Stephen Houston (Brown University)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

References

Ara, Fray Domingo de. 1986. Vocabulario de Lengua Tzeldal Según el Orden de Copanabastla. Edited by Mario Humberto Ruz. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girard, Rafael. 1949. Los Chorti ante el problema Maya, vol. 1. Mexico City: Antigua Librería Robredo.

Gómez López, Tómas. 2017. Estudio lexicográfico del tseltal de Villa Las Rosas. Ph.D. dissertation, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico City.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaufman, Terrence, with John Justeson. 2003. A Preliminary Mayan Etymological Dictonary. Unpublished ms.

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

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

Laughlin, Robert M. 1975. The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Piacentini, Elena, and Gianpasquale Chiatante. 2022. Habitat Selection, Density, and Breeding of Great Spotted Woodpecker Dendrocopos major in a Protected Natural Area in Northern Italy. Avocetta 46:97–114.

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

Reents-Budet, Dorie, Ronald L. Bishop, Carolyn Audet, Jaime Awe, and M. James Blackman. 2005. Act Locally, Think Internationally: The Pottery of Baking Pot, Belize. Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 2:365–86.

Ringle, William. n.d. Concordance of the Morán Dictionary of Ch’olti’. Ms. in possession of author.

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

Sotheby’s. 2025. Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, 17–28 October 2025. Online catalogue. 

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

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

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

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

Tozzer, Alfred M. 1941. Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán: A Translation. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology XVIII. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

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

Villa Rojas, Alfonso. 1990. Etnografía tzeltal de Chiapas: Modalidades de una cosmovisión prehispánica. Tuxtla Gutiérrez: Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas.

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

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

Zalaquett Rock, Francisca, Alice Balsanelli, Rodrigo Petatillo Chan, Fernando González-García, and Miguel García Cruz. 2024. Los cantos de las aves en las percepciones, vivencias y mitos de los lacandones de Nahá y Metzabok, Chiapas. Estudios de Cultura Maya 64:217–49.

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.

Stephen Houston (Brown University)

In the third-quarter of the 16th century, a Nahuatl-speaking scribe compiled the Cantares Mexic.^os [Mexicanos], a set of “Mexican songs” lush with metaphors of beauty, glory, and loss (Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City, MS 1628; Peñafiel 1904). More than just songs, the Cantares implied vigorous drumming and even dance: “Here begin log-drum songs [Nican ompehua Teponazcuicatl]…Tico, tico, toco toto, and when the song ends [auh icontlantiuh cuicatl] Tiquiti titito titi” (Bierhorst 1985:219; Figure 1). The drums were the vertical huehuetl, struck with the hands, and the horizontal teponaztli, hit by mallets tipped with rubber or resin. The finest, most artfully prepared ones appear to have been made of rosewood, a tree now endangered in Mexico, and their intervals did not follow western tunings. For the teponaztli, often equipped with two tongues or sounding boards, the opposed notes tended to be “slightly below a major third, to slightly above a fifth” (Herrera-Castro et al. 2019:1).

 

The syllables in the quotation — Tico, tico, toco toto…Tiquiti titito titi — are less well understood (Bierhorst 1985:74–79). Known to scholars as “vocables,” sequences like toco, toto appear at the start and close of certain songs or divide the stanzas within them. Clustering into CV or CVC forms, they offer contrasts between alveolar (t) and velar (c) stops joined to close frontal (i) and close-mid back (o) vowels. Thus: ti, to, qui, co, along with the less common tih, tin, toh, ton, con, and coh (Lewy 2015:100). Some occur as disyllables (tico), others as trisyllables (titito).

What do the sounds mean? Most scholars believe they specify drum beats (Nowotny 1956:186–87; Schultze-Jena 1957; Tomlinson 2007:42, 44). Perhaps they were fills, rhythmic passages between stanzas, with each syllable matching a pitch or beat. “Play this sequence of strikes now, before singing ensues.” More likely, however, they established and reinforced the pitches and beats of a whole song or stanza. In this respect, they resemble a percussive solfège, a way of using syllables to signal pitch or rhythm, if somewhat imprecisely. The vocables tease out, not so much a definite series of pitches, as the relation of one sequenced note or beat to another. There is no exactitude of a tuning fork, an invention waiting until 1711, only a reminder of a song “meant to go with words…[in which] the basic unit of music-writing is not the note but the syllable” (Kelly 2015:12, writing of early Medieval Europe). The singer, so nudged, understood what to do and how to perform. Properly cued, the audience would know which song was to come. That the singer and drummer were often the same person is confirmed by a performance in 1551 of what may be an unrelated song (Bierhorst 1985:78). The writer who witnessed it had to watch closely. Otherwise he would miss how the vocalist, Don Francisco Plácido, hit the drum.

The vocable system must have been widespread. John Bierhorst, translator of the Cantares, refers to comparable syllables, apparently sung rather than drummed, among the Cora of Durango, Mexico (Bierhorst 1985:74, 78). An audio from 1968 attests to a reduced number of syllables, alternating between ti and to, ki and ko, but the similarity is too strong to be a coincidence. (Like Nahuatl, Cora is an Uto-Aztecan language, so the roots may go deep.) The same “pattern of percussion,” with exactly the same syllables, occurs in Zapotec texts of the Colonial period, along with (evidently) non-lexical vocalizations between separate stanzas of music (ayao, hiya, hoya, etc., Tavárez 2006:420, 429, 433, 436, 437; ibid. 2017:46).

By one view, the variation in syllables express where a beat was struck. According to an early Franciscan missionary, Toribio de Benevente Motolinía, the vertical drum, the huehuetl, was hit at both the center and edge of its drumhead, which could be tuned by adjusting its tautness (Haly 1986:97). In this way, some of the syllables, with their percussive initial sounds (t, qui, k) and high and low vowels (i, o), might have correlated with different sonorities of drums (see Lelis de Oliveira 2024:133, for similar ideas). This area emitted that sound, over here, struck just so, came another, with two hands at play to create two or three beats. The importance of such “strike zones” and what to label them recall the bol syllables of paired tabla drums in India (Shepherd 1976:65). A fusion of speech and sound, bol derives from Hindi bolnā (बोलना), “to speak.” The syllables, which include tā, te, ra, ka, along with combined forms for two hands, dhe, din, etc., are tied to drum sounds by listeners familiar with the tabla (Patel and Iversen 2003:928; see Mehrabi et al. 2019). A marked degree of onomatopoeia or sound symbolism probably operated behind them (Rowell 1992:141–42).

Of great complexity, the bols are taught not so much individually, but as sequences learned during initial stages of training. For masters like Zakir Hussain, these can be enunciated at staggering speed (view 28:00). Thereafter come decades of intensive practice. Songs or song cycles are identified by long sequences of bols, to be memorized by performers. In Japan, shōga, a series of chanted kana syllables, are also used to transmit orally, with subsequent memorization, how to play Japanese flutes within the centuries-long tradition of nō theater (Anno 2010:132–33, fig. 4). Doing this with a master, as part of ensemble, is crucial to sorting out subtleties and indicating where embellishments might be possible or permissible. Such syllables are just as central to learning the art of bagpiping in Highland Scotland, where musicians used a system of chanted vocables known as canntaireachd (Dickson 2013:46–47). In all cases, syllables and muscle memory work together to fix songs in musicians’ minds. Tabla in particular is notable for its schools, oral transmission, and, for prominent musicians, lines of descent by family and master-pupil relations (Shepherd 1976:table II). In sum, vocables reflect a domain of oral recitation. Records of them appear to have been unusual or incidental to the principal emphasis, that of in-person training by master musicians. Similar kinds of training, oral transmission, memorization, and inheritance may have informed the Cantares and those who performed them.

Maya drums seldom survive in anything but stone, although rare examples are known in wood, if of uncertain date (e.g., a single-tongued teponaztli or tunk’ul shaped as a recumbent figure, its “chest” the resonator, the piece probably a cave-find; Kerr# 7905, now in the Fundación Ruta Maya, Guatemala; see Figure 2a). Most are simply painted, and of varying size. There is a suspicion that, in a pinch, ceramic bowls, covered by skin or jaguar pelage, bound around the rim, could function as drums (Figure 2b, c). Improvised in this way, such instruments could have been far more prevalent—indeed, at least one figurine from Copan documents the use of ceramic bowls or vases (even gourds?) as resonators or amplifiers for percussion; turtle shells struck with mallets could thereby intensify their sound (Figure 3; Zalaquett Rock 2021:fig. 20; for use with a small tunk’ul, albeit in a non-Maya context, see Chinchilla Mazariegos n.d.). Notably, Ch’orti’ Maya describes some drums in terms of their skin or hide covering, pächil te’, from pächij, “skin, hide” (Hull 2016:176–77).

 

 

 

Paintings on Maya drums are little studied, but two may appear with vertical bars that could reflect, by visual evocation, a pulse of regular rhythms (Houston et al. 2006:163, fig.4.24). Recordings of songs in highland Guatemala leave little doubt that drums could also have two or three distinct notes, played in combination with other instruments (Yurchenco 1985:48; de Gandarias Iriarte 2013:76). A binary tone is evident in double drums joined into a single object, allowing the hand to play on each with different fingers and, because of divergent size in the drums, resulting in two pitches (Adams 1971:fig. 70c; Inomata et al. 2010:fig. 91a–c, d). The dating seems to be towards the final decades of the Classic period, hinting at some shifts in playing style or instrumentation. That pre-Conquest music had a history should go without saying. Timeless, unchanging practices are inherently implausible: Baroque music and instruments are far from Stravinsky or the agile, jazzy violin of Stéphane Grappelli; Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo lies distant from Madame Butterfly. Why should early Maya music be treated as a synchronic totality? Most doubled drums show attention to ergonomics as well, in that they are at oblique angles to one another. One hand could grasp the drum while the other tapped on the two surfaces. Larger drums would have been far less restrained in audio output. The sonic reach of sizeable examples could have been some kilometers, to judge from the size of painted depiction of a tunk’ul at Ek’ Balam, Mexico, an example in stone found at Copan, Honduras, K4120 in the Kerr Database of images, and colonial-era reports of their acoustic range (Houston et al. 2006:263, fig. 8.14; Carrillo González et al. 2014).

Drums with glyphs are exceedingly rare. A shattered instrument from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, bears a text that names the object, lajab, “thing for clapping, touching lightly,” a  drum that seems to have belonged to Yat Ahk, the last major ruler of the city (Holley 1983:530, fig. 69; Houston et al. 2006:fig. 8.11b; for relevant lexical entries, Hull 2016:247). Found on the floor of Structure J-11 in the palace, it provides direct evidence of royal performance (or a claim to it) and points to further proof that, as noted before, drum-strikes could range from solid pounding to lighter taps with fingertips (Ch’orti’ Maya applies the verb t’ojt’i to less robust activities like ringing a bell and tapping a drum; Hull 2016:434).

A drum from Yalloch (Yaloch), Guatemala, doubtless acquired by Thomas Gann, who resided nearby in (then) British Honduras, is remarkable for its Teotihuacan-inflected design and, in the middle of the text, a possible self-reference, the outline of a drum (Figure 4a). Teotihuacan-linked performance and dance are documented on some Late Classic vases from the area of Motul de San José, Guatemala, and there may have been a similar connection here to a particular genre of music: the blats, dissonance, and unsettling babble of foreigners, but impressive or amusing nonetheless (e.g., K5418, K6315; for musical ambivalence, see Ross 2020, on the pervasive love and loathing around the music of Richard Wagner).[1] The other drum is so large, at 42.8 cm in height, that it would have to rest upside down. Its bottom is of precarious, narrow size, impossible to place in a stable position (Krempel and Paredes Maury 2017; Figure 4b). That necessity, to park or store the drum without toppling, probably led to the orientation of its paintings of youthful, male musicians and dancers. (In use, the drum would show them head-down, almost illegibly so.) Some youths hold small rattles, and possibly there is one with a drum, although the image is indistinct (“Individual 6,” Krempel and Paredes Maury 2017:figs. 3, 5). Yet the ceramic itself functions as an ancillary, outsized complement to an image of less noisy, diminutive rattles and turtle-shell resonators. It supplements and out-booms that percussion, appearing to overwhelm the singing by the figures just off-image, to lower right, on the wide body of the drum. It also affirms the role of the young in such performance, their voices, perhaps, higher, piercing, clearer. The owner of the drum was a “great youth,” a chak ch’ok, the others of yet lesser age, seemingly (‘i-tz’i, “younger [brother]”). 

 

 

But the most relevant drum, from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, is incised rather than painted (Figure 5). At this city, almost all legible texts are inscribed, as here, in a style consistent with the ruler named on the shattered drum from Structure J-11 (Houston 2016:419–20). Indeed, this drum comes from a late floor in that very building. The text consists of readable glyphs: wa, ku, possibly infixed with a k’a (see insert for comparison, from a bench-back from Pomona, Mexico, if lacking in the thumb common to that sign). Yet the repetition is nonsensical. The syllables do not spell any possible term for “drum” in Mayan languages. They may be pseudo-glyphs, signs deployed as placeholders for writing but without sense, but the incised texts of this place and ruler trend towards legibility.

 

 

 

A tantalizing possibility is that these are vocables, that the Classic Maya, like Nahuatl singers and drummers of 750 years later, used non-lexical syllables to audiate—to conceptualize rather than hear—a sequence of two-part or three-part drumbeats near the time of the Maya Collapse. The variance from Nahuatl and Zapotec practice accords with the temporal and geographic diversity of notational systems in early Medieval Europe (Rankin 2014:360–61). Comparisons elsewhere, with Nahuatl drummers, Medieval European musicians, Japanese flute-players, and Scottish bagpipers, make such syllables unsurprising or at least conceivable. Syllables, not notes, jibe with human perceptions and segregations of sound; they guide and energize the core task of memorization (e.g., for a Medieval context, see Rankin 2012:387, “le lecteur doit avoir en tête la mémoire du dessin mélodique”; for a phonological explanation related to where vowels are formed, see Hughes 1989:7–9).

Maya vocables fit also with the oral setting in which such music was likely taught and learned. As noted for the Indian bol: it could have been a system that “preserve[d] the music in skeletal form as a spur to memory, but impart[ed] its full details in face-to-face instruction, by demonstration and imitation, teacher seated across from student”…and was hence rare in written form (Rowell 1992:141). Further, the proposed vocables sit well with a writing system suffused by syllables. Their play in readable texts, composed into words, bestowed, perhaps, an intrinsic musicality of cadenced, aesthetically pleasing sound. Was this, in fact, the motivation behind some of the Maya pseudo-glyphs with their readable signs but seeming lack of intepretable words? Regrettably, there is no other direct evidence to buttress the find at Piedras Negras. It stands mute, in ways, during the Classic period, that the drum did not.

 

[1]     Musicians dressed in Teotihuacan costume, “Tlaloc-mask,” and the dark body paint often associated with that city occur on a vase, whereabouts and photographer unknown, but almost certainly from the area of Motul de San José, Guatemala (the pink glyphs and quality of line point to this attribution). The players employ aberrant instruments, including curved rattles of gourd and large spiked trumpets. A fire from criss-crossed paper or sticks radiates curls of flame near the main dancers/singers, consistent with the rituals linked by the Maya to that central Mexican civilization. 

 

  

Acknowledgements  My thanks go to Felipe Rojas, David Stuart, Paul Tamburro, and Haicheng Wang for discussing these ideas with me. Haicheng reminded me of Zakir Hussain’s brilliance with tabla bol, and Paul drew my attention to the essay by David Hughes on a comparative explanation for such syllabic sequences. Ann McMullen at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, helped with accession information about the drum from Yaloch, Guatemala.

References cited

Adams, Richard E. W. 1971. The Ceramics of Altar de Sacrificios. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 63(1). Cambridge, MA.

Anno, Mariko. 2010. Nōkan (Nō Flute) and Oral Transmission: Cohesion and Musicality through Mnemonics. Asian Theatre Journal 27(1):130–48.

Bierhorst, John. 1985. Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Carrillo González, Juan, Francisca Zalaquett Rock, and Laura Sotelo Santos. 2014. Los sonidos del Tunkul: Códigos acústicos mayas de la península de Yucatán. In Entramados sonoros de tradición mesoamericana: Identidades, imágenes y contexto, edited by Francisca Zalaquett, Martha Nájera, and Laura Sotelo, pp. 111–48. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Mayas, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo. n.d. Un instrumento musical en el arte de Cotzumalguapa ¿Variante del tecomapiloa? Unpublished ms.

Danien, Elin C. 2006. Paintings of Maya Pottery: The Art and Career of M. Louise Baker. Report submitted to FAMSI, accessed May 1, 2025.

de Gandarias Iriarte, Igor. 2013. El son Guatemalteco tradicional: Caracterización, tipos y distribución étnico-geográfica. Guatemala City: Instituto de Investigaciones Humanísticas.

Dickson, Joshua. 2013. Piping Sung: Women, Canntaireachd and the Role of the Tradition-Bearer. Scottish Studies 36:45–65.

Haly, Richard. 1986. Poetics of the Aztecs. New Scholar 1/2:85–133.

Herrera-Castro, Mariano, Alejandra Quintanar-Isaías, Felipe Orduña-Bustamante, Bertina Olmedo-Vera, and Ana Teresa Jaramillo-Pérez. 2019. Wood Identification and Acoustic Analysis of Three Original Aztec teponaztli Musical Instrument. Madera y Bosques 25(1):e2511690.

Holley, George R. 1983. Ceramic Change at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Illinois University.

Houston, Stephen. 2016. Crafting Credit: Authorship among Classic Maya Painters and Sculptors. In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy L. Costin, pp. 391–431. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

—————, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hughes, David W. 1989. The Historical Uses of Nonsense: Vowel-Pitch Solfege from Scotland to Japan. In Ethnomusicology and the Historical Dimension: Papers Presented at the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, London, May 20-23 1986, edited by Morgot L. Philipp, pp. 3–18. Ludwigsburg: Philipp Verlag.

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

Inomata, Takeshi, Daniela Triadan, and Estela Pinto. 2010. Chapter 9: Complete and Reconstructible Drums. In Burned Palaces and Elite Residences of Aguateca: Excavations and Ceramics, edited by Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, pp. 362–68. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Kelley, Thomas F. 2015. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation. New York: W.W. Norton.

Krempel, Guido, and Sofía Paredes Maury. 2017. An Exceptional Classic Maya Polychrome Drum of Unknown Provenance in the Fundación La Ruta Maya. Mexicon 39(4):74–80.

Lelis de Oliveira, Sara. 2024. Traducción de un canto al toque del teponaztle de los Cantares Mexicanos: Desafíos, problemas y estrategias. Nova Revista Amazônica 12(1):124–34.

Rowell, Lewis E. 1992. Music and Musical thought in Early India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lewy, Matthias. 2015. Ti qui to co: The Combinations of Syllables in the Cantares Mexicanos–A Comparison of Sound Reconstruction. In Flower World Music Archaeology of the Americas, Mundo Florido Arqueomusicología de las Américas vol. 4, edited by Matthias Stöckli and Mark Howell, pp. 99–123. Berlin: ēkhō Verlag.

Mehrabi, Adib, Simon Dixon, and Mark Sandler. 2019. Vocal Imitation of Percussion Sounds: On the Perceptual Similarity between Imitations and Imitated Sounds. PLoS One 2019 Jul 25;14(7):e0219955.

Nowotny, Karl Anton. 1956. Die Notation des “Tono” in den aztekischen Cantares. Beiträge zur Völkerkunde, Neue Folge 4/2:185–89.

Patel, Aniruddh D., and John R. Iversen. 2003. Acoustic and Perceptual Comparison of Speech and Drum Sounds in the North Indian Tabla Tradition: An Empirical Study of Sound Symbolism. Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Barcelona:925-928.

Peñafiel, Antonio. 1904. Cantares en idioma mexicano: Reproducción facsimilar del manuscrito original existente en la Biblioteca Nacional. Mexico City: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento.

Rankin, Susan. 2012. Écrire les sons: Création des premieres notations musicales. Cahiers de civilisation médiévales 55:379–92.

—————. 2014. Identity and Diversity: The Idea of Regional Musical Notation. In ‘Nationes’, ‘Gentes’ und die Musik im Mittelalter, edited by Frank Hentschel and Marie Winkelmüller, pp. 375–94. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Ross, Alex. 2020. Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Satterthwaite, Linton, Jr. 1938. Maya Dating by Hieroglyph Styles. American Anthropologist, n.s., 40:416–28.

Schultze-Jena, Leonhard. 1957. Alt-aztekische Gesänge, nach einer in der Biblioteca Nacional von Mexiko aufbewahrten Handschrift übersetzt und erläutert. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.

Shepherd, Frances A. 1976. Tabla And The Benares Gharana. Ph.D. dissertation, Wesleyan University.

Tavárez, David. 2006. The Passion According to the Wooden Drum: The Christian Appropriation of a Zapotec Ritual Genre in New Spain. The Americas 62(3):413–44.

—————. 2017. Performing the Zaachila Word: The Dominican Invention of Zapotec Christianity. In Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, edited by David Tavárez, pp. 29–62. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Tomlinson, Gary. 2007. The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yurchenco, Henrietta. 1985. The Rabinal Achí: A Twelfth Century Drama of the Maya-Quiché of Guatemala. Acta Musicologica 57(1):37–50.

Zalaquett Rock, Francisca. 2021. Instrumentos sonoros prehispánicos mayas, Tomo I: Idiófonos. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

“[E]very age is an age of ignorance because the rise of some knowledges is often accompanied by the loss of others” (Burke 2024a:35)

“Ignorance” is an emotive term. It can be a valid description of gaps in knowledge or an accusation against others, those presumed to be, whether justifiably or not, less learned or schooled in the literature of this or that discipline. But who can deny that scholars come and go with the remorseless scything of time? A vade mecum, a body of work, will molder with eventual disuse and disattention; even in life, inevitably, people notice certain writings and then, as the authors depart or diminish in status or relevance, tend to cite them less and less.

Citations have their own history, of course, depending on discipline and person (Grafton 1997). To “footnote”—to cite—offers its own kind of positioning. People being people, there is always a social nexus involved, contingent on those doing the citing and those being cited. This is compounded by what has been called an “ignorance explosion,” i.e., rapid expansions of knowledge without comparable digestion of new ideas and evidence (Lukasiewicz 1974). Such an “explosion,” a surfeit of data, gives ample scope “for each one of us not to know” (Burke 2024a:36; see also Burke 2024b).

Some contributors, for reasons of deep injustice, never get their due, or not enough of it (Burke 2024a:32–33; Hutson 2002; Yan et al. 2024). Others are sent to oblivion, for solid reasons, yet their cases raise inevitable quandaries about referencing sound work by dubious people (Barofsky 2005; Rosenzweig 2020; Souleles 2020). The question becomes, how to acknowledge research, including those from one’s own oeuvre, in ways that are at once ethical and thoughtful (Kennedy and Planudes 2020)? How does one ponder, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, “known unknowns” yet leave open a window to “unknown unknowns” (Burke 2024a:7–8)? Here may be a divide between overlooked yet detectible facts—some found, alas, by disreputable people—and things truly beyond our ken, the facta that are imperceptible and unconsciously ignored. At stake is the tough question of what creates the conditions for oblivion and obliviousness, the citational decisions that foment the unconscious and conscious forgetting of people and their work.

This is not a purely abstract issue. A recent fusillade against the largest US dig, at Tikal in the late 1950s and early 1960s, accuses it of subservience to “American big business,” in research informed, we are told, by “ineluctable dependencies between security, espionage, international politics, corporations, conservation, and donor economies” (Meskell 2023). A tarnish presumably descends on its many results, still being published 50+ years after fieldwork (e.g., Greene 2024). Are its conclusions or data disallowable once (if) we accept this reductive view? On this point, perhaps, the polemicist Richard Hofstadter would have an opinion.

Most Mayanists are not listening. To judge from widespread citation, they find abiding value in the results of the Tikal project (e.g., Martin 2015, with countless other examples), and are likely to understand that it did not take place in this decade, but a lifetime ago, in another world of funding, staff, labor relations, local and international politics, shifting academic landscapes, logistics, aims, and ideas. Anachronism does not absolve such work of its flaws. In a photographic database, women appear as human scales and helpmeets in the laboratory, allowed to study small things, evidently, and assigned to the quasi-“domestic” sphere of curating objects. Yet, by the standards of the time, there was at least a chance of good intentions and cogent results. Samuel Johnson said it well: “[t]here is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it” (Boswell 1830:272).

Still, the biographical arc of citation is merciless. It rises, falls, flits out of view as scholars become notable and then…not. People die, their social networks fray and memory of them fades. This can be monitored, very roughly, with many provisos and constraints, in the Google Ngram viewer. When a few names are inputted, they appear to have different “topographies” of citation in book-based Ngrams. The names here are Gordon Willey, Michael Coe, Linda Schele, and, in self-study, as the instigator of this mischief, the essayist himself.

For much of the mid-century, going into its final quarter, there could be few more prominent scholars than Gordon Willey, the doyen of Maya archaeology and beyond. Courtly, generous, fortunate (and deserving enough) to fill a fulcrum job, Willey received a two-volume festscrift and subsequent, sympathetic evaluations by former students and close colleagues some five years after his death (Fash and Sabloff 2007; Leventhal and Kolata 1983; Vogt and Leventhal 1983). Then there are the Mayanists Michael Coe and Linda Schele, both of inestimable impact on the field (Coe 1998; Houston et al. 2021), with, as a squib at the end, the “boomer” of the bunch, Houston. The result is a set of spline charts over time (Figure 1. X-axis, years; Y-axis, highest point, for Schele in 1999, 0.0000023825%).

 

 

Graphically, the splines reveal a complexity that is likely to mirror four academic passages to relative oblivion, if not yet there by any means. Gordon Willey’s spline, fashioned from a long life and career, involves a rapid rise, then a relatively constant level, a massif, that corresponds to his time as a professor of Harvard and distinction as an archaeologist (he was hired in 1950 and remained as a senior professor until 1987); what follows is a slow decline, peaking slightly at his death in 2002, heading inexorably down that same slope. Citations of him may, in the future, lean towards histories of archaeology and specific references to Willey’s descriptive monographs on artifacts from various excavations: direct data do not go out of fashion (Willey 1972).

In contrast, Michael Coe’s spline peaks at a lower level, has a bulge towards the end of his time as faculty at Yale (he retired in 1994), but then picks up appreciably, with only slight reduction up until 2022, the latest year in the data. The downward slope has been arrested. Linda Schele’s is the Mount Everest of the group, no ridgeline or plateau here, but it also falls precipitously at her untimely death: does this signal the influence of charisma or an energetic, personal (and personable) presence in media, or her innovative means of scholarly dissemination? Houston’s rises from his first year at graduate school (1980), plateaus at his arrival at Brown (the job-linked leveling noted for others), then picks up with an award and a period of higher productivity.

But a Google Scholar citation diagram, pehaps more accurate and finely tuned, indexes a more gloomy reality, in the statistics beloved of university bean counters (Figure 2): down, down, after 2020, as Covid takes hold, and people seem to cite him less, a pattern appreciable with some other Mayanists too. Is the bloom off studies of Maya glyphs and art, predictive of approaching oblivion, or is this some blip from a singular time? Notably, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, that decisive analyst of Maya history, has a lower Ngram level but one that stays remarkably level up to the present, a plateau merited by extraordinary breakthroughs. Yet individual scandals do, through Ngrams, reveal deliberate forgetting—oblivion—in citational terms. The slight surprise is that, aside from having splines with perceptible rise, individual contributions, this or that article or breakthrough, appear to be indiscernible in most trajectories. As Timothy Beach notes, a further complication is co-authorship, more prevalent in STEM-oriented Mayalogy.

 

The end of this story, when scholars no longer “need to be known,” is itself unknowable. Academic careers and the advent of ready searchability indicate incremental declines in citational salience but not to any final disappearance. The human memory has now been decisively if artificially extended, and search engines do not forget. But there are patterns: ridge-like splines reflecting jobs at universities—ones that form graduate students to cite their professors’ work!—vertiginous ones like stratovolcanoes, varied slope angles (steep = rapid fame), and citational plateaus without foreseeable end. They all point, in their totality, to an undeniable truth. Academic figures are not abstractions, but people with distinctive if patterned arcs, as cited by a social nexus that chooses, amidst ever-growing information, to remember them…or to forget.

 

References

Barofsky, Robert. 2005. Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Boswell, James. 1830. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. London: J. Sharpe.

Burke, Peter. 2024a. Ignorance: A Global History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

______. 2024b. Writing a History of Ignorance. Yale University Press Blog.

Coe, Michael D. 2000. Linda Schele (1942–1998). American Anthropologist 102:133–35.

Fash, William, and Jeremy Sabloff. 2007. Gordon R. Willey and American Archaeology: Contemporary Perspectives. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Grafton, Anthony. 1999. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Greene, Virginia. 2024. Tikal Report No. 28: The Pottery Figurines of Tikal. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Houston, Stephen D., Mary Miller, and Karl Taube. 2021. Michael D. Coe (1929–2019): A Life in the Past. Ancient Mesoamerica 32(1):1–15.

Hutson, Scott R. 2002. Gendered Citation Practices in American Antiquity and Other Archaeology Journals. American Antiquity 67(2):331–342. doi:10.2307/2694570

Kennedy, Rebecca, and “Maximus Planudes.” 2020. An Ethics of Citation. Classics at the Intersection.

Leventhal, Richard M., and Alan L. Kolata (eds.). 1983. Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey. Albuquerque: Univeresity of New Mexico Press.

Lukasiewicz, Julius. 1974. The Ignorance Explosion. Leonardo 7:159–63.

Martin, Simon. 2015. The Dedication of Temple VI: A Revised Chronology. The PARI Journal 15(3):1–10.

Meskell, Lynn. 2023. Pyramid Schemes: Resurrecting Tikal through the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Journal of Field Archaeology, 48(7):551–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00934690.2023.2209398

Rosenzweig, Melissa S. 2020. Confronting the Present: Archaeology in 2019. American Anthropologist 122:284–305. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13411

Souleles, Daniel. 2020. What to Do with the Predator in your Bibliography? Allegra Lab.

Vogt, Evon Z., and Richard M. Leventhal (eds.). 1983. Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 

Willey, Gordon R. 1972. The Artifacts of Altar de Sacrificios. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, 64(1). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Yan, Veroica X., Katherine Muenks, and Marlone D. Henderson. 2024. I Forgot that You Existed: Role of Memory Accessibility in the Gender Citation Gap. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001299

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

Humans like their food warm. Heat reduces the number of pathogens, makes proteins easier to digest, and increases the amount of energy from meals (Carmody et al. 2011; Smith et al. 2015). Over millennia, this biological benefit became a pleasure, a trait of our species: “[w]e humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of flame” (Wrangham 2009:14). Perhaps, as pyrophiles, our ancestors even took detours, dumping meat for simmering in hot springs or eating flame-licked foods left by wildfires (Herzog et al. 2022; Sistiaga et al. 2020). Cool food has its place, but hot meals are better.

Still, pyrophilia has its limits. A fire keeps the body warm on chilly or frozen nights. In cooking, however, that same fire carries risks. It can spread out of control and, in more elaborate food preparation, requires kitchens that, in pre-Modern times (and even at present), reek of slops and swarm with flies (Woolgar 1999:140–41). For elites, these are problems. Costly buildings cannot be allowed to go up in flames, and cooking, no matter how refined, needs separation from the complicated, almost “balletic,” rank-accentuating displays of “grand eating” (Strong 2002:237; comparative evidence of royal courts in Adamson [ed.] 2000; Duindam et al. 2011). The churning machinery behind the scenes should stay there, away from dining as a social performance. Nor do elites welcome the rude talk and bustling noise of, in the European past, specialized, often male kitchens (Woolgar 1999:136). The idea of placing customers in the midst of food preparation may be popular today. Consider the “chef’s table” concept. But it would have horrified cuisiniers like Antonin Carême or Auguste Escoffier. In the France of Louis XIV, operational flaws—the parting of Oz’ curtain—had consequences, as when François Vatel, majordomo of Minister Fouquet and the Prince de Condé, ran himself through with a sword when seafood came late to a feast (Michel 1999). Keeping food labor away from diners accentuated their sense of refinement. It reinforced hierarchy and the illusion of seamless work. Yet the opposite was also true, for gaps and flaws in dining exposed deficits in the host.

Needs varied. At Versailles, during the reign of Louis XIV, closer, smaller kitchens did effective service when the king and queen dined en famille (Chateau de Versailles:2), a pattern seen also at the Château de Marly, Louis’ leisure retreat, where austere etiquette sometimes took a holiday (Bergeret 2014; Ringot and Sarmant 2012). In contrast, the more stultifying meals, the grand couvert, resulted from more distant, labor-intensive food preparation (Strong 2002:249–56). Many plates were necessary, many mouths had to be fed. Repasts required complicated place settings, service, habits of eating, and diktat about who sat (or stood) when and where. In general, both in France and elsewhere, royal food followed a long and complex trajectory from larder to mouth, to say nothing of the challenges of gathering foodstuffs at their source.

All of this meant that, as a cross-cultural matter, royalty could have, once the food made it to the table, a tepid and unappetizing meal. In Medieval France, after a suitable fanfare and washing of hands, “dinner was brought in” but “none too warm” (Wheaton 1983:6). At Eltham Palace, in greater London, English kings probably experienced the same, at least to judge from site plans. The royal kitchen lay across a moat from the dining hall, where meals must often have arrived lukewarm (Steane 1999:91, fig. 43). Serving order made this worse. If dishes were brought in all at once, in the service à la française named after customs at Versailles, food cooled and sauces congealed (Strong 2002:231; see also Fine 2020:7): all show, little pleasure. Fast eating would not solve the matter. Royal tables had too many dishes, too many strictures against gauche, lunging behavior, too many servers to do their work in proper order; plates might be whisked away before people had their fill. A later development, the service à la russe, with one course at a time, ensured warmer servings, but historical evidence from Medieval and Early Modern times suggests a mixture of both sorts of service (Woolgar 1999:161).

There were other remedies. In Medieval England, a “pentice,” a covered way, or a half-door, a “hatch,” allowed servants to rush-deliver a meal from kitchen to table (Steane 1999:91, fig. 43; Steane 2001:101–102; Woolgar 1999:145). Insulated boxes further helped to keep food warm (Taylor 2005:629, fig. 4), or there could be chafing dishes with a small flame underneath. These were about rewarming: a gentle heat only, and, in some cases, prongs to support the plate or bowl being heated, or an all-in-one combination of a bowl with flame and modicum of fuel (Vakasira 2020). In late 19th and early 20th century Europe and America, blurrings between kitchen and table service resulted in the so-called guéridon in which waiters prepared food on a trolley brought to the table (Naus 1991). Often gendered, these performances—a kitchen outside a kitchen!—became in other cases a focus of male camaraderie or domestic amusements of fleeting popularity. More extensive rewarming was done at the French Court, in the réchauffoir of the “hamlet” built for Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon villa (Heitzmann 2000: 71, 81–82). Thus, to maintain temperature, there could be expedited delivery, insulation or coverings (of middling effectiveness), and implements or places to rewarm food prepared elsewhere.

Worries about keeping food warm were not confined to Europe. Hernán Cortés’ “second letter” to Charles V, probably sent in 1520, describes an impressive protocol of dining for the Emperor Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, probably in his palace, the “Domus Don Muteczuma” (Boone 2011:34; see also Houston and Newman 2021).

“Three or four hundred boys came bringing the dishes, which were without number, for each time he lunched or dined, he was brought every kind of food: meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. And because the climate is cold, beneath each plate and bowl they brought a brazier with hot coals so that the food should not go cold. They placed all these dishes together in a great room where he ate, which was almost always full. …While he ate, there were five or six old men, who sat apart from him; and to them he gave a portion of all he was eating. One of the servants set down and removed the plates of food and called to others who were farther away for all that was required. Before and after the meal they gave him water for his hands and a towel which one used was never used again, and likewise with the plates and bowls, for when they brought more food they always used new ones, and the same with the braziers. He dressed each day in four different dressed again in the same ones” (Cortés [1524] 1996:111–12; emphasis mine; see also a similar description from Bernal Díaz, discussed in Coe 1994:74).

Here is evidence of service à la française, all the dishes coming at once, along with reports of food sharing, changes of clothing, and heating of food. The Florentine Codex, prepared in the period up to 1577, supplements and at times contradicts this description, albeit for non-imperial (if high status) banquets. A wealthy merchant would buy the spices, crockery, chocolate, baskets, cloth—for guests to wear or clean their hands?—garments, turkeys, and, according to the image in Book 9, folio 27v, instruct a woman as to their preparation (Figure 1). The virgules by the speaker’s mouth and his wagging finger suggest the heavy hand of gender roles: an instance of proto-mansplaining. There are hints, in Book 9, folio 28r, of sequencing too, a kind of service à la russe. The meal starts with tobacco, a key initiator of social interactions, then wafts of bouquets of flowers in specific order, a palette cleanser for the senses, followed by tamales. (Of late, gastronomy has once again found the importance of ambient smells, Spence 2022.) At the end comes chocolate, on folio 29r. This was to be given to high ranking people, along with a gourd with beating stick and a coil on which to rest it. The Nahuatl text makes it clear that all others received their chocolate in clay vessels, the perishable (a gourd) being accorded greater value than the permanent (a ceramic). Tamales seem only to occur in woven baskets, rather like the zhēnglóng (蒸笼; 蒸籠) bamboo steamers of China. Perhaps the similiarity came from the steamed nature of foods within, and the necessity of modulating or discharging moisture.

 

 

The overall setting for the Aztec feast appears to be outdoors, on flagstones; a schematic, masonry building occurs in the background without the circular cornice-insets of a lordly residence. Nonetheless, the host and guests sit on the high-backed tepotzoicpalli thrones of Indigenous lords. The reference to braziers, suitable for a cold clime, appears to be a chafing process, perhaps using the fuel mentioned on folio 27v in the Florentine Codex. The conquistador Bernal Díaz, an eyewitness, provided more detail about Motecuhzoma’s meals. When the weather was cold, servants warmed the emperor with braziers filled with non-smoking bark, along with a screen “worked in gold” to moderate the heat; his meals might conclude with another toke on a pipe filled with tobacco and sweetgum, followed by a nap (Coe 1994:74). In archaeological reports from Aztec sites, cooking braziers are not mentioned outside of vessels, usually globular jars in domestic contexts, or noted sparingly, but they may well have been transported closer to places of serving as a sort of mini-réchauffoir (Olson and Smith 2016:142, Table 2; Rodríguez-Alegría and Stoner 2016:199).

Book 8, folio 50v, of the Florentine Codex mentions foods of war, in essence, Aztec MREs, the provender of soldiers (Meals Ready to Eat). The directors of the markets were charged with gathering this food, “biscuits, dried maize and chía seeds, and dried maize dough, and dried, lime-treated maize dough.” The impression is that warriors traveled with cold foods, or preserved (but processed) foods that could be heated quickly near a campfire or nibbled en route to conflicts. Even in conditions of extended field operations or restricted intake, present-day estimates calculate a range of 1500 to 3600 kilocalories a day. A single tortilla averages about 240 kilocalories, a tamale just north of 200 (Weber et al. 1996). Presumably, these quantities—an absolute minimum of 6 to 7 tortillas and 8 to 9 tamales a day, and that in conditions of duress—were not transported by noble warriors but by tumplined servants and camp followers. Those people likely also carried the equipage of warriors, which could be burdensome, needing repair or patching and careful tending after each scuffle. But the point was that heating was desirable but not necessary.

Writing of the very early Colonial Maya of Yucatan, Diego de Landa also reports that banquets involved gifts of clothing and the washing of hands (Tozzer 1941:91–92). Both the Florentine Codex (Book 9 in particular) and Landa’s description of feasts append slightly surreal and, in the Aztec instance, hallucinatory rituals, dances, and music afterwards. To judge from the sequence in these descriptions in Landa and the Florentine Codex, these events may have followed banquets, a hypothetical “Stage 4” to the three other courses reflected in Figure 1: stretching on for hours and, for the Aztecs, with mushroom ingestion to release self-revelatory visions. A greater similiarity may lie in the apparent sequencing of consumption and the disposition of serving plates and vases within Classic Maya tombs: were they deposited in a way that, step-by-step, reflected notional food service at a banquet? A Maya service à la russe vs. service à la française? That is: not simply an aggregate of foods for the deceased but, in their placement and sequencing, a reflection of normative meal service. For their part, a banquet for the living might reflect, to reciprocal extent, the meals of the dead.

Such a functional segregation appears, for example, in the Early Classic royal tomb of Burial 9 at El Zotz, Guatemala (Houston et al. 2015:86–156, fig. 3.2). Drinking vessels, presumably for chocolate, were perishable, and found only with fragments of their painted stucco coverings; other sectors of the tomb floor had probable bowls for tamales and, under the royal bier, offerings of children, apparently understood as the sacrificial food of deities (Scherer and Houston 2018:128–29, figs. 5.16–5.19; see also the now-destroyed Structure 1, jamb, Tohcok, Campeche, with the Jaguar God of the Underworld poised over a small figure in an incense burner, beneath the so-called wi-TE’-*NAAH sign linked to Teotihuacan; that tie is reinforced, in further allusion to that city, by the 18 BAAH *CHAN deity in the text—note Xcalumkin Jamb 6 for a comparable association of Teotihuacan raiment and the name glyphs of this being).

The Maya Lowlands are, outside of tropical canopies, hot places for much of the year, although cloud cover and rain can chill the skin. In late December, sleeping in a hammock needs a light blanket to get through the night. These are not the Mexican highlands, however, although warm meals remain, as everywhere, desirable. To overwhelming extent, the solid foods consumed by the Classic Maya were, whatever the actual diet, exemplifed by tamales, waaj, often shown stuffed in the mouth, in counterpart to mouths with signs for “water,” ha’ (Figures 2; Houston et al. 2006:107–16; this fulcrum identification of tamales is in Taube 1989). The glyph itself, following a reading suggested by David Stuart, is WE’, “eat,” in the sense of softer mastication, not biting (k’ux), which is attested in hieroglyphs, in sacrificial contexts, or snacking on fruit (mak’), which is not (Zender 2000:1042–45; see also Tokovinine 2014:10, fig. 1; in some Mayan languages, words for “eat” are contingent on the food being consumed, Hinmán Smith 2004:44). The glyph in Figure 2 may read WE’-ne-la, perhaps, we’nVl, “eater/feaster” (‘eat [maize]’ + antipassivizer + nominalizer), namely, a participant in a banquet. (Incidentally, the transposition of the ne and la are most likely for aesthetic and practical reasons. A reduced ne, compacted to the side, could be confused with a ni syllable.)

 

The lintel from which the title comes is the only known image in the Classic period of what happens ritually at the shift from one year to the next. One celebrant is a sajal, a subordinate rank, the other a youth, ch’ok; both use the title in Figure 3. The scene is noisy, boisterous, full of off-kilter dance. Each figure holds two rattles, their bodies in mirrored symmetry. One represents a vulture, the other a macaw; the two birds appear as small heads above their faces. Indeed, the motion may simulate that of birds. For its part, the dyadic pattern (two men, two birds) hints obscurely at some tie to the old and new years and to the transition between them.

 

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Not so tamales, which taste their best while warm or hot, their juices seeping in, the texture soft, added meats piping hot. An argument has been made that, at Classic Maya sites, presumed censer burners were in fact for cooking or rewarming (Figure 4; Ball and Taschek 2007:458–61; see also Chase and Chase 2004b:355, fig. 16.7c). They show eminent portability, unpackable into parts. All appear to be from the final years of the Classic period and some decades beyond. Similar composites or ceramics are attested at far earlier dates in highland Chiapas and Guatemala, where they had been interpreted as incense burners, even when imitated in the Maya Lowlands (e.g., Borhegyi 1959; Miller et al. 2005:166, fig. 3.13; Popenoe de Hatch 1997:164–65, fig. 160; Sharer 1978:fig. 34). Three-pronged thermal devices, the better to support the dish being heated, are also documented in the Early Classic period at Teotihuacan, Mexico, with evident acceptance of their role in cooking or warming (Solís 2009:384).

 

 

The striking feature is that Aguateca, the Late Classic “Pompeii” of the Maya, has, despite its in situ finds and large inventory of complete ceramics, no evidence for such warmers in a palatial setting (Inomata et al. 2010). Here, perhaps, is culinary history: near-coeval sites with different heating or warming practices, an inception of réchauffoirs in the Preclassic in Highland zones to the south of the Maya Lowlands, possibly the relative proximity of kitchens for initial preparation. At Aguateca, they may not have been far away, while, at Caracol, the excavators comment on the absence of cooking in its many palaces (Chase and Chase 2004a:3). That incense was never heated on these devices may be difficult to prove, however: massive three-pronged carvings at Late Preclassic Kaminaljuyu supported incense burners, not ceramics for food preparation (Parsons 1986:figs. 125–28). Their depiction of an early form of Chahk, the rain god, may indicate rites of rain-making, smoke being an obvious analogue (a stimulus?) to clouds. For ceramics, this is the eventual contribution of residue analysis, with the chance that, as among the Aztecs, fragrances could be regarded as a kind of food. Thermal devices, too, might have been put to multiple uses.

Another ceramic hedged in time is the basal-flanged bowl with lid, from the Early Classic period (Figure 5). These are clearly intended for tamales, and one example on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, looted from the area of Naranjo, Guatemala, shows a Maize God head in its interior, a trope for the foods made from his body, and a glyphic reference to “eating [tamales],” uht-i we’-? (K5458). The exceptions are equally noteworthy. The lone plate (lak) that refers to “chocolate” is almost certainly, as suggested to me by Shanti Morell-Hart, a unique glyphic reference to a Maya mole or at least to chocolate-flavored tamales (now at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, the ceramic derives from Structure F, Group 1, Holmul, Guatemala [11-6-20/C5666]; for varied drinks, see Beliaev et al. 2010). The dancing Maize God in the interior points to a delectable sauce for steamed breads or stews. The plate dates to the final decades of the Late Classic period and may betoken changing or introduced cuisines in a time of heightened foreign contact (Halperin 2023). No earlier reference to moles exists, although there would have been many available plates to do so. In much the same way, the restricted orifices of chocolate vases in the final years of the Classic period and into the Terminal and Postclassic periods raise the possibility that chocolate was frothed in a different way, perhaps, as in later times, with sticks (for such a drinking pot, see Martin 2020:fig. 73c). By common claim, the beating stick, the molinillo, is thought to be post-Conquest, and pouring was the proper—and well-documented—way to raise a froth (Coe and Coe 1996:87–88). Yet there is a pronounced similarity between restricted orifices on colonial chocolate pots and the small apertures and large bodies of chocolate vessels in Terminal Classic times (Coe and Coe 1996:images on pp. 131, 132, 160, 237). Evidence of stick-wear or the lack of it may prove decisive.

 

A notable contrast with later tamale and food-serving dishes is the presence of a lid. Not a single tamale plate from the Late Classic period retains a cover, if they ever had them. The thermal implications need some thought. The Early Classic lids plausibly helped to retain heat during long services, in an array of assembled dishes, or if kitchens lay at some remove from places of consumption. Several examples have open-bottomed ceramics that were inserted into spouted bowls (Houston et al. 2015:98, 118–19). These may have been employed for certain kinds of steamed cuisine, intensifying moisture, or perhaps as a way of retaining heat. (We do not know the role of the baskets stressed by the Aztec, for none of them survive other than as impressions in tomb muck or building fill.) By contrast, Late Classic depictions of tamales typically display them in uncovered bowls, ready for eating; perhaps they were covered with textiles, but there are no hints of this in surviving imagery. Are the bowls from the Early Classic an indication of service à la française, plates brought in unison, at hazard for cooling in a lengthy meal? (Whipping off a lid might have provided its own form of drama, a “reveal” to induce smiles and salivation.) Did the open plates of the Late Classic correspond, in service à la russe, to the timed delivery of individual dishes, or, as Andrew Scherer speculates to me, to a heightened emphasis on the display of food rather than its palatability? Alternatively, the discrepancy may simply have resulted from the shifting proximity of kitchens or the means to rewarm or reheat. Far-cooking, if delectability were the aim, needed measures that near-cooking did not.

The single image of service à la française comes from the final years of the Late Classic period, in a mythic scene where animals bring open tamale bowls and vases for chocolate to God D and a set of Twins; seemingly, two scribal monkeys tally the haul (Figure 6). The dishes and vases are held aloft in the t’abayi or k’ahlaj gesture of toasts and offerings (Houston 2018:62–67). Actual consumption in Classic imagery is almost never shown, and the food appears largely to flow to a royal presence: the regal body or its supernatural analogue is the consumer, with almost non-existent depictions of subsequent dispersal of gathered foods. A daring dwarf, probably thought to be amusing, quaffs a beverage on one pot, but the scene is highly unusual (Houston et al. 2006:127–28).

 

There is another seldom-noted property of tamale plates from the Late Classic period. To my knowledge, not a single example shows a historical or dynastic scene, which is the heavy (but non-exclusive) content of imagery on the vases (for images on plates, see this, this, and that). If present, historical figures are in the distant, Teotihuacano-past, places might be referred to, drenched with maize-related glyphs, or a Hero Twin has his arm ripped off (Chinchilla Mazariegos 2017:figs. 64–65). All interior designs display the Maize God in various guises, or scenes from the Classic Maya mythos and calendrical notations (k’atun [winik-ha’b] endings) of impersonal if broad import. Another anomaly marks the earlier, lidded bowls: frequently appearing with modeled animal or human heads, almost none of them, other than peccary, relate to what might be in those bowls as food. The majority are heads of humans or scribal howler monkeys (mythic, not creatures of the canopy), or they show macaw or other birds (e.g., Houston et al. 2015:88–144). In general, these are, in an anthropological sense, “not-foods,” i.e., unfit for humans yet emplaced on receptacles for human fare. The sacralization and aberrancies seem pervasive in the foodware of the Classic Maya. Daily consumption acquired the tincture of the supernatural, of personages not in the present, of creatures abhorrent to human diets.

A final comment on heat. Four Late Classic ceramics in a “codex-style” (black line on beige background, red highlights on rims) spell out an enigmatic sequence of glyphs (Figure 7). One plate refers to itself, u-lak, but then follows with a metaphor: yotoot u-k’inil, “it is the dwelling/home of his warmth.” In Ch’orti’, the language closest to that of the glyphs, k’ihnir [k’inil in ancestral form] refers to “steam, vapor, heat, warmth” (Hull 2016:234). There could be some unexplained metaphor at play, but this may be an overt cue to warm foods in such plates. That one such text is on a vase—the example at the Fralin Museum in Charlottesville—keys in to the warm drinks, served at dawn, that were known among the Maya (Tozzer 1941:91).

Maya foods have their journeys, their synergies and wrestling bouts with humans, a give-and-take by means of many hands, especially in elite kitchens (Morell-Hart 2020). A grain, a maize kernel, might pass from field to processing, to heated tamale, then on in formal service to tables with fancy pots…eventually, after digestion and defecation, collection and mulching, to the nightsoil that fertilized seeds (Keenan et al. 2021). But there was also change and the culinary equipment to take new directions: bowls that retained heat, or even caused foods to steam in their own juices, or warming stations brought right to the royal table. At the level of elite rhetoric there seemed to be, in final reflection, a curious blending of exaltation and anomaly. Repasts that highlighted gods, mythic beasts, and dead lords built on everyday needs, and the figured bodies of the inedible stepped up to house delicious things.

 

Acknowledgments   Arlen Chase was helpful with bibliographic references, and useful comments came from Harper Dine, Shanti Morell-Hart, Esteban Herrera-Parra, and Andrew Scherer. David Stuart gave good feedback on the Yaxchilan-area lintel; James Doyle supplied a crucial image. Dmitri Beliaev tells me that, in this powerpoint, worth a close look, he and colleagues came independently to the same conclusion about the k’inil reading. The present essay arose while viewing pieces assembled by David Saunders and Megan O’Neil for “Picture Worlds: Greek, Maya, and Moche Pottery,” their exhibit, now closed, at The Getty Villa (Saunders and O’Neill 2024); my thanks to David for the invite.

References

Adamson, John [ed.]. The Princely Courts of Europe 1500-1750: Ritual, Politics, and Culture under the Ancient Regime 1500-1750. London: Seven Dials.

Ball, Joseph W., and Jennifer T. Taschek. 2007. Sometimes a “Stove” Is “Just a Stove”: A Context-Based Reconsideration of Three-Prong “Incense Burners” from the Western Belize Valley. Latin American Antiquity 18(4):451–70.

Beliaev, Dmitri, Albert Davletshin, and Alexandre Tokovinine. 2010. Sweet Cacao and Sour Atole: Mixed Drinks on Classic Maya Ceramic Vases. In Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by John E. Staller and Michael Carrasco:257–72. New York: Springer.

Bergeret, Virginie. 2014. Le pavillon de la Perspective à Marly: Un bâtiment central aux fonctions multiples. Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles.

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

Borhegyi, Stephan F. 1959. The Composite or “Assemble-it-Yourself” Censer: A New Lowland Maya Variety of the Three-Pronged Incense Burner. American Antiquity 25(1):51–58.

Carmody, Rachel N., Gil S. Weintraub, and Richard E. Wrangham. 2011. Energetic Consequences of Thermal and Nonthermal Food Processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(48):19199–203.

Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase. 2004a. Searching for Support Staff and Kitchens: Continued Investigation of Small Structures in Caracol’s Epicenter: 2004 Field Report of the Caracol Archaeological Project. Report submitted to the Belize Institute of Archaeology.

______, and ______. 2004b. Terminal Classic Status-Linked Ceramics and the “Maya-Collapse”: Defacto Refuse at Caracol, Belize. In The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation, edited by Arthur Demarest, Prudence Rice, and Don Rice:342–66. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo. 2017. Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Coe, Sophie D. 1994. America’s First Cuisines. Austin: University of Texas Press.

______, and Michael D. Coe. 1996. The True History of Chocolate. London: Thames & Hudson.

Cortés, Hernán. [1524] 1996. Hernán Cortés: Letters from México. Translated and edited by Anthony Pagden. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Duindam, Jeroen, Tülay Artan, and Metin Kunt [eds.]. 2011. Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective. Leiden: Brill.

Fine, Leon G. 2020. The Transformative Influence of La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier Francois (1651) on French Culinary Practice. Frontiers in Nutrition 7:42.

Halperin, Christina. 2023. Foreigners Among Us: Alterity and the Making of Ancient Maya Societies. Abingdon: Routledge.

Heitzmann, Annick. 2000. Le réchauffoir du Hameau: Une cuisine pour Marie-Antoinette à Trianon. Versalia: Revue de la Société des Amis de Versailles 3:76–85.

Herzog, Nicole M., Jill D. Pruetz, and Kristen Hawkes. 2022. Investigating Foundations for Hominin Fire Exploitation: Savanna-Dwelling Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in Fire-Altered Landscapes. Journal of Human Evolution 167:103193.

Hinmán Smith, Joshua M. 2004. Manual of Spoken Tzeltal. Unpublished manuscript, translated by Stuart P. Robertson.

Houston, Stephen. 1998. Classic Maya Depictions of the Built Environment. In Form and Function in Classic Maya Architecture, edited by Stephen Houston:333–72. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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

______, and Sarah Newman. 2021. Maya Creatures V: The Peccary’s Teeth, the Jaguar’s Bone. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography—Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

______, Sarah Newman, Edwin Román, and Thomas Garrison. 2015. Temple of the Night Sun: A Royal Tomb at El Diablo, Guatemala. San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press.

______, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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

Inomata, Takeshi, Daniela Triadan, and Estela Pinto. 2010. Complete, Reconstructible, and Partial Vessels. In Burned Palaces and Elite Residences of Aguateca: Excavations and Ceramics, edited by Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan:180–361. Monographs of the Aguateca Archaeological Project First Phase Volume 1. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Keenan, Benjamin, Anic Imfeld, Kevin Johnston, Andy Breckenridge, Yves Gélinas, and Peter M.J. Douglas. 2021. Molecular Evidence for Human Population Change Associated with Climate Events in the Maya Lowlands. Quaternary Science Reviews 258:106904.

Looper, Matthew, and Yuriy Polyukhovych. 2016. Codex-style Inscribed Vessels in the Fralin Museum of Art. Glyph Dwellers 44.

Martin, Simon. 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Michel, Dominique. 1999. Vatel et la naissance de la gastronomie. Paris: Fayard.

Miller, Donald E., Douglas D. Bryant, John E. Clark, and Gareth W. Lowe. 2005. Middle Preclassic Ceramics. In Ceramic Sequence of the Upper Grijalva Region, Chiapas, Mexico: Part 1, edited by Douglas D. Bryant, John E. Clark, and David Cheetham:141–264. Papers of the New World Archaeological Foundation 67. Provo: New World Archaeological Foundation, Brigham Young University.

Morell-Hart, Shanti. 2020. Plant Foodstuffs of the Ancient Maya: Agents and Matter, Medium and Message. In Her Cup for Sweet Cacao: Food in Ancient Maya Society, edited by Traci Ardren:124–60. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Naus, Laura. 1991. “The Most Social Utensil in the World”: Chafing Dish Recipes for Popularity, 1980-1920. MA thesis, University of Delaware.

Olson, Jan. M., and Michael E. Smith. 2016. Material Expressions of Wealth and Social Class at Aztec-Period Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 27(1):133–47.

Parsons, Lee A. 1986. The Origins of Maya Art: Monumental Stone Sculpture of Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala, and the Southern Pacific Coast. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 28. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Popenoe de Hatch, Marion. 1997. Kaminaljuyú/San Jorge: Evidencia Arqueológica de la Actividad Económica en el Valle de Guatemala 300 a.C a 300 d.C. Guatemala City: Universidad de Guatemala.

Ringot, Benjamin, and Thierry Sarmant. 2012. “Sire, Marly?”: usages et étiquette de Marly et de Versailles sous le règne de Louis XIV. Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles 5.

Rodríguez-Alegría, Ricardo, and Wesley D. Stoner. 2016. The Trade in Cooking Pots under the Aztec and Spanish Empires. Ancient Mesoamerica 27:197–207.

Saunders, David, and Megan O’Neil (eds). 2024. Picture Worlds: Storytelling on Greek, Moche, and Maya Pottery. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum.

Scherer, Andrew K., and Stephen Houston. 2018. Blood, Fire, Death: Covenants and Crises among the Classic Maya. In Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice, edited by Vera Tiesler and Andrew K. Scherer:109–50. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Collection.

Sharer, Robert J. 1978. The Prehistory of Chalchuapa, El Salvador: Volume Three, Pottery and Conclusions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sistiaga, Ainara, Fatima Husaina, David Uribelarre, David M. Martín-Perea, Troy Ferland, Katherine H. Freeman, Fernando Diez-Martín, Enrique Baquedano, Audax Mabullai, Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, and Roger E. Summons. 2020. Microbial Biomarkers Reveal a Hydrothermally Active Landscape at Olduvai Gorge at the Dawn of the Acheulean, 1.7 Ma. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(40):24720–28.

Smith, Alex R. Smith, Rachel N. Carmody, Rachel J. Dutton, and Richard W. Wrangham. 2015. The Significance of Cooking for Early Hominin Scavenging. Journal of Human Evolution 84:62–70.

Solís, Felipe (ed.). 2009. Teotihuacan, Cité des Dieux. Paris: Musée de quai Branly/Somogy, Éditions d’Art.

Spence, Charles. 2022. On the Use of Ambient Odours to Influence the Multisensory Experience of Dining. International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science 27:100444/

Steane, John M. 1999. The Archaeology of the Medieval English Monarchy. London: Routledge.

____. 2001. The Archaeology of Power: England and Northern Europe AD 800–1600. Stroud: Tempus.

Strong, Roy. 2002. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. London: Jonathan Cape.

Taube, Karl A. The Maize Tamale in Classic Maya Diet, Epigraphy, and Art. American Antiquity 54(1):31–51.

Taylor, Valerie. 2005. Banquet Plate and Renaissance Culture: A Day in the Life. Renaissance Studies 19(5):621–33.

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

Tozzer, Alfred M. 1941. Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán: A Translation. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology XVIII. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Vakasira, Georgia. 2020. Experimental Study of Byzantine Chafing Dishes. EXARCH 2020/21.

Weber, Charles W. Edwin A. Kohlhepp, Ahmed Idouraine, and Luisa J. Ochoa. 1993.
Nutritional Composition of Tamales and Corn and Wheat Tortillas. Journal of Food Composition and Analysis 6(4):324–35.

Wheaton, Barbara K. 1983. Savoring the Past The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Woolgar, C.M. 1999. The Great Household in Late Medieval England. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wrangham, Richard. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.

Zender, Marc. 2000. A Study of Two Uaxactun-Style Tamale-Serving Vessels. In The Maya Vase Book: A Corpus of Rollout Photographs of Maya Vases, Volume 6, edited by Justin Kerr:1038–55. New York: Kerr Associates.