by Stephen Houston and Harper Dine (Brown University)

“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890)

Addictive substances have many reasons to exist—from the entwined evolutionary perspectives of both plants and people (e.g., Pollan 2001). In 19th century England, opiates dulled the pain of a toothache, soothed a restive child or led to restorative sleep. One chemist mixed laudanum, a tincture of opium, into 20% of his prescriptions, and laborers in the “ague-ridden Fens” of eastern England often dropped opiate pills into their beer, taking the edge off a hard day’s work (Berridge 1977:78, 79). Only later, when professional pharmacists wished to monopolize opium—and xenophobic concerns arose about what was perceived as a drug associated with Chinese immigrants and members of the East Indian working class—did moralizing laws take effect in the United Kingdom (Berridge 1977:79–80), a clear example of the way economic motivations and prejudice can become codified in notions of what is virtuous or right. The broader point is that various kinds of drug use—including everyday substances such as caffeine—have a long social history (e.g., Grund 1993).

In the case of tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), the well-known psychoactive plant native to the Americas, a relationship with people extends as far back as 10,350 BC, denoting an extensive story of mutual influence (Duke et al. 2022). When absorbed through the skin, mouth, stomach, rectum or lungs, tobacco, a member of the Solanaceae or nightshade family, triggers a surge of dopamine that induces euphoria and calm (Picciotto and Mineur 2014:546). With certain varieties and in higher doses, it even mimics death, followed by a recovery that can seem miraculous (Wilbert 1987:157; see also Harrington 1932:195–96). A drug this potent, with such diverse uses and impacts, is bound to vary in meaning. In Indigenous America, these form part of what Johannes Wilbert calls “tobacco shamanism,” a suite of practices and visionary or healing experiences that involve drying, shredding, pulverizing, incinerating, and poulticing tobacco (Wilbert 1987:149). This processing allows leaves of the plant to be smoked, drunk, licked, chewed, ingested through the rectum (by enema), blown on others, or packed as wet masses on the skin.

Most of these practices are well-attested among the Maya and adjacent peoples, with evidence going far into the past (Thompson 1990:110–22). Residues in vases from the Pacific piedmont of Guatemala point to liquid consumption of tobacco, perhaps for healing or visions (Negrin et al. 2024), seeds have been recovered from Formative Honduras (Morell-Hart et al. 2014:75–76) and Late Classic Belize (Dedrick 2014), and glyphic and chemical evidence shows that small containers from the final years of the Classic period stored snuff, possibly as trade goods packaged at their source in molded containers (Houston et al. 2006:114–16; Loughmiller-Cardinal and Zagorevski 2016; see also Groark 2019; Hull 2019). Some of these ingestibles were “polydrugs,” admixtures of other substances such as aromatic marigolds that might have cut the asperity of certain tobacco species (Zimmermann et al. 2021; see also Cagnato 2018). Among the Lacandon, such additives included vanilla or fragrant bits of tree-bark (Palka 2017:116).

But smoking, aspiration through the lungs, was likely the most common way of ingesting tobacco. A photograph of a Lacandon Maya speaker from over 70 years ago, by Gertrude Duby Blom, features a large, hand-rolled, and tapered cigar, the individual leaves of tobacco or nance-leaf wrapping quite visible as rough diagonal folds (Figure 1a; Robicsek 1978:fig. 20). Striations or lashings like this are depicted on the similarly large cigar smoked by God L, the deity of traded wealth, on the east door jamb of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque, indicating a comparable method of rolling (Figure 1b; Robertson 1991:fig. 44). These somewhat resemble the tobacco bundles that Lacandon Maya would prepare for trade in the mid 20^th century and before (Figure 1c; see also a smoking God L with his occasional companion, K’awiil [Robicsek 1978:figs. 35, 132, 133, pls. 101, 103]; see also Palka 2017:120, fig. 4.14). Not all tobacco was or is of the same quality. The Lacandon were known to neighboring communities for their good tobacco (Vogt 1969:25), but such business had costs for the cultivators. Extensive production of the crop exhausted the fertility of local plots, and its care and processing needed extra hands, usually women (Palka 2005:207, 211; Palka 2017:104, 114, 120).

It is a different style of smoking that appears in most Classic Maya imagery. Delicate cigarettes, not sizable cigars, occur most often (Figure 2). Even God L puffs on a cigarette in two related images that show the orderly arrangement of gods in primordial time; as the presiding deity, he alone seems permitted to smoke (Figure 3). The presence of black background on the two vases and their occurrence at a place of dawning (k’inichil) indicate nocturnal or near-nocturnal scenes; the lit cigarettes would have shown brightly in such settings, a glow before sunrise (for an explicit reference to tobacco smoking at night, see the Codex Madrid 87b, for figures seated at “night,” AK’AB). At Palenque, in the Temple of the Cross, God L stands as a kind of sentry to the dark, symbolic sweatbath inside. In Maya imagery, smoking tobacco appears to cue events at night or in dim spaces. The evening might also have been thought a good time to smoke after the exertions of the day.

There is another telling feature of Classic Maya cigarettes. When close-ups are available, they sometimes reveal a distinctive kind of segmentation that seems to differ from the cigar wrappings described above. On one late vase, among the last polychrome, narrative scenes produced by the Classic Maya, two lords grasp thin tubes; they appear to be speaking to one another, so the objects are held at an angle away from the face yet could easily be raised for a puff (Figure 4; closeup in Figure 5). On two other pots identical tubes emanate smoke or are being lit from a torch (Figure 6).

It is possible that these tubes are bamboo grass (Bambusoideae), the stems of which are natural hollow cylinders whose nodes present as regular, perpendicular ridges, also seen in other contexts of Maya art (Houston et al. 2017). Such grass and other reeds could have served as a way of packing tobacco, perhaps ground snuff, into light containers of compressed, regular shape (Houston and Schnell 2018; an alternative might be corn-husk wrappers, known in South America, but those seem far wider than those on display here [Wilbert 1987:101, 104]; for another description of such “tubes” or cañuotos, see Robicsek 1978:43; also Negrin et al. 2024:526). Eric Thompson describes examples seen during the Grijalva expedition to Cozumel Island in 1518: there were “cañas (‘reeds’ or ‘canes’ about a palm long which gave off a delicate odor on being burned” (Thompson 1990:108). Such tubes were also mentioned among the Aztec and in Michoacan, sometimes offered in burials of important men (Thompson 1990:122). The organic, ephemeral nature of bamboo, cane or reed cigarettes could explain the absence of such tubes in archaeological deposits.

As in many other contexts of elite Maya imagery, the central figures in these scenes are men. (Women likely smoked as well, but that was not depicted in imagery.) Nor will a habitual smoker swoon into visions or liminal “death” from the minute quantities of tobacco in these thin tubes, whatever their organic housing. These are suited best to individual delectation, not to be passed around as Lacandon cigars were. There is an undeniable jauntiness, a casual quality to the gesture, figures often slightly off-kilter, leaning over, deploying the “dainty hand,” pinky up, an index figure extended, that also marks glyphs and images of certain scribes (Stuart 2017). These are settings of courtly ease and pleasure, if in a refined manner, and highly “homosocial” in the sense of single-gender gatherings, and perhaps connected to the types of power displayed or enacted behind the scenes. Tobacco had strong sacred associations for the Maya and elsewhere in Mesoamerica, a solemn ingredient of healing, but that attribute appears muted in these scenes. The images appear to focus on a distinctly masculine pleasure, a performance that touches on how the cigarette is held, in what company, how it is lit or ashed, where the smoke should go, when to light up, when not (Gilbert 2007). There may be a gestural decorum and subtle signalling that is, indeed, difficult to reconstruct. Why, for example, is joint consumption of cigarettes relatively rare in this imagery (Figures 2, 4)? When was drinking, as with the small bowl held by one figure, part of these pleasures (Figure 2, upper left)?

The late vase in Figure 4 is anomalous in its emphasis on two smokers at the center of the scene; more usually, it is a figure or figures to the side, almost whimsical in pose, and, elsewhere, it is solely God L, a slightly disreputable being, who puffs on his throne. To notable extent, the “segmented,” cane-like cigarettes occur relatively late in the Classic period, from the mid-8th century on. All practices have a history, a time of introduction, robust use, and desuetude. When depicted in the Postclassic codices, cigars, not cigarettes, are the norm, with the large, tapered shapes and copious tobacco to be shared around a group (e.g., Codex Madrid 79b, 87a). The time of the segmented cigarette, of almost desacralized tobacco, indulgently consumed, would seem to have been far briefer in span. Cigarettes may not only have been a “signature” commodity (Halperin 2023:85–88, 108–109). They were also, perhaps, a packaged and lightweight item of trade during a period of considerable movement and, as in the vase of Petol, novel modes of consumption.

References

Berridge, Virgina. 1977. Opium and the Historical Perspective. The Lancet July 9:77–78.

Cagnato, Clarissa. 2018. Shedding Light on the Nightshades (Solanaceae) Used by the Ancient Maya: A Review of Existing Data, and New Archeobotanical (Macro- and Microbotanical) Evidence from Archeological Sites in Guatemala. Economic Botany 72 (2):180–95.

Dedrick, Maia. 2014. The Distributed Household: Plant and Mollusk Remains from K’axob, Belize. Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Gilbert, Emilee. 2007. Performing Femininity: Young Women’s Gendered Practice of Cigarette Smoking. Journal of Gender Studies 16(2):121–37.

Groark, Kevin P. 2019. ‘Elder Brother Tobacco’: Traditional Nicotiana Snuff Use Among the Contemporary Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico. In Breath and Smoke: Tobacco Use among the Maya, edited by Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal and Keith Eppich, pp. 54–92. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Grotenhuis, Liesbeth. 2017. Smoking Hot: the Odalisque’s Eroticizing Cigarette. Via [Online]: 11–12.

Grund, Jean-Paul C. 1993. Drug Use as a Social Ritual: Functionality, Symbolism and Determinants of Self-Reflection. Rotterdam: Instituut voor Verslavingsonderzoek (IVO), Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.

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

Harrington, John P. 1932. Tobacco among the Karuk Indians of California. Smithonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 94. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

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

———, and Joshua Schnell. 2018. Tubing. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography–Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

———, Karl Taube, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, and Timothy Beach. 2017. Bamboo—A Neglected Maya Material? Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography–Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

Hull, Kerry. 2019. The Smoking of Bones: Ch’orti’ Maya Use of Tobacco and Ritual Tobacco Substitutes. In Breath and Smoke: Tobacco Use among the Maya, edited by Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal and Keith Eppich, pp. 126–56. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Loughmiller-Cardinal, Jennifer, and Dmitri Zagorevski. 2016. Maya Flasks: The “Home” of Tobacco and Godly Substances. Ancient Mesoamerica 27(1):1–11.

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

Morell-Hart, Shanti, Rosemary A. Joyce, and John S. Henderson. 2014. Multi-Proxy Analysis of Plant Use at Formative Period Los Naranjos, Honduras. Latin American Antiquity 25(1):65–81.

National Institute on Drug Abuse. 2021. Is Nicotine Addictive? Retrieved from https://nida.nih.gov/publications/research-reports/tobacco-nicotine-e-cigarettes/nicotine-addictive on May 15, 2024.

Negrin, Adam, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, Cameron L. McNeil, W. Jeffrey Hurst, and Edward J. Kennelly. 2024. Analysis Suggests Ritual Use of Tobacco at the Ancient Mesoamerican City of Cotzumalhuapa, Guatemala. Antiquity 98(398):518–34.

Palka, Joel W. 2005. Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

———. 2017. Real Tobacco for Real People: Nicotine and Lacandon Maya Trade. In Substance & Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica, edited by Stacey Schwartzkopf and Kathryn E. Sampeck, pp. 103–27. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Picciotto, Marina R., and Yann S. Mineur. 2014. Molecules and Circuits Involved in Nicotine Addiction: The Many Faces of Smoking. Neuropharmacology 76B:545–53.

Pollan, Michael. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House.

Robertson, Merle G. 1991. The Sculpture of Palenque, Volume IV: The Cross Group, the North Group, the Olividado, and Other Pieces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Robicsek, Frances. 1978. The Smoking Gods: Tobacco in Maya Art, History, and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Stuart, David. 2017. A Note on the Sign for TZ’IHB, “Writing,’ Painting.” Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography–Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

Thompson, J. Eric S. 1990. Maya History and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Vogt, Evon Z. 1969. Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. .

Wilbert, Johannes. 1987. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Zimmermann, Mario, Korey J. Brownstein, Luis Pantoja Día, Iliana Ancona Aragón, Scott Hutson, Barry Kidder, Shannon Tushingham, and David R. Gang 2021. Metabolomics-Based Analysis of Miniature Flask Contents Identifies Tobacco Mixture Use Among the Ancient Maya. Scientific Reports (Nature Research) 11:1590. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81158-y

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

Alabaster was a rarity among the Classic Maya, reserved for fine bowls in elite settings, especially tombs or palaces (Houston 2014:258; Kubler 1977:5n1). Known as xix, a spelling attested in at least two glyphic texts, it appeared to refer to rocks affected by water (Houston et al. 2018; Luin et al. 2022:907, fig. 4). Geologically, xix is a white sedimentary calcite (CaCO3) mined in, among other places, a source near Zinacantan, Chiapas (Berlin 1946:27; for other quarries, see Urcid 2010:fig. 56). A comparable term, tecali, named after a community of that name, was applied to banded stone of similar composition in Mexico (Diehl and Stroh 1978:74). The Maya evidently prized the translucency, crystalline texture, and hard, white surface of alabaster, the better to highlight delicate incisions that could be filled in with red pigment.

An unusual find of two alabaster effigies comes from Burial 195, under Structure 5D-32 in the North Acropolis at Tikal, Guatemala (Figure 1, Coe 1990:565-568, 920, figs. 198-199, 330; Coggins 1975:344; Moholy-Nagy 2008:55, fig. 138). The tomb almost certainly belonged to a ruler of Tikal, ‘Animal Skull’, who died around AD 600.[1] The product of a tumultuous phase in Tikal’s history, Animal Skull does not clearly descend from earlier rulers of the city. His reign took place after a “rupture [that] follows hard on the heels of a major military defeat” at Tikal, leading to a “130-year monument hiatus and an interruption to its dynastic line” (Martin 2020:104, 247, 345).

Despite the gap in monuments, there is no textual hiatus at Tikal. A suprisingly large number of pots belonged to Animal Skull, a pattern seen also with his near-contemporary, “Aj Numsaaj/Aj Nunsaaj” at Naranjo (Zender 2019:35, for discussion of the ruler’s name; see also Houston 2018:71-74). Prestige ceramics must have flowed in special abundance at this time. Perhaps it was a way to reconstitute frayed relationships and build new ones by means of gifted pots. In Animal Skull’s tomb, there was also a quite literal flow of silt that washed into the tomb some years after its completion and sealing. Surrounding perishable objects, it left cavities when offerings in the tomb rotted away, preserving original shapes and coverings of painted stucco. Among the finds was a covered wooden bowl with a remnant text (Martin 2008). It referred to a ruler from the antagonistic kingdom of Caracol, Belize, from which the bowl may have arrived as a gift or as war booty. Apparently, Animal Skull had other broad connections, including ties to the dynasty of Altar de Sacrificios, a royal seat some 100 km southwest of Tikal (Martin 2020:412n16).

Said to be “somewhat eroded,” the alabaster effigies measure ca. 28 cm long, 12 cm wide, and 15 cm high (Moholy-Nagy 2008:55, fig. 138). They occur side-by-side but otherwise alone in a quadrant of Burial 195. One carving is blockier, less curved than the other. Poised on their front legs and haunches, almost ready to jump, they were intended, it seems, to stare eternally at the head of Animal Skull. He lay flat on his back nearby. What sort of animals were they? Some scholars see them as agoutis or sereques (Dasyprocta punctata), but the fuller, rather alert tails point to another identification (Coe 1990:566; Moholy-Nagy 2008:fig. 138): they are rabbits, perhaps cottontails in particular. The small ears cue that mammal rather than hares. Famously procreative as a genus, the rabbits were placed in the tomb as a pair, suggesting a buck and his doe.

It is highly likely these carvings were non-local, deriving instead from the metropolis of Teotihuacan, which was largely in ruins when these alabaster–tecali–pieces were placed in Burial 195. Excavations at the apartment compound of Oztoyahualco found just such a carving, also, probably, of a rabbit, in the center of courtyard (Figure 2a). The dimensions, style of carving, and disposition of limbs are quite close to those of the alabasters at Tikal. Other such finds include a piece in a photographic archive, head gone but with similar limbs (Figure 2b), and two very different creatures, felines both (Figure 2c), including a calcite or tecali example that entered the collection of the British Museum in 1926 (Figures 2d). Two appear to have receptables on their backs for offerings, and the evident dyad of predators (felines) and prey (rabbits) may not be a coincidence. The rabbit at Oztoyahualco dates to the Xolalpan phase, ca. AD 350-550), the shattered mammal (supposedly) to the subsequent Metepec period (AD 550-660), at the time of Teotihuacan’s decisive decline (Beramendi-Orosco 2009:106-107).

Study of animal bones at Oztoyahualco reveal a notable preponderence of rabbit, with other evidence in the form of possible pens, hide-preparing tools, and osteological signs of butchering (Somerville et al. 2016:3; see also Somerville and Sugiyama 2021:63-64). This evidence indicates that these animals were a key resource for the apartment compound and for Teotihuacan in general. The rabbit effigy itself appears to have been placed on top of a small temple platform in the middle of a courtyard at Oztoyahualco (Figure 3a). Whether this was in homage to a succulent rabbit god is speculative, but it does suggest that such platforms displayed the effigies for local ritual, that these were central, if portable, votive carvings. Indeed, an example of a temple “maquette,” with the same portability as the carvings from Oztoyahualco–and marked by the distinctive talud-tablero (slope-panel) feature of Teotihuacan–has its own super-structure, with a chamber large enough to accommodate such effigies (Figure 3b). Courtyard temples of similar sort have been found at Tikal (Figure 3c), including, not far away, to the east, a recent find in Group 6C-XV (Román et al. 2023)–the latter being part of the city that was abandoned at the end of the Early Classic period, ca. AD 500-600.[2] Perhaps such a temple, with now missing chambers, contained the effigies, which might be switched out for votive need or removal and use in intermittent displays or processions.

The calcite rabbits in Burial 195 have not been linked before to Teotihuacan. Yet they correspond to a type of carving attested at that site, in a material employed for at least one animal effigy of comparable size. Calcite carvings of this nature and scale are not otherwise known in the Maya region. As tomb furniture, this may reflect the need of an upstart ruler, Animal Skull, to find roots in more distant pasts and places…or perhaps in ritual effigies taken from a part of his city abandoned prior to his death and burial.

Acknowledgements  I thank Joshua Kwoka for sharing the image in Figure 2b and Mary Miller for reminding me that we are, as of this writing, in the Year of the Rabbit!

[1] As an epithet, “Animal Skull” is an ersatz place-holder. The actual name remains a puzzle, for it includes a turtle head and, at times, a feline ear, along with a suite of other titles and affixes or infixes that come and go.

[2] Oztoyahualco does not only offer a parallel to Tikal (Taube and Zender 2009:188-189, fig. 7.15). A manopla or boxing cudgel from Caracol, Belize, bears a striking resemblance to an object found in the apartment complex (left below, Oztoyohualco Burial 13, Teotihuacan: Ortiz Díaz 1993:527, 533, 536, figs. 389, 391; right below, Caracol, Belize: Royal Ontario Museum, 971.466, Anderson 1959, mislabeled as a “monkey skull” but correctly noted to be Early Classic in date). Note the “dead” or discolored incisor on the skull, an idiosyncratic hint that it matches an actual person with this injury or decay.

References

Anderson, A. Hamilton. 1959. Actas del XXXIII Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, San José, 20-27 Julio 1958:211-218.

Baez, Miguel. 2009. Sculpture de Jaguar. In Teotihuacan, Cité des Dieux, edited by Felipe Solís, 261. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly/Somogy Éditions d’Art.

Beramendi-Orosco, Laura E., Galia Gonzalez-Hernández, Ana Soler-Arechalde, Manzanilla LR. 2021. A High-Resolution Chronology for the Palatial Complex of Xalla in Teotihuacan, Mexico, Combining Radiocarbon and Archaeomagnetic Dates in a Bayesian Model. Radiocarbon 63(4):1073-1084.

Coe, William R. 1990. Excavations in the Great Plaza, North Terrace, and North Acropolis of Tikal. Philadephia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.

Coggins, Clemency C. 1975. Painting and Drawing Styles at Tikal: An Historical and Iconographic Reconstruction. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge.

Diehl, Richard A., and Edward G. Stroh, Jr. 1978. Tecali Vessel Manufacturing Debris at Tollan, Mexico. American Antiquity 43(1):73–79.

Houston, Stephen D. 2014. Miscellaneous Texts. In Life and Politics at the Royal Court of Aguateca: Artifacts, Analytical Data, and Synthesis. Aguateca Archaeological Project First Phase Monograph Series, Volume 3, edited by Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, 258–269. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

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

—-, David Stuart, and Marc Zender. 2018. If…Alabaster Could Talk. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography, Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

Jiménez Delgado, Jonathan E. 2009. Miniature d’un Temple et de son Soubassement. In Teotihuacan, Cité des Dieux, edited by Felipe Solís, 213. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly/Somogy Éditions d’Art.

Kubler, George. 1977. Aspects of Classic Maya Rulership on Two Inscribed Vessels. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology No. 18. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University.

Laporte, Juan Pedro, and Vilma Fialko. 1995. Un reencuentro con Mundo Perido, Tikal, Guatemala. Ancient Mesoamerica 6(1):41–94.

Luin, Camilo A., Dmitri Beliaev, and Sergei Vepretskii. 2022. La vasija de travertino del Museo Popol Vuh. In 34 simposio de investigaciones arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2021, tomo 2, edited by Bárbara Arroyo, Luis Méndez Salinas, and Gloria Ajú Álvarez, 903-912. Guatemala City: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia, Asociación Tikal.

Martin, Simon. 2008. A Caracol Emblem at Tikal. Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Maya Writing and Iconography, Boundary End Archaeological Research Center.

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

Moholy-Nagy, Hattula, with William R. Coe. 2008. The Artifacts of Tikal: Ornamental and Ceremonial Artifacts and Unworked Material. Tikal Reports 27A. Philadelphia: University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

Ortiz Díaz, Edith. 1993. Ideología y vida doméstica. In Anatomía de un conjunto residencial Teotihuacano en Oztoyahualco, 1: Excavaciones, edited by Linda Manzanilla, 519-547. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Román Ramírez, Edwin, Lorena Paiz Aragón, Angelyn Bass, Thomas Garrison, Stephen Houston, Heather Hurst, David Stuart, Alejandrina Corado Ochoa, Cristina García Leal, and Rony Estuardo Piedrasanta Castellanos. 2023. A Teotihuacan Altar at Tikal, Guatemala: Central Mexican Ritual and Elite Interaction in the Maya Lowlands, unpublished manuscript. 

Somerville, Andrew D., and Nawa Sugiyama. 2021. Why Were New World Rabbits Not Domesticated? Animal Frontiers 11(3):62–68.

—-, —-, Linda R. Manzanilla, and Margaret J. Schoeninger. 2016. Animal Management at the Ancient Metropolis of Teotihuacan, Mexico: Stable Isotope Analysis of Leporid (Cottontail and Jackrabbit) Bone Mineral. PLoS ONE 11(8): e0159982. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159982.

Taube, Karl A., and Marc Zender. 2009. American Gladiators: Ritual Boxing in Ancient Mesoamerica. In Blood and Beauty: Organized Violence in the Art and Archaeology of Mesoamerica and Central America, edited by Heather Orr and Rex Koontz, 161–220. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.

Urcid, Javier. 2010. Valued Possessions: Materiality and Aesthetics in Western and Southern Mesoamerica. In Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks, Number 3: Ancient Mexican Art at Dumbarton Oaks, Central Highlands, Southwestern Highlands, Gulf Lowlands, edited by Susan T. Evans, 127-220. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Zender, Marc. 2019. The Classic Maya Causative. The PARI Journal 20(2):28-40.

Stephen Houston (Brown University)

In 1560, a pictorial census was compiled for the province of Huexotzinco in what is now the Mexican state of Puebla (Aguilera 1996:529). Taxation – or its avoidance – was the aim. Known today as the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, this document arose from local complaints about burdens on Indigenous nobility (Prem 1974:708-9). The census seems to have done its job. Don Luis de Velasco y Ruiz de Alarcón, the second Viceroy of New Spain, cited it when turning down later attempts to tax native elites in the area.

Now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where it is labeled Ms. Mex. 387, the Matrícula offers a large trove of Aztec glyphs. Tributaries are shown with heads to specify age and gender, wrinkles for the former, disinctive hair for the latter, along with small lines leading to individual names in Aztec writing (see Houston and Zender 2018). Among other graphs, the Matrícula even has a way of denoting blindness (Wood 2020-present). This occurs on fol. 546v, which declares, in Nahuatl, yzcate yn popoyome, “here are the blind people,” just above a column of at least five heads (Figure 1). Each head has two horizontal bands across the face, one above the eye, the other below. Similar devices appear on fol. 608r, which records blindness, not with bands, but lateral smudges and globs of black ink (Figure 2).

As noted by David Stuart and his colleagues (2017), Aztec script drew at times on earlier systems of writing, including that of the Maya. Examples include the Aztec sign for “writing,” evidently copying a Maya “sky band,” and two distinct glyphs for “day, sun, heat” that are dead-ringers for the “day” (k’in) and “Venus” (ek’) signs (Figure 3). All are celestial in nature, suggesting a certain esotericism to these appropriations.

The mark for “blindness” may be a borrowing too. One Maya supernatural, ‘Akan, a being associated in the Classic period with death imagery and inebriation, has among his attributes a dark band and a sign for “night” or “darkness” across his eyes and, in places, his forehead (Figure 4; for ‘Akan, see Grube and Nahm 1994:707-9). To judge from the eyeband, he is probably a god who cannot see.

On the celebrated “Altar” vase, ‘Akan chops his own head off, but gropingly so, his eyes concealed (Figure 5).

‘Akan may embody recent death, the eyes open but unseeing, in contrast to skeletal beings stripped of flesh (on eye opening and loss of brain activity, see Laureys 2007). In a kind of taphonomic staging, he corresponds to the newly dead, not those long putrified and excarnated. Analogies may be found in the Kusōkan images of Japan, which contemplate “the nine stages of a decomposing corpse” (Kanda 2005).

For the Classic Maya, the disabling of sight is securely linked to those who have just died. This is attested in two phrases, one from a wooden box citing the death (or “road-entering”) of a lord from the kingdom of Tortuguero, Mexico; the other occurs on a panel from Lacanjá Tzeltal, also in Mexico (Figure 6). Rich in euphemism – both operate in complex cross-references to death – they categorically negate sight, reading: ma-‘a ‘i-‘ILA-ji, “not seeing.” That ‘Akan was also a creature of inebriation leads to another trope, that of being “blind-drunk,” a state in which the eyes coordinate poorly, if at all, with their ready cognition (Clifasefi et al. 2006; for ‘Akan as a drinking god, see Grube 2004).

Blinding may not only have come from death. A captive with eyeband from Tikal Stela 39 could conceivably have received this torture at the hands of his captors (Figure 7; for the systematic blinding of captives, if in a Balkan context, see Holmes 2012). This was, to say the least, an immiseration that would hinder opponents and inflict broader psychological trauma.

A captive who was likely blinded – his slit eye oozes with blood – occurs yet more clearly on a vase from the Ik’ kingdom of northern Guatemala (Figure 8).

That blindness was shown in Classic Maya text and imagery should not be surprising given the strong, positive emphasis on its opposite, the extromissive powers of sight (Houston et al. 2006:163-76). By comparison, there is, in recent literature on the senses, a latter-day deemphasis on sight, a dethroning of vision in favor of other senses (Jay 1993). To be “ocularcentric” is to miss larger worlds of perception and lend pernicious weight to “sensory normativity” (Petty 2021:297, 298). But the Maya might have disagreed: near-perfect humans were, according to mythic accounts from Highland Guatemala, capable of penetrative sight, to the extent of angering the gods of creation (Groark 2008:427-8). Removing that acuity, as the gods did, reduced the capacities of their hubristic creations. For most humans, death and sightlessness lay ahead in an inevitable future.

Acknowledgements  This essay benefited from comments by Charles Golden, Andrew Scherer, David Stuart, and Karl Taube.

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