This is the third in an anticipated series of essays on the visual histories and iconographic associations of the Maya day signs, presented in no particular order (previous studies have treated the days Men and Caban).
Figure 1. The standard hand form of the day Manik. (a) UAX: B-XIII murals, (b) NAR: St 43, (c) PAL: 96 Glyphs, (d) COM: Pendant 8A, (e) EKB: Mural of 96 Glyphs, (f) Dresden Codex. Drawings by D. Stuart (a, e, f), A. Tokovinine (b), and M. Zender (d).
In his commentaries on the meanings and forms of the days of the tzolk’in, Eric Thompson (1950:76) expressed a special puzzlement surrounding Manik, the seventh day (Figure 1). In other Mesoamerican writing systems and languages, the corresponding signs and names for the day universally represented a deer (Figure 2). But the Yukatek nameManik, Thompson wrote, shows “no connection with deer; neither does the glyph, which is a hand, shown sideways with thumb and one figure touching or extended with back to the observer.” What Thompson didn’t know at the time is that Maya scribes also occasionally employed a deer’s head to represent Manik, following widespread Mesoamerican practice (Figure 3). As it turns out, the hand and the deer head are interchangeable as Manik, which makes the common use of the hand as the day sign even more vexing. Where does it come from? Here I would like to explore how the Manik hand might have originated early on as an alternate form of “deer,” which came to be used throughout the Maya script, and beyond the context of the day sign.
Figure 2. Deer day signs in non-Maya writing systems. (a) Isthmian script (La Mojarra), (b) Zapotec script, (c) Cacaxtla writing, (d, e) Nahua script (Borgia Codex), (f) Nahua script (Piedra del Sol). Drawings by D. Stuart (a, d, e, f), J. Urcid (b), and C. Helmke (c).Figure 3. Deer head variants of Manik in Maya script. (a) San Bartolo, Xbalanque structure, (b) La Corona, Element 4, (c) Palenque region, stucco glyph, (d) Yaxchilan region, door lintel.
The Yukatek name Manik’ is of obscure origin. Campbell (1988) and Kaufman (2020) reported a probable corresponding form in Ch’olan as Manich’, preserved in baptismal records of Chiapas (day names often were used as personal names, as we see in Nahuatl). Kaufman suggested these may be loans into lowland Mayan from proto-Sapotekan *mmani7, “mammal, large bird,” but I am not sure that this is a secure connection (as Kaufman noted, the attested Sapotekan name for the day is China, “Deer”). In Tzeltlan languages, the day name was Moxik, which is also of unknown origin. I agree with Kaufman’s (2020) suggestion these obscure lowland Mayan names may have had a religious association as the designation of a “deer god,” or as a deified patron of hunting (see Looper 2019:119-152). In highland Mayan languages, the form is consistently keej or a close cognate, corresponding to the generic word for “deer.” This geographical and linguistic pattern is interesting, for the names we see used in the Maya lowlands and Ch’olan-Tzeltalan sources were not the words for “deer” that we see elsewhere. It raises the possibility that the Classic Mayan day name was not “Deer” (Chij or Kej), but a more specific reference.
Figure 3. Late Preclassic Deer variant of Manik day sign from Xbalanque structure, San Bartolo, ca. 300 BCE. Note cartouche border behind the ears and antler. Drawing by D. Stuart.
The deer head was used as the Maya day sign from a very early date. In a recent paper, my colleagues and I discussed the discovery of the earliest known Maya date glyph, a Late Preclassic record of the day 7 Manik from San Bartolo, dating to approximately 300 BCE (Stuart et al. 2022). The form of the day sign is striking and important, for it shows us the head of a deer, much like we know from other Mesoamerican scripts. Its head is turned and faces left, with its neck gracefully bent, perhaps to show the common pose of a deer turned and nibbling at its side. Given its early date, the deer’s head at San Bartolo may represent an early stage in Maya script development before the closed hand emerged as the standard form for the day.
Today we widely recognize the Manik hand sign in non-calendrical settings as the syllable chi, a reading that had been considered off-and-on in the earliest years of Maya epigraphic research. Cyrus Thomas (1892) was the first to do so, noting with great insight that the hand element served as a purely phonetic element, “sometimes to be read chi, as in the symbol for chik’in, ‘west’.” Thompson later rejected this possibility, in keeping with his dismissal of phoneticism in Maya script overall. Ultimately it was Knorosov, six decades later, who resurrected Thomas’s chi value, and applied it to several spellings in the codices. One common variant of the chi syllable in the Classic script is a deer’s head, which can alternate with the hand in several contexts (Figure 4). It is particularly common in the sequence yi-chi in the dedicatory formula of vessels from the El Zotz region. So here we have the same pattern as in the day sign, a free substitution of the two allographs (Note 1).
Figure 4. Alternation of the hand and deer head as the chi syllable (yi-chi) from two vessels from the El Zotz region. (a) Kerr 4357, (b) vessel lid published by Coe (1973:86).
Incidentally, David Kelley (1976) suggested ke as an alternative syllabic reading of the hand, noting that it could stand alone in the codices at times for “deer” (Yukatek keeh), outside the context of the Manik’ day sign. While today ke is not seen as a viable reading for the hand, Kelley was right to note the fluid functionality of the hand sign, and the deer head can be syllabic ke in at least one case I am aware of (Note 2). One case is in the glyphic name of the deer shown coupled with Wuk Sip, the god of hunting, in the Dresden Codex (Figure 5a). This is the same deer we find depicted in some Classic period vases, with the very same name, chan chij winik (4-CHIJ-WINIK) (Looper 2019:138). Zender (2017) has investigated this particular being in the context of a mythic cycle involving the moon goddess, the maize god Juun Ixi’m, and the patron of hunting Wuk Sip. The numeral four on the name suggests a cosmological deer being with aspects in the world quarters. In Classic times the hand could also serve as a logogram for “deer,” as we see in the name caption of a wahy being, an eyeless deer coiled in a snake (Figure 6). These overall patterns demonstrate that the deer head and the Manik hand shared dual functions, both as the logogram CHIJ and as the syllable chi.
Figure 5. A deer god in the Dresden Codex and in Classic period iconography. Note the name glyph with the alternation of the hand and the deer head CHIJ. (a) Dresden Codex, 13c, (b) K8927.Figure 6. The hand as the logogram for “deer,” in the name of a wahy being. Kerr 8733. Drawing by D. Stuart.
On the face of it, the syllabic chi value of the Manik hand seems a straightforward explanation for its use in the day sign, a phonetic allusion to the word chij, “deer.” But there are problems with this, in my view. It raises yet another conundrum, having to account for the near-constant use of a supposed CV syllable as a partial spelling of the word used for the day’s name. No other day sign is ever a syllable cueing a fuller word. Furthermore, all day signs are by nature logograms, so chi as the day seems a strange outlier of a long-standing pattern. What’s more, as we have noted, the day name in the lowlands was perhaps not even Chij, for only Manik’, Manich’ and Moxik are historically attested. In essence, we are still left with Thompson’s old puzzle, as well as the broader question: just how did the hand come to be used for chi, for Manik, and for “deer”? The three functions must be related, but what’s their true connection?
Figure 7. Graphic abbreviations of the Deer day sign at Cacaxtla (a, b) and in the Codex Féjerváry- Mayer (c, d). Drawings (a, b) by C. Helmke.
To begin to answer this, let’s first return to the wider Mesoamerican forms of the “Deer” day glyph. As we know, a deer’s head or body is attested in Maya writing, as well as throughout the rest of Mesoamerica (Figures 2 and 3). Occasionally, we see simplified forms that originated as parts of deer, as pars pro toto replacements. For example, in Nahuatl writing the day Mazatl can be shown as a deer’s hoof or, more commonly, as the antler of a deer (Figure 7c,d). Earlier, at Cacaxtla, we also see an antler used as a simplified way of writing the day “Deer,” in direct alternation with the deer’s head (Helmke and Neilsen 2011:4) (Figure 7a, b). This follows the familiar practice of day signs having simpler and even more familiar forms that originated as parts of these heads, as pars pro toto replacements. We have reviewed some examples of this in our earlier considerations of Men and Caban. Early on in the history of the Maya script, scribes established many of these reduced forms as standard ways to write the days, all of which I believe were first conceived as highly complex iconographic representations of specific deities and supernatural beings (Imix as the Water Serpent, for example, Men as the Principal Bird Deity, and so on).
This practice of visual reduction brings up what I see as an intriguing possibility for explaining the Manik or chi hand. Could this “hand” have originally been a representation of a deer’s antler, just as we see elsewhere, that came to be reanalyzed visually, and misunderstood? If we look at various representations of antlers in Maya art and writing, it seems not too far-fetched to see the odd positioning of the fingers and thumb in Manik as reflecting the visual structure of an antler, at least as the Maya represented it (Figure 8). Some early chi or Manik hands look almost identical, as we see in the spelling of the honorific title K’IN-chi for k’inich, on an altar recently recovered at Tonina (Figure 8e). If this is the case, the antler (later the “hand”) developed out of a standard pars pro toto reduction of the deer’s head, as a variant of what amounts to the same sign.
Figure 8. Antlers in Maya art and Writing. (a-d) Representations of deer antlers in iconography, (3) an antler-like chi in the spelling of chi-K’IN, from Tonina, (f-i) the sign XUKUB for “antler” and its possible head variant (i). Note the general resemblance to the shape of the Manik or chi hand. Drawings by D. Stuart.
One attractive aspect of this proposal is that it would explain cases where the hand serves as a logogram for “deer,” whether in the context of the day sign or elsewhere. It also agrees with the use of the deer’s head as a syllable for chi. That is, both signs work the same way because they are, in origin, the same thing. The syllable derived from the logographic form, I suggest, just as we see in many other signs. The sign for fish (KAY) gave rise to the syllable ka, which could also be written in reduced form as the tail fins (or a dorsal fin) of a fish (that is, Landa’s “ka comb” was originally a fin, but scribes had no sense of its origin even in the Classic period).
As an aside, it is interesting that deer antlers have been noted for their visual resemblance to human hands. The antler of a mature male white-tailed deer (the most common species in the Maya world) often has five points or “tines,” resembling a hand. Antlers can also be “palmated” or flattened in their centers, a term derived from the resemblance to the palm of a hand. Humans, in imitating deer in play or ritual, often place two hands with contorted fingers against the forehead to mimic the form of antlers (Note 3). Stephen Houston has suggested (personal communication, 2023) that a similar hand gesture may have been used as a signal among Maya deer hunters.
A resemblance also exists between the general shape of the chi hand and the logogram for “antler,” read as XUKUB, “antler, horn” (Lopes and Davletshin 2004) (Figure 8, f-i). The head variant of XUKUB seems the image of the hunting deity Wuk Sip (i) (see Grunbe 2012). One wonders if the hand developed as an intentional visual divergence, helping scribes to distinguish the graphic reduction of CHIJ from XUKUB. In any event, by the Classic period, CHIJ “deer” had its deer head and “hand” form, and XUKUB kept its representational appearance.
Conclusion
Here I suggest that the single Maya logogram for “deer” — certainly an old sign in the script — once had two related forms or allographs: a standard deer head, and a common abbreviation in the form of a deer antler. Both were used for the seventh day of the tzolk’in, Manik. However, over time, and before the Classic period, calligraphic practice led to the antler being perceived (misinterpreted) as a human hand with its distinct shape. Their functions never changed despite their graphic separation. The deer head was the logogram CHIJ and the syllable chi, as was its shorthand form (pun intended).Still, it must be said that there is no known archaic form of the day Manik that displays an antler; what I describe here is only a speculative extrapolation, an exercise in “visual etymology” working backward from later forms.
Notes
Note 1. The other common head variant of chi, not discussed here, represents an animate agave plant, based on CHIH, “agave, agave drink.” It too freely substitutes for the hand and deer in yi-chi and other contexts.
Note 2. In one ceramic text I know, a deer head (not the hand) is syllabic ke in the spelling of ke(le)-ma, keleem, “youth.” This spelling can only be be specific to Yukatek, and a local innovation of a syllabic sign.
Note 3. The following is the description of the sign for “deer” in American Sign Language (ASL): “To sign “Deer” in American Sign Language (ASL), extend and spread out your fingers on both hands, resembling a pair of antlers. Move your hands by the sides of your head, ensuring that each thumb touches each side of your head. Each hand should form one antler.”
References Cited
Campbell, Lyle. 1988. The Linguistics of Southeast Chiapas, Mexico. New World Archaeological Foundation, Brigham Young University, Provo.
Coe, Michae D. 1973. The Maya Scribe and His World. Grolier Club, New York.
Grube, Nikolai. 2012. A Logogoram for SIP, “Lord of the Dear.” Mexicon XXXIV:138-141.
Looper, Matthew. 2019. The Beast Between: Deer in Maya Art and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lopes, Luis, and Albert Devletshin. 2004. The Glyph for Antler in the Mayan Script. Wayeb Notes 11.
Stuart, David, Heather Hurst, Boris Beltran and William Satunro. 2022. An Early Maya Calendar Record from San Bartolo, Guatemala. Science Advances, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abl9290
Thompson, J. Eric. S. 1950. Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, D.C.
Zender, Marc. 2017. The Maize God & the Deer Lord’s Wife. Paper presented at the 22nd Annual European Maya Conference, Malmö University, Sweden, on December 16th, 2017.
This is the second in a series of occasional essays on the visual histories and iconographic associations of the Maya day signs. It follows up on previous studies that have explored some aspects of these wider connections (Mex Alboronoz 2021, Stone and Zender 2011, Thompson 1950). My emphasis here is on what might be called the iconographic “roots” of various days, exploring how their forms underwent significant transformations over the centuries, obscuring aspects of their visual origins and iconographic identifications. Each case study will work to help establish the wider point (more a working hypothesis) that all of the Maya day signs originated in the Preclassic era as representations of deities or mythic animals, and that through constant copying and repetition, these were reduced and abstracted, often losing their original forms in the process. A few of these evolutions and “devolutions” are known to epigraphers (i.e., that the Ahau “face” was never a face to begin with). Still, they are more common than many realize, and laying out the developmental histories helps us to understand the broader history of the 260-day calendar in Mesoamerica.
Figure 1. Variants of the day sign Caban (Kaban) in chronological order (standard and animated versions). (a) UAX: Str. B-XIII murals, (b) TIK: St.31, (c) NAR: Alt 1, (d) PAL: T.XVII tablet, (e) XUN: Pan. 3, (f) PAL: T. XIX platform, (g) EKB, Mural 96 glyphs, (h) Dresden Codex, (i) RAZ, Tomb 12, east wall, (j) QRG: St. D, (k) COP: Corte Altar. Drawings by D. Stuart.
As with many of the Maya day signs, the visual origin of Caban, the seventeenth day of the sequence, has long been unclear (Figure 1a-h). Its form is identical to the common logogram KAB, “earth, ground,” and its name of course reflects a basic connection to that word (see Stone and Zender 2011:136-137). The visual histories of the day sign for Caban and of the KAB logogram show the same developmental trajectory, so we will them here as basically a single sign operating in different contexts. The sign normally shows a so-called “caban curl” element in the upper left and a semicircular form at the lower right. An internal border that runs along the top and down the left side is standard, although this is omitted in some cases. What does the sign represent? Agreeing with an interpretation first proposed by Eduard Seler, Thompson (1950:86) was adamant that it was “a lock of hair worn by Goddess I of the Maya codices.” While there is some resemblance to the hairlock we see on the late moon goddess, this supposed connection quickly dissolves once we realize that it is only in Postclassic representations of the goddess that we see any resemblance. Thompson only considered very late examples when making his comparisons. We need to look elsewhere for an explanation.
Figure 2. Maudslay’s 1889 presentation of the full figure 8 Caban from Quirigua, Stela D. Note the iconographic association made between the face and the standard Caban day. Drawing by Annie Hunter.
One important clue comes from an elaborate animated form of Caban on Stela D of Quirigua (Figure 1j). It shows a bejeweled man with bound hair and a distinctive curl behind the eye, similar to the inner detail we see in Caban. Perhaps with Goodman’s input, Maudslay (1889) made this connection early on in the published illustration of Stela D, showing a slightly reconstructed face of the day sign beside a standard Caban (Figure 2b). Other animated Caban day signs are rare. The only other examples known to me are a 4 Caban Year bearer day painted in Tomb * from Rio Azul (Figure 1i), and a damaged 7 Caban that appears on Dos Pilas, Hieroglyphic Stairway 2. A full-figure Caban appears on the so-called ”Corte Altar” from Copan (Figure 1k), again showing a young male with curl markings on his body. These examples provide a good overview of examples of what is essentially the same character, with distinctive iconographic attributes. So, while rare, this animated Caban must have existed in the background of Classic Maya scribal culture, within a standardized repertoire of imagery that was only occasionally called upon.
Figure 3. The head variant of KAB. (a) TIK: Marcador, (b) YAX: L. 22, (c) PAL: T.I.m., (d) CRN: E. 56, (e) ANL: Pan. 1, (f) four examples of U-KAB-ji-ya from NAR: St. 46. Drawings a-e by D. Stuart, f by A. Tokovinine.
We see many examples of this same head as the standard animation of the KAB logogram, used with far more regularity in the script (Figure 3a-e). Previously I have taken this head to be a somewhat informal elaboration on the basic KAB, where the scribe has chosen to make use of a generic-looking head as a way to lend it some animate quality. However, there is good reason to see this head for KAB and Caban day sign as more than simple personifications. This is perhaps indicated by its sheer frequency and its consistency of form in both early Classic and Late Classic examples. The curl appears behind the eye, or in some early examples, around it, like a descending vertical stripe. On Naranjo Stela 46, the head variant appears five (possibly six) times in spellings of U-KAB-ji-ya (u kab-[i]j-iiy) suggesting that the scribe saw it as a standard sign type (Figure 3f).
Figure 4. The animate number 11. (a) YAX: L. 47, (b) PNG: Pan. 2, (c) COP: Temple 26 inscription, (d) PAL: T. XVI stucco. Drawings by I. Graham (a), D. Stuart (b, c), and M. van Stone (d).Figure 5. Patrons of the Month Tzec, including head forms of the KAB sign. (a) PNG: Pan. 12, (b) COL: Bonampak area, “Po Panel,” (c) PAL: TC. Drawings by D. Stuart (a), A. Safranov,(b), and Linda Schele (c).
Tellingly, this animated KAB appears in two other settings where it stands alone as a singular representation of a Maya deity. First, we see it as the deity that serves as the number 11 (Figure 4). One example (c) from Palenque’s Temple XVII takes a “celt” element as a prefix, a feature we see on several deity names in both the Classic and Postclassic, and replicating a deified term for the earth that we find on Copan, Stela A. The patron of the moth Tzec is the same thing (Figure 5a, b). Its earliest forms show it to be the deity we have already discussed, and the example from Piedras Negras Panel 12 is particularly complex. Here we see the marking “dripping” over the eye and more of a thickened, dark band with a zigzag. As with the day sign, the simpler KAB works also the month patron (Figure 5c). In this context, the deity head and the standard KAB are once again equivalent signs.
We can easily connect these portrait heads, in turn, to a god who is depicted in the postclassic codices (Figure 6). This is “God R,” so designated from the revisions made to Schellhas’s original list (Taube 1992:112). His portrait name glyph is preceded by the number 11, so there is little doubt it is the same as the deity shown in Figure 4. Note that the he has precisely the same Caban curls over or behind the eye, identical to the animate KAB sign.
Figure 6. “God R” in the Dresden Codex (pages 5b and 6a).
Animate Origins
Did the deity glyphs in Figure 3-5 arise out of the simpler KAB sign, as a personification, or was the reverse true: did the familiar KAB develop as an abstraction from the head? It is a chicken-and-egg conundrum, perhaps, but I do believe there is enough evidence to support the second of these options, that the profile of the deity is the original. As other case studies show, Maya day signs mostly originated as visually complex portraits of deities or animals, which were simplified out of scribal preference. The parallel contexts we have touched on here (day sign, logogram, Tzec patron, and the number 11) all would seem to indicate that their “root image” was the personified form, the deity. I posit that through the familiar process of graphic reduction, and via repeated calligraphic practice, the deity’s profile head was abstracted and reduced to its essentials and diagnostics – his painted eye. His nose, mouth, and eye were “lost” early on, producing a short-hand version, such that all that was left was the distinctive dark patch and curl, along with the border that had originally run along the top of the head. Beginning deep in time, the day sign we recognize as Caban was born out of a long process of visual transformation, ultimately taking on a life of its own. Still, some scribes and iconographers retained this mythological identity to the day, particularly within the restricted contexts of the Tzec month patron and in the animated number. I wonder if small vestiges of the profile face can be seen from time to time even in some later, standard Caban signs, as we see in Figure 1e, where just the lower lip of the face was preserved as a small, vestigial detail.
Figure 7. Fully animate Caban day signs (6 Caban and 4 Caban) from Copan, Altar T. Drawings by D. Stuart.
An allusion to this deeper historical connection comes through two playful and wonderfully odd examples of the day Caban used by later Maya scribes (Figure 7). Altar T of Copan displays two remarkably inventive day signs of Caban as full-figure glyphs, each holding a month glyph. The bejeweled figures have Caban glyphs as heads with a hint of a mouth, and numbers of their coefficients appear above, attached to the heads. On the left is the earlier of the two embodied dates, 6 Caban 10 Mol (9.16.12.5.17, the accession of Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaa) and on the right is the later anniversary, 4 Caban 10 Zip (9.17.12.5.17). Each head has an obsidian blade atop its head, which we also see on the animated number 11 and on the Caban sign from Quirigua. Here the nature of these odd figures as animate Cabans is not solely based upon their glyphic heads, but on their specific iconographic identities, as deities. The designer of Altar T artfully took the abstracted Caban signs, and almost with a knowing wink placed them where the faces of the day gods should be. Lucky for us, the artist revealed some esoteric knowledge of deep script history.
Figure 8. Repeating scenes of wading warriors with the Maize God. Note the dark Caban markings about the eyes, alternating with stripes. (a) K4117, (b) K1224, (c) K2011, (d) detail of K1365. Photographs by J. Kerr, drawing by D. Stuart.
Interestingly, God R of the codices has been described as a deity of war and sacrifice (Taube 1992:112-115). We can link this “Caban deity“ to several representations of obsidian-wielding warriors on codex-style vessels (Figure 8). These are single or multiple individuals who appear with the Maize God, Juun Ixi’m, in scenes that depict his entering the primordial waters. The facial Caban curls are clear in many of these depictions, and their obsidian weapons perhaps relate to the obsidian imagery we see in the glyphs. In two examples we also see ears or ear ornaments in the form of spondylus shells. Sometimes the distinctive Caban curls appear “floating” in front of the faces, as Taube (1992:112-115) has noted, in an apparent overlap with some representations of the Hero Twins (K1202 shows an image of Juun Ajaw with an identical curl before his face). On these warrior figures the Caban curls alternate freely with other painted eye marks in the form of doubled vertical stripes, or a stripe with an “IL” shape. It seems that the eye markings on all of these “Caban deities” could take a few different forms without affecting their identification. In general, they strongly resemble the darkened patch over the eye that we see in early examples of the KAB or Caban head described above (Figure 5a, for example). It would seem that the curl of the standard Caban hieroglyph was the lone vestige of the face, originating as the markings about the eyes, a distinctive characteristic of this particular god, or group of gods.
1 Caban at San Bartolo?
Figure 9. Day record (1 Caban?) from the east wall of Structure sub-1A chamber, San Bartolo, Guatemala. Drawing by D. Stuart.
The Late Preclassic murals of Structure sub1-A of San Bartolo include a painted day sign that once was on its east wall (Figure 9). Here we see a profile face with a spondylus shell ear, and striped “IL” markings over the eye. One of the two stripes bends backward, identical to the facial markings we see on some of the warriors just described in the mythological scenes of the Maize God’s watery entrance (FIgure 10). The shared spondylus shell ear is a feature that makes this connection especially compelling, suggesting these are the same character — the same warrior with dark face paint over the eye.
Figure 10. Mythic warriors from K1366 and K2011, compared to the San Bartolo day sign. Details of rollout photographs by J. Kerr.
We therefore can entertain the possibility that the day sign at San Bartolo is not 1 Ahau, as I had previously believed, but rather 1 Caban. This day held importance in Maya calendar and forms the base date of one of the intervals written in the 4-column array from Structure 10K-2 (Macleod and Kinsman 2012). There, as the opening column, it is the header for the interval that established the base for the 819-day count cycle, a key component of Maya computational astronomy and four-quadrant cosmology (Linden and Bricker 2023). The 1 Caban from Structure sub1-A at San Bartolo has no surrounding elements that allow us to confirm such associations, but its juxtaposition with 3 Ik on the opposite wall was related to a four-part cosmological arrangement of the mural chamber (Stuart 2017, Stuart and Hurst 2018). In a future post, I will also explore how the day 1 Caban served an important role in the Year Bearer count as well.
Some Iconographic Implications
The simplified KAB sign appears in Classic Maya iconography as markings for ground lines and ground space (Stuart and Houston 1994:57-59). If we are to accept the idea that the image of KAB originated with the profile face, then these are best seen as non-textual extensions of the later abstraced glyph. I know of no examples of the KAB sign or its iconographic relatives in Preclassic Maya art, which is probably significant given the suggestions I’ve made here (it may not have existed as yet). The Classic period overlaps between sign and icon helps to accentuate the point that Maya iconography and writing, at least in its later stages, were inseparable visual and linguistic systems.
The basic meaning of kab as “earth, ground,” naturally suggests that the “God R” and the related warrior deities hold some identity with the earth itself. It is worth noting that there is no well-defined “earth god” in Maya mythology, so perhaps this Caban character (or characters) might qualify for such a role. Their imagery as warriors in the primordial waters of mythology may be related to this.
Finally, we should keep in mind the curious links that this Caban deity shows with Juun Ajaw and his other headband twin companion. This needs further exploration, for it may in the end offer some support for the initial identification I made of the San Bartolo day glyph as 1 Ahau. Nevertheless, for now, I see a stronger visual connection to the warrior deities discussed, pointing to its proper identification as 1 Caban. There is more to ponder, clearly.
Conclusions
The visual origin of the Caban day sign is now clearer, deriving from the profile portrait of a deity with distinctive facial markings (Figure 11). Its common, familiar form throughout the Classic period was a graphic shorthand of this portrait. The example from Rio Azul, dating to about 400 CE, hearkens back to the original and shows us the closest known Classic example to that underlying form, an example of which we may see as San Bartolo.
Figure 11. Hypothetical development of the Caban day sign from 100 BCE to ca. 682 CE. The first stage remains tentative. Drawings by D. Stuart.
This visual history takes us to a larger issue that was touched on briefly in my discussion of the day Men, and which bears repeating here. Underlying my interpretations of Caban and Men is the strong sense that most Maya day signs originated in the Preclassic as animated forms, as the heads of deities or animals. The very early use of the deer’s head for Manik at San Bartolo, at 300 BCE, is one example of this chronological tendency (we will explain the likely visual origin of the “Manik hand,” also the syllable chi, in a future post). To cite a couple of other examples, the common day sign for Chuen was first a portrait of the scribal monkey deity, and its eye came to be used as its standard shorthand representation. The day Ix similarly originated as the eye of a spotted feline. These original forms were still known to the artisans of Maya courts, but tended not to be used in regular scribal practice. What were once complex representations of deities and animals were simplified through expediency and convention, so that they began to take on abstract shapes and forms. I suspect this process began very early in the history of the script, long before the Classic period.
ADDENDUM (September 6, 2024):
I have remembered an important Late Classic example of the Caban day head variant, on a ceramic sherd on display in the Tonina site museum, illustrated below. This sign is the same as the KAB head variant we see in Figure 3, and a late version of the Rio Azul variant (Figure 1i and 11, middle).
Sources Cited
Linden, John, and Victoria R. Bricker. 2023. The Maya 819 day count and Planetary Astronomy. Ancient Mesoamerica 34(3):690-700. doi:10.1017/S0956536122000323
Maudslay, Alfred P. 1889-1902. Biologia Centrali-Americana: Archaeology. Volume 2. R.H. Porter, London.
Mex Alboronoz, William Humberto. 2021. Tiempo y Destino entre los gobernantes mayas de Palenque: una perspective desde la cuenta de 260 días. Palabra de Clio, Mexico D.F.
Stone, Andrea, and Marc Zender. 2011. Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. Thames and Hudson, London.
Stuart, David, and Stephen Houston. 1994. Classic Maya Place Names. Studies on Precolumbian Art and Archaeology, no. 33. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
Stuart, David, and Heather Hurst. 2020. Creation in Four Acts: The Narrative Structure of the San Bartolo Murals. Paper presented at the 2020 Mesoamerica Meetings, UT Austin.
Stuart, David, Heather Hurst, Boris Beltran and William Satunro. 2022. An Early Maya Calendar Record from San Bartolo, Guatemala. Science Advances, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abl9290
Taube, Karl A. 1992. The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan. Studies on Precolumbian Art and Archaeology, no. 32. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.
Thompson, J. Eric S. 1950. Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC.
“[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%).
Figure 1. Google Ngram views of Gordon R. Willey (1913–2002), Michael D. Coe (1929–2019), Linda Schele (1942–1998), and Stephen Houston (1958–present) (data accessed Aug. 11, 2024).
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.
Figure 2. The author in a Google Scholar citational index over time (accessed Aug. 11, 2024).
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.
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.
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
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.
Figure 1. Stages or courses of a wealthy merchant’s feast (photographs from the Digital Florentine Codex, Getty Research Institute).
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.)
Figure 2. Possible glyph for “eater/feaster.” Unprovenanced lintel from the kingdom of Yaxchilan, reign of Bird Jaguar IV, Feb. 1, 753; sculpted by Chakjalte’ (photograph by Stephen Houston).
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.
Figure 3. Apparent year bearer ceremony with vulture (uus, right) and macaw dancers (mo’, left), accompanied by rattles in each hand. Unprovenanced lintel from the kingdom of Yaxchilan, reign of Bird Jaguar IV, Feb. 1, 753; sculpted by Chakjalte’ (photograph by James Doyle).
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).
Figure 4. Braziers for possible cooking and warming of food: (upper left) Cayo Unslipped three-prong composite, based on partial examples from the Belize River valley, Belize (Ball and Taschek 2007:fig.1); (upper right) Cayo Unslipped brazier, Buenavista del Cayo palace (Ball and Taschek 2007:fig. 4); and (lower center) floor find, epicentral Caracol, Belize (Chase and Chase 2004:fig. 16.7w).
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.
Figure 5. Early Classic basal-flanged bowl with lid, Vessel 19, Burial 9, El Diablo, El Zotz, Guatemala, ca. AD 400 (photograph by Jorge Pérez de Lara).
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).
Figure 6. Offerings of tamale bowls and chocolate(?) drinks to late version of God D, ca. AD 800 (photograph by Justin Kerr, K3413).
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).
Figure 7. Dwellings of “heat” or “warmth”(?), from top to bottom (Houston 1998:fig. 13, Dumbarton Oaks Hellmuth Archive, dr. 13-LC-p2-162; Dumbarton Oaks Hellmuth Archive, PC.M.LC.p2.213.4; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.2010.115.5, K7185, photograph by Justin Kerr; Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, 1982.12.33, photograph by Yuriy Polyukhovych [Looper and Polyukhovych 2015:17]).
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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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).
Figure 1. Left, face of Pakal, detail, Palenque Temple XXI throne, Julian July 23, AD 726 (photograph by Jorge Pérez de Lara[?]); right, detail of K’inich Ahkal Mo’ Nahb, stone panel, Temple XIX pier, Julian February 4, AD 734 (photograph by Jorge Pérez de Lara).
While cataloguing the holdings of the “bodega” or storeroom of stuccos and various stones at Palenque, Peter Mathews and Linda Schele noted an unusual trait in one carving from the northwest court of the Palace: “[t]wo pairs of very carefully drilled holes about .05 cm. deep are located on and behind the earplug…We do not know the use for these holes, but several people have suggested that they were used for inlays of other materials” (Schele and Mathews 1979:#82, Bod. #186). A more recent photograph demonstrates that there were four such tandem holes, clearly intended for hanging ornament (Figure 2; Parpal Cabanes and Raimúndez Ares 2024:fig. 7). Paired holes to either side of a crack are documented on ceramics and alabaster bowls; a small cord was probably passed through and cinched to prevent a break from spreading (e.g., Inomata and Eberl 2014:figs. 6.30–6.32; K6312, K6436). Infrequent repairs such as these must have reflected some special value, perhaps of an emotional sort. Few of these vessels have special aesthetic distinction or dynastic content, nor, in the case of ceramics, are they shaped from challenging, labor-intensive materials like alabaster. The panel fragment from Palenque is about something else. The holes are in places where chest, back, neck, and ear jewelry might have been attached, to dangle over the surface. The figure is probably a woman, a queen or illustrious mother—the absence of a text prevents any certain identification, unfortunately—and the finery hints at a respectful, almost affectionate gesture by the patron and his carver. Attachability also implies the chance of detachment, a switching out with other ornament. As with a human body, the carving could be dressed anew.
Figure 2. Panel fragment, Northwest Court, Palenque, 30 cm x 31 cm (photograph by Benito Velázquez Tello, Coordinación Nacional de Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural-Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico, Parpal Cabanes and Raimúndez Ares 2024:fig. 7).
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).
Figure 3. Palenque Stela 1, front slope, Temple of the Cross, 9.13.0.0.0 8 Ajaw 8 Wo, Julian March 16, AD 692, Museo de Sitio de Palenque “Alberto Ruz Lhuillier”; note perforations through ear assemblages (height of figure in grey, 170 cm.; photographs by Stephen Houston).
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?
Figure 4. Tonina Monument 102, first steps of stairway, southern façade, Str. E5-2, height of person (“hauteur du personnage”) 89 cm (Becquelin and Baudez 1982, II:712, III:fig. 98).
A final note: Palenque itself is unique in describing the process of giving or attaching objects to sacred effigies (Figure 5; see Houston et al. 2001:43–45; Stuart 2005:166–167, fig. 132; Zender 2004:199–200, fig. 8.1). These are described as ‘ikaatz, jewels, treasures or tributary items of both celestial (kaanal) and terrestrial (kabal) nature (Stuart 2006). They consisted of collar ornaments or pectorals (uuh) and earspools (tuup), and, to judge from the absolutive suffixes here, are merely present, not securely possessed or owned. It is conceivable that such rites might also apply to select depictions of kings and queens, in carvings accorded special status as repositories of precious ornament. The fact that two of these carvings, the Palenque stela and Tonina Monument 102, are both fully in the round and close to actual human dimensions suggests a play of scale in which carvings could transpose with humans, humans with their depiction: jeweled, dressable, in flux, a class of images that live.
Figure 5. Temple of the Inscriptions, Center Tablet:B6–A9 (Robertson 1983:fig. 96)
Acknowledgments David Stuart reminded me of the evidence from Piedras Negras for inlays or attached jewelry, for which my thanks.
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