by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

The metaphor comes naturally: human frames, powerful ones, strain to lift things. Why not buildings? Because people do not have the strength. Supernaturals are the only ones who can muster enough brawn. Atlas, a Titan who unwisely tangled with Zeus and other Olympians, had to hold up the sky, relieved only, in a brief episode, by beefy Hercules. Many examples of Atlas were axes mundi, supporting the sky and more rarely the earth (a model taken from Homer); others held up a celestial globe (a conceit lifted from Hesiod and displayed elegantly in the Farnese Atlas, a later Roman copy of a Hellenistic original; Museo Archeologico Nazionale, inv. 6374, Anghelina 2010:195; cf. Odyssey I:45 [“…Atlas of baneful mind, who knows the depths of every sea, and himself holds the tall pillars which keep earth and heaven apart”], and Theogony 746–748; Figure 1). The first existed within a terrestrial frame, the second outside of it.

Figure 1. Early depiction of Atlas with a tortured Prometheus, Laconian Cup, Arkesilas Painter, ca. 565–550 BCE, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, Musei Vaticani, 16592 (photograph by ArchaiOptix, CC BY-SA 4.0).

In buildings, Greek myths came to fuse with Vitruvius’ notions of cross-ties between human bodies and architectural elements, but also with a broader concept of the telamōn, the “bearer,” and atlantean, or the female caryatid, a less strenuous, more stately figure, carrying cornices on their heads like so many water jars or containers (Rykwert 1996:133, fn55 443). These were said, in a much disputed account about the columns of the Erechtheion in the Acropolis of Athens, to be a mockery of enslaved matrons from the vanquished city of Caryae, in the Peloponnese (Plommer 1979:97; cf. Shear 1999:67, 85, who derives the forms from treasury buildings at Delphi, in a debate unlikely to end any time soon). At the least, there is figurative service to others and literal service to the building, lest it collapse. Sinew, muscle, and, for the telamōn, sweat, all of these kept the buildings standing. That such supporters were tied to subjugated groups has been tracked back, by one argument, to Achaemenid Persia and to a way of depicting an unending state of subjection (Vickers 1985:11, 16, fig. 6, for an image of Darius I’s throne, with telamōn-like “bearers”).

Shapes can have many laminated meanings. A study of the obelisk as a form over time and in varying places carries it from an emblem of solar cults in Egypt, piercing the sky, to Roman trophies and a blend of imperial and introduced beliefs; then on to Renaissance invocations of ancient wisdom, aware of Egypt yet hopelessly confused about it, and all the way to King Louis-Philippe of France and “Cleopatra’s Needle” on Greywacke Knoll in Central Park, New York City  (Curran et al. 2009:14, 104, 177). There was a persistent fascination about how to move and deposit such stones to grand effect. An obelisk might have intense meaning or operate as “a centerpiece that symbolized, effectively, nothing” beyond a grand gesture: a nod here to the colossal obelisk on Bunker Hill in Boston, a monument dedicated to a battle rather than to veneration of the sun (Curran et al. 2009:251, 269).

In much the same way, telamōn or atlantean figures, caryatids too, appear in Pompeii baths as examples of “normative masculinity”—the bodies of naked bathers echoed the rippled “bearers,” at once Titans and satyrs, on surrounding walls—or in Vatican paintings that allude to foreign peoples, especially those from Africa (Hakenen 2020:45, 46, fig. 5; Scott 2025:484). The Pompeii figures are instances where disorderly, almost irrational figures, endowed with an “aura of Greekness,” have been harnessed to a practical purpose (Hakenen 2020:50, 60). Slightly erotic, they titillate bathers. They also work hard to support the bath vault. In recent political gestures, the caryatid has even come to embody Greece itself and its claims to sculptures held by the British Museum (Plantzos 2017:3–5, figs. 1–2). On a sunny afternoon in 2015, several barefoot women, clad in white, processed in silence to visit their “sister,” a lone caryatid in the Museum that had been taken by Lord Elgin from the Erechtheion.

The caryatid-protestors ignored their core function, to support a building. That would have been an awkward procession indeed. But this was not true of the late Medieval sculptor Adam Kraft. In 1496, he completed a full-length, almost dominant self-portrait of himself and two other assistants (Gesellen) in the Sakramentshaus, St. Lorenz church, Nuremberg (Figure 2; Klamt and Clarke 1998:406, 410, 416, fig. 2; Schleif 1993:599, 602; for earlier examples from Germany, referring to self-images as “virtuoso artifacts,” or, in the words of Horst Bredekamp, “half dustbag, half God,” Ecker 2024:304). Holding a mallet and chisel, he appears ready to carve yet another tabernacle of similar magnitude, stooping to show his effort, both respectful because of the presence of the eucharist above and looking out squarely at those walking nearby. The soaring structure rests lightly on his shoulders and those of his assistants or journeymen. At once deferential and assertive—none of this would be possible without them (or their patron’s money)—Kraft and his workmen support, serve, and obtrude.

Figure 2.  Adam Kraft supporting a tabernacle, Sakramentshaus, St. Lorenz Church, Nuremberg, Germany, 1493–1496 (photograph by Uoaei1, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Some 250 years later, combinations of telamōn and caryatids twist and smile while sustaining the cornice of Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci palace at Potsdam, Germany. The Rococo extravagances of these couples may hint at the complexities of Frederick’s sexuality—he was well-known for leading his architects with a firm hand and must have had a strong impact on such details (Blanning 2016:55–56, 177). Ironically, the caryatids were probably among the few women with a permanent presence at what he called his “villa” (Blanning 2016:188–194). The idiosyncrasy of these choices, from Pompeii to Potsdam and further afield, raise the prospect that identifying a type of architectural element is merely the start of sorting out why it was used in a particular way, at that time and place (e.g., O’Neill 2018; see also Jütte 2023a:14–27, who links caryatids to the identity of Jews in central Europe and their “burden of modern outsiderdom”). Columns had deeper import. Those who gnawed at pillars and columns in Medieval art were seen as hypocrites, afflicted with excessive zeal or piety and a misguided “devotion toward dead things,” if in feelings that gave away at moments to sincere folk devotion (Jütte 2023b:336). In itself, the trope of columns in anthropomorphic form does not so much explain as invite further study. Subtle and varied motivations lay behind most mergers of bodies and buildings.

The blurring of social, architectonic, and cosmic roles, subservient people merging with stone, wood, and the wide firmament, is attested among the Classic Maya. More than metaphor, it blends different kinds of beings, materials, and scales; it grafts flesh on to an unbreakable, unyielding frame. The first Maya atlanteans are from the Late Classic period and passing into other expressions, with Toltec touches, at sites like Chichen Itza, Mexico (e.g., Martin 2015:188–192; Taube 1992:92–97; Tozzer 1957:64, 74, 112, 117, 119, figs. 65–69, 181, 196, 261–264, 265, 615). At once stony and watery, both traits of domains underfoot, they also hold up the sky in multiple images: Homer might recognize the act, less so Hesiod. These are creatures of the firmament, not beings outside of it. Most of them are shown as elderly, the Itzam beings, literally as old as the hills, withered of shank and empty of teeth but still potent with wisdom and experience. Outside of Chichen Itza, most are male, all gods, excepting a few rare fusions, and a few of those duck-like wind deities (ik’ k’uh, “wind god”; Taube et al. 2020:58–63; an explicit reading of the name is with an impersonator of the deity on Yaxchilan Hieroglyphic Stairway 2, Step X:A2 [Graham 1982:163], David Stuart, personal communication, 1998; notably, this figure is a subordinate lord, not a ruler). Like exhalations from caves—a phenomenon common in the Maya region, from the play of air pressure between their interior and exterior—one such atlantean emerges from a stylized hole in the ground to support a throne at Dos Pilas, Guatemala (Houston 2022:fig. 64).

In imagery, atlanteans may occur in groups fours, one for each corner of the sky, sometimes abbreviated as two (Martin 2015:figs. 6, 9, 29, 41). This enhanced visual clarity, only the two in front being visible in a flat display (Martin 2007). A Terminal Classic or Early Postclassic pair from the Lower Temple of the Jaguars, Chichen Itza, makes explicit that the Creator Couple consists of an Itzam with Ix Chel, an ancient goddess of curing, midwifery, world destruction, and the tending of the dead and dying (Martin 2015:218–221, figs. 40–43; Taube 1994:658). Lifting is in the here-and-now but also a primordial effort. Entering and leaving by such figures reenacts creation and, by a rough match, the life cycle itself. Scales mix and multiply with a comprehensive, overall integrity. The house is like the cosmos, the cosmos like a house, in a semiotic reciprocity with wide currency among the ancient Maya and their present-day descendants (Houston 1998a:348–357; 1998b:521).

The four supporters of the sky lend themselves to architectural metaphors and fusions. One example comes from a Late Classic altar at the city of La Corona, Guatemala (Martin 2008; Stuart 2013). Old Itzam, their knees slightly bent from exertion, hold up the roof of a water temple. After all, a roof needs four vertical beams to keep it aloft. The aquatic theme is consistent with these beings, for their foreheads often show a lashed water lily; above the house undulates a water serpent (see Stuart 2025). The subterraenan world the Itzam occupy was filled with underground rushes of water, passing through caves on a seasonal basis, and inhabited by gods of wind: a pairing of wind gods, one with “wind” or ik’ sign, the other with a sign for rushing water (polaw/palaw? [Lopes 2004]), is well-documented in Maya art and imagery, from the musicians in the Bonampak murals to the subterranean and underwater servitors on Panel 3 from Cancuen (Miller and Brittenham 2012:fig. 137). [Note 1] The occupant of the water temple on the La Corona altar is the current queen who addresses a long-gone predecessor. The latter stands on her own platform, which, like the other, was most likely a portable structure to be move about: the text, studied by Simon Martin, fills with references to the arrivals (huli) of princesses who married into the local dynasty (Martin 2008; Stuart 2013).

The importance and vitalities of the Itzam supports, horcones, “main posts” in Spanish, are suggested by evidence from the Tzeltal Maya. A house is endowed with spirit forces, with numerous biological and genealogical allusions to its components (Figuerola Pujol 2014:233–234). Foundations are likened to mothers, as in Tzeltal me’-ts’ak; the door is a “mouth,” ti’nail, windows are like “faces,” sit, corners correspond to “ears,” chikin; the roof is a “head,” jol, principal pillars are like a “thigh,” okom. Yukateko drills down on these metaphors, the “back” of a wall is a t’ol pak or, in more recent usage, o’kom, “main post,” from a word for “leg, foot” (Ruz 2014:85; Wauchope 1938:34, table 2).

In fact, these fusions of body part and buildings occur in most Mayan languages. Among the many examples are: Yukateko, chi’na, “building-mouth,” and yol nah, “heart of the building” (Barrera et al. 1980:101, 979); Ch’orti’, u’t niyo’tot, “face/eye” of my dwelling” or “door,” and “roof” being the “head of dwelling,” jor otot (Hull 2016:120, 178); and Colonial Tzotzil, ti’ lok’ebal, “mouth for leaving” or “door,” and ‘ak’ol ti’ na, “upper lip of a building” or “lintel” (Laughlin 1988:386, 418). The act of creating or undoing access to buildings involves two expressions in particular. One involves “closing,” often with a word mak, “cover” but more narrowly with the meaning of “close.” For example, “door” in Ch’orti’, mahkib, is a thing that allows closing, or, for the same word in Chontal Maya, mäcti’ otot, “dwelling-covering” or “door” (e.g., Hull 2016:266; Keller and Luciano Gerónimo 1997:389, with a probable contrast between a physical door and doorway it fills, the u ti’ otot). Another is to “open,” pas, as in pajsa’r, “opening” in Ch’orti’, a word tied to ideas of dawning, an opening at the horizon between sky and earth (Hull 2016:320; see pasel, “creation,” in Tzotzil [Laughlin 1975:266]). As mentioned before in this tradition of lush metaphor, a small act is reflected in large ones, larges ones mirrored in the small. Each part of the building is potentially endowed with its own spirit and hungers. In Yucatan historically, birds would be sacrificed to upright supports as part of the building process (Figuerola Pujol 2014:247, 251). Each edge or corner or opening represents a place of danger, needing protection from malign, external forces, especially at night. That is when the zone of safety contracts to the limits of the house, pressed in close by the gathering dark (Pierrebourg 2014:187). A place of shelter implies an area outside a zone of security. A building has cracks and holes where intruders might enter. These require ritual (and actual) vigilance by those inside.

Classic Maya texts reveal further nuances. Bodily fusions are evident in terms for lintels, described in a few inscriptions as “face-down stones” (u-pa ka-bu TUUN-ni-IL/?li, AD 514, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art #61-15, F7-F8; I first noticed glyphic spellings of the -ba or -bu causatives on positional roots in 1996; see Kaufman and Norman 1984:106, for Ch’olan descendants; for lintels in general, see Brittenham 2023). A lintel from Laxtunich has a unique monumental depiction of the lifting of such carvings (Houston et al. 2021a:142–143, fig. 81, see below). The lintel, replete with signs of vitality, including mouth and eyes, looks downward in the image and, in actual orientation, down to viewers looking up at the lintel when it was in place. The sculptor, whose name was in part Mayuy, inserted his own name into those eyes, making him the sole figure within the scene to interact with viewers of the lintel. No other personage “breaks the fourth wall,” a forthright contact with those outside an image or performance, and he did so indirectly (Houston 2026:37–41). Terminal Classic inscriptions at Chichen Itza use another metaphor, ti’, for “mouth” but also, securely in these texts, for the word “door” (Figure 3). In addition, an internal hiearchy, a social definition of structural elements, has taken place. The stone lintel (pakab tuun, “face-down stone”) is now the “lord” of the door of his dwelling (yajawti’il yotoot, “the ‘door’s lord’ [lintel] of his dwelling”; note the distinctive, Northern spelling and articulation of the -b on Mayan positional verbs). The lintel, first stated to be of stone—most would have been of wood, hence the need to specify—is given high rank as the dominant feature of the door. Society and its levels of status have mapped onto parts of a building.

Figure 3. A stone lintel as the “lord” of a dwelling’s door, Lintel 4:B1–E1, Las Monjas, Chichen Itza, Mexico (drawing by Ian Graham, Thompson 1977:271). 

If the lintel is, in a sense, sovereign, it stands to reason that other components of the doorway would have reduced status. This has broad implications for understanding elite buildings of the Classic period. A longstanding puzzle has been what to do with a label that appears to mark door jambs. The glyph in question looks like a k’a syllable, tagged for possession, perhaps abstraction, with its -l ending (Houston et al. 2021b:25–32). A more solid view is to see it as having two syllables in fused form, almost achieving, by long use, the properties of a word sign or logograph. It became, as it were, a frozen spelling. As David Stuart suggests, the conflated syllables are surely pa and k’a, spelling pahk’ (personal communication, 2023, with the /h/ suggested for philological reasons by Marc Zender). That word occurs throughout lowland Mayan languages, pointing to its deep antiquity and broad usage. In Yukateko, the term corresponds to a “wall that one has made or makes,” “roof support,” “make a wall,” or, in pak’i na,” house of masonry” (Barrera Vásquez et al. 1980:623); Colonial Tzotzil offers up pak’, “to plaster” (Laughlin 1988:278) or, in the present-day version of that language, “plaster/house wall with daub/,” a pak’bal na being a wattle-and-daub house (Laughlin 1975:263). Common Ch’olan presents a reconstructible word, *pähk’, “mud wall” (Kaufman and Norman 1984:128), Ch’orti’, its descendant, pak’i, “mold clay” (Hull 2016:323). Accordingly, pahk’ ranges in a close set of meanings from a physical construction, a wall, to a viscous daub or stone masonry and on to the act of making or daubing. The overall connotation is of a kind of daub-work or segmental construction, a link to building as an action, and, in particular, high-investment stonework. There may also have been an attempt to apply the label to a natural, columnar feature in a cave. At Naj Tunich, one such column, almost standing free from the cave wall, bears a probable u-pa[k’a] spelling, as a possible reference to the shape and its resemblance to a support for a roof (Stone 1995:177, fig. 7-24, pl. 11). The individual who possesses it is otherwise unknown, and not transparently of the most exalted, regal status.

Figure 4. “Column” in Naj Tunich cave, Drawing 51, with u-pa[k’a] ha? reading; judging from the cluttered arrangement, the text and ballplayer scene may have been painted at different times (Stone 1995:pl.11, photograph by Chip and Jennifer Clark).

Examples from texts occur in two settings, on tablets forming walls and door jambs (some possibly reset), and on capstone over vaults. They are not overwhelming in number, and their occurrences seem highly localized to a few places, all from a little over a century. Dating to AD 654, the “Tableritos” of the internal Palace stairway at Palenque, Mexico, link the house to Pakal the Great, ruler of the city, here with an erroneous title of age (he should be in his 3rd block of 20-year spans, not his 2nd; more likely this reckons with his time on the throne, from AD 615 on, Figure 5). The building belonged to Pakal, yet the second text reveals that the pahk’ pertained to, perhaps, a companion of 40 years, in this case a nobleman, Aj Sul, known from other texts at Palenque (Stuart and Stuart 2008:163–164). Of the ownership of the Palace, at this time, there can be no doubt; but the wall, as a thing or result of physical acts, possession skews to a loyal underling. Two days later, that wall, now the overt possession of Pakal, was said to be “covered,” mahkaj. Had its ownership transferred to the king? The covering could refer to the vault or, as an outside chance, a doorway formed by blocks attached to jambs.

Figure 5. Stones 1 and 2, internal stairway, “Subterráneos” passages of the Palace, Palenque, AD 654, now in the Museo de América, Madrid (Polyukhovych et al. 2024:80–82, photographs by Jorge Pérez de Lara).

Other pa[k’a]-li/IL spellings at Palenque accentuate the fact that such features are not always of reigning kings, but might go deeper into the past. One such example is on the main, back panel from the Tablet of the Foliated Cross at Palenque. A commission of K’inich Kan Bahlam in AD 692, the text refers, at the accession of the king, to the “changing” (u-he-le-wa) of this pahk’Vl, but one tied to a long-dead ruler who came to the throne in AD 431 (Figure 6; Stuart and Stuart 2008:113–114). Presumably, this was the second version of the elaborate scene, proferred by (or linked to) an ancestor in this symbolic sweat bath of a dynastic god (Houston 1996). The central point is that the owner was not the Kan Bahlam, but someone who lived over 250 years before. Parts of the Cross Group at Palenque may replicate now-lost temples at another location.

Figure 6. “Changing” of a wall slab belonging to an earlier ruler, K’uk’ Bahlam, a Toktahn Ajaw, affiliated with an earlier location of the dynasty, Tablet of the Foliated Cross:I7–I9, Palenque, AD 692 (drawing by David Stuart).

An even clearer instance of authorial deflection is on Yaxchilan Hieroglyphic Stairway 3, Step IV:B7–C4, in its poorly executed, badly aligned final passage (Houston 2019:230–233). The slab helps to form the entrance to the central doorway of Structure 33 at that city. The inscription explains the lapse of standards but also how it got there. A form of tribute, this was the pahk’Vl of a subsidary nobleman, a sajal, offered up (t’abayi) by him and a second, shadowy figure, coming to Yaxchilan, seemingly as tribute. The verb, of an Itzam, the aged god and atlantean par excellence, fits logically with an act of elevation or raising. The slipshod quality hints at provinciality, so different from the other, more accomplished texts on the building. And the block was of no great dignity: it was the first block to be stepped on while entering the chamber, a good place to wipe off the dirt from sandals or bare feet.

There are some pahk’Vl that seem to be royal commisions, as in a large inventory of capstones from Ek’ Balam, Mexico (Lacadena 2004). Most were said to have been “covered” (ma-ka-ja), possibly in reference to their placement over a room or vault, the way. Others are documented in cities like Xcalumkin, Mexico, always on columns or frames around doorways, in a singular region were what was otherwise an inferior title, sajal, appears to have been employed by higher ranks (e.g., Graham and von Euw 1992:158, 163). Other evidence affirms the tie between subordinates or underling rulers and defining features of doorways or entrances. At Tonina, a stucco resplendent with daubed colors, now degraded by fitful maintenance, reveals that a koht, ko-to, possibly “enclosure” or “perimeter wall,” was raised up by nobleman holding the title of AJ-K’UH-na (Figure 7; the /h/ infix was suggested to me by Marc Zender). [Note 2] Despite decades of careful study, the precise meaning of that title remains elusive. The subsequent glyph on the Tonina stucco, for a unit of 20 years (wi-WINIK-HA’B), may not be part of his name; one would ordinarily expect another title right after it, and none occurs. Instead, it could refer to the enclosure, perhaps a place of jubilee in synch with an important cycle of time, including one of nine solar years mentioned in a passage, not illustrated here, just above the koht reference (Stuart 2007).

Figure 7. Door jamb labeled with a kot, in probable allusion to an enclosure beyond the portal June 10, AD 708, Tonina, Mexico (photograph by Stephen Houston).

Similar ties of subordinates to door jambs appear in two locations about 100 km east of Tonina. One is on a long vertical panel of about adult human height (Figure 8). Stolen from the site of Lacanjá Tzeltal or its environs, it is now in the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire in Brussels; its pair is in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (Matsumoto et al. 2023:164–165, fig. 4). The texts may have been shaved from the sides of stelae, for there are many stone carcasses at Lacanjá Tzeltal in which carvings have been sawn off for sale. But they may also have been jambs. The height of ca. 165 cm suits a door frame, and the pairing could place them on either side of an entrance, if as part of a longer text; notably, the inscription appears to begin in media res. Among other features, the text is unusual for its reference to the summons (pe-ka-ja), perhaps for conciliar reasons, of at least eight subordinate lords to the presence (yichnal) of a presiding figure, K’ab Chante’, the Sak Tz’i’ lord, i.e., of Lacanjá Tzeltal (Davletshin and Beliaev 2022; Houston 2014). Perhaps they did more tangible service in that gathering or summons. That they were “called” (pehkaj) to do actual labor, as Albert Davletshin and Dimitri Beliaev propose from comparative evidence in Mesoamerica, is perhaps less plausible for aristocrats than other sorts of contribution (cf. Davletshin and Beliaev 2022:38–39). Speculatively, that input might include the jambs themselves, carved at their command, along with hypothetical ancillary texts and, via subordinates of yet lower status, the labor that went into the building(s) displaying the inscriptions. Later sources from Colonial Yucatan indicate that to “finish the work” (nuppez, acabar la obra) involved the act of “closing the door” and “adjusting two things,” as though of door jambs (Ruz 2014:82). For buildings, these relied on collective labor, supervised by “oficiales” on “andamios y tablados,” expected of subordinates who should expect no pay for that work: “no les pagó cosa ninguna por ella” and “la cual no les ha pagado” (Ruz 2014:83, 84). That verb, nup’ or its cognates, also exists in Chol to describe shutting a door, and the word must have been widely distributed (*ñujp’il, Aulie and Aulie 1998:213).

Figure 8. Possible door jamb from the vicinity of Lacanjá Tzeltal, Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire/Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, #AAM 00066.13 (Matsumoto et al. 2023:fig. 4a).

Another example of non-local lords displayed on door jambs occurs on the door jambs of the mural building at Bonampak (Miller and Brittenham 2013:239–241; Figure 9). Although indifferently preserved, these show richly dressed, plumed figures, all facing outwards. That orientation hints at a state of egress, not ingress, from rooms in the building. It thus varies from the alternating movements implied inside the rooms (Figure 10). In that pattern, the rooms with less bellicose scenes (Rooms 1 and 3) flow in; that of chaotic warfare and its display of bloodied captives (Room 2) flows out, in a nighttime sally to meet enemies and vanquish them. Of the door jambs, however, only one jamb retains a legible text (Room 2, east jamb), and that is not a reference to the current ruler of Bonampak. Instead, it appears to display a lord who was deceased at this time and affiliated with the nearby city of Lacanha. The lintel above the entrance to Room 3 may show him, but the more probable referent is an underling of Bonampak whose main, known monument is now at Dumbarton Oaks (Tokovinine 2012:65–66, fig. 29). The murals are less about a ruler than about a young prince, probably the heir to the dynasty, and not the king featured in some of its imagery (Houston 2018:154–155). More broadly, the murals exemplify a nexus of personalities, duties, obligations, and antagonisms that roiled most kingdoms, and with particular vehemence at the end of the Late Classic period. A ruined record, the door jambs may nonetheless reflect a desired cohesion as pillars of support for the ruler of Bonampak and his heir.

Figure 9. Bonampak door jambs, Mural Building, Bonampak, Mexico, ca. AD 791 (composited by Stephen Houston; reconstruction paintings by Heather Hurst and Leonard Ashby, copyright Bonampak Documentation Project, 2002). 

Figure 10. Alternating patterns of ingress and egress, Mural Building, Bonampak, Mexico, AD 791 (composited by Stephen Houston; reconstruction paintings by Heather Hurst and Leonard Ashby, copyright Bonampak Documentation Project, 2002). 

A final monument, from across the Usumacinta River, is the lintel by Mayuy with its two atlanteans (Figure 11; legal authorities in the United States, where the lintel resided for years, have now returned it, wrongly, to Mexico). They were part of an implicit set of four kings (their titles read 4 Itzam Tuun), raising the lintel itself and, behind it, just visible, the band of the sky on which their overlords sit: to viewer’s left, the king of Yaxchilan; to the right, the king’s magnate, the patron who commissioned the carving (Houston et al. 2021a, 2021b; see also Zender 2019:fig. 4)). Identities blur, for the king is the sun rising up to its full intensity at close to the spring equinox. The magnate is an aspect of the Maize God, and the two identifiable nobles (the one to the left is of higher status as the “first sajal,” ba sa-ja-la), are the Itzam Tuun. A terrestrial and celestial order has blended with a political order; the time of creation and first foliage (see the eruption of vegetation under a seated Itzam of pronounced age) amalgamates with a view of fixed political hierarchy. On the Laxtunich lintel, figuratively and here literally, third-tier nobles appear to fuse with door jambs. Like jambs, they hold up the lintel, which embodies the sky. The maximal lords sit there in relaxed pose, striving not at all.

Figure 11. Laxtunich Lintel 1, AD 773, subordinate lords in a three-part hierarchy lifting a lintel and the sky (photographer unknown).

If atlanteans have any general message it is that the bodies of subordinates can be likened to supports of lintels and roofs. But the specific rationale for them differs greatly. The here-and-now matter. The abundant and surprisingly varied atlanteans at Chichen Itza are at times creator couples, warriors, and even courtiers, their diversity recalling the idiosyncrasies of an individual sort in the Emperor Qin Shihuang’s terracotta army (Figure 12, Hu et al. 2022). They could have been the distillate of roles, godly templates, types of people in the ethnic complexities of Chichen Itza, or of specific people who served the polity. Their clothing and ornament may disclose much about categories of people at the city. In rare cases, a few exhibit a limp penis and testicles, usually a sign of humiliation in Maya imagery. The supple meanings of the form, and the fundamental claim of perpetual, obedient subservience, allow for any and all of these views. (The apparent dearth of atlanteans at Mayapan, also in Yucatan, and often imitative of Chichen Itza, is noteworthy [Proskouriakoff 1962:passim]: did it imply a contrastive system of political order or simply a lapse of the metaphor?) The indications from Bonampak to Laxtunich, Palenque to Tonina, are that the capacious utility of this metaphor served in multiple ways: as defensive perimeters on the edges of or entrances to kingdoms, as potentially unruly figures brought to heel, harnessing their strength to a central purpose, as exactions, as guardians at gates and portals, as invocations of historical figures long gone but recruited to ongoing service. The infusion of divinity into architectural fabrics brings to mind a puzzle about “dwellings,” otoot, in Maya texts and as attached to certain buildings, past and present (Hanks 1990:91, 108, 315; Plank 2004; Stuart 1998:381). Applicable to all manner of homes, for most people, the plain and seldom-observed truth is that most such otoot in Classic texts are those of gods or the deceased or inanimate objects, a receptacle for bloodletters or snuff, the homes of deities and the dead. They are places of spirits, inalienable possession, and ethereal, unquestionable propositions about ownership. Surprisingly few of the named otoot have to do with living people, although naah, “structures,” do fall more solidly into the human domain. To no shock, the register of everyday speech, then and now, deviates from the restrictive and exclusionary register of Classic-era elites.

Figure 12. Atlantean figures at Chichen Itza, ca. 1895 (Cornell University Library Accession Number: 15/5/3090.00639, no copyright restrictions).

The atlantean metaphor also dissolves the perception that buildings were a uniform totality. By an alternative perspective, they consisted of parts with specific meanings, personal links or identities, and innate vitalities, almost a physical, political primer that might also have reflected real offerings of labor and stonework. The striving atlanteans at Laxtunich could, perhaps, have contributed that stone and the building that housed it, subordinates called to the area of Lacanjá Tzeltal did more than palaver, the lord who possessed the kot at Tonina offered that feature for his king. It is unsurprising that European political theory sought philosophical and descriptive inspiration in houses too (Purdy 2011). For others, far from the Maya, the labors of Atlas became a stimulus for imagining utopias of orderly knowledge and rationality, moving on, eventually, to other fancies and obsessions and yearnings (Tolias 2022). An emblem of cosmic fixity found instead a high degree of conceptual plasticity, a real diversity amidst seeming uniformity. This elasticity of meaning was no less evident among the Classic Maya and their successors.

Note 1. A reference to a POLAW/PALAW?-wa chi-ji exists on the tablet of Temple XVII, position F5, at Palenque. A “sea/water-deer” is baffling, but it may be a unique term for the mammalian—and quite edible—Antillean manatee known to occur in the Usumacinta River and its tributaries (Puc-Carrasco et al. 2017; Ramírez Jiménez et al. 2017; photograph below by Jorge Pérez de Lara). 

Note 2. The koht reading is from Yuriy Polyukhovych, who was among the first to see the text after its excavation by Juan Yadeun (Yuriy Polyukhovych, personal communication, 2007; again, for the internal /h/ I credit Marc Zender). There are two other koht. One, at Calakmul, identifies a precinct or elevated and painted platform in the vicinity of its great market (Simon Martin, personal communication, 2010). The other is recorded on Pendant 14b from Comalcalco, Tabasco, where a companion, yi-ta-ji, of A[j] Pakal Tahn is one Chan Xobte’ Chahk, the ko-to-ka-ba-AJAW-wa, koht kab ajaw, the “platform/precinct-earth lord” (see below, position B4, a photo courtesy of Marc Zender). The massive brick or earthen platforms at this swampy, stone-free city suggest that this title refers to Comalcalco, an area of platforms and precincts made of earth. They were either fired into lak, “baked clay,” attested in a syllabic spelling on a brick at the city, or, scraped from muck nearby, heaped into unprocessed, packed, and smoothed masses. 

Acknowledgements

Some of these thoughts came about while preparing for a (zoomed) talk at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, where Alexander Brust and Christian Prager asked me to present at “Tikal and its Wooden Memory: Current Research on Classic Maya Lowland Politics, History and Narratives,” a conference held from October 13 to 15, 2023 (Houston 2023). In June 2026, Frauke Sachse and Adrianne Varitimidis of Dumbarton Oaks helped organize a stay for me at its incomparable library. This essay and other work were the better for it. David Stuart supplied a key reading, pak’, of welcome use here. Over the years, as in this essay, I have drawn from Jorge Peréz de Lara’s peerless photographs of Maya carvings. He is the G.O.A.T. of that documentation, as is Heather Hurst in her renderings of painted imagery. Marc Zender supplied helpful suggestions about vowel complexity and an excellent photograph of the Comalcalco pendant. Thinking about the Classic Maya is sometimes improved by looking away from them: a visit with my wife, Nancy, to Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci “Villa” in May 2026 got me musing about atlanteans.

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