complexes near Caracol’s Epicenter, Caracol Archaeological Project Investigations for 2014, A Continuation of the 2012 and 2013 Research Focus. Report Prepared for the Belize Institute of Archaeology.

______. 2018. Sampling and Timeframes: Contextualizing the Protoclassic and Early Classic Periods at Caracol, Belize. Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 15:3–15.

Chin, Karen, Rodney N. Feldmann, and Jessica N. Tashman. 2017. Consumption of Crustaceans by Megaherbivorous Dinosaurs: Dietary Flexibility and Dinosaur Life History Strategies. Nature: Scientific Reports 7:11163.

Fash, Barbara W., Alexandre Tokovinine, and Ian Graham. 2022. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions: Volume 3, Part 4, Yaxchilan. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Fergus, Rob, and Kerry Hull. 2010. Tz’utujil Maya Avian Ideology: Ethnoornithological Perspectives in the House of Birds. In 2010 Proceedings of the 9th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Social Sciences, June 2-5, 2010. Academia.edu.

García Campillo, José Miguel. 1992. Informe Epigráfico sobre Oxkintok y la cerámica Chochola. In Oxkintok 4, Misión Arqueológica de España en México, Proyecto Oxkintok Año 1990, edited by Miguel Rivera Dorado, pp. 185–200. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura.

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Guerrero Martínez, Fernando. 2017. Etno-ornitología Maya Tojolobal: Orígenes, cantos y presagios de las aves. Hornero 32(1):179–92.

Helmke, Christophe, Yuriy Polyukhovych, Dorie J. Reents-Budet, and Ronald L. Bishop. 2017. A Bowl Fit for a King: A Ceramic Vessel of the Naranjo Court Bearing the Komkom Emblem Glyph. The PARI Journal 18(1):9-24.

Hofling, Charles A. 2014. Lacandon Maya-Spanish-English Dictionary/Diccionario Maya Lacandón-Español-Inglés. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Hopkins, Nicholas A., J. Kathryn Josserand, and Ausencio Cruz Guzmán. 2010. A Historical Dictionary of Chol (Mayan): The Lexical Sources from 1789 to 1935. Tallahassee: Jaguar Tours.

Houston, Stephen. 2018. The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text. New Haven: Yale University Press.

______. in press. Vital Signs: The Visual Culture of Maya Writing. Bollingen Series; the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

______, and Simon Martin. 2012. Mythic Prototypes and Maya Writing. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography — Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

______, and Andrew Scherer. 2020. Maya Creatures IV: Why Do Dogs Dress Up? Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography — Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

Hruby, Zachary, David Stuart, Daniel Vallejo-Cáliz, and Scott Hutson. 2022. An Incised Ceramic Vessel Excavated at Ucí, Yucatán, Mexico. Mexicon 44(6):153–61.

Hull, Kerry. 2016. A Dictionary of Ch’orti’ Mayan-Spanish-English. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

______, and Rob Fergus. 2011a. Ethno-Ornithological Perspectives on the Ch’ol Maya. Reitaku Review 17:42–92.

______, and Rob Fergus. 2011b. Ethno-Ornithological Research among the Chontal Maya of Tabasco, Mexico. 2011b. Ethno-ornithological Research among the Chontal Maya of Tabasco, Mexico. In The 2011 Proceedings of the 10th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Social Sciences, June 1-4, pp. 961–94. Honolulu, HI.

______, and Rob Fergus. 2017. Birds as Seers: An Ethno-Ornithological Approach to Omens and Prognostications among the Ch’orti’ Maya of Guatemala. Journal of Ethnobiology 37(4):604–20.

Hunn, Eugene S. 1977. Tzeltal Folk Zoology: The Classification of Discontinuities in Nature. New York: Academic Press.

Imbau, Louis, and André Desrochers. 2002. Foraging Ecology and Use of Drumming Trees by Three-Toed Woodpeckers. The Journal of Wildlife Management 66(1):222–31.

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______. 2017. Aspects of the Lexicon of Proto-Mayan and its Earliest Descendants. In The Mayan Languages, edited by Judith Aissen, Nora C. England, and Roberto Zavala Maldonado, pp. 62–111. London: Routledge.

Landa, Fray Diego de. 1978[1959]. Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Biblioteca Porrua 13. Mexico City: Editorial Porrua.

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______. 1988. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán, Volume I, Tzotzil-English. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Martin, Anthony J. 2023. Life Sculpted : Tales of the Animals, Plants, and Fungi that Drill, Break, and Scrape to Shape the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Martin, Simon. 2008. Wives and Daughters on the Dallas Altar. Mesoweb Articles.

______, and Nikolai Grube 2008. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. 2nd edition. London: Thames & Hudson.

Méndez Pérez, Maruch, and Diane Rus. 2023. Ch’ul Mut: Sacred Bird Messengers of the Chamula Maya. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.  

Mora Marín, David, and Amy Glenn Mora. 2023. Of Flies and Vultures: An Explanation of the Origins of 3M2/T59 ti. Notes on Mesoamerican Linguistics and Epigraphy 32. 

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Polian, Gilles. 2018. Diccionario multidialectal del tseltal, tseltal – español. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas.

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Rossi, Franco D., and Sarah Newman. 2025. Seeing and Being Bugs in Classic Maya Art. The Mayanist 7(1):33–54.

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Stone, Andrea, and Marc Zender. 2011. Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. London: Thames & Hudson.

Stuart, David. 2005. The Inscriptions from Temple XIX at Palenque: A Commentary. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Taube, Karl A., Travis W. Stanton, José Francisco Osorio León, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, María Rocío González de la Mata, and Jeremy D. Coltman. 2020. The Initial Series Group at Chichen Itza, Yucatan: Archaeological Investigations and Iconographic Interpretations. San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press.

Tokovinine, Alexandre. 2014. Beans and Glyphs: A Possible IB Logogram in the Classic Maya Script. The PARI Journal 14(4):10-16.

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Vallely, Andrew, and Dale Dyer. 2018. Birds of Central America : Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Wisdom, Charles. 1940. The Chorti Indians of Guatemala. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

______. 1950. Materials of the Chorti Language. Middle American Cultural Anthropology Microfilm Series 5, Item 28. Chicago: University of Chicago Library.

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Stephen Houston, Brown University

For the Late Classic Maya, imagery teased with reality. The space within a frame, the “inside,” flirted with the “outside,” the space from which viewers peered in. Visual clues hinted at the possibility of bridging the two. [1] Several carvings, most from the 8th century CE, showed an arm, scepter, headdress, smoke or fringe edging out beyond a bounded frame. That this feature was uncommon likely boosted its impact. A similar playfulness marked vases from a small group of painters, several named, in the kingdom around Motul de San José, Guatemala. Here and there a human hand or panache of feathers extended up to hide parts of glyphic text passing around the outer rims of vases (Figure 1). [2] But this was a coy game rather than a deep riddle. Informed readers could easily reconstruct the missing glyphs. The intent may have been to make rim texts resemble actual objects in space, obscured by people or things closer to the viewer. In a sense, human figures both impinged on glyphs and dominated them, in much the way that a flesh-and-blood person, vigorous and gesturing, acted in the world “outside.”

 

 

To some, thinking of non-Maya evidence, the frame could seem a near-irrelevance. Immanuel Kant argued that a frame enhanced the aesthetic appeal of things within it, but mostly, for him, the frame was little more than incidental or inessential ornament. [3] Modernists, if one can generalize, found value in removing it altogether, the better to integrate the viewer “outside” with the world “inside.” Yet the frame had a clear function. It divided the inside from the outside and, in a sportive way, expressed “self-awareness,” a subtle acknowledgement of its own existence. The feathers bursting out and smoke billowing forth implied a “limit transcended…extension rather than closure…release rather than confinement.”[4] As a simile, the frame had even broader use. Georg Simmel, interested in how individuals related to wholes, likened picture frames to acts of social separation and connection. [5] Viewers could go “inside,” and, in a few cases, perceive or construe an internal world seeping out. To Simmel, this recalled the vexed relation between individuals (entities within the frame) and society (those things or people outside it); indeed, he believed the process would be “wearing,” never easy or fully resolvable. Later, the simile would lead to other thoughts about the constitution of reality, from the “frames” of Erving Goffman to those of the Nobelists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. [6] But none of these authors conceived of works, apparently inert, that could spark with innate vitality and volition. [7] That idea always lurked behind Classic Maya imagery: the very term for “image” or “portrait” equated to that for “self,” a potential blurring of signifier and signified, of a depiction with its original. [8]

Frames further established, in theatrical and narrative terms, a mise-en-scène: setting, actors, action! Through visual editing, they sorted the world into information worth showing and that beneath notice, although the meanings of these selected views varied over European history. [9] Victorian photography singled out focal moments in plays, caught as though in the act, with self-conscious poses and explanatory captions. [10] Such displays would then influence stage productions. Perhaps the Maya also anticipated this reciprocal effect. On many Classic pots and some carvings, a defining frame coincided with the ceiling of a palace. Swagged cloth, sometimes gathered by rope or string, sagged down from above; vertical elements dividing a scene fused with palatial walls and pilasters. Frames might also house glyphic captions, where written signs could fit without cluttering the background. Looking in at these scenes, as must have been done habitually, led to expectations about how to behave outside of them. The framed images operated as small primers for elite society. The stylized gestures and poses may even reveal the conventions of Classic dance and sacred theater. [11]

The designer Edward Tufte believed that visual information needed an escape from “flatland.” [12] For him, that meant drawing close, in this or that diagram or display, to the “multivariate,” three-dimensional lushness of our “perceptual world.” Tufte’s aim was to improve communication, in graphic analogy, one presumes, to the spare prose favored by American writers: minimalist, edited to the bone, allergic to the distractions of what Tufte called “chartjunk.” [13] Those traits would have collided with the semantic density and complexity of Maya imagery, but they did accord with fully plastic carvings at places like Tonina, Mexico. Rulers “broke the fourth wall” by looking out, and usually down, towards flesh-and-blood interlocutors. [14] Like humans, the sculptures were said to “stand,” wa’laj, rooted firmly in a plastered floor or stone plinth by a butt or tenon invisible to viewers. [15]

Yet flatland had its purpose. Some figures floated, wreathed in clouds or as partly glimpsed ancestors and ethereal spirits from dreams. But they were an anomaly, and the extent to which they were thought tangible or material is unclear. A “groundline” is far more frequent, as flat and two-dimensional as it gets: a painted stroke of even width, sometimes doubled on a few ceramic scenes, perhaps to signal solidity, or a carved edge on which figures stand, sit or recline on backs or stomachs. Rulers can position themselves directly on the flesh of captives, as on Stelae 12 and 14 from Naranjo, Guatemala, or with bare feet on the uneven contours of a hill, an image from Stela 2 at Nim Li Punit, Belize. But it is the groundline that confirms the inescapability of gravity. In most Mayan languages, to be a child of a woman, a weighty burden for mothers, involved a word that was either a close homophone of “heavy” or cognate with it. [16] This was a condition of gravity-bound humans, from uterus to birth and beyond. Curiously, sky had weight, held aloft by Atlantean figures or humans impersonating them. [17] For gods and their consorts, enthroned kings too, the sky might appear to be kind of groundline, as solid, evidently, as any of earth or stone. Often shown as a band of bounded signs, it was less arching and ethereal than rectilinear and subject to right-angle jags.

Groundlines might be repeated. A Classic Maya vase, from ca. 750 CE, here shown rolled out, has a line at its base, with various crouching or seated supernaturals, including a bug spewing some flowing substance while interacting with an aged god (Figure 2). Above is another groundline. It meanders because it was painted after the figures. A straighter path across the surface would have obscured important details of costume. Figures pair or triple up interactively. A mosquito appears to bite another aged deity, a trope found in a few Maya images, and, as excess or excrement, blood squirts out in blobs from his rear, dribbling over a heedless deity below. [18] In Maya conventions, to appear in the upper part of an image is to be further back in space. To notional extent, the first row, to the bottom, lay closer to the viewer than the row above. One file of beings, some festooned with eyeballs, had no clear contact with the other, although both do eventually come to address a figure on a sky throne to the right. This pattern is found in other images with deities: one line above, another above, both facing the dominant god on his throne. [19]

 

 

The violation of groundlines is an earmark of deities or primordial events. In virtually all instances, a body rising from below occurs solely with supernaturals or with the first couple emerging from an underground cavity. [20] But, in ceramic scenes, there are no figures plunging from above, partly “off-camera” so to speak. Indeed, that would be a case of spatial illogic. The base of a vase sits on firm ground, accessible to ascending things, while its rim opens to a cavity, to nothing. Yet there is a visual paradox, one related to the supposed firmness of matter. In Maya imagery, interred people, signs for completed time, or deities or figures in conversation occur within a quatrefoil, a four-lobed outline that shows them underground, under the earth’s surface yet somehow visible (Figure 3). That space was linked to a “heart,” an ohl, the center of a body, one belonging to a cosmic turtle floating on a primordial sea. [21] Along with other flat surfaces, the carapace defined a groundline that appeared to be impenetrable or difficult to traverse. Through special sight, however, the viewer acquired that capacity. Concealed knowledge disclosed itself, and, by a god-like power, boundaries came to seem porous.

 

Notes

1 I thank Andrew Scherer for comments on a draft of this essay. For general points here: Paul Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 98; Glenn Peers, Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2004), 1; Rebecca Zorarch, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 152.

2 Bryan R. Just, Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2012), figs. 75, 81, 86, 93, 103, 110, 120,121, 123, 126, 129, 140, 141, 148, 149.

3 Bente Kiilerich, “Savedoff, Frames, and Parergonality,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001), 320, 321.

4 Verity Platt and Michael Squire, “Framing the Visual in Greek and Roman Antiquity: An Introduction,” in Verity Platt and Michael Squire, ed., The Frame in Classic Art: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 41, 71. On “limited transcended”: Jeffrey Hurwit, “Image and Frame in Greek Art,” American Journal of Archaeology 81 (1977), 5.

5 Georg Simmel, “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study,” Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994), 16–17.

6 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 10, 11; implementing these concepts in practice, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211:30 (1981), 457.

7 Stephen Houston, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 76–102

8 Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 58–61.

9 Christine Traber, “In Perfect Harmony? Escaping the Frame in the Early 20^th Century,” in Eva Mendgen, ed., In Perfect Harmony: Picture + Frame, 1850–1920 (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1995), 221, 222.

10 Daniel A. Novak, “Caught in the Act: Photography on the Victorian Stage,” Victorian Studies 59:1 (2016), 36, fig. 4.

11 For an analogy: Stephen Houston, The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 1.

12 Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990), 12.

13 Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983), 107, 121.

14 Stephen Houston, “The Fourth Wall,” Maya Decipherment Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography – Boundary End Archaeological Research Center (2017), https://mayadecipherment.com/2017/06/28/the-fourth-wall-belief-and-alief/, accessed Aug. 18, 2025.

15 David Stuart, “Shining Stones: Observations on the Ritual Meaning of Early Maya Stelae,” in Julia Guernsey et al., eds., The Place of Stone Monuments: Context, Use and Meaning in Mesoamerica’s Preclassic Tradition (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 289–96. Conceptually, they might have been regarded as stone versions of wooden images erected or forced into the ground, as in yookte’l baah; see Tonina Monument 183, yookte’l baah, Ángel A. Sánchez Gamboa, Alejandro Sheseña and Guido Krempel, “Nuevos datos sobre Aj Ch’aaj Naah, Aj K’uhuun de Toniná,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 105: 2 (2019), fig. 2b. 16.

16 Terrence Kaufman and William Norman, “An Outline of Proto-Cholan Phonology, Morphology and Vocabulary,” In John S. Justeson and Lyle Campbell, eds., Phoneticism in Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Publication 9 (Albany: State University of New York at Albany, 1984), 115; Terrence Kaufman, with John Justeson, A Preliminary Maya Etymological Dictionary (2003),1403, http://www.famsi.org/reports/01051/pmed.pdf, accessed, Aug. 18, 2025.

17 Stephen Houston, Andrew Scherer, and Karl Taube, “A Sculptor at Work,” in Stephen Houston, ed., A Maya Universe in Stone (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2021), fig. 19.

18 Michael D. Coe, The Maya Scribe and His World (New York: The Grolier Club 1973), pl. 64.

19 Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston, The Maya, 10^th edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2022), figs. 5.40, 6.8.

20 Michael D. Coe, Lords of the Underworld: Masterpieces of Classic Maya Ceramics (Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1978), pl. 16; see also K8540 in the Justin Kerr database housed at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. On an unpublished vessel in a private collection, a trumpeter rises up, only his torso visible, from the area near the base of mythic tree.

21 Houston et al., Memory of Bones, 36, 186, figs. 1.37, 5.5; Karl A. Taube, William A. Saturno, David Stuart, and Heather Hurst, The Murals of San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala, Part 2: The West Wall, Ancient America 10 (Bernardsville, NC: Boundary End Archaeology Research Center, 2010), 72–75, figs. 46–74.