Maya Decipherment

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

What is archaeology? To some, it begins with Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, the Victorian excavator of Cranborne Chase in England. He had the financial resources and unfettered access to archaeological sites—most lay on his lands—to organize laborers and lead a campaign of fieldwork. His military background added a brisk, orderly clip to the whole, in a command structure that would be recognizable on digs today. A project director = the general; crew chiefs = officers; excavators = enlistees. (We know who gets the garlands.) Or perhaps, as in Denmark, it coalesced around 19th-century efforts to arrange artifacts by material or technology through time (Eskildsen 2012:39). But there was no single moment of origin, no “Eureka!” in the bathtub. In a century of empirical promise, there was instead, by one account, a synergy between surmise and stratigraphic testing. Stone tools came before ones of bronze and iron, as found in layers that showed their ordering through time, as crafted by peoples with a supposed resemblance to those who lived at the margins of European empires (Heizer 1962:264). Speculation predated such ideas; effective methods made them testable. Incremental knowledge ensued.

But the margins of this story are messy. There were earlier rumblings, including, in the 1780s, antiquarian renderings of city plans and tombs commissioned by Don Baltazar Jaime Martínez Compañón, then Bishop of Trujillo, Perú (Trever 2012:198–110, figs. 4.2, 4.4., 4.8, 4.16, 4.19). As Lisa Trever notes, the images display astonishing detail, including a plan of the Chimu capital of Chan Chan, yet there are doubts about their reliability. Objectivity did not quite have its present-day definition (Daston and Galison 2007:17). Along with closely observed artifacts and clothing, some tombs contained fresh, fleshy bodies that looked “uncanny.” Seemingly, people had just dozed off or settled into a saintly lack of corruption. Did the images use that convention to express the high degree of preservation in coastal Perú? The renderings are among a vast compendium of drawings, 1411 in total, along with 20 musical scores—the Bishop had been the choirmaster of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Lima (see Macera, Jiménez Borja, and Franke 1997, for its treasures of “natural history”). This meant that his direct supervision of each and every rendering or the excavations behind them was improbable. The actual artists, as well as the fieldworkers, were more likely a set of unnamed locals (Berquist 2008:380 fn7). If this was archaeology, it had missing links. Who made the observations, when and where were did they occur? How reliable or authoritative were the witnesses? What was the understanding of relative or absolute time? New Spain in Bourbon times offers many parallels to the Bishop’s work, along with the same array of potentials and limitations (e.g., López Luján 2024; 2026).

Here, then, is a conventional account: Enlightenment baby steps (and some before), 19th-century synergies, present-day triumphs, and, of late, ethical sociologies of knowledge. But there is a wider view of archaeology. It could simply describe attempts “to explore and explain the past on the basis of its material remains” (Rojas 2019:181). That opens the usual story to alternatives. In Song China, for example, archaeology can be understood, in contrast to 19th-century Denmark, as an exploration of the “past on the basis of its material remains” but in text-dependent and text-involved ways, in a literate connoisseurship directed at ancient bronzes and their labeling (Moser 2024:16, 20–22). From it came copies, new castings, and the extraction of objects from “mounds and tombs,” xū mù (墟墓), according to one literatus (Moser 2019:66; 2024:210–214, 220–222). By earnest hope, the study and delectation of these objects would lead to emotional and moral refinement. Elites would be the better for it and improved governance the result (Sena 2019:7–8).

Here and elsewhere, the past was more than “a limitless and plastic symbolic resource, infinitely susceptible to the whims of contemporary interest and the distortions of contemporary ideology” (Appadurai 1981:201, 203, 218). Understandings of old things were constrained by ideas of credible evidence, assertions of continuity (or its disruption), the perceived or accepted authority of sources, and conditions of their relative debatability. Material things affirmed beliefs, as in the True Cross and its many splinters, the Prophet’s Footprint (قدم الرسول, Qadam al-Rasool, the “foot of the Messenger”) or the tooth of the Maya Water Serpent (Houston 2017b). They mustered emotions, shored up beliefs, and declared narratives about the past to be true. Objects could be seen or held as material facts. Those guarding their vestiges or making images of them operated as the relevant authorities. They claimed to interpret such things for others.

An argument can be made the Classic Maya were no less concerned with exploring and explaining “the past on the basis of material remains.” To be sure, terms for “antiquities,” antigualla, loosely defined, are infrequent in Mayan languages. In the Motul dictionary, Colonial Yukatek offers Vch ben (uchben), “cosa antigua, vieja, de mucha edad y tiempo,” from an expression for time that has “passed” or “occurred” (uch), and in ways that could also apply to stories and old, dried-up maize (Acuña 2001:573; Barrera Vásquez, Ramón Bastarrachea, and Brito Sansores 1980:897). As for artifacts, curation of Olmec-style jades, themselves impervious to decay and thus likely to last, is attested in some finds from later Maya contexts (Burial 39, El Perú, Guatemala, ca. AD 600–650, Rich et al. [2010:figs. 4–8]; Salitrón Viejo, Honduras, ca. AD 1–400 Hirth et al. [2023:62]; Temple of the Warriors, Chichen Itza, Mexico [Karl Taube, personal communication 2020]; unprovenanced but inscribed examples, Schele and Miller [1986:pls. 10, 31, 32]; K2927, from the Broolyn Museum; for a context coeval with the Olmecs, see Paso del Macho, Yucatan [Bey 2025:484, fig. 30.4]). A notable feature is that they are seldom close to their time of first carving. Maya glyphs were added centuries later, or the objects were deposited close to a millennium or more after their making. Because of that distance, stories attached to them were likely to be projections or fabulations, if, one presumes, sincerely held. Continuity might have been asserted but on tenuous grounds.

Jade lasts but so does ceramic. One pot may allude to Classic Maya archaeology as broadly understood (Figure 1). A chocolate vase owned by a royal youth, it was painted in the 8th-century AD by a scribe (IK’ [i]tz’a-ti) from the kingdom of Motul de San José, Guatemala. On its curved surface, a group of old gods cavort with much younger ladies. In the top register, above a band representing the sky, are two seated deities of the wind, marked respectively by a sign for water and wind (for a focus on its celestial elements, see Layser 2017). Their crossed arms betoken inferior status, subordinate to the woman who addresses them. Four Itzam Tuun, hard and stony gods who sustain the Earth, receive a bare-chested woman raised up from below by yet another, eagle-eyed god (Martin 2015:188–192, fig. 5). The register under the sky shows more old gods, each clutching what appears to be a waist-wrap. Five seated ladies engage with a larger female (they too are gesturally subordinate), and an eagle-eyed old god presides on his jaguar-pelt throne or tz’am, a reading from Marc Zender.

Figure 1. Area of Motul de San José, Guatemala, ca. AD 725–750, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Landon T. Clay, #1988.1174. Photograph by Justin Kerr, Justin Kerr photograph collection, K1485, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.

The puzzles multiply. The overall narrative is hard to sort out other than what seems to be its erotic and festive undertone, or its possible rites of espousal. Do some of the ladies repeat from lower to upper register? Is it the enthroned deity, perhaps appearing twice, who lifts the young female over the side? Despite the celestial setting, the scene bubbles with water, and all the male deities have water-lily headdresses: the main god uses part of the Water Serpent title, YAX-CHIT-ti, as a component of his name (the chit reading comes from David Stuart, personal communication, 1998). Other glyphs have deciphered signs or syllables, but only a few phrases are fully legible (e.g., the main female, IX-ja?/HUL?-NAHB, a reference to her as as “lady of bodies of water,” possibly a courtesan status, or the small glyphs inserted under two other ladies about to float up into the festivities above, CHAN-na-NAL 6-TAL-6, and KAB 6-TAL-6, “celestial 6th-#6, earth[y] 6th-#6” [Houston 2018:174–177, fig. 89, for “watery women” as courtesans]).

To lower left in the scene is a trefoil (three-lobed) feature painted red (Figure 2). The convention and color signal that this feature is underground and dark but viewed in profile. (A hole or cavity glimpsed from above would have four lobes.) The objects inside represent an assemblage of pots: one cylindrical vessel, a cup perhaps, a high bowl with twisted band close to its rim, a water jar (olla) tipped on its side, the sign for water, HA’, indicating its contents, now spilled on the ground. There are also two standing ollas of varying size and an enigmatic antler-like feature to upper left. Completing the set are two lip-to-lip ceramics and a jar with markings for mead or balché drink, a beverage derived from honey and the bark of the pitarilla tree (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006:116, fig. 3.11). In short, this is an underground chamber filled with ceramics. Possibly the pots were intended for the festivities, cooled below ground, but no consumption takes place elsewhere in the image. Crucially, two of the ceramics are temporally diagnostic. For the region where the pot was made, they were not from its time of shaping, painting, and firing.

Figure 2. Dark, underground chamber, with, below, details of support stand, jar above marked for mead or balché, and lip-to-lip ceramics. Photograph by Justin Kerr, Justin Kerr photograph collection, K1485, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.

The first is the stand under the jar for mead (lower left in Figure 2). Its shape and dimensions correspond closely to the so-called “ring stands” or “annular supports” that occur in the Early Classic period (Figure 3). Where dateable, ring-stands extend from the beginnings of the Classic up to the cusp of the Late Classic (e.g., Río Azul, Guatemala, Tomb 19, dating to ca. AD 415 to 430, Hall [1989:68, 152–153, fig. 25]). In far Costa Rica, especially in the Nicoya Peninsula, similar shapes are known slightly later, or overlapping with the Early Classic, but the chronology of introduced or exported forms, including chocolate pots, can deviate from those in Mesoamerica (Stone 1977:fig. 139, with a date of ca. AD 450–800; Houston 2017a; James Doyle, personal communication, 2026). At other times, such stands may have been replaced by coiled bands, termed yahualli by speakers of Nahuatl, or by long-decayed versions in wood. A round ceramic will tip without such support.

Figure 3. Ring-stand supports (not to scale): a, b) Cave-48, La Lagunita, Quiche, Guatemala, first of limestone, second of ceramic, ca. AD 300? (Ichon and Arnauld 1985:62–63, 207, figs. 35c, 82h); c) Guacamallo Red-on-Orange, S.D. C121C-5, Structure F-24, Caracol, Belize, ca. AD 250–300? (Chase and Chase 2018:fig. 1d); d) Structure B36 Platform, Caracol, Belize, ca. AD 250–300? (Chase and Chase 2005:fig. 3c); e) Cache 30, Mound 20, Mirador, Chiapas, “Early Classic” (Agrinier 1970:71–72, fig. 86.16, fig. 96); f) Burial 9 [El Diablo tomb], El Zotz, Guatemala, ca. AD 400 (Newman et al. 2016:fig. 3.22); and g) Unnamed Red Slipped, K’ak 2-3, Holmul, Guatemala, ca. AD 300–550, note internal cross-surfaces for support (Callaghan and Nievens de Estrada 2016:fig. 6.15c1).

The lip-to-lip ceramics with angled rims like these also characterize the Early Classic period, many of so-called “Aguila Orange,” a red-toned and -slipped pottery; the configuration of two cache vessels appears in Preclassic times as well (Figure 4, Begel 2024:876, 880, Table 1; Culbert 1993:fig. 149c, e, f; Guderjan 2004:237, 241, 245, 246). At El Zotz, in the regal El Diablo tomb, they typically held infants who may have been sacrificed for the interment (Houston et al. 2025:figs. 2.8–2.12, 2.27, 2.38; Newman et al. 2015:96, 113–117, 124, figs. 3.13, 3.29–3.31, 3.39; Scherer 2015:183–192).

Figure 4. Lip-to-lip ceramics: a) K’o burial, Guatemala (near Holmul), 350–300 BC (Skidmore 2011:fig. 6; Tomasic 2009:fig. 7.12); b) Burial 9 [El Diablo tomb], El Zotz, Guatemala, ca. AD 400 (Newman et al. 2016:fig. 3.22); and c) Aguila Orange lip-to-lip caches vessels, “large variety,” Tikal, Guatemala, Early Classic period (Culbert 1993:fig. 149, c, e, f). 

Remarkably, just such a combination occurs on the Vase of the Initial Series from Uaxactun, Guatemala (Figure 5; Smith 1955:96, who assigns the ceramics in the image to the Tzakol or Early Classic period). Despite the find-spot, it was painted at or near the city of El Zotz about 40 km away (Carter 2015:6–10). The vase presents multiple enigmas, from an aberrant, almost impossibly early Initial Series date (256 BC?) for the event depicted on it, to the labelling of someone as “Quetzal-Sky,” eerily similar to K’uk’ulkan, “Feathered Serpent,” of the Postclassic period (Houston 1984:799–800; the “sky” is a homophone for “snake”). The holder: a jaguar with torch lashed to his back, perhaps about to be sacrificed—the burning of captives in this manner is attested in Classic sources (Martin and Grube 2008:82; Schele and Miller 1986:pl. 94a). The two, flat-bottomed bowls are kept tight by a cloth with a bow. The Vase conjoins history and myth, distant times with the politics of the period in which the Vase was made. The figure standing behind the jaguar is called the “first lord” (Yax Ajaw) of a place associated with prepotent dynasty centered on Calakmul, Mexico (AJ-chi ku-NAHB, Aj Chihk Nahb, “He of the Coati(?) Pool” [Calakmul], Martin 2020:111, 128, 131). Many lip-to-lips occur in a tomb a short distance from where the Vase was painted. Plausibly, the artist knew of just such ceramics and how they were used. 

Figure 5. Details of “The Vase of the Initial Series,” with jaguar, torch lashed to back, holding a lip-to-lip cache vessel. Watercolor by Mary Louise Baker, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, inking by Nicholas Carter (2015:figs. 6, 10c).

The Boston vase arcs over and bridges times. It has an historical owner, a young man of high status, named above an image of godly revelries. Tucked into a corner is what appears to be an inventory of pots, retrievable, with sweat, from an earlier tomb or cache. Earlier by about two centuries, perhaps: it was less archaizing in intent, a mere evocation, than a display of ceramics actually seen within an underground chamber. And not, like an Olmec jade, exceptionally remote, but from a few generations past. Here is a view every bit as uncanny as those from Bishop Baltazar Jaime Martínez Compañón.

Curation of valuable objects must have taken place in the Classic period, to judge from two tecali (alabaster) carvings in the tomb of ruler at Tikal (Houston 2023). In more remote times, the occupants of the Olmec city of La Venta dug down to a cache to check on its contents, and then backfilled (but see González Lauck and Courtès 2013:24, 28, fig. 6b, for stratigraphic qualms about this evidence). The Diablo tomb from El Zotz, that of the probable founder of a dynasty, contains one bowl a century or more older than the rest, yet plain and otherwise unmemorable (Newman et al. 2015:145, fig. 3.58). A tomb may be like a shipwreck, a compressed moment in time, but its contents potentially trawl through deeper pasts. Did the bowl have some emotional resonance for the owner, or was it merely a convenient holder for funeral food, a pot that had somehow survived the years? The depiction of older ceramics, in scenes of temporal disjunction, either mythic in nature or in some mix with the dynastic, suggest strong familiarity with past material culture. In showing and collecting pots, in projecting meaning on them, a few Classic Maya seem, by broad definition, to have been archaeologists.

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by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

To cultivate crops is to risk their destruction by pests. For present-day Maya in highland Guatemala, anxious about fields, these assaults come from “weevils, white grubs, moths, beetles, caterpillars, and aphids…wireworms, mites, crickets, scales, flies, leafhoppers, and ants,” with particular comment on gorgojos, “weevils” (Morales and Perfecto 2000:52). A nuisance, all such insects nonetheless had, by traditional belief, a claim to food, “[h]ay que compartir con los animales” [one has to share with animals]…although farmers still elected to apply lime (loathed by grubs) and botanical pesticides (often from plants harvested locally) (Morales and Perfecto 2000:54, 58). These must have been more effective than a Roman remedy against caterpillars, mentioned by Pliny the Elder (ca. AD 23–79). He recommended “fixing up on a stake the skull of an animal of the horse class, provided it is that of a female…[or] a river crab hung up in the middle of a garden” (Natural History, Book XIX.LVII.159, Pliny 1950:535). Columella, writing a little earlier than Pliny, urged that bear’s blood and beaver skin be smeared or rubbed on pruning knives, the better to repel the “leaf-roller,” a pest in vineyards (On Trees, XV, Columella 1955:379).

These practices, fanciful or not, reflect a certain desperation. History records many devastations by locusts and other insects, crushing local economies and destabilizing communities (Olvidadase and Dindo 2025:87, Table 1). Such predations could be “catalytic” to social change, if not always “determinative”; that is, they compounded rather than instigated vulnerabilities, yet their effects were still profound (Olvidadase and Dindo 2025:88). Among the Aztecs, droughts were accompanied, in 1446, by a plague of locusts, followed by years of misery (Hassig 1981:172, 173). The Yukatek Maya of the Colonial period were no less distressed by pests. War, “rains of little profit,” hangings of people, defeat: such ill fortune coincided with “a year of locusts” (Roys 1967:154). Hinting at Old Testament fusions (cf. Exodus 13–15), Christianity was said in the Chilam Balam of Chumayel to arrive in another “year of locusts,” along with calamities like “blood-vomit, drought…smallpox…[and] the importunity of the devil” (Roys 1967:164). 

Pest management was (and is) an enduring concern in Maya agriculture. A well nourished “postura” or individual planting of maize and bean plants—in Highland Guatemala, the four, sown kernels of such clumps indicate some cosmological import—flourish better with traditional fertilizer, not synthetic ones, which seem more susceptible to infestations (Morales, Perfecto, and Ferguson 2001:146, 153). Beneficial arthopods contribute to pest reduction, so not all bugs are bad (Benrey, Bustos-Seguro, and Grof-Tisza 2024:2, 4). Diminished “pest-pressure” is the goal rather than the complete absence of pests. That there is an acceptable degree of loss fits with an attitude of balanced concessions to other creatures. For insects, especially weevils, as opposed to marauding raccoons and coatimundi, losses are in any case more likely during post-harvest storage (Nations and Nigh 1980:13).

By now, it is well known that the Classic Maya grew agave (maguey) plants and consumed their products, from fibers to saps, including frothy aguamiel and, as its sugars break down into alcohol, the semiotically dense beverage of pulque (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006:116–117, 120, 122; Looper and Rehg 2023; Tokovinine 2016:16, figs. 3, 4; see also Barrera Vásquez 1941). Renowned for its preservation and care of excavation, Cerén, El Salvador, shows as many as 70 maguey plants for one household alone (Sheets 2017:108; Sheets and Woodward 2002:186–188, fig. 20.2). In highland Mexico, the use of maguey extends to clothing and cordage, fuel and construction material, particularly in areas where cotton does not grow well and deforestation has taken its toll (Parsons and Parsons 1990:4).

Ritual incantations to maguey in 17th century Nahuatl coax and encourage the plant: “[l]et it be soon! …here is the good place, the fine place that I have swept for you. Here you will be sitting” (Ruiz de Alarcón 1984:122). That people talk to plants, and that they presumably listen, signals a discursive, ritualized care beyond planting, pruning, and harvesting. At Teotihuacan, also in highland Mexico, pulque was a nutritional resource and risk-buffering food as well as a filling, potable liquid (Correa-Ascencio et al. 2014:14223, 14227; only one small sector of the city was sampled, but the results are likely relevant to Teotihuacan in general). Fiber processing is well-documented among the Classic Maya too, for glyphic evidence points to use of special metates (grinding stones) for pounding and grinding maguey fiber (Stuart 2014). At times of privation—the Mexican Revolution is one such period—maguey became, in some areas of highland Mexico, almost the sole means of sustenance (Parsons and Parsons 1990:11). Yet there is always pleasure mixed with pain. Known as chih in Classic Maya sources, pulque is said to be only slightly inebriating, but that effect must have been intensified by episodic use, binge drinking (especially among young men), and rectal ingestion, bypassing the stomach and its less speedy processing of alcohol (Houston 2018:128–130). The lack of restraint in Maya scenes of drunkenness is anything but decorous.

A notable feature of aguamiel and pulque is their need for “formidable management,” i.e., care of plants not yet yielding product, attention to when plants start their final “death-bloom” extraction of aguamiel, and, as a special urgency, its transport as a fermented drink to consumers (Parsons and Parsons 1990:18). Pulque spoils quickly. For maguey, the telltale sign of maturation, and a portent of its imminent demise, is the astoundingly rapid growth of stalks (with seeds) some 4 to 8 m in height (Figure 1, Parsons and Parsons 1990:29). Exuberant life is soon followed by death. It is perhaps for this reason that the Classic Maya link the agave plant to skulls and skeletons, reflecting its tough exterior but also its impending demise (Houston and Scherer 2020:figs. 1, 2). In one image, K1822, from the Kerr archive of Maya pots, the glyph for maguey merges with the head of one version of the Maya rain deity, ‘O Chahk, savoring of seasonality and cycles of moisture (see also Dine and Houston 2026). Depending on location and species, the plant appears to bloom largely in late spring or through the summer, and this merger of plant and rain god may express some tinge of that timing. (Typically, in the Maya region, that is a period with heavy rainfall.) An added urgency with agave is that, in its final burst, the plant will consume all its sap. Humans have to intervene early, at just the right time. Premature collection will result in too little liquid, unpalatable at best; the same will occur if collection takes place beyond a window of 2 to 3 weeks (Parsons and Parsons 1990:29; see also Escalante et al. 2016:3–5, Table 1, which tabulates many different species of agave yielding aguamiel and pulque). Within months, possibly up to a year, the plant will die from this extraction, as part of its so-called “castration.” There may have been an emotional resonance to this. On one pot, the gesture of the skeletal deity of maguey displays the arm upright and bent in a well-attested gesture of lamentation (Houston and Scherer 2020:fig. 2). Death is nearby, expectant.

Figure 1. Flowering agave with final bloom (CC BY 4.0).

Humans are not the only creatures to use maguey and consume its fluid. A dire competitor is the Agave Snout Weevil, Scyphophorus acupunctatus, which grows to some 8 to 19 mm in length (Figure 2). A real threat to modern production of tequila, a distilled residue of maguey sap, they attack boles and, by weakening the plant, contribute to other, rotting diseases (Cuervo-Parra 2019:2; Figueroa-Castro et al. 2013:1455; Waring and Smith 1986). To judge from modern evidence, shifts in climate appear to spur their activity and ability to destroy stands of maguey, perhaps an economic stressor in the past as well (Salazar-Rivera et al. 2026). Weevil larvae munch on the plant, but the adult drills in, leading to one term for “weevil” in Colonial Tzotzil, joch’, “woodborer,” from a word for “drill” (Laughlin 1988, I:211). 

Figure 2. Agave Snout Weevil, Scyphophorus acupunctatus (photograph by Rafael Carbonell-Font, CC BY 4.0).

A unique image of an Agave Snout Weevil exists on a chocolate vase from the area of Naranjo, Guatemala (Figures 3, 4, 5, Looper and Rehg 2023). It dates to the later 6th century AD, and, the work of a widely productive painter, was formerly in the collection of Landon T. Clay; a fire at his residence led to its complete loss (Dorie Reents-Budet, personal communication 2026). The text above may note the name of the owner, or, possibly, a term for “white pulque,” SAK-chi? . The name and titles of “Aj Num Saaj,” ruler of Naranjo, follows (see Tokovinine, Estrada-Belli, and Fialko 2024:787–791; by a conservative view, the precise reading of the ruler’s name is still conjectural, hence the quotation marks). For the moment, the most sure bet is that this spells a nominal. The ruler who owned or commissioned this and many other vases—more than a dozen exist, some from archaeological settings—favored mythic narratives with cavorting birds, animals, and bugs (Houston and Tokovinine 2016). The pot reveals a scene in which a bipedal jaguar looks across a maguey plant to a seated armadillo and a mosquito. All animals speak or vocalize, a fact plain from the dotted streams coming from their mouths. In between is an unmistakable agave plant, resting on a skull with some touches of the rain god’s head. From the plant, sprouting in aureole glory, is the quiote or scape, the stalk that grows with surprising speed. Ordinarily, on actual plants, several flowers appear—they are a rare delicacy, especially if boiled in salted water (Figueredo-Urbina, Álvarez-Ríos, and Zárraga 2021)—but a need for representational economy may have limited it to one illustration here. Painting in other growths would have cluttered what is already a tight visual space. The flowering suggests the agave has not been castrated nor aguamiel extracted; the plant is in its final death-bloom, a tenuous time, even of slow-motion crisis. A particular time of year is implicated, perhaps from late spring to late summer.

Figure 3. Gathering of jaguar, armadillo, and agave plant (MS0066), later 6th century AD, area of Naranjo, Guatemala. Photo by Ronald L. Bishop, 1970s, courtesy of Dorie Reents-Budet.

Figure 4. Vocalizing mosquito to side of armadillo, with text showing theonym (Yopaat) of “Aj Numsaaj” and that ruler’s full epithet, followed by the *6(?) Kab reference common at Naranjo, Guatemala (cf. K5362, for similar elision of dot-number, MS0066), later 6th century AD, area of Naranjo, Guatemala. Photo by Ronald L. Bishop, 1970s, courtesy of Dorie Reents-Budet.

Figure 5. Hero twins seated on prone toad, to side of agave grouping (MS0066), later 6th century AD, area of Naranjo, Guatemala. The birds at the small of their backs may represent prey. The Twins, wearing the hats of travelers and hunters, grasp a blowgun (1 Ajaw) and what may be a conch, perhaps with ink hollow (“Xbalanque”). Photo by Ronald L. Bishop, 1970s, courtesy of Dorie Reents-Budet.

The bug at the center, the bole of the plant, is crucial. Patently, it is an Agave Snout Weevil (Figure 6). For ancient America, this representation is among the only such plant pests ever identified in ecosystemic relation to its host. [Note 1] Like the weevil, it is black; it has three protruding elements, again like the bug. Its cramped, flexed body shape compares to other burrowing insects, and it sits at the bole of an agave where the weevil feeds (Houston 2025). When active, the weevil leaves a dark, rotting mass. The insects also make a loud clicking noise while dining. That is duly cued by the single dotted emission coming from its snout. A noisy group in general: even the mosquito emits what may be its high-pitched whine (Figure 3).

Figure 6. Comparison of Agave Snout Weevil, three protrusions visible in both (left, CC-BY-SA-4.0; right, photograph by Ronald L. Bishop, 1970s courtesy of Dorie Reents-Budet).

The identification is crisp, but the larger setting of gathered feline, armadillo, and agave pest remains opaque. Other pots of this time and place, including one in The Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC (1985.102.5, K1558), highlight similar interactions and revelries of beasts and bugs. The obscurity is also high, of stories, some etiological or explanatory, that lie “off-pot,” a sum of inaccessible, background knowledge that is assumed for viewers. A larger question, of what is conventional, what closely observed, further clouds the pot. The Agave Snout Weevil is both recognizable and stylized, a conundrum in lexical classification generally. It exists between a local subjectivity, perfectly serviceable to ancient Maya, and a Linnean “scientific realism” that might derive from microscopy, cladistics or DNA-based classes (Amundson 1982:241; Rossi and Newman 2025:35). Loose congruence between the two will almost always exist; consummate congruence, never.

Acknowledgements 

Shanti Morell-Hart provided good advice, as did Andrew Scherer. Dorie Reents-Budet was most collegial in permitting use of the photographs featuring the weevil. From Berlin, in the middle of a busy schedule, she also sent other photos of this now-lost pot. I am grateful for that help.

Note 1.  See also Capinera (1993), for Mimbres-region arthopods in the Southwest of the United States, or, for stinging ants and acacia in one vase from about the same time as that with the weevil (Taube 1989). Christian Prager (personal communication, 2026) wonders whether worms and other plant-predators appear on the pages of the Madrid Codex, albeit with terse and mostly uninterpretable texts (see Madrid 25d, 27d, 28c).  

References

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by David Stuart

In Part I of this series on Maya regional names, I suggested the reading of a certain hieroglyph in Classic sources as MAAY-HA’, meaning something like “Fawn Waters.” I also posited that this corresponds to the historical name “Maya” (or Maaya’) which referred to the large region roughly corresponding to the Yucatán Peninsula, or the northern part of it. The supposed Maayha’ glyph is also non-local in scope, appearing in three widely dispersed places (Yaxchilan, Tayasal and Río Azul) and in visual settings where it relates to the earth, hills, and caves – the landscape itself. Here I expand on that initial proposal, investigating visual contexts where the glyph for Maayha’ occurs, and examining how the “iconography of place” also emphasized the character we sometimes refer to as Cosmic Caiman, a widespread symbol of the earth’s surface. I believe these settings bolster the proposed Maayha’ reading, and open other avenues of investigation into regional place names and related terms. One of these can be considered the name of the caiman itself, K’inich Ahiin, meaning “The Solar Caiman.” While not exactly a toponym, K’inich Ahiin was, I think, a proper name for the animate being that represented the earth, with close thematic overlaps to Maayha’, peten, and other ancient geographical terms.

As touched on in the first essay, several of these geographical references come together in the paintings of Río Azul, Tomb 1 (Figure 1). The possible Maayha’ glyph appears within a complex visual program that is fully toponymic in nature, marking the tomb as a cosmological place and conforming to a pattern we see in many of the other painted tombs of the site (Acuña 2015). For example, another painted crypt, Tomb 12, emphasizes the world directions and the cosmic eagles associated with those places; Tombs 6 and 25 display directional mountains and the canonical Year Bearers associated with them (4 Caban, 4 Ik’, etc.) (Acuña 2015:178, Stuart 2004). In Tomb 1, the imagery emphasizes water as well as maize, the latter perhaps indicated by the stacked and animated “beads” on each wall, a key diagnostic element in the iconography of the tonsured maize god Jun Ixi’m (Figure 2). This is the deity who of course “entered the water” and  later came to be resurrected as primordial maize.

Whatever the case, it seems that the décor of Tomb 1 presented a symbolic environment for resurrection and rebirth (Acuña 2015). The central text panel records a “birth” on September 29, 417 CE that may be the apotheosis of the deceased occupant, referring to his emergence out of the waters of the earth, as the reborn sun. This of course echoing some familiar themes we know from Pakal’s sarcophagus at Palenque. To the left of the birth text we find the animate signs WITZ and CH’EN stacked one atop the other, and above of these in turn we see the small MAAY-HA’ glyph.  I believe this detail, like a glyph in a royal headdress, serves to name the “hills and caves,” the landscape which is the environment of birth and earth-emergence. An accompanying glyph that shows a skull may be another place reference.  To the right we have another vertical grouping of K’IN atop AHIIN-na, referring to a caiman or crocodilian (ahiin) (Figure 3).

The name K’inich Ahin, or “Solar Caiman,” appears elsewhere in texts and iconography. I mentioned on of these on an inscribed vase from Tayasal, where the IK’-a place name and MAAY-HA’ glyph are also featured (see Figure 4, top). Another  example is on Yaxchilan, Lintel 31, where it appears as part of the proper name of a building, Structure 10 (Figure 4, bottom). There we see the name introduced by the same sequence, in a more conventional glyphic arrangement: K’INICH-AHIN-na. This is followed by a second block, where the initial element is hard to make out (note the rodent’s head in its lower portion), followed by PET-ne, spelling the word peten. The full name of Structure 10 was therefore K’inich Ahiin ? Peten, “the Solar Caiman ? Region(?).” Here the presence of peten in connection with the caiman is of particular significance. It is a very familiar word today, of course, usually in reference to the “Department of Petén” in northern Guatemala. Originally the word had two related senses, which we see in colonial Yucatec sources, as well as in reflections of modern usage. Peten is “island (isla)” and also “region, province (comarca, región ó provincia).” What connects them in the sense of an area that is demarcated and therefore “circled” [Note 1]. The root pet is “round, circular,” and peten essentially refers to the idealized shape of space, whether an island such as Flores (named Peten, “the Island,” among the modern Itzaj), or as a larger unit of territory (u petenil Yucatan means “la provincia de Yucatán”). Structure 10 of Yaxchilan, dedicated on a Period Ending 9.16.13.0.0, was apparently some type of peten as well, at least, of a specific named variety associated with the Solar Caiman. It seems to have been a symbol of a region or place, at least metaphorically.

Step III of Yaxchilan’s Hieroglyphic Stairway 3 displays what I take to be the same place name, but now in a hybrid iconographic form (Figure 5). This complex design (redrawn here) appears at the bottom of the sculpture, as a “toponymic register” below an image of a kneeling prisoner and a lengthy text recording his capture, leading up to the accession of Shield Jaguar IV (or perhaps Kokaj Bahlam IV) (Stuart and Houston 1994: 62). The place name function of the design is clearly indicated by the Pa’chan glyph in the form of the crested CHAN bird with a cleft (PA’) at its top. Its –na suffix lends a further glyphic flavor to the composition. Above this we see a disc with a portrait of the sun god K’inich Ajaw, which forms the body of the caiman or crocodile. In this instance it is the familiar “Cosmic Monster” of Maya art, with its distinctive attributes, including the net-like headband, and the so-called “quadripartite badge” at the base of its tail (a representation of an animate offering bowl or lak, a place of birth and emergence) (Justeson [cited in Frediel and Scale 1988:75], Robertson 1974, Stuart 2005). At the lower left of the composition, we see a cartouche framing a mouse or rodent, connected to the head of the crocodilian by a tendril like element. This confirms a connection the toponym design on Yaxchilan’s Stela 7, mentioned in Part I, with its caiman, solar disc, rodent, and MAAY-HA’ glyph. The ornate composition on Step III’s toponymic register also incorporates many of the elements we have in the proper name of Structure 10 – the K’INICH being the disc with the sun god, the AHIIN being the caiman, and the enclosed rodent element is present as well. No little deer with a HA’ glyph is easily visible on Step III, but inspection of the photograph suggests it may be just to the right of the rodent, slightly smaller in size.

The connection to the Lintel 31 name is confirmed by a closer inspection of the circular frame that forms the body of the caiman, surrounding K’inich Ahau. This looks to be a disc, simple and unadorned. However, to its right we also see a distinctive curved element, with a lower detail that reveals it to be tail, the hieroglyphic sign ne (Figure 6). This combination can only be understood as the hieroglyphic combination PET-ne, where the PET logogram works doubly as the solar disc for K’inich Ajaw. Now we have more of the components of the proper name cited on Lintel 31: K’inich Ahiin ? Peten. This reveals that the toponymic register of Step 3, while citing Pa’chan (Yaxchilan) is also displaying something broader as its geographical setting — the name of the caiman and of region. The point here is to show the earthly caiman’s body as a peten, as a “region.”[Note 2]

In the design from Step III we also see the small rodent within a floral cartouche, linked by a tendril-like line to the head of the caiman (see lower left of Figure 5). This relates again to the toponymic register on Yaxchilan Stela 7, where a similar rodent is in one of the two cartouche that emerges from a solar caiman’s eye. The opposite cartouche on Stela 7 is the MAAY?-HA’ glyph previously discussed, suggesting that the Step III design, with its emphasis on peten and the caiman, may refer to expansive named regions, with K’inich Ahiin as their overall setting.

Step VIII of Yaxchilan’s Hieroglyphic Stairway 2 offers another depiction of the same cosmological elements, this time incorporated into ballgame regalia (Figure 7). This is a portrait of Yaxun Bahlam III, who is identified in the accompanying text as an embodiment of the sun god, K’inich Ajaw. Curiously, we see the ruler with his back toward us, displaying his elaborate “back-rack” regalia in the form of a cosmic caiman or crocodile, its tail rearing upward, transformed into a cluster of quetzal feathers. The center of the caiman’s body is once more a solar cartouche (the telltale centipede heads emanate from the cartouche, only visible in photos). Within the disc we see what looks to be another small, rodent-like animal. I take this to be a representation of the “Solar Caiman,” K’inich Ahiin, which is included as part of the sun god’s ceremonial regalia.

Yet another image that I take to be K’inich Ahiin occurs in the stuccoes of the Subterraneos (subterranean passages) within the Palace of Palenque (Figure 8). Here we see a solar cartouche in the very center of the caiman’s body, suggesting that it is the sun coursing within the earth before its reemergence. This also relates to the iconography on the cosmological throne or bench placed nearby in the Subterraneos, carved in the form of the caiman’s body (Figure 9).  This is clearly one of the “caiman thrones” or scaffolds used in Period Ending ceremonies (Stuart 2005:98, Taube 1989[2019]). The inscription that forms the body of the caiman includes a sequence of glyphs states the elaborate name of the building in which the throne once stood: numul ta kab, numul ta chan ahiin(?)nal yotoot, “passing through the earth, passing through the sky, the ‘Caiman Place,’ is the house of…” (Stuart 2003). Although I did not address this point in my 2003 study, I see this extended phrase as an architectural reference, perhaps even the proper name given to the Subterraneos themselves, an underground “house.” The image of the sun in the body of the caiman in the stucco decoration may be a visual correlate to this complex name [Note 3].

The stucco image of the caiman is part of a series of decorations above the interior stairwells in Palenque’s Subterraneos, the best-preserved of which shows the Maize God in swirling water bands – again emphasizing a theme related to the earth’s interior (Robertson 1985:32-25). These iconographic details help to indicate how the dark passageways beneath Palenque’s palace formed a figurative underworld that was directly incorporated into the throne room of K’inich Janabpakal, shown on the nearby Oval Palace Tablet as an embodiment of the reborn sun, K’inich Ahau, and as the Maize God, Jun Ixi’m. This agrees with the possibility that these labyrinthine passageways of the Palace were explicitly conceived as a replication of the underworld – a series of  built-in passages symbolizing descent and re-emergence, associated with K’inich Janabpakal, the initial embodiment of the sun god in Palenque’s dynasty. This remarkable recreation of mythic space within the Palace will be explored in a future essay.

Cosmic Crocodiles of Earth and Sky

The use of crocodilians as earth symbols has a long and deep history in Mesoamerican cosmology and art. Well-known is the mythic reptile known as Cipactli, the Nahuatl term for the animate earth that takes the form of a supernatural caiman, often represented in the Postclassic pictorial books, and even in sculpture from time to time (Figure 10). It is the name of the first day of the Nahuatl day list-corresponding the Maya Imix or Imox, a cosmic serpent associated with water and sustenance (although not a caiman in origin) (see Stuart 2024). In Maya art caimans of different types can serve as representations of the animate earth, perhaps best exemplified by the image carved onto the top of Copan’s Altar T (Figure 11). Here its aquatic aspect is emphasized, surrounded by numerous mythological figures and a hieroglyphic text along its back [Note 4].

For the Postclassic Maya of Yucatán, the crocodilian symbol of earth was named Itzam Cab Ain, perhaps translatable as the “Magic Earth Caiman,” and discussed in detail by Taube (1989[2018]) (Taube specifically cited the image in Figure 5 as a Classic period depiction of the same entity). It may also be described mentioned in the following passage from the Relacion de la Ciudad de Merida, written around 1580:

Tuvieron noticia de la creación del mundo y un creador de cielo y tierra, y decían, que éste que los creó no podía ningun hombre pintarle como era. También tuvieron noticia de la caida de Lucifer y del Diluvio, y que el mundo se había de acabar por fuego, y en signficación de esto hacían una ceremonia y pintaban un lagarto que signficaba el Diluvio y la tierra, y sobre este lagarto hacían un gran monton de leña y ponian fuego y, después de hechos brasas, allanábanlo y pasaba el principal sacerdote descalzo por encima de las brasas sin quemarse, y después iban pasando todos los que querían. entendiendo por esto que el fuego los havia de acabar a todos.

They heard about the creation of the world and a creator of heaven and earth, and they said that no man could paint the one who created them. They also learned of the fall of Lucifer and the Flood, and that the world would end by fire. To signify this, they performed a ceremony and painted a crocodile, which represented the Flood and the earth. On top of this crocodile, they made a large pile of wood and set it alight. After it turned to embers, they leveled it, and the high priest walked barefoot over the embers without being burned. Afterward, all who wished to could cross over. By this, they understood that the fire would destroy them all.

Erik Velásquez Garcia (2004, 2006) has closely studied these myths and discusses their reflections in the Books of Chilam Balam. There, the name Itzam Can Ain comes up again in relation to a primordial flood, after which the earth is brought about through his sacrifice and destruction.

[In the reign of 13 Ahau and 1 Ahau were the days and nights that fell without order and pain was felt throughout the land. Because of this] Oxlahun ti Ku [and] Bolon ti Kuh [the Nine Gods] created the world and life; and there was also born Itzam Cab Ain [Iguana Earth Crocodile]. [Ah Mesencab] turned the sky and the Petén upside down, and Bolon ti Ku raised up Itzam Cab Ain; there was a great cataclysm, and the ages ended with a flood. The 18 Bak Katun was being counted and in its seventeenth part, Bolon ti Kuh refused to permit Itzam Cab Ain to take Peten and to destroy the things of the word, so he cut the throat of Itzam Cab Ain and with his body formed the surface of the Peten. (Craine and Reindorp 1979:117-119; quoted in Velásquez Garca 2006:6).i

The description of how its “body formed the surface of the Peten” (the “province”) offers a striking parallel to what we see depicted in the toponymic design from Yaxchilan’s HS 3, with the PET-ne hieroglyph fused with the caiman’s body (see Figure 5).

So we can easily see how the name K’inich Ahiin closely relates with certain “Cosmic Monsters,” including the crocodilian being who displays a skeletal head on its tail or rear-end, ritual offering bowl (lak) decorated with the sun glyph and holding sacrificial instruments (Figure 11). This isn’t always an earthly beast, however, adding some confusion to its interpretation. Other key iterations are celestial, as the “Celestial Monster,” or “Starry Deer Crocodile,” or sometimes as a less-specific serpent [Note 5] (Freidel and Schele 1988:74-76, Martin 2015, Stuart 1988, 2005). The latter is the croc has stars attached to its body and deer hoofs for its appendages — but not always. Its body may also be formed by “stone” (tuun) or otherwise by celestial bands. Cosmic crocodiles therefore occupy both the earth and sky, as Martin (2015) rightly emphasizes in his excellent discussion of these iconographic characters as “sky-earth crocodilians.” On the inner doorway sculpture of Temple 22 of Copan, the Starry Deer Crocodile has a body made of S-shaped clouds, perhaps a figurative image of the Milky Way arcing across the nocturnal sky. In a previous study (Stuart 2005: 71-74, 166-168) I suggested that many of the elongated crocodilians in Maya art were symbols of the solar pathways, both celestial and terrestrial. In its earthly aspect, the caiman gives birth to the sun from the k’in-marked bowl at its rear end. As an aspect of the animate earth, the crocodile is where the sun is both consumed and reborn. Thus the name under discussion here, K’inich Ahiin, would seem to refer to this role. As a celestial being, the crocodile reflects the same pathway, sometimes as a nocturnal track. The description on the Palenque throne mentioned earlier makes this explicit, noting the path of the sun  as “passing through the earth, passing through the sky” — an apt description. The caiman is perhaps one means of depicting the pathway in animate form.

Martin (2015) also notes how the Maya cosmic crocodiles resonate strongly with myths from central Mexico, which describe a primordial cosmic monster named Tlalteotl (literally “Earth Deity”) who was slain and severed in two, one part representing the sky, the other the earth. The best Classic Maya precedent we have for these late myths, all centered on the sacrifice and cutting of a caiman to form the earth and the sky, comes from Temple XIX at Palenque (Stuart 2005:68-77, Velásquez García 2002, 2006). There, in the extraordinary mythic accounts leading up to the birth of the Palenque Triad gods, we read of the sacrifice of a starry caiman who has two specific aspects. One is names the WAY-PAAT-AHIIN? “Hole-Backed Starry Caiman” and the other the tz’i-ba-la-PAAT-AHIIN? “Inscribed-Backed Starry Caiman.” These esoteric descriptions refer to the body of the earth-caiman as having the “hole” or void from which the sun emerges. The “inscribed” caiman is an odd description, but it is surely related to Late Postclassic images of the earth-caiman that show a sequence of day signs along its body. These appear in both late Maya and central Mexican iconography (Taube 1989[2018]). I suspect that day sequences are conceptually related to the k’in signs we see as the bodies of the caimans at Yaxchilan, Palenque and elsewhere. That is, the individual days, like the sun, pass through the caiman’s body. This is perhaps another basis for the simple descriptive name K’inich Ahiin, the Solar Caiman [Note 6].

Conclusion

We have departed a bit from the possible MAAY-HA’ glyph and reading mentioned at the outset, but the complex story of the Cosmic Caiman is part of the larger discussion of regional names and geographical concepts. Given the glyphic and iconographic cases mentioned here, I take K’inich Ahiin to be a proper name as well (perhaps one of many) given to the Cosmic Caiman, the consumer of the sun before its daily rebirth. This would be the Classic Maya correlate to Itzam Cab Ain of ancient Yucatan, and to Cipactli in central Mexico. The appearance of the glyph for peten as part of K’inich Ahiin’s extended name phrase, even visually integrated into his image at Yaxchilan, indicates its important as a regional name of a sort, wide-ranging in scope, an expanse of land. I think this also is true of the glyphic combination of witz and ch’en (“hills and caves”) presented with K’inch Ahiin in the Río Azul tomb. This resembles a pairing of nouns that could describe the Maya landscape in broad terms. That the supposed MAAY-HA’ glyph accompanies several mentions of K’inich Ahiin is significant, for its strengthens the case that Maayha’ was an ancient region or peten set upon the animate, crocodilian earth.

Notes

Note 1. The many senses and scales of peten reflects how important circular ideas of space were for the Maya, encompassing totality. We see this in indigenous maps of the colonial era, in k’atun wheels, and in many other fundamental categories. Pet kah refers to an “aldea,” a peten tun is a large round stone used as a grindstone, etc.

Note 2. It is very possible that that these two Yaxchilan mentions of peten in connection to the earth-caiman are referring to the distinctive loop the Rio Usumacinta takes where Yaxchilan is situated. That is, a formation of land that is both circumscribed and circular.

Note 3. The Palenque throne text employs a “caiman” head sign that is slightly different from the standard AHIIN logogram. Here it displays the features of the Starry Deer Crocodile (see Note 5 below), with a star element on its eye and ear, corresponding to the head on the left end of the throne’s front edge. Do we reading this as AHIIN as well? It is difficult to say, but it seems best for now to consider them separate. This is the portrait of the starry crocodilian, the animate form of the sign for “star,” as opposed to the more generic AHIIN we see in the K’INICH AHIIN-na spellings discussed here, for instance (see Stuart 2005:fig. 44).

Note 4. The front face of Altar T shows a playful representation of two calendar dates, one the accession day of the ruler Yaxpasaj Chanyopat, and the other its one k’atun anniversary. The day signs for Caban are animated as full human figures. I have to wonder if their prominence in the design has something to do with the meaning of the day Caban as “earth,” given the dominant image of the earth-caiman on top. In other words, the caiman and the earth iconography of the altar may hinge on the underlying meaning of date being celebrated.

Note 5. This is a term I coined a couple of decades ago, also referring to it erroneously at times as the “Starry Deer Alligator.” As I’ve been reminded by several colleagues, true alligators are not native to Central America. Crocodiles and caimans were both called ahin or ayin in Mayan languages (from port0-Mayan *ahiin).

Note 6. The Palenque Temple XIX passage offers a tantalizing connection between the Classic period to the later mythic narratives of the Books of Chilam Balam and of Cipactli, in central Mexico (Stuart 2005:68-70, Velásquez García 2002, 2006). The “chopping” of the caiman on 12.10.12.14.18 1 Etznab 6 Yaxkin was clearly an act of world creation (note the verb i patlaj, “then it is made”), establishing the two complimentary aspects of the caiman. The Temple XIX text also emphasizes how this primordial act established the ritual significance of two fundamental “elements” of Maya ceremonial life – flowing blood (u ch’ich’el) and the drilling of ritual fire (joch’ u k’ahk’). Each would constantly need to be replicated in sacrificial ceremonies of world-renewal, even up to the rites described in the Relacion de la Ciudad de Mérida, quoted earlier.

Works Cited

Acuna, Mary Jane. 2015. Royal Death, Tombs and Cosmic Landscapes: Early Classic Maya Tomb Murals from Rio Azul, Guatemala. Maya Archaeology 3, edited by Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, pp. 168–185. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco.

Craine, Eugene R., and Reginald C. Reindorp (translators and editors). 1979, Codex Pérez and the Chilam Balam of Mani. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Freidel, David, and Linda Schele. 1988. A History of the Lowland Maya Cosmogram. In Maya Iconography, edited by Gillett Griffin and Elizabeth P. Benson, pp. 44-93. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Martin, Simon, 2015. The Old Man of the Maya Universe. A Unitary Dimension to Ancient Maya Religion. In Maya Archaeology 3, edited by Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, and Joel Skidmore, pp. 186–227. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco.

Relación de la Ciudad de Mérida. In Garza, M.de la, A.L. Izquierdo, M. C. León and T. Figueroa. 1983. Relaciones histórico-geográficas de la gobernación de Yucatán. 2 vols. UNAM, México.

Robertson, Merle Greene. 1985. The Sculpture of Palenque. Volume II: The Early Buildings of the Palace and the Wall Paintings. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Stuart, David. 1988. Blood Symbolism in Maya Iconography. In Maya Iconography, edited by Gillett Griffin and Elizabeth P. Benson, pp. 175-221. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

_________ . 2004. Year Bearers in Classic Maya Inscriptions. The PARI Journal 5(2):1-6

_________ . 2005. The Inscriptions of Temple XIX of Palenque. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco.

__________. 2022. The Green and the Yellow. Metaphors of Color, Cyclical Process and Divinity in Maya Language and Art. Paper presented at the 2022 Mesoamerica Meetings, University of Texas at Austin, January 15, 2022.

Taube, Karl. [1989]2018. Itzam Cab Ain. Caimans, Cosmology and Calendrics in Postclassic Yucatán. In Studies in Ancient Mesoamerican Art and Architecture: Selected Works by Karl Andreas Taube, pp. 118–149. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco. Electronic version available: http://www.mesoweb.com/publications/Works

Velásquez García, Erik. 2002. Una nueva interpretación del Monstruo Cósmico maya. In P. Krieg-er, ed., Arte y Ciencia. XXIV Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte,
pp. 419-457. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Méxi-
co, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, México.

________________. 2006. The Flood Myth and the Decapitation of the Cosmic Caiman. The PARI Journal VII(1):1-10.

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 (Sugiyama, 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 involve 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. Tz’utz’ for “pizotes” is almost pan-Mayan, and the syllables with the hair-crested 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 parallel the Maya inclination to call 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 as root for “smooth, shiny, glistening,” 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.

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