Maya Decipherment

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

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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.

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