Maya Decipherment

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Stephen Houston (Brown University)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stephen Houston (Brown University)

Carved surfaces tend to endure, if, for the Classic Maya, in eroded, broken or hacked form. But, in the past, stone seldom stood alone. Images of stelae reveal a larger reality. There can be paper, gore, and whole or incomplete human bodies, including a freshly severed head atop a carving (e.g., Stuart 2014, K8351 and K8719 in the Kerr tally of rollout photographs; to be sure, these are both mythic scenes). An extant sculpture, Ixkun Stela 1, has regular holes along its edges, presumably to attach offerings or some wrapped textile (Houston 2016b). Stelae were not just for final display, as set pieces, finished and ready for viewing. They were, evidently, part of an ongoing process that involved acts of carving, erection, concealment, exposure, binding, heaping or draping with blood-flecked paper and human heads, periodic burning or censing, and cleaning—blood or incense had to be wiped away, one imagines, or paper and cloth removed or replaced. Stelae needed to be cared for, activated, used, renovated. Yet ephemera like blood, flesh, paper, cloth, and cord do not last. Time, the elements, and inattention would reduce them to the resistent part, the worked stones that survive.

A few carvings from Palenque and Tonina in Chiapas, Mexico, show another feature: evidence that jewels (earspools, pectorals and collars), long-gone, were once attached to them. Without exception, these are on royal or aristocratic portraits, two fully in the round. At Palenque, insets or inlays have been attested for “breath beads,” the tokens or embodiments of regal souls that occur only with the most important people in multi-figural compositions (Figure 1). The contrast must have been meaningful, for the bead did not adorn depictions of other, lower ranking individuals (González Cruz and Bernal Romero 2012:fig. 7; Stuart 2005:45, 188, in unnumbered plates).

A more obtrusive example comes from the lone, carved stelae at Palenque, Stela 1, some 240 cm in height (Figure 3; Robertson 1991:38, figs. 67–68, 70). Most likely dating to AD 692, an important calendrical anniversary, it has long intrigued scholars because of its anomaly at Palenque and its similarity to fully plastic figures in the stonework of Tonina, a dynastic capital that tusseled with Palenque (e.g., Stuart and Stuart 2008:195). No testing has been done of its vesicular limestone, so the stela may have come from elsewhere. Was it war booty or carved by an artist from Tonina (Houston 2016a; Miller 2000)? The holes in its ear assemblages are large enough to accommodate substantial and removable jewelry. Similar openings, holes or slots for ear ornaments occur on Piedras Negras Stela 36 and a scatter of other portrait sculpture (Stuart and Graham 2003; see also Godfrey 1940:32).

Given the similarity, it is perhaps unsurprising that Tonina has its own carving with what may have been detachable jewelry (Figure 4). This is the decapitated Monument 102, a sandstone sculpture found on the lower steps of a stairway by Structure E5-2, at the central axis of a pyramid near the summit of the city. The excavators observe: “[a]utour du cou et sur la poitrine, un collier dessiné en creux, était destiné à recevoir des incrustations (sans doute de jade) sous forme de perles rondes ou ovales et d’un pendentif en plaque” (Becquelin and Baudez 1982, II:713). Thus: with slots and hollows just deep enough to have held actual jades or beads for a collar. The figure is notable for not clutching a scepter like other such carvings at Tonina (Mons. 3, 5, 12, 14, 20, 26, 56, 142, 146, 150, 168) or frozen in the act of scattering incense (Mons. 9, 13, 29, 45, 47, 85, 87, 101, 158, 162, 163, 166, 169, 176). The clothing is close to informal, at least for an elite man, the hands crossed in repose, somewhat like an attendant courtier (see figure to far right, K558). Ian Graham and Peter Mathews comment on its “pristine” condition (Graham and Mathews 1996:126). This anomaly, of a figure without texts, not surely regal, widely visible yet clothed as though at a courtly and less public event, may relate in some unknown way to the anomaly of a carving with places for detachable jewelry. Ornament employed to exhibit status and wealth, not ritual obligations. There is much that is unanswerable: why was the figure portrayed in this way, as though in courtly service yet fronting an important building? Why did he lack ceremonial regalia and an identifying text yet also appear with potentially detachable ornament? Was the carving soon buried, hence its condition, after the removal of the head?

Acknowledgments   David Stuart reminded me of the evidence from Piedras Negras for inlays or attached jewelry, for which my thanks.

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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.

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