Maya Decipherment

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.