Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture 9781477323274

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VITAL VOIDS

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VITAL VOIDS Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture ANDREW FINEGOLD

University of Texas Press

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Austin

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Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of CAA.

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2021 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Finegold, Andrew, 1976– author. Title: Vital voids : cavities and holes in Mesoamerican material culture / Andrew Finegold. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032975 ISBN 978-1-4773-2243-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2327-4 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2328-1 (non-library ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mayas—Material culture. | Mayas—Antiquities. | Signs and symbols—Central America. | Signs and symbols—Mexico. | Holes in art. | Symbolic anthropology. Classification: LCC F1435.3.M32 F56 2021 | DDC 972.8/01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032975 doi:10.7560/322437

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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CHAP TER 1

What’s in a Hole? Material Culture and Interpretation 1 CHAP TER 2

Perforated Vessels: Revitalizing the Discourse Surrounding “Kill Holes” 17 CHAP TER 3

Cavities in the Living Earth 37 CHAP TER 4

The Act of Drilling 71 CHAP TER 5

Perforating the Body 89 CHAP TER 6

Conclusions: Beyond the Resurrection Plate 117 Notes 127 Bibliography 139 Index 157

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Illustrations Fig. 1.1.

“Site of an Ancient Temple of the Aztecs—Naranja [sic],” photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, 1875 7 Fig. 1.2. “Guatemala, Remains of an Ancient Temple at Naranja [sic],” photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, 1875 9 Fig. 1.3. “Ancient Sacrificial Stone, Naranja [sic], Guatemala,” photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, 1875 9 Fig. 1.4. The Resurrection Plate 13 Fig. 2.1. Line drawing of the Resurrection Plate 18 Fig. 2.2. The Resurrection Plate viewed obliquely 20 Fig. 2.3. Photograph of the back of the Resurrection Plate 20 Fig. 2.4. Perforated olla recovered from the Sacred Cenote, Chichen Itza 21 Fig. 2.5. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya vessel with “repair holes” 22 Fig. 2.6. Drawing of Izapa Stela 25 24 Fig. 2.7. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya vessel depicting a crocodilian world tree growing from a ceramic plate 24 Fig. 2.8. Perforated plain plate from Naachtun 31 Fig. 2.9. Diagram showing the relationship of metaphor and metonymy to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language 32 Fig. 2.10. Photograph and drawing of an incised bone from Tikal Burial 116 33

Fig. 2.11. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya vessels showing the animacy of books and writing 35 Fig. 3.1. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya vessels showing the Maize God emerging from a turtle carapace 38 Fig. 3.2. Late Classic Maya plates showing the Maize God emerging from a flowering skull 39 Fig. 3.3. Late Classic Maya plates with imagery representing the place of the Maize God’s rebirth 40 Fig. 3.4. Late Classic Maya vessels depicting fireflies 41 Fig. 3.5. Late Classic Maya plate depicting the Maize God in a fish 42 Fig. 3.6. Late Classic Maya plate depicting the dressing of the Maize God 42 Fig. 3.7. Late Classic Maya plate depicting a dancing Maize God or impersonator 42 Fig. 3.8. Late Classic Maya plates depicting the disembodied head of the Maize God 43 Fig. 3.9. Good and bad farmers, from the Florentine Codex (book X, chapter 12) 45 Fig. 3.10. Auguries for the tilling of the soil and sowing of crops, from page 12 of the Codex Vaticanus B 45 Fig. 3.11. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya vessel depicting the Maize God emerging from a turtle shell 46 vii

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Fig. 3.12. Late Classic Maya plate depicting the Maize God or an impersonator, from burial chamber in Uaxactun Structure A-1 46 Fig. 3.13. Late Classic Maya codex-style dish (the Cosmic Plate) depicting a mythological scene of creation 47 Fig. 3.14. Rollout drawing of a Late Classic Maya vessel depicting a scene of the Maize God’s emergence from a turtle shell 49 Fig. 3.15. Late Classic Maya codex-style bowl depicting K’awiil 49 Fig. 3.16. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya bowl depicting a mythological scene 49 Fig. 3.17. Illustration of the portion of the mural depicting the Maize God inside a quatrefoil turtle, from the west wall of San Bartolo Room 1 50 Fig. 3.18. Examples of incised Olmec and Early Classic Maya greenstone celts 51 Fig. 3.19. Copan Stela H 52 Fig. 3.20. Chalcatzingo Monument 1 53 Fig. 3.21. Illustration of the mural from the north wall of San Bartolo Room 1 54–55 Fig. 3.22. Depiction of Chicomoztoc from f. 16r of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca 56 Fig. 3.23. Depiction of the emergence of Lord Five Flower and Lady Three Flint from the “Seven Caves” place, page 14 of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall 56 Fig. 3.24. Architectural decoration from Teotihuacan 57 Fig. 3.25. The façade of Chicanna Structure 2, with its doorway in the form of a monstrous maw 60 Fig. 3.26. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya vessels showing maize being freed from buildings split by the Storm God 61 Fig. 3.27. Drawings of Late Classic Maya painted capstones from Dzibilnocac 62 Fig. 3.28. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya vessel incised with a scene of the Maize God’s emergence from a ball court 63

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Fig. 3.29. Late Classic Maya ik’-shaped window at Palenque 65 Fig. 3.30. Drawing of La Venta Monument 6 66 Fig. 3.31. Drawing of the lid of the sarcophagus of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal of Palenque 67 Fig. 3.32. Early Classic Maya tripod vessel known as the Dazzler Vase 67 Fig. 3.33. The placing of the flayed skins of sacrificial victims into a hole at the Temple of Yopitli, from the Florentine Codex (book II, chapter 22) 69 Fig. 4.1. Fire drilling, from page 38 of the Madrid Codex 72 Fig. 4.2. Drawing of Izapa Stela 67 73 Fig. 4.3. Aztec sweatbath, from f. 77r of the Codex Magliabechiano 75 Fig. 4.4. Drawing of the Aztec atl-tlachinolli sign 76 Fig. 4.5. Yaxchilan Lintel 15 77 Fig. 4.6. Spiked incense burners as the world tree 79 Fig. 4.7. Teotihuacan-style incense burner, likely from the vicinity of Tiquisate, Guatemala 80 Fig. 4.8. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya vessels depicting the Maize God’s birth from ajaw signs 81 Fig. 4.9. Stone altar from Mayapan and k’atun wheel from Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán 82 Fig. 4.10. Late Classic Maya plate with the Maize God surrounded by the twenty day signs 83 Fig. 4.11. Aztec New Fire ceremony from page 34 of the Codex Borbonicus 84 Fig. 4.12. Depictions of the celestial turtle carrying the three hearthstones of creation on its back 86–87 Fig. 5.1. Zapotec urn depicting a figure passing a cord through his maize-cob phallus 90 Fig. 5.2. Late Classic Maya plates with perforations that align with the groins of Maize God figures and a nobleman 91 Fig. 5.3. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya vessel depicting a group bloodletting dance 92

Illustrations

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Fig. 5.4. Fig. 5.5.

Fig. 5.6.

Fig. 5.7. Fig. 5.8. Fig. 5.9. Fig. 5.10. Fig. 5.11.

Fig. 5.12. Fig. 5.13. Fig. 5.14. Fig. 5.15.

Fig. 5.16.

Fig. 5.17. Fig. 5.18. Fig. 5.19.

Illustration of the mural in Room 3 of Bonampak Structure 1 92–93 Drawing of the relief from the center-south panel of the South Ball Court at El Tajín 94 Illustration of a scene of auto-sacrificial bloodletting from the west wall of San Bartolo Structure 1 94 Page 19 of the Madrid Codex 95 Ixtlán del Río–style sculpture depicting a group bloodletting ritual 95 Frontispiece of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer 96 Detail from page 53 of the Codex Borgia 96 Illustrations of auto-sacrificial bloodletting from the Florentine Codex (appendix of book II and book III, chapter 3) 97 Yaxchilan Lintel 24 98 The Hauberg Stela 99 Drawings of Aztec reliefs depicting auto-sacrificial bloodletting 100 First bloodletting ceremony during the festival of Izcalli, from the Florentine Codex (book II, chapter 37) 102 Locating precious stones at sunrise, from the Florentine Codex (book XI, chapter 8) 105 Birth almanacs that include infants being perforated 107 The Blom Plate 108 Depiction of a ritual nose-piercing ceremony, from f. 21r of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca 109

Fig. 5.20. Illustrations from Mixtec codices showing the nose-piercing of Eight Deer 110 Fig. 5.21. Illustration of Charlemagne being crowned as Holy Roman Emperor, from f. 141v of Les grandes chroniques du France 111 Fig. 5.22. Aztec figural sculptures from Coaxcatlan with inlaid shell, obsidian, and turquoise elements and chest cavities 112 Fig. 5.23. Front and back views of a Huastec sculpture 113 Fig. 5.24. The Stuttgart Figurine 114 Fig. 5.25. Late Classic Maya codex-style dish with image of a supernatural sculptor holding a carved head 115 Fig. 5.26. Teotihuacan-style hollow ceramic figurine from the Tiquisate region of Guatemala 116 Fig. 6.1. Late Classic Maya plate perforated through the eye of a supernatural head 118 Fig. 6.2. Late Classic Maya plate perforated through the eye of an anthropomorphic figure emerging from the maw of a supernatural serpent 119 Fig. 6.3. Perforated Late Classic Maya plates with ik’ signs and floral motifs exuding scent scrolls 122 Fig. 6.4. Late Classic Maya plates perforated through images of conch shells 123 Fig. 6.5. Early Classic Maya conch shell trumpet with incised imagery 124 Fig. 6.6. Drawing of a typical Classic Mimbres burial 125 Fig. 6.7. Punctured Classic Mimbres bowl depicting an agricultural scene 125

Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

T

his book began as a proposal for a twentyminute talk. Michael Carrasco and Maline Werness-Rude were to be the co-chairs of a panel titled “Mesoamerican Ceramics: Form, Meaning, and Function” at the 101st Annual Conference of the College Art Association, held in New York City in 2013. I had just distributed my dissertation (on the narrativity of battle murals in Epiclassic Mesoamerica) to the committee and was waiting to defend it when the call for papers was announced in the spring of 2012. I wrote a short abstract for a paper that would analyze the hole in the Resurrection Plate in relation to the imagery painted on it. Because of the panel chairs’ desire for a temporal and geographic spread in presentations, my proposed talk was not accepted for inclusion. However, Michael and Maline liked my idea and asked me if I would be willing to develop it into a chapter for a volume that they were planning. I readily agreed and set to work, submitting my finished draft to them the following spring. When I had reached my word limit, however, I found that there was still much to be said. That was the point at which this book first began to take shape in my mind. As I have come to learn, edited volumes sometimes get waylaid. While waiting on promised essays from several other contributors, the editors moved forward with getting the interest of a press and returned the papers that they had received— including mine—to their authors with extremely thoughtful and generous comments. I proceeded to

make revisions based on their feedback, resulting in a much-improved paper. While the Mesoamerican ceramics volume still remained unpublished, I now conceived of that essay as a short version of a much larger project on holes, cavities, and voids in Mesoamerican material culture. I began to apply for fellowships based on this project. My ideas and approach to the material were generally well received both by Mesoamericanists and by scholars specializing in other areas of art history and archaeology. The research and writing of this book were completed with the assistance of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (2015–2016) and a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the University of East Anglia (fall 2018). As I presented my work at conferences and invited lectures and discussed my ideas with colleagues, I received extremely helpful feedback and suggestions that have also significantly contributed to the resulting book. Various portions were presented at the Art Department of Reed College; the Columbia University Seminar in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; the DePaul University Department of the History of Art and Architecture; the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin; the Latino Cultural Center of the University of Illinois Chicago; the 40th Annual Mesoamerica Meetings Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin; the 106th Annual Conference of the College Art Association in Los Angeles; the 40th xi

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Annual Midwest Conference on Mesoamerican Archaeology and Ethnohistory in Chicago; the 45th Annual Midwest Art History Society Conference in Indianapolis; the 11th Annual Meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group—North America in Gainesville; the 56th International Congress of Americanists in Salamanca; the World Art Research Seminar of the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich; and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University. I am grateful to all the audience members of the talks listed above and am especially indebted to the following people for their comments, advice, conversations, and/or encouragement: Hannah Baader, Aristoteles Barcelos Neto, Anna Blume, Jonathan Brown, Mark Canuel, Elizabeth DeMarrais, Amanda Gannaway, William Gassaway, Anne Haour, Jack Hartnell, Jonathan Hay, Ellen Hoobler, Steven Hooper, Zachary Hruby, Bryan Just, Justin Kerr, Tim King, Rex Koontz, George Lau, Elliot López-Finn, James Maffie, Lois Martin, Virginia Miller, Keith Moxey, Joel Palka, Esther Pasztory, Francisco Pellizzi, Janice Robertson, Robin Robertson, Andy Roddick, Pat Rubin, ´ Cassandra Smith, Deborah Spivak, Sanja Savkic, Stephanie Strauss, Lisa Trever, Rogelio Valencia Rivera, Andrea Vazquez de Arthur, Debra Walker, Mary Weismantel, Estella Weiss-Krejci, Chris Wingfield, Gerhard Wolf, and Cherra Wyllie. My gratitude especially goes to Claudia Brittenham, who enthusiastically offered to read a first draft of this manuscript and very promptly returned many pages of notes with an eye to both the big picture and individual details. Her thoughtful suggestions have undoubtedly very much improved this book. Finally, my colleagues in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) have been extremely supportive in every regard and are a reliable source of intellectually stimulating conversation. A modified version of chapter 5 was published in the October 2019 issue of the journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. I am grateful to Emily Engle for her editorial guidance; to the two anonymous reviewers for comments that improved both my writing and my argument; to Margaret Moore for her keen copy editing; and to xii

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the University of California Press for readily granting permission to reproduce that content here. This book owes a great deal to the staff at the University of Texas Press. My gratitude goes to senior editor Kerry Webb for her enthusiasm about the project and for expertly shepherding my manuscript through the editorial process. Editorial assistant Andrew Hnatow provided useful information and guidance related to the preparation of the manuscript. My thanks to Lynne Ferguson and Kathy Lewis for their diligent copy editing of the manuscript, to Sue Gaines for her thoughtful indexing, and to Joel Pinckney for his work related to publicity and promotion. I am particularly grateful to the anonymous specialist reviewers consulted by the press, whose supportive remarks, gentle corrections, and useful comments have enabled me to improve the contents of this book. At the encouragement of the reviewers, the press has allowed the inclusion of the many color illustrations in this book, for which I am very appreciative. The obtaining of high-quality images and permissions to reproduce them has been made possible through a Dean’s Research Prize from UIC's College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts as well as a UIC Provost’s Award for Faculty Support. Brenda Roman, an administrator in UIC’s School of Art and Art History, was invaluable in helping to disburse moneys from these awards to the numerous institutions from which I obtained images and permissions. I am very grateful for her patience and persistence as she guided me through the bureaucracy and for the helpfulness and patience of those on the other end of this process: Diana Edkins and Robbi Siegel of Art Resource; Elizabeth Bray of British Museum Images; Sue Grinols of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Sian Aldridge and Nathan Pendlebury of the Liverpool Museums; Carolyn Cruthirds of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Cynthia Mackey of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. I am also grateful to others who directly assisted me with images and permissions, including Susanna Pelle of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze; Patricia Boulos of the Boston Athenaeum; Bruna Lago-Fazolo of the British Library; Miguel Jorge Juárez

Acknowledgments

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Paredes, Vanessa Fonseca Rodríguez, and José Antonio Reyes Solís of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH); Ana María Palacio of the Museo de América; and Camilo A. Luin of the Museo Popol Vuh. I am particularly grateful to those scholars and institutions who generously shared high-quality images and allowed them to be reproduced at no cost: the Art Institute of Chicago; Eugenia Antonucci and Anna Rita Fantoni at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana; the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale de France; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Mary Miller and the Bonampak Documentation Project; Claudia Brittenham; Alisa Reynolds of the Chrysler Museum of Art; David Grove; Heather Hurst; Sarah Applegate and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Christian Prager and the Maya Image Archive; Kaylee Spencer Ahrens and the Maya Portrait Project; James Doyle and the Metropolitan Museum of Art;

Joyce Weaver at the Mint Museum; Mike Searcy and the New World Archaeological Foundation; Alessandro Pezzati and the Penn Museum; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Stanford University Libraries; Emily Umberger; Debra Walker; and especially Justin Kerr, to whom all Mayanists owe a great debt. Finally, I give my deepest thanks to my wife, Claudia Weber. She has read through many drafts of my writing and has consistently offered valuable suggestions to improve its style and clarity. Moreover, her boundless patience and support have been crucial in seeing this project to completion. This book therefore owes much to many people, from the encouragement of Michael Carrasco and Maline Werness-Rude to develop the initial kernel of an idea to all those who have provided invaluable suggestions, feedback, and assistance along the way. Responsibility for any errors or omissions, of course, remains entirely my own.

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VITAL VOIDS

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CHAPTER 1

What’s in a Hole?

Material Culture and Interpretation

T

his book is about nothing; more specifically, it is about the symbolic meanings and metaphoric potentials attributed to the literal, phenomenological nothingness of bounded voids by ancient Mesoamerican peoples. Beginning with the holes drilled in the bases of some Classic Maya ceramic dishes and continually returning to a close reading of a single vessel that was perforated in this manner, the discussion ranges across a wide variety of cavities and holes: from caves and the empty spaces of architecture to piercings and perforations of the body. This diverse evidence from the material record—augmented by insights gleaned from pre-Hispanic iconography and hieroglyphic inscriptions, sixteenth-century texts, and more recent ethnographic accounts—serves as the basis for an argument about the ontology of holes, cavities, and voids in Mesoamerica. It can be summarized in fairly simple terms: empty spaces were understood as places from which vital energies and material abundance were propagated. They were prerequisites for—and essential to—a variety of interrelated processes tied to the continual unfolding of creation and the ongoing emergence, transference, and flow of fundamental life forces. If this assertion is rather broad, it is also relatively radical. This breadth stems from being a reconstruction of ideas that were never explicitly stated but instead were based on a careful and sometimes creative analysis of a variety of source materials. Direct textual evidence related to this topic may never have existed; certainly there is

none in the meager quantity of indigenous writing that has survived the devastation of the Conquest. Despite an undoubtedly rich literary tradition, less than two dozen pre-Hispanic books have been preserved. Thousands of others succumbed to the flames of Spanish priests in the sixteenth century as part of their attempted eradication of native culture or disintegrated in the moist conditions of the Maya Lowlands after centuries of burial or exposure. Texts preserved in durable materials, such as those inscribed on stone monuments or painted on ceramic vessels, are typically brief and formulaic: even when dealing with mythological or cosmological content, they tend to record concrete information such as specific names, dates, and activities. These provide important pieces of information, especially in the light of recent advances in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs, but a degree of inference and extrapolation is required to arrive at the unstated metaphysical and ontological assumptions that serve to structure these texts and the worldview to which they belong. More extensive cultural information is recorded in early colonial texts. Along with more recent ethnographic accounts, they are a valuable resource through which to understand the indigenous worldview. However, some scholars have raised questions about the applicability of such sources for the interpretation of earlier Mesoamerican cultures. George Kubler famously argued that the devastation wrought by the Spanish Conquest represents an absolute disjunction between the preceding and 1

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subsequent symbolic orders.1 Responding to the extreme skepticism of Kubler’s stance, a number of scholars have argued that enough continuities exist between the cultures of the ancient past and those of more recent times to justify making use of the latter as an aid to the interpretation of the former, even after taking into account the upheavals associated with the Conquest.2 However, it is widely understood that colonial and modern indigenous accounts should not be indiscriminately applied in the study of pre-Hispanic cultures: they need to be compared with multiple lines of evidence to demonstrate continuities. Thus, while the available textual record from the early colonial period is an important source of evidence for this study, it is used cautiously, as a complement to archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic data. The broad nature of the thesis of this book also stems from its being a generalization about an aspect of Mesoamerican worldview that I am arguing was shared among the diverse cultures that developed in this region over several millennia. Ever since Kubler cautioned those interpreting past cultures that the continuity of a form does not equate to a continuity of the meaning(s) attributed to it, many scholars have shown justifiable skepticism with regard to assertions of continuity across great spans of time or between distinct cultures and linguistic groups.3 While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century characterizations of the ancient American past tended to flatten all cultural production into a homogeneous indigeneity (as is still often the case in current popular cultural treatments of these civilizations), in recent decades scholarship has more often emphasized disjunctions and differences through analyses that hypercontextualize material remains within ever more narrow geographic and temporal frames. This important shift has certainly engendered a more nuanced understanding of the past yet, if applied too strictly, threatens to obscure the commonalities and shared beliefs that united neighbors in both space and time. In this regard, as Jeffrey Quilter has suggested, “With a paradigm built on disjunction, opportunities for explaining the past, especially in symbolic matters, may now lie in assuming or demonstrating continuities.” As Quilter goes on to state, “It is not then, once more, a simple question of disjunction 2

versus continuity, all or nothing. Instead, we must disentangle the short and the long threads of history, the unique from the general, the long-lasting and durable from the short-term and evanescent.”4 The argument made in this book about holes and voids as vital spaces of creation is one of the “long threads” of Mesoamerican culture, but it is supported by numerous localized manifestations of this general metaphysical understanding. Specific instances of iconography, textual accounts, and archaeological evidence derive from distinct cultural moments and should not necessarily be understood as reflecting direct continuities of meaning or ritual practice. Taken together, however, these individual examples are strongly suggestive of an underlying ontology of holes and voids that belongs to the longue durée, what Alfredo López Austin has referred to as the núcleo duro (hard core) of the Mesoamerican worldview.5 Despite its generality—or, rather, because of it—the thesis presented here is significant for a couple of reasons. First, it asserts an indigenous orientation toward voids that is radically different from what is found in Western philosophy. The West has most commonly conceived the void as the foil to being, the nothing that is a necessary counterpart to something, the empty space in which matter can exist and interact, the cleaving that separates subject from object.6 Although it is dialectically implicated at the very foundations of being, the void—as well as associated concepts such as emptiness, lack, and holes—has typically been tinged with negative associations. These include the fear of death as nonbeing and, in modern times, anxiety over the absence of stable meaning (the death of God or of transcendental truth). This negative character is most evident in common metaphorical usages of these terms: something that is voided is no longer valid or useful; to be in the hole is to owe money and to dig a hole is to get oneself further into trouble; to lack something is to have a deficiency. Emptiness, like hunger, is a condition to be avoided whenever possible and to be filled when encountered. In psychoanalytic terms, lack is coterminous with desire and its projection in the form of the Lacanian objet petit a.7 This brief characterization is of course reductive and belies the well-attested complexities and

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divergent paths within the rich philosophical tradition of the West. However, it captures something of the general tenor underlying the characterization of voids and nothingness for at least the past two and a half millennia, which stands in useful contrast to the Mesoamerican conception of holes as vital spaces of emergence presented in this book. Moreover, it is only because of the surfeit of surviving texts on such matters—indeed, the very logocentrism of Western civilization—that such a broad-stroked characterization could potentially be dismissed as reductive. The opposite situation is found in Mesoamerica. This brings us to the second significant contribution of this book: even in the absence of direct textual accounts, aspects of the philosophical and conceptual lives of ancient peoples—their ways of being-in-the-world—can be plausibly reconstructed. Certainly I make no claim to be alone in this endeavor. The entire discipline of archaeology is centered on making sense of past cultures based on the material traces that have survived. Postprocessual archaeologists in particular have shown interest in recovering aspects of the cognitive realm. Much of the evidence cited in support of the thesis presented here comes from the efforts and insights of others. Some of the most compelling analyses in this vein draw inferences based on the ways in which meaning was intentionally structured in iconography or in the arrangements of objects in caches, burials, and other symbolically laden deposits. To take one example, a quadripartite motif or configuration of objects is commonly interpreted as a cosmogram—a fundamental cognitive map of the world directions as they manifested in the movement of the position of the sun’s rising and setting between the solstices. This image of space-time appears to be shared widely among the indigenous peoples of the Americas.8 More than serving as mere representations, such object groupings, particularly when removed from sight and placed within the foundations of buildings or in the tombs of important individuals, appear to have been conceived as actively producing an effect. They establish the site as an axis mundi, a manifestation of the fifth, central direction. The logocentrism of the West contains a clear split between signifier and signified. Language and

other signs can be used to express thoughts and abstract concepts as well as to point to concrete things in the world, all of which have a separate and autonomous existence. Signs are not the things they point to. This absolute divide between signifier and signified does not exist in Mesoamerica; rather, the signified was often understood to be rendered present through the sign. Materials manifested qualities and had an affective presence in the world, particularly when combined in the proper configurations, just as properly costumed human actors could manifest divine beings. Objects have agency but are in turn manipulated by human agents. In his ambitious and insightful exploration of Maya philosophy, Alexus McLeod has argued that the Maya had a correlative cosmology in which everything is interconnected. It is governed by “a transformative metaphysics in which there are both substances and processes, but neither of them has ontological priority over the other.”9 The evidence for—and implications of—this aspect of Mesoamerican worldview is explored more thoroughly in the following chapter. It is introduced here to show that the production and manipulation of objects and materials should be understood as active interventions into the flows and relationships between people and the world they inhabit. As such, the material record potentially indexes a wealth of cosmological and ideological data. By engaging with a specific aspect of Mesoamerican material culture, this book puts forward an argument about the values attributed to holes, cavities, and voids. Moreover, these features are uniquely suitable subjects through which to examine the articulation between matter and ideas more generally, both in terms of the indigenous worldview and for modern interpretative paradigms.

ON HOLES

Because of their ubiquity and the ease with which we talk about them in daily discourse, holes give the impression of being readily knowable and classifiable. However, the more they are put under scrutiny, the more they show themselves to be elusive and full of contradictions. Although they are often discussed as if they are things, they are immaterial What’s in a Hole?

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and therefore lack substance, which is typically taken as a central attribute of objects. Yet, despite their immateriality, holes are undoubtedly physical particularities, not abstractions. They can be considered parasitical in that they require a material host within which to reside, yet this relationship raises the question of whether a hole is merely a topographical quality of the surrounding object rather than an entity describable in its own right. All of these considerations give rise to an ontological and epistemological complexity that has made holes an ongoing topic of interest to philosophers as well as cognitive and perceptual psychologists. Do holes exist? David Lewis and Stephanie Lewis took up this problem in an imagined dialogue between two imaginary philosophers, Argle and Bargle, whose absurd names belie the seriousness of the inquiry. Argle is a nominalistmaterialist, someone who believes only in the existence of concrete objects: abstractions and properties—numbers, colors, and sensations, for example—have only a secondary, descriptive value. Argle’s interlocutor, Bargle, believes in the reality of immaterial universals and points to the holes in cheese as an intractable problem to challenge Argle’s materialist commitments. Argle first claims that holes do not exist. Any descriptive formulation suggesting that they do can be rephrased to describe a quality or attribute of the surrounding material: “there are holes in the cheese” becomes “the cheese is perforated.” Challenged by Bargle to count the holes in cheese and compare the quantity of these immaterial attributes to the quantity of physical objects such as crackers, Argle eventually relents and takes the opposite position: holes exist and they too must be material objects. This materiality is not conflated with whatever substance might occupy the space of a hole—air, for example—but rather with the matter that surrounds it: “the hole-lining is the hole.”10 Bargle poses a number of objections to this schema, and the subsequent discussion results in the aporia of an unresolved impasse. In a significant book on the topic, philosophers Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi have largely followed the pragmatic argumentation of the Lewises’ Bargle. Their stated purpose is to “take seriously what common sense has to say about holes,” treating them as things that exist even if in the end they 4

might actually not exist. The authors put forward evidence in support of the existence of holes: they have shapes—forms that can be recognized and measured—and dispositions that “give rise to a series of relational ties between the [host] object and what possibly surrounds it,” most notably the possibility of their being filled. Casati and Varzi argue that holes are dependent particulars rather than merely properties of the objects in which they are found. They are not reducibly described as parts of the host objects but are rather immaterial bodies located at their surfaces; that is to say, they are superficialities.11 All of this applies to the general category of holes, but topological distinctions can be drawn between three types of holes: depressions or hollows at the surface of an object, tunnels that completely perforate an object, and cavities contained entirely within the interior of an object. A number of other philosophers have pursued lines of argumentation somewhere between Argle’s materialism and Bargle’s idealism. Andrew Wake, Joshua Spencer, and Gregory Fowler have proposed that holes are merely regions of spacetime.12 They cannot be regions of space alone: these cannot move, whereas holes can. A donut lifted off a plate contains or delimits a moving hole, for example. Kristie Miller has echoed this view, with the addendum that they are qualified regions of space-time, meaning that each hole is contingent and belongs to a material universe in which everything necessarily has properties rather than to a purely abstract, conceptual space-time.13 Finally, Phillip Meadows has hewed most closely to Argle’s nominalist-materialist claims by considering holes as properties of objects, much the same way angles are.14 That is to say, rather than being objects themselves, holes are relations. Research into perception and cognition has also led different scholars to sometimes contradictory conclusions. Counting experiments with preschool-aged children appear to show that young children are not necessarily biased toward discrete, bounded objects but can just as readily identify parts and holes associated with objects.15 Furthermore, unlike typical cognition of figure and ground, in which bounded areas perceived as figures are remembered and can later be identified while those perceived as grounds are not, the shape of

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holes within objects is memorable.16 This suggests an equivalent cognitive status of holes and objects, with the former registering as the bounded immaterial spaces of their interiors.17 However, as Marco Bertamini and a number of coauthors have argued, although attention can be directed toward holes and their shapes thus remembered much like figures, a fundamental, preattentive perceptual differentiation is made between the holes and objects.18 Disagreements therefore exist among cognitive scientists as to the ways holes are perceived and processed by the mind, particularly with regard to whether these bounded negative spaces are ascribed a status similar to that of bounded solid areas. Although ontology and perception are distinct areas of inquiry, the unresolved nature of holes in both philosophy and cognitive science is quite similar. Philosophers ask whether holes should be considered objects in their own right, or at least a unique category of object (immaterial beings), or whether they are merely attributes of the material objects in which they are found. Cognitive scientists ask whether holes are perceived in a manner identical to figures (that is, as objects) or whether there are fundamental differences in the ways they are perceived. It is the parasitical nature of holes—their dependence upon a material object in which to reside—that gives rise to these conundrums. The heart of this relationship is the surface that mediates between object and hole: both the ontological and perceptual debates about the status of holes largely revolve around the question of whether this boundary belongs to the object or the hole. The bulk of the discussion between Argle and Bargle, for example, grapples with this interface, the hole-lining. Perceptually, a contour shared between a figure and a ground has long been understood as being assigned to the figure as part of the process of recognizing it as such. When a reversal of figure and ground occurs, this involves both a reassignment of the bounding contour and the bestowal of a “thing-character” to the object that is now perceived as the figure.19 The shared, mediating interface between hole and object thus plays an important role in the ambiguity of the status of a hole and its shifting recognition as both figure and ground, both as an (immaterial) thing in its own right and as merely

an attribute of a material object. In many ways, this boundary is a parergon, as described by Jacques Derrida in his discussion of the relation of a frame to a painting. When one looks at a painting, the frame is considered external to it; yet when one steps back and looks at the wall, the frame belongs to the painting. The frame is a parergon in that it is “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.”20 Likewise, the hole-lining—the determinate surface that gives rise to the hole—belongs neither to the object nor to the hole: it shifts in attribution between them depending upon where we direct our attention. When we talk of holes as things or perceive them as having form in a manner comparable to figures, we are ascribing the hole-surround to the hole. Conversely, when we treat holes as mere attributes of objects or perceive them as ground visible through an opening, their bounding contours belong to the host objects. Derrida’s explication of the character of the frame is part of a larger deconstruction of Immanuel Kant’s claims in the Critique of Judgment about the possibility for a disinterested engagement with an artwork (and the aesthetic realm more generally) taken purely on its own terms. As the case of the frame shows, what is considered intrinsic to the work, belonging to it, shifts depending on the perspective taken by the viewer. One can never exclude externalities; they will always be present in any judgment and, indeed, in the very conditions that allow for the identification of an “artwork,” which can never be autonomous, as such. There is thus a structural relationship whereby an object conceived as self-contained for the purpose of analysis is actually dependent on that which is deemed external to it. Although this formulation could apply to any object of interpretation, it is particularly salient with regard to holes because it precisely describes the parasitical relationship of a hole to its surrounding matter. A hole cannot even be conceived in isolation, much less discussed as such; rather, it must always be considered in relation to its host. We have now transitioned from considering the ambiguous ontology of holes to recognizing that this very ambiguity—manifested in the parergonal What’s in a Hole?

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role of the hole-lining—is directly implicated in the possibility of situating holes, as objects of analysis, within an interpretive schema. Derrida formulated this problem as follows: No “theory,” no “practice,” no “theoretical practice” can intervene effectively in this field if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning (put under shelter by the whole hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist tradition) and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question completely.21

What meanings can be attributed to holes in Mesoamerica must necessarily be garnered from externalities: the surrounding material itself, but also the context of the broader cosmological and philosophical tradition within which they are situated. Such a statement applies to all interpretative endeavors but, again, is especially implicated in the case of holes due to their immaterial contingency. At the level of the object itself, there is literally nothing there: for it to become visible, describable, and knowable, extrinsic elements must be recognized as both belonging to it and external to it. A final assertion by Derrida makes this point clear: [Elements are parergonal] not because they are detached but on the contrary because they are more difficult to detach and above all because without them, without their quasidetachment, the lack on the inside of the work would appear. What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon.22

Derrida points to a lack inside the work: its lack of autonomous meaning, the impossibility of a stable meaning intrinsic to the work, the dependence of the work on what is outside of it. If meaning is always grounded in externalities, indeed in the oppositional differentiation of interior from exterior itself, it is always a matter of contingency 6

and deferral, never of closure. This epistemological quandary is often characterized in negative terms, as a loss accompanied by melancholia or as a nihilism equating the absence of stable meaning with the absence of meaning altogether. As literal absences, holes and voids can be taken as materializations of this lack or at least as places where it is encountered most acutely; as discussed earlier in this chapter, they too are often colored with negative associations. I argue in this book that the same structural characteristics of holes presented here were precisely what led to their positive associations in Mesoamerica, as productive places of fecundity and creation. In the Mesoamerican worldview, the entire cosmos was always in a state of coming-into-being. This included both matter and spirit, if a distinction between the two can even be firmly postulated. Like everything else, meaning was never conceived as stable or intrinsic but was understood to be an emergent property of the relations between people and things. Far from seeking a closure to meaning, holes were produced and manipulated as a means to open things up, to create a parergonal space that facilitated further interrelatedness between the host matter and its environment. Like Casati and Varzi, as well as the Lewises’ Bargle, this study treats holes as if they exist. This allows for a wide variety of holes of different scales and made in diverse material surrounds to be considered as belonging to a coherent class of objects with similar attributes and associations. This is not done for the sake of expedience but rather because it captures the indigenous ontology of holes, cavities, and voids as it can be inferred from the material culture, iconography, and supporting textual accounts. Holes were not mere topographical features of their host objects in Mesoamerica. They were vital spaces that played an important role in mediating between the material and the symbolic, between substance and meaning.

AN EXAMPLE: NARANJO MONUMENT 1

Turning now to an example, some of the considerations outlined in the previous section can be reiterated more concretely. Monument 1 at Naranjo,

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Figure 1.1. “Site of an Ancient Temple of the Aztecs—Naranja [sic],” by Eadweard Muybridge, 1875. Plate 98 from the album “The Pacific Coast of Central America and Mexico: The Isthmus of Panama; Guatemala; and the Cultivation and Shipment of Coffee,” Stanford University Library Special Collections (a 21001239).

a Middle Formative site at the northern edge of modern-day Guatemala City, is an irregular slab of andesite planted vertically in the earth, with 80 cm of its 2.52 m height sunken into the ground, a maximum width of 2 m, and a maximum thickness of 50 cm (fig. 1.1).23 It was one of seven upright stone monuments arranged in a row in front of the major architectural structure at the site, composed of a taller Mound 1 flanked by the lower North and South Platforms. Both the architecture and the monuments followed an approximate north-south alignment. All of these upright stones remained uncarved with relief imagery or decoration, although some have surfaces that were either selected for their relative smoothness or modified to be made more regular. The stones are of different shapes, sizes, and materials; two had altars placed in front of them.24 All were sunken within a clay floor that covered a large plaza area and appears to have been laid contemporaneously with their erection; a C-14 date associated with Monument 3 has been calibrated to 800–750 BCE, which corresponds well to the seriation of associated ceramic sherds.25 In the open area between the artificial construction and a natural hill to the east are two additional rows of monuments parallel to but at some distance from the first, with a total of eleven additional monoliths.26 Although clearly arranged in conjunction with

Row 1, Monument 1 was placed about 2 m to the east of the line formed by the other stones and therefore stands out from the rest.27 It is further differentiated by the large round hole that was intentionally cut through its upper central portion, a feature that is unique not only at this site but also among all known Middle Formative–period stone monuments in southeastern Mesoamerica as well as in later examples of stelae from that region.28 It is already difficult to interpret the meaning of such early manifestations of upright monoliths arranged in front of ceremonial architecture—notably including stela-altar pairs—at Naranjo. They cannot be presumed to have played an identical ideological function as the later (and better understood) stela cult did among the Classic Maya.29 How, then, can we hope to engage with an anomalous feature such as the hole in Monument 1, which has very few direct cognates that might help to illuminate its role or meaning? The precise meaning that this hole held for the ancient residents of Naranjo can never be conclusively known and can at best only be speculated upon. Yet we can be more certain in asserting that the hole was meaningful for those who made it. Among the only interventions carved into the stones at Naranjo, this was a purposeful and labor-intensive act. Round and smooth, the hole What’s in a Hole?

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is qualitatively different from the evidence of iconoclastic aggression found on many Classic Maya monuments, which targeted the images of rulers carved on their surfaces or violently broke them into pieces.30 Furthermore, the monument was left standing in the original position in which it was erected, in direct relation to at least six other monuments and the adjacent ceremonial architecture. This suggests that the creation of the hole did not entail a major conceptual shift in the status of the monument, even if it was done at some point after the stone was first set in place. Thus, the hole should be considered a positive, integral aspect of this stone and its social role, not a negative act of vandalism or decommissioning. The renowned English photographer Eadweard Muybridge visited Naranjo in 1875, when he made the earliest known images of the site. He appears to have been especially fascinated with Monument 1, which takes center stage in all three images that he made on the day of his visit. One is a view across the old plaza, now transformed into an agricultural field with tilled rows and the stubble of crops. Many of the other stones are visible along with the centrally placed Monument 1 and its distinctive hole (fig. 1.2). A second view, used to illustrate the preceding discussion, features Monument 1 more prominently, as the adjacent Monuments 7, 8, and 9 recede along a diagonal into the distance, an arrangement mirrored by several thatched-roof structures in the background (fig. 1.1). Three local men stand and sit between the monuments. The third image is of most interest. Here Monument 1 almost entirely fills the vertical dimension of the horizontally oriented photograph. The hole is likewise filled, with the face of an indigenous man who stands behind the stone (fig. 1.3). This fascinating photograph could serve as an illustration of Lacan’s theory of the gaze. In Lacanian terms, the hole is a manifestation of the gap between subject and object: the objet petit a, “the embodiment of a void, of the lack or loss of the primordial object which can only emerge as always already lost.”31 Confronted with a hole, Muybridge has attempted to grasp it by filling it with the head of a living person.32 Thus occupied, our attention is directed toward this spot, which now also looks back at us. The gaze is thus shown to be a function 8

external to the point of vision (the camera lens) and to exist in the gap—here literally in the hole— between the subject and the object, both of which are beheld by it.33 Like the relationship between a hole and that which occupies it, the objet petit a is both purely formal—a function of structure (of the gaze, in which one sees oneself as both observer and observed)—and substantial—the projection of desire that occupies this gap (the desire to be desired, in the eyes of the other).34 Yet this substantiation also inevitably embodies the lack that gave rise to it. The relatively long exposure required by cameras of that time has caused a slight blurring of the individual’s face in Muybridge’s photograph, creating an uncanny contrast with the ultrasharp surface of the surrounding stone. By manifesting the technological limitations through which the image is mediated, the image of the blurred face that we see within the hole points to a lack or deficiency in the subject position while at the same time showing itself to be an image arising from and dependent upon the camera, rather than an autonomous externality.35 This, of course, is a modern interpretation of a modern object: Muybridge’s photograph. It would not be appropriate to apply Lacanian theory directly to Naranjo Monument 1 itself. However, this analysis is suggestive of the potential productivity of considering both the ways in which meaning can be considered to be an emergent phenomenon and the structures that give rise to it. Noting the different types of stone from which the monuments in Row 1 were made, Karen Pereira has proposed that this reflects both a heterogeneity of praxis during the early period of the site’s construction that may indicate the presence of different groups of people interacting there and the possibility that the materiality of the monuments intentionally established correspondences with the various source locations in the surrounding landscape (some as far as 30 km away) as a form of placemaking.36 Putting aside the question of reading objects as such direct proxies for people, the importance of both the materiality of the stone as a notable consideration and places in the landscape as holding special significance is well attested in the ethnographic literature of the Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples.37 Similar meaning has

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Figure 1.2. “Guatemala, Remains of an Ancient Temple at Naranja [sic],” by Eadweard Muybridge, 1875. From the album “Central America, Volume 1,” Boston Athenaeum (41905).

Figure 1.3. “Ancient Sacrificial Stone, Naranja [sic], Guatemala,” by Eadweard Muybridge, 1875. Plate 84 from the album “The Pacific Coast of Central America and Mexico: The Isthmus of Panama; Guatemala; and the Cultivation and Shipment of Coffee,” Stanford University Library Special Collections (a 21001239).

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been attributed to the offering caches excavated from the foundations of the Aztec Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City), albeit on a much more ambitious scale. Here objects and materials from distant places at the edges of the empire were collected together within the realm’s most sacred site to re-create the world in microcosm and establish the shrine as the preeminent axis mundi at the center of the Aztec world.38 Just as the material substance of Monument 1 placed a part of the surrounding landscape within the potent symbolic order being created at the center of Naranjo, I believe the hole in its middle served a similar purpose of making the distant present. The hole in Monument 1 makes it permeable, alters its topography, and collapses a clear distinction between exterior and interior. When that which is outside of and separate from the monolith passes through the aperture in its center, it is framed, surrounded by its stony body, incorporated into it. This is the case even when what passes through is immaterial: light and the visible realm. According to Stephen Houston and Karl Taube, for the Maya, “the eye is procreative. It not only receives images from the outer world, but positively affects and changes that world through the power of sight—in short, it behaves as an ‘emanating eye’ that establishes communion between internal will and external result.”39 The aperture in Monument 1 can therefore be understood as a portal linking the seer and the seen in a reciprocal relationship. And what was it that was seen, that was mediated by the hole in the monument? A strong case can be made that celestial light was one of the intended substances to be captured. Even stelae in the Classic period, which were regularly carved with Maya royal portraits and hieroglyphic inscriptions, were intimately associated with time and the marking of the completion of discrete temporal periods. Indeed, it seems likely that by covering them with their images Maya rulers were appropriating this function, which likely began during the Formative period, as part of the ideological basis for their claims to authority. In an insightful rumination about the presence of “plain” stelae, both alongside the betterdocumented carved examples at Classic Maya cities such as Tikal and at Formative-period sites such 10

as Naranjo, David Stuart has identified what he argues were the underlying associations of upright stone monuments in southeast Mesoamerica: It is important to stress that such monuments were not always used as media for the presentation of royal images and iconographies of power and cosmology. Many examples from the Preclassic and Classic periods were intentional “plain” tuuns [stones], either natural in form or somehow finished, that embodied a number of multifaceted ideas about time, permanence, and the transcendent space bridging the sky with the substance of the earth. By the Middle Preclassic, the appearance of images on stelae brought new layers of meaning to what was an already complex array of ideas, anchoring episodic representations of history, myth, and ceremony to the substance of stone itself.40

Thus, among other associations, the erection of upright monuments such as those at Naranjo was likely related to time and the marking of its passage. They were permanent witnesses to the cyclical movements of the celestial bodies. This relationship is directly implicated at Naranjo by their placement in north-south rows (aligned with monumental architecture that was similarly oriented): they face toward the eastern and western horizons, the directions where the sun, moon, planets, and stars rise and set. Moreover, light—particularly light emanating from celestial objects such as the sun and stars—was conceived in similarly agentive terms as sight: capable of bridging distance to touch and impact human affairs, it was often depicted in the form of projecting rays and, notably, eyeballs.41 As much as the monuments were witnesses to the movements of the celestial bodies, these lights in the sky witnessed the earth upon which they shone. The creation myth recorded in the sixteenthcentury Popol Vuh of the K’iche’ Maya shows the role played by the celestial realm in terrestrial placemaking, in the establishing and legitimizing of claims to specific sites by distinct social units: “And that became their citadel, since they were there when the sun, moon, and stars appeared, when it dawned and cleared on the face of the

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earth, over everything under the sky.”42 In regard to this proposal, it is notable that a similar plain stela perforated with a hole at the site of Cholula—one of the only other examples of a perforated stone monument in Mesoamerica—also faces to the west. In a discussion of this Classic-period monument, Geoffrey McCafferty has suggested that “it is possible that it may have functioned as a device for astronomical observations relating to the setting sun at the solstice.”43 I would merely point out that the term “observations” does not do justice to the ideologically laden conjunction between earthbound human observer and celestial phenomena that the perforated stone was likely understood to materialize. If the role of Monument 1 was to frame a segment of the sky, it functioned as a parergon, an ideological mediation between the heavens and the earth that belonged exclusively to neither. Because the horizontal position of celestial bodies shifts steadily over the course of the year, the hole in the monument could only have aligned with a particular spot at certain moments in time. Yet its ongoing presence as an aperture would have been a token both of the original moment of alignment (the moment when time was set into motion) that was invoked in the situating of the site of Naranjo within the spatiotemporal order of the cosmos and of its regular reaffirmation through the cyclical movements of the heavens. As an earthbound stone, the monument was separate from the sky that it framed. As an index for the moment in which the social order was witnessed by celestial bodies, however, the monument was also a piece of the sky and the time that it marked made tangible. Some similarity might be noted between the preceding analysis of the hole in Naranjo Monument 1 and the Lacanian analysis of Muybridge’s photograph of that monolith. In both, the gaze is posited as external, situated within the hole between the subject and object positions, which mediates between the projective agency of the vision attributed to each. There are significant differences, however. For one, the analysis of Monument 1 was based on indigenous metaphysics rather than modern psychoanalytical theories of desire and individuation. Moreover, these two approaches conceive of the hole in almost diametrically opposite ways. In a

Lacanian formulation, the hole (the small other) is a void in the symbolic order (the big Other embodied by the phallic monument), a manifestation of a lack that is simultaneously the source of desire and the space into which it is projected. From an indigenous, correlative perspective, the hole is a positive intervention that adds focus and saliency to the conjunction of light and sight, which are shown to be the immaterial organizing principles of the symbolic order. This analysis of the hole in Naranjo Monument 1 draws upon better-documented accounts of Mesoamerican cosmology and the long tradition of upright stone monuments known as stelae, attempting to fill a gap in our knowledge by situating it within what is more securely understood. Although objections might be raised about the appropriateness of looking at this standing stone through the lens of cultural ideas and practices from a millennium or more after it was set up, this remains our best means of understanding this early manifestation of a monumental tradition that appears to have had many consistent features. Another possible objection to the interpretation presented here is the relative lack of similarly perforated monoliths in Mesoamerica. If this hole manifested such fundamental structures and concepts as I have proposed, then why was it not more widely emulated? Whether the hole was intended to establish a correspondence between the ceremonial center of Naranjo and the celestial realm or produced for some other purpose entirely, its incorporation within a monolith that remained in clear relation both to other monuments and to the architectonic space of the site strongly suggests that it was conceived as an integral part of—rather than counter to—the presiding symbolic order. Its status as an unusual feature should not detract from this fact. Naranjo Monument 1 was placed during the beginning of the Middle Formative period and was among the earliest examples of upright stone monuments—stelae—set up in the plazas in front of monumental architecture, which would become a signal feature of later Maya civilization. As Pereira has suggested, this early moment of monument erection was heterogeneous, a time when diverse sizes, forms, and source materials were utilized. The absence of other upright stone stelae with What’s in a Hole?

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similar holes suggests that this feature was experimented with but was not deemed necessary to the social and ideological functions and messages of these monuments.

THE RESURRECTION PLATE AND THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

The example of Naranjo Monument 1 was intentionally chosen for the interpretive difficulties that it presents. It is a so-called plain stela, which lacks any associated iconography or even archaeological evidence of ritual activities that might help illuminate its functions or meanings. Furthermore, it is from a relatively poorly understood early period in the development of Mesoamerican civilization, so far in the past that the applicability of textual evidence or comparisons with similar cultural features from later times becomes somewhat fraught. This necessitated an analysis based primarily on the qualities of the hole itself and the structured relations in which it participates, aspects that remain important throughout this study. The rest of this book, however, revolves around the close analysis of an object decorated with richly evocative iconography that belongs to a later and much better understood culture: a Late Classic Maya dish now often referred to as the Resurrection Plate. Each successive chapter begins by revisiting this object, considering a different potential aspect or meaning associated with the hole that was drilled in its center, followed by an exploration of that theme through examples that look more broadly across Mesoamerican material culture. A hole has an ontological value and can be known only in relation to the surrounding matter in which it is located. Likewise, my argument about the Resurrection Plate in particular is fleshed out through an exploration of the ideas and practices to which it relates. Considered from an inverted perspective, the Resurrection Plate serves as an anchor for a broader argument about holes in Mesoamerica. Structuring the book in this way serves an important purpose. Once we start looking for them, holes can be found everywhere; a treatment of this topic could easily get out of hand, becoming unwieldy or muddled. 12

The grounding of this study in a singular concrete example helps both to focus it and to limit its scope, much as a hole is given definition by the solid materiality of the edges around it. The remainder of this chapter, then, is an introduction to the object in question: the Resurrection Plate. Measuring 32 cm (125/8 in.) in diameter and 5.8 cm (25/16 in.) deep, the Resurrection Plate is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and owes its (modern) name—as well as the frequency with which it has been published—to the imagery of the Maize God’s emergence from a turtle carapace painted on its upper, concave surface (fig. 1.4).44 Lacking archaeological provenience, this dish must be analyzed based on its style, iconography, and inscription, all of which serve to connect it to a specific cultural context. It is one of the best-known examples of a group of Late Classic Maya vessels that are given the name “codex-style” because their decoration is similar in format and appearance to the imagery found in the handful of surviving Maya screenfold manuscripts. Vessels of this type feature texts and imagery—typically of mythological subject matter—painted in black slip with fluid yet confident calligraphic lines over cream-colored backgrounds; their rims are painted with red framing bands.45 Archaeological evidence, augmented by chemical analysis of the pastes from which codex-style pottery was made, firmly locates the production and distribution of vessels of this type within the Mirador Basin of northern Petén, Guatemala, during a relatively brief period, from the last quarter of the seventh century through the first half of the eighth century CE.46 As with many Late Classic Maya painted vessels, this dish includes an inscription identifying its owner: Titomaj K’awiil.47 Although individual ceramic inscriptions are rather brief, this name is associated with numerous codex-style vessels, which together give a more extensive picture of him. An inscription on another vessel identifies him as the son of a 4-k’atun ajaw (a title designating a ruler in his fourth k’atun, a period of slightly less than twenty years). Comparisons with other pottery inscriptions help identify Yopaat B’ahlam as the likely candidate for Titomaj K’awiil’s father. Both father and son were notable patrons of

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Figure 1.4. Late Classic Maya codex-style dish, the Resurrection Plate, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, slipped ceramic, diameter 32 cm (125/8 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1993.565. Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1892).

high-quality ceramics and claimed the title k’uhul Chatahn winik, “holy/sacred Chatahn person.”48 Titles such as this—best known through emblem glyphs—are usually understood to be locative. In addition to being correlated with distinct polities, however, they also can reference places of different scales (larger or smaller than the level of a site) or can refer to mythological places of origin.49 What, then, are we to make of Chatahn? A number of investigators have proposed, based on the archaeological recovery of a red-on-cream vase with the name of Yopaat B’ahlam at the site of Tintal as

well as the proximity of clay that matches a regional signature identified by chemical analysis of some codex-style vessels, that this site is the likely home of that ruler and the toponym “Chatahn.”50 Others have proposed that Chatahn, a designation found in a number of inscriptions across the Mirador Basin, was an ancient and perhaps mythological lineage or place of origin from which a variety of Late Classic nobles of this area claimed descent.51 Regardless of the exact location of Chatahn, the Resurrection Plate can be situated in a relatively specific time and place, having been made for (or What’s in a Hole?

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possibly by) Titomaj K’awiil in the Mirador Basin during the late seventh or early eighth century. The most notable aspect of the Resurrection Plate is its iconography. At the center of a largely symmetrical composition we see the Maize God with an elongated forehead resembling a ripening ear of corn topped by feathers and jeweled hair suggesting foliage and corn silk. He is depicted being reborn from a turtle shell representing the earth, with the help of two deities, variously identified as the Headband Gods or as Gods S and CH in the literature.52 This important scene belongs to a series of mythological events related to the agricultural cycle that are known from depictions on numerous other vessels (see chapter 3). The scenes depicted on these painted ceramics contain additional details that help provide a more complete understanding of the imagery found on the Resurrection Plate.53 The partial emergence of the Maize God from the ground thus represents the sprouting and growing of the plant, part of the larger cycle that includes the god’s burial (planting), journey through the underworld (gestation within the earth and subsequent germination), and eventual sacrificial decapitation (harvesting). Beyond giving meaning to the recurrent agricultural cycle, the mythology relating to maize was central to the Maya—and broader Mesoamerican— worldview. It encompassed ideas about the creation of the world; the origins of humanity and civilization; the relationship of people to the (tangible as well as numinous) world, including death and the afterlife; and the nature of legitimate rulership.54 The glyphic nominal phrase associated with the representation of the Maize God on the Resurrection Plate identifies him as Juun Ixim Ayiin (One Maize Crocodile), a manifestation of the central world tree, an axis mundi centering the dimensions of space and time and linking the terrestrial world with the heavens above and the underworld below.55 The depicted scene should therefore be understood as portraying an act of world creation, establishing the conditions necessary for the appearance of humans. The early colonial manuscript of the Popol Vuh contains a K’iche’ Maya creation myth that, to judge from the iconography of monumental artworks created during the Late Formative period 14

as well as on Classic Maya ceramics, records versions of stories and concepts that had been passed down over two millennia. According to this text, the first ancestors of humanity were created from ground maize.56 Maize, so fundamental to human existence, was understood to form the very substance of flesh. The mythological personification of the plant, then, was a conflation of the intimately linked life cycles of cultivator and cultigen. This metaphor was extended to the ritual interment of the deceased, whose bones were “planted” in the earth just as the hard, dry kernels of maize were, thereby ensuring the continued prosperity of subsequent generations.57 Rulers, at the apex of society, were closely identified with the land under their dominion and were thus responsible for its productivity and protection. As such, they commonly presented themselves as manifestations of the Maize God and in their sumptuous burials sought successful transformation into ancestors—divine agents reborn within the landscape itself.58 The multivalent symbolism of the Maize God would have allowed the imagery depicted on the Resurrection Plate to suggest different connotations under different contexts. When used to serve tamales in the court of Chatahn, the dish would have prompted Titomaj K’awiil and his guests to consider the divine origins of the food that they had just consumed, thereby sacramentalizing their meal. Following the death of the dish’s owner, a hole was drilled in the center and it ceased to be used as a serving vessel. Rather than destroying the dish at the end of its perceived utility, this transformation actively repositioned it within a new context as tomb furniture. Placed in proximity to the body of the deceased, the image of the Maize God’s rebirth as a world tree becomes the archetype of resurrection and world renewal, an apt metaphor for the apotheosis of the ruler as an ancestor. It would not be unreasonable to conjecture that the selection of such intentionally polysemous imagery at the time of the plate’s initial decoration reflected an anticipation of both of these future contexts. This argument is developed in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 considers the hole in the Resurrection Plate in relation to the Late Classic Maya practice of drilling holes through the bases of some dishes and incorporating these into burials.

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Rather than being understood as “killing” the vessels and releasing their animating spirit, which is how such holes have frequently been discussed, the evidence strongly suggests that perforated vessels were conceived as playing an important role in the construction of the symbolic space of the tomb. In refuting the characterization of such interventions as “kill holes,” I examine the nature of Maya (and, more broadly, Mesoamerican) animistic beliefs, making the case that the artist of the Resurrection Plate—as well as some other ceramic painters— created imagery that anticipated its drilling and incorporation into the burial of its owner. The alignment of the imagery with the hole on this dish relates to at least three distinct but interrelated aspects of the creation, symbolism, and ritual use of holes in Mesoamerica, each of which is the focus of a subsequent chapter. Chapter 3 examines holes in the living earth, including burials, caves, architecture conceived as human-made versions of these natural features, and caching pits and vessels. These chthonic cavities were intimately linked to ideas about the fecundity of the earth as well as the sources of the waters and rain clouds necessary to bring forth its agricultural bounty. They were also closely associated with the emergence of the first people, with the veneration of ancestors as an ongoing presence in both the community and the landscape, and with processes of placemaking. If the underworld was a land of the dead, it also gave rise to new life: the various holes made in the earth figure prominently in this regard. Chapter 4 considers the creation of fire, an act that is related to holes through the process by which both are produced: drilling. In addition to being practically important—to agriculture and the production of ceramics, for example—the potent energy of fire, manifested in its heat and illumination, made it a central aspect of Mesoamerican ritual life. Braziers and incense burners were crucial elements of worship directed toward gods and

ancestors alike, and fire played an important role in rituals of instantiation and renewal. Notably, fire was a central element in numerous creation stories and was closely associated with the sun and with calendrical rituals. Chapter 5 focuses on the production of holes in the human body, including as part of auto-sacrificial bloodletting rituals, the piercing of the flesh to accommodate jewelry, and hollows or cavities found in sculptural representations of the human form, such as Teotihuacan host figures and some Aztec statues. I argue that all such holes were conceived in similar terms, as conduits for the flows of vital energies both emerging from and entering into the body, which were often made manifest through the insertion of particularly charged materials. To adorn the body was not merely a superficial act but a means both to give form to and to effect transformations in its social being. This book argues that all of these seemingly distinct manifestations of holes and voids were actually interrelated to some extent. The Resurrection Plate is a key object: in anticipating the hole that would later be drilled through the dish he painted, a particularly talented artist created an image that folds together all three of these themes. If the ritual perforation in a ceramic plate can simultaneously evoke the breaking open of the earth, the drilling of fire, and the piercing of the body for a Classic Maya artist and his audience, we are forced to ask what commonalities would link these practices. The answer that I propose is that they are all associated with vital emergence in the form of the production and exchange of material abundance and life energies. This is a fundamentally ontological argument about the understanding of holes in Mesoamerica. Even when the supporting evidence (especially the image painting on the Resurrection Plate) is iconographic or textual, the focus of this book is on the production and interaction with actual holes, those immaterial and sometimes overlooked instances of material culture.

What’s in a Hole?

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CHAPTER 2

Perforated Vessels

Revitalizing the Discourse Surrounding “Kill Holes”

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ue to the mythological content of its imagery, the Resurrection Plate is among the best-known and most published examples of Classic Maya ceramics. Yet, because the interest in this vessel has been predominantly iconographic in nature, it has most often been reproduced in the form of a line drawing (fig. 2.1). At least two practical factors have undoubtedly contributed to this choice of illustration by many scholars. First, drawings such as this aid in the legibility of an image by flattening it, eliminating shadows and other nonpictorial features, reducing it to the highcontrast of black-and-white, and sharpening or even filling in gaps where marks have become faded or effaced. Additionally, obtaining high-quality photographs and the permissions to reproduce them can be expensive for authors, while many journals and university presses, especially in previous generations, have not had budgets to adequately publish full-color images. Line drawings have proven extremely useful for epigraphic and iconographic analyses, including the identification of individual motifs and the correlation of scenes with mythological texts. In the case of the Resurrection Plate, the myth is reconstructed from the image alone, because no known textual account exactly matches it. Read against the background of surviving texts, most notably the Popol Vuh, this image fills in an important gap in our knowledge of Maya mythology and cosmology, particularly in relation to maize. Iconographic analysis in this vein has been— and will undoubtedly continue to be—an important

and fruitful tool for our understanding of ancient Mesoamerican art and culture. Yet reliance on line drawings also presents limitations. For example, it obscures significant aspects of an image that were undoubtedly of importance within its original cultural setting. These include facture (evidence of the hand of the artist), the materiality of the image and its ground, the formal relation of the image to the ground on which it was executed, and the conditions of its probable reception. Much recent scholarship has tended to reassert the situatedness of Mesoamerican images: their relationship to the tangible material objects and architectonic spaces that they adorn and their phenomenology within the physical and social landscapes in which they were encountered.1 Such a reengagement with the mediality of images that had previously been considered solely for their semantic content can be characterized as an ontological turn in Mesoamerican studies. This shift in scholarly focus has been extremely productive and, moreover, appears to more accurately reflect indigenous cosmology and philosophy as it relates to images. Seen as being inextricably bound to the material and spatial conditions of their presentation, images necessarily have a recursive or reflexive relationship with the contexts in which they are encountered: they cannot help but be shaped by—and were often actively responding to—these concerns. Analyses of images thus allow for insights into the uses and associations that the objects and spaces they decorate held for the people who made them. 17

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Figure 2.1. Line drawing of the Resurrection Plate. Drawing by Linda Schele (SD5505) © David Schele. Courtesy of Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org).

Some of these considerations have already been alluded to with regard to the Resurrection Plate in chapter 1, where I noted not only that this image represented a specific myth but that its placement on a dish used both for food service and as funerary furniture provided an ideological gloss to both contexts. A closer examination of this image in conjunction with the plate on which it was painted suggests that it was conceived as more than just thematically relating to the social contexts in which it could be anticipated to be encountered. Rather, the image presents itself as inextricably bound to 18

and expressive of the plate’s identity as a material object, specifically as a material object belonging to and socialized within the symbolic order of the Late Classic Maya court. Looking at a slightly oblique photograph of the Resurrection Plate rather than at a line drawing, we can see just how attentive the artist was to the subtleties of the three-dimensional form of the dish as he crafted his composition (fig. 2.2).2 The long tress of hair that rises from the Maize God’s head in imitation of corn silk, for example, begins with a round jewel that is painted right

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where the lip of the plate begins to curve upward. This three-dimensionality adds to the impact of its forward sweep as it curls back in front of the deity’s face. Likewise, while the faces of the flanking figures are painted on the flat base of the vessel, their zoomorphic headdresses rise above them on the lip. This is also the case with the turtle head and deity that emerge from the front and back of the carapace representing the earth. While these effects are notable, they are subtle. The close alignment of the underbelly of the turtle shell with the base of the sloping rim, however, suggests a much more direct connection between the image and the vessel. Even so, it might be thought that the artist merely responded to the shape of the ground upon which he was painting and conformed his composition to fill it out appropriately. There are further indications, however, that the turtle shell was intended to be directly conflated with the plate itself. When the plate is inverted, its shape is nearly identical to the flattened bell curve of the turtle shell (fig. 2.3). From this vantage point, without the distraction of the image painted on the front, the small hole drilled through the vessel stands out. Numerous other plates were perforated in a similar manner, by being drilled or punctured through their centers, as part of a funerary practice examined in greater detail below. What is important here is that the practice was relatively common, so it is therefore not unreasonable to conceive that the artist of this specific dish created an image that anticipated or evoked it. Returning to the image on the front, we see that the hole aligns with a crack in the carapace, the upper edge of which was painted so as to cross the midpoint of the plate. That is, the imagery was painted with an awareness of the geometry of the ceramic ground: the center point of the turtle’s shell, where it is pierced with a crack, was placed to coincide with the middle point of the plate, the place where an actual hole was later drilled through the body of the vessel. A literal passageway has been created in the hard, smooth material of the ceramic vessel just at the spot where the image shows a similar penetration—seen here from the side—within the hard, smooth turtle carapace. Just as the image of the Maize God relates to the tamales placed on this dish, the turtle shell

from which he rises was conflated with the plate itself. Further associations evoked by the interaction between the image and the hole are explored at length in subsequent chapters. This chapter begins by discussing the drilling of the plate as part of a Classic Maya funerary tradition. Perforations drilled or punched through the bases of some Classic Maya vessels like the one in the Resurrection Plate have long been recognized by scholars as resulting from an intentional intervention into—and transformation of—the objects’ conceived status or role. Vessels treated in this manner have consistently been referred to in the literature as “killed” and the apertures created in them as “kill holes.”3 This terminology was first used by archaeologists working on unrelated North American material in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Such a designation suggests both the destruction of functionality and a concomitant release of the soul of the vessel.5 The regularity with which references to “killing” are placed inside quotation marks could reflect an acknowledgment by many Mayanists of the insufficiencies of this term or unease with either the emphasis that it places on the utilitarian aspects of the ceramics or the way it frames the animistic nature attributed to the vessel. A number of scholars have recently begun to consider this aspect of Classic Maya material culture more closely, particularly with regard to the burial contexts in which such perforated vessels are typically found, in an effort to come to a more nuanced understanding of the possible meaning(s) of this ritual practice.6 Following a general discussion of the problem and its historiography, this chapter examines current thinking about the nature of Mesoamerican animism and considers the practice of perforating ceramics in relation to this broader worldview. Finally, the implications of the close integration between image and vessel on the Resurrection Plate are explored. This sets the stage for the extended close reading of the interaction between the hole and the imagery on this dish throughout the remainder of this book, which demonstrates the rich metaphorical potentials of such ritual perforations. Rather than “killing” vessels, such holes served to (re)activate them as fecund nodes of symbolic meaning. Perforated Vessels |

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Figure 2.2. The Resurrection Plate viewed obliquely. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure 2.3. The back of the Resurrection Plate. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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CERAMIC PERFORATION AMONG THE CLASSIC MAYA

The hole in the Resurrection Plate belongs to a specific category of ritual vessel perforation practiced with some frequency in the Maya area. Usually placed directly at the center of the base— that is, at the nadir of a vessel’s concavity—such holes appear to have been intended to void the utility of the container, at least symbolically, prior to its interment as tomb furniture. Although the majority of examples now in museum collections lack any record of their provenience, many dozens have been recovered during archaeological excavations. The consistency of these findings indicates that a mortuary association can be attributed to this practice. Perforated funerary ceramics are known from across the Maya area, with examples dating from the Formative through the Postclassic periods. The vast majority, however, are concentrated in the central Lowlands (particularly north and central Petén and southern Campeche) during the Late Classic period.7 By referring to dishes treated in this manner as having been “killed,” an affinity is established between them and all vessels (indeed, all objects) that were treated in an apparently destructive manner. This has led to a conflation between the category of perforated funerary vessels with other categories of punctured and broken ceramics that is perhaps not warranted. Many ollas that have had their sides perforated with holes have been recovered from caves, cenotes (naturally occurring sinkholes that served as sources for fresh water), and chultuns (human-made underground storage pits) (fig. 2.4). Because they are vessels made to hold liquids and were deposited in places associated with the watery underworld, María Alejandra Martínez de Velasco Cortina has suggested that this type of perforation could have been part of fertility or rain-bringing rituals, an interpretation with which I concur.8 Based on differences in both their morphology (ollas versus shallow dishes) and the contexts of their depositions (caverns versus burials) it seems likely that these vessels represent a category of ritual vessel perforation distinct from that of funerary ceramics, such as the Resurrection plate.

Figure 2.4. Perforated ceramic olla recovered from the Sacred Cenote, Chichen Itza, height 23.5 cm (9¼ in.). Peabody Museum Expedition, E. H. Thompson, Director, 1904–1907. Photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM07-7-20/C4705.

Likewise, discussing dishes that have had small holes drilled through their centers as having been killed implicitly conflates them with vessels and other objects that have been more definitively broken. Thoroughly smashed vessels have been recovered from contexts suggesting either ritual or desecratory behavior and associated with the abandonment of structures or polities. 9 In such “termination events,” the destruction of the ceramics is irrevocable; unlike perforated ceramics, which remain essentially intact, these vessels have truly been shattered into fragments. It is possible to conceive of a continuum of destructive action transitioning objects from one state of being into another, with termination events as one extreme and the drilling of funerary ceramics toward the opposite end. That is to say, drilled perforations may indeed have been intended to deactivate some aspect of the plates in which they were made, but characterizing them as “killing” these objects fails to capture the full picture. Even as the designation “kill holes” thus implies similarities with other destructive practices and interventions into the integrity of ceramic vessels, Perforated Vessels |

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it suggests a conceptual contrast with another category of intentional perforation found in some Classic Maya pottery: repair holes (figs. 2.5, 3.3c). These are usually found in pairs on either side of breaks and allowed for the suturing and continued use of a valued vessel. But several problems complicate the supposed dichotomy between “kill holes” and “repair holes.” While kill holes indeed render vessels incapable of holding liquids, they are most commonly found on plates, where they would not have significantly impacted the ability to serve solid foods.10 There is some variation in their size and method of production, and the corpus includes a few examples of larger holes perhaps a centimeter or more across, including some that were pecked or gouged into the vessel. However, the vast majority of the known examples are only a few millimeters across, and most were drilled in a minimally invasive manner. Conversely, repaired ceramics—often in the form of cylindrical drinking vessels—would have remained porous and therefore unsuitable to hold liquids. Their preservation demonstrates the intrinsic value placed on their objectness; they were prized for their aesthetic, social, historical, and perhaps even numinous qualities, but no longer as functioning receptacles for liquids.11 Thus, in both instances, the piercing of a ceramic vessel—either with a kill hole or with repair holes—served to foreground its social significance, symbolic associations, and aesthetic values, as distinct from any continuing utilitarian role.

Yet these aspects of the vessel (social, symbolic, and aesthetic) were always present, even when its potential functionality remained intact.12 By characterizing a hole as killing the dish in which it was made, emphasis is placed on the (symbolic) termination of its usage with regard to food service, thereby obscuring the ongoing importance of these other qualities. Although this terminology may be useful in distinguishing a category of treatment enacted upon certain ceramic vessels, it is thus not a matter of a neutral identification. Even when it is used out of convention, it entails the folding together of a description of the vessels’ condition (having been perforated) with an interpretation of this practice (having been killed). For some scholars, the use of this terminology is not just a matter of convenience: they see this interpretation as being warranted. In her groundbreaking exhibition catalog focused on Maya courtly ceramics, Painting the Maya Universe (1994), Dorie Reents-Budet speculates that “the so-called kill hole through the center of the plate may imply the ritual killing of the vessel to free its spirit.”13 Along the same lines, in a recent master’s thesis on this topic, María Alejandra Martínez de Velasco Cortina has proposed that the holes in Classic Maya funerary ceramics were created to release the animating spirits of divinities from the material substance of the vessels within which they had temporarily resided.14 She bases this assertion on the prevalence of evidence demonstrating

Figure 2.5. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya codex-style vessel with “repair holes,” 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, slipped ceramic, height 16.2 cm (6 3/8 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1198).

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animistic beliefs in both the myths and ethnographic accounts of modern Maya populations and the texts and images of the ancient Maya.15 Moreover, perforated ceramic plates appear to be closely associated with burials and therefore with the idea of death. To refer to the dishes pierced through at the time of their transition into tombs as having been killed would therefore not seem inappropriate, and it is the mortuary context that has informed most interpretations of this practice. For example, W. Bruce M. Welsh has speculated that “the bowls were holed to indicate that the bowls, like the deceased, were dead.”16 Observing that perforated dishes were often placed inverted over the head of the deceased, Michael Coe has proposed that “the hole is there so that the spirit of the dead person may rise through it.”17 In this interpretation, the hole would serve as a psychoduct like those occasionally incorporated into the architecture of burial chambers, most famously in the tomb of Pakal at Palenque. Andrew Scherer also considers the burial context integral to understanding perforations in ceramic vessels. Along with the paucity of drilled or punctured ceramics in nonmortuary caches and other contexts, he notes that perforated funerary ceramics are almost always found inverted and in relation to the head of the deceased.18 I would add that—even in the handful of instances where they were not placed adjacent to the head—only a single perforated vessel is typically recovered from any one burial. All of this strongly suggests that the holes were made first and foremost in relation to the interring of the deceased rather than to release the spirit or life force from the vessel. If the latter were the prime motivation, we would expect to find perforated dishes in a greater variety of contexts both within and outside of graves. Rather than suggesting the killing of the vessels in which they were made, Scherer sees the perforations in funerary ceramics as analogous to other interventions at the time of interment, such as the painting of crosses or dots on the centers of dishes.19 He conceptualizes all of these activities as centering the burial with regard to the four horizontal directions and establishing an axis mundi linking the earthly plane with the underworld and celestial realm. This ritually enacted cosmological

symbolism, he argues, created a path for the rebirth of the deceased. The imagery on the Resurrection Plate provides strong support for this analysis: it explicitly identifies the Maize God as Juun Ixim Ayiin (One Maize Crocodile), a zoomorphized botanical connection joining the subterranean, terrestrial, and celestial realms. The ayiin portion of his name ties this version of the Maize God to other crocodilian world trees, such as the one seen on Izapa Stela 25 (fig. 2.6). Creation imagery from other codex-style vessels depicts crocodilian world trees growing from ceramic dishes placed between divine agents, showing the potential for a plate to serve as the support or container for such cosmologically potent manifestations (fig. 2.7).20 As part of a burial assemblage, perforated vessels established an axis mundi that connected the deceased in the underworld with the earthly domain of the living and the heavens above; both body and dish had a continued existence in a transformed state. While such perforations can indeed be understood as marking the conclusion of the role of these dishes as serving vessels, the objects themselves went on to fulfill a further purpose, which in the case of the Resurrection Plate had likely been envisioned at the moment of its creation. Instead of killing the vessel—releasing the numinous spirit from the material object that it had inhabited and leaving behind an empty shell— the hole placed at its center activated the body of the dish as a conduit or portal through which vital forces could continue to flow. Joel Palka has discussed the perforations in cremation urns from Postclassic eastern Chiapas in a similar manner. Although these represent a funerary tradition distinct from the earlier Classic Maya tradition to which the Resurrection Plate belongs—cremation rather than entombment, three holes placed on the upper sides of jars rather than singular holes drilled at the centers of shallow dishes—they do directly associate perforated ceramic vessels with burial practices. Despite making a compelling case that these anthropomorphic urns with little wear were made specifically to become the “symbolic bodies of the deceased,” Palka suggests that the holes “signaled that [the vessel] was now used in the land of the dead or that it was unusable for domestic purposes.” However, Perforated Vessels |

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Figure 2.6. Izapa Stela 25. Drawing by Ayax Moreno, originally published as figure 13.24 in Clark and Moreno 2007. Courtesy of the New World Archaeological Foundation.

he characterizes this as a shift in the vessel’s function, rather than an end to it. He discusses the holes, which are configured in a facelike arrangement, as passageways to allow for the transmission of life forces and ongoing communication between the living and the dead. Suggesting that they might more properly be referred to as “emergence holes” rather than “kill holes,” Palka further proposes that “life forces in the cremains would exit these holes to be reborn in the afterlife.”21 As discussed above, use of the term “kill hole” to refer to a perforation in a ceramic vessel suggests the ending of the life of the object. Of what did this life consist? Most scholarly reflections on the nature of kill holes are brief but can be categorized according to their explicit and implicit stances. Several authors have argued that the indigenous worldview understood inorganic objects to possess autonomous life much like people (or, at least, as having the potential to be ensouled) and that the drilling of vessels accomplished the release of the spirit or divinity that had resided within the material body of the vessel. Others have taken a more equivocal stance, seeing such objects as inalienable possessions belonging to the deceased and the act of perforating as serving to transition them from the world of the living to the realm of the dead along with their owners. This view suggests ideas of contamination and distributed personhood that do not necessarily conceive of objects as independently affective

Figure 2.7. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya codex-style vessel depicting a crocodilian world tree growing from a ceramic plate, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, slipped ceramic, height 15.8 cm (6¼ in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1607).

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beings but rather as possessing agency through their associations with people. Furthermore, even arguments that do not consider the ritual perforating of some funerary ceramics as killing them, such as those made both by Scherer and in the present study, do not discard the idea of these objects possessing a form of animacy. Very much the opposite: they see the dishes not as inert objects but as active participants in establishing the burial chamber as a charged space. How, then, should Mesoamerican animistic thought be understood?

LIVING OBJECTS: ON MESOAMERICAN ANIMISM

The ontological turn in Mesoamerican studies described at the start of this chapter is part of a wider interest in the life of things, engagement with their materiality, and reconsideration of the nature of animism within the field of archaeology and across the social sciences.22 A number of interrelated concerns precipitated this move. The past generation has seen a growing recognition that indigenous worldviews have been significantly misunderstood through the distorting lenses of Cartesian positivism and Western chauvinism. Contrasted with the “proper” scientific understanding that grew out of Enlightenment empiricism and the centrality of the human subject, animistic thought was long characterized as a primitive and superstitious misapprehension of the world, a false consciousness.23 Attributing agency to objects or features of the landscape was considered to be an anthropomorphizing projection that served to mask the real relations of people to natural and social processes. This mode of analysis can be considered materialist, in contrast with the focus on materiality that has only more recently come to the fore.24 Seeking both to decolonize the study of nonWestern societies and to understand these cultures on their own terms, some scholars have begun to give primacy to indigenous conceptions of being and to reconsider what an animistic worldview actually entails. The rethinking of animism has focused on problematizing Cartesian distinctions between mind and body: between what is alive

and what is not, between the cognitive and the material, and between the individual and the environment.25 It might therefore be thought of as a largely epistemological project, a reconfiguration of the conceptual nets through which we categorize the world: there is only one reality, and different cultures make sense of it in different ways. Many scholars, however, have argued that it is a matter of ontological difference: taking seriously the potential for being itself to be multifarious.26 Rather than merely projecting human traits onto nonhuman animals and things, animistic belief recognizes radically different forms of being alive in the world. This proposition sees being as both mutable and emergent, arising from the networks of relations between things and people. Tim Ingold puts it as follows: According to a long established convention, animism is a system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert. But this convention, as I shall show, is misleading on two counts. First, we are dealing here not with a way of believing about the world but with a condition of being in it. This could be described as a condition of being alive to the world, characterized by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next. Animacy, then, is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather—and this is my second point—it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.27

Thus conceived, animacy belongs not to individual people or objects but to an entire field of relations Perforated Vessels |

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that is constantly changing and encompasses a range of actors with varying degrees of agency, which is itself an emergent property of these relations.28 While this is a compelling reconsideration of the nature of animism, such attempts to reengage with relational, networked ontologies involving both human and nonhuman actors have not gone unchallenged. Materialists—meaning those concerned with identifying the material bases of society and analyzing political economy—see this project as inherently antimodern and antiEnlightenment, a refetishization of inert things that entails the objectification of human relations.29 Perhaps out of fear of losing this perspective on the realm of the social, many considerations of materiality have typically contrasted the unmotivated efficacy of objects with the intentionality of human agency.30 This approach could be considered to posit a “weak” animacy that questions the boundaries of personhood and allows for the material world to intrude upon the realm of the social but nevertheless maintains a subordinating distinction between the affordances and properties of material objects and the active awareness of human cognition and therefore upholds the primacy of Western ontology and epistemology.31 Although such perspectives may help explain how material things participate in and mediate human social relations, they are less than satisfying to the extent that they do not fully engage with the worldviews of the people under consideration, which undoubtedly played an important part in shaping the ways people interacted with both each other and their material environment. A methodological synthesis that draws on Western social theory while at the same time allowing indigenous ontologies to be taken seriously would therefore be desirable. These stances are typically posed in seemingly intractable terms: either reality is singular and capable of being objectively explained or there are multiple states of being in the world; either humans are the ultimate source of all agency or both human and nonhuman agents participate within a living matrix of constantly shifting relations. Yet a middle ground should be sought: one in which traditional analyses of political economy, social construction, and ideology recognize and are informed by indigenous understandings of the animate nature of 26

reality that are the field within which all relations— material and social—take place. If the preceding comments represent an overview of the broader scholarly discourse related to animism, what, then, is the current understanding of this topic with regard to Mesoamerica specifically? Certainly the archaeological, iconographic, epigraphic, and ethnographic evidence all strongly supports the assertion that Mesoamericans of all periods have understood themselves to be living in an animate world in which matter is—or has the potential to be—imbued with life force. A good case can be made that all of Ingold’s points above apply to the Mesoamerican worldview: that animacy reflects a constantly shifting and always emerging field of relations between humans and nonhumans. In an expansive and probing analysis that draws on ethnographic accounts, the philosopher James Maffie has described a very similar conception of Aztec metaphysics: the ultimate unity of reality in which everything is composed of an immanent and impersonal divine “energyin-motion” (teotl ), which undergoes constant self-transformation and self-unfolding.32 Although things may appear to be separate and distinct, they are all aspects of a unitary cosmos in a constant state of becoming. As such, everything that exists is interdependent and correlational. In Aztec metaphysics, the very fact of something existing necessitates that it be in some sense alive, participating in the vitalizing force of teotl, and harboring the capacity to “move, act, change, transform, affect, and be affected.”33 This general metaphysical understanding appears to have been shared across Mesoamerica.34 As discussed in chapter 1, McLeod’s recent treatment of Maya philosophy shows a conception of the world as unitary, correlative, and transformative: that is to say, very similar to what Maffie has described for Aztec metaphysics.35 Scholars disagree, however, as to which Mayan term might be analogous to the Nahuatl concept of teotl, the unifying and animating force. Maffie, following Miguel León-Portilla, proposes k’in, which refers to the sun as the source of both life and time, as the equivalent term.36 Based on his work with contemporary Nahua people in Veracruz, Alan Sandstrom provides some ethnographic support for identifying

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the ultimate reality with the sun: “But it should not be forgotten that for the Nahuas all of these spirits trace back to the one creator deity, the sun, whose visible presence in the sky affirms the oneness of the universe. The sun not only provides the heat in our bodies, but it is the animator of the universe as well.”37 Yet, if teotl is the ultimate animating reality of the universe, the Aztecs conceived of different types of animating forces, including tonalli, which is associated with solar and bodily heat and was understood to link an individual’s fate to the day of birth.38 The Mayan k’in seems to correspond better with tonalli than with teotl. The Mayan word ch’ulel, often translated as “soul” or “spirit,” has also been suggested as a cognate of teotl. Houston and Stuart have glossed it as “vitality” or “holiness,” “the vital force or power that inhabits the blood and energizes people and a variety of objects of ritual and everyday life.”39 Alternatively, McLeod has proposed that “itz should be seen as a concept expressing the unification of different aspects of the world, seen and unseen” and “may be understood as ‘cosmic essence,’ ‘sap,’ ‘spirit,’ or ‘vital fluid.’ ” Recognizing the overlap in its meaning with ch’ulel, he suggests that itz “is manifest in humans as ch’ul[el].”40 Certainly these two terms suggest a relationship, but this term was not limited to people, as Evon Vogt’s discussion of ch’ulel among the Tzotzil-Maya Zinacantecos shows: The phenomenon of the ch’ulel is by no means restricted to the domain of human beings. Virtually everything that is important and valuable to Zinacantecos also possesses a ch’ulel: domesticated plants, such as maize, beans, and squash; salt, which possesses a very strong ch’ulel; houses and the fires at the hearths inside the houses; the wooden crosses erected on sacred mountains, inside caves, and beside waterholes; the saints whose “homes” are inside the Catholic temples; musical instruments used in their ceremonies; all the various deities in the Zinacanteco pantheon, etc.41

Finally, Stephen Houston sees the Mayan k’uh (usually translated as “god,” or, in its adjectival

form, k’uhul, as “holy,” “sacred,” “godly,” or “divine”) as equivalent to the Nahuatl teotl and the Mixtec ií. K’uhul may have been the Classic-period version of ch’ulel, as the two terms appear to be related; however, it was applied solely to gods and rulers rather than to people at large. Seeing k’uh as “a general, unitary principle and an animate force that alights and merges with the particular and the tangible,” which “adheres to particular objects, places, effigies, [and] even units of time,” Houston postulates that the claim of exclusivity made by rulers reflects the fact that they are the sole source of the texts and that there was “a wider distribution of souls and energies [in the world], along with ancestors of a non-royal sort.”42 Thus, there were numerous terms for animating forces across Mesoamerica. While these might indicate useful distinctions, they are all ultimately manifestations of a singular essence that connects all things within a unified reality. As is indicated by the last item in Vogt’s list of things that possess ch’ulel, the same can be said about the gods. While named divinities abounded among the Maya, Aztecs, and other Mesoamerican peoples, the precise nature of these deities and their relation to the underlying unity of the universe has proven difficult to pin down. They often have clearly defined associations—with elements of the natural world, for example, or with places or even with specific human individuals—and are portrayed in texts and images as anthropomorphic beings possessing distinctive traits, personalities, and even life histories.43 Yet there is abundant evidence and a growing consensus that these gods did not reflect a pantheon like those of Classical antiquity. The significant overlaps between individual deities and their attributes suggest that they were multiple and mutable rather than fixed and singular beings.44 According to Nancy Farriss, “the complex Mesoamerican iconography and the multiplicity of gods have tended to obscure the fact that these were refractions or manifestations of sacred power emanating from a single source.”45 Eva Hunt asserts that God was both the one and the many. Thus the deities were but his multiple personifications, his partial unfoldings into perceptible Perforated Vessels |

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experience. The partition of this experience into discrete units such as god A or god B is an artifice of iconography and analysis, not part of the core conception of divinity. Since the divine reality was multiple, fluid, encompassing of the whole, its aspects were changing images, dynamic, never frozen, but constantly being recreated, redefined. This fluidity . . . was expressed in the dynamic, ever-changing aspects of the multiple “deities” that embodied it.46

Pointing to the nature of Aztec metaphysics as process-based (organized around a constant state of becoming rather than being as a stable construct), Maffie has proposed that individually named “gods” reflect “specific processes and constellations of processes for ritual, practical, pedagogical, and artistic purposes.” The divine essence of the universe’s coming-into-being (teotl ) was everywhere, while certain aspects of this process—what we recognize as deities—were set apart, named, and made into the focus of ritual activity. There was no divide between the sacred and the profane, but rather a distinction between “that which is well-rooted in teotl and thus more fully disclosing of teotl ” and that which is less so.47 The deities can therefore be understood as instances of heightened power or import deriving from saturation of and integration with teotl: that is, as a revealing of the divine force that already exists everywhere. Moreover, the gods were made manifest as teixiptlameh, a Nahuatl word often translated as “images” or “impersonators.” These objects and people are better thought of as foci to assist in making present specific named aspects of teotl (that is, deities).48 This did not involve external spiritual beings occupying previously inert or mundane material supports, for there is ultimately no distinction between matter and spirit within the unity of teotl. Rather the divine was brought forth (disclosed) through a proper configuration of material elements and ritual activities that were themselves constituent of its presence.49 By correctly assembling the right elements, a teixiptla is not a container for a deity but is the god, which is merely a proper name for that pattern of teotl: “There is neither ontological nor constitutional distinction between representation 28

(signifier) and represented (signified). There is only teotl presenting itself.”50 Through their insightful examination of the ways in which the term baah (variously, “self,” “head,” and “image”) was used in the Classic-period inscriptions, Houston and Stuart have compellingly shown that the Maya also conceived of an identity between an image and its subject.51 Like the teixiptla of Central Mexico, Maya rulers regularly “impersonated” deities, rendering them as present through the proper configurations of costumes and ritual actions. In a more permanent manner, images carved into stone were also considered to be manifestations or extensions of the deities or individuals that they represented. As the preceding comments suggest, sacred or animating forces were not equally distributed or concentrated: they could build up, be focused, or become dissipated. Ritual activities in large measure sought to manipulate the flows of these forces, and claims to special access to them were central to the idea of legitimate rulership across Mesoamerica.52 The flows of life forces could be manipulated by people—deities were able to be manifested through proper ritual, for example. This suggests an asymmetry in the field of the animate in which “[humans] are the masters in these unequal dealings.”53 Although Houston sees this as reflecting an incompatibility of Maya conceptions of the animate world with relational models such as Ingold’s, I disagree. Mesoamerican ritual operated in a manner that was logically consistent with an understanding of the world as a unified and living field of relations that were subject to manipulation and intervention, reifying this ontology into ideologies that bolstered the special status claimed by a small coterie of elites. Animism does not attribute life in equal measure to all entities across its field of relations. The existence of death in an animate world is a dramatic reminder of this. The living and the dead are not deemed to possess equivalent degrees of animacy, but this does not mean that the dead lack it entirely. All evidence suggests that the active roles played by people in Mesoamerican society did not end with their deaths: death initiated their transitioning into a different state of being, as ancestors.54 Certainly the specific beliefs and rituals associated with death and the dead varied across time and space

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in Mesoamerica, but a continued interaction with ancestors as persistent beings appears to have been widespread. Various categories of animating life force such as tonalli or ch’ulel dissipated from the body after death: some, being impersonal, returned to merge with the rest of the animate world, while others, constituting the soul or personality of the individual, survived into an afterlife.55 Spirit leaving matter was a slow process rather than an immediate extinguishing: even when disarticulated, the material remains—bones, ashes—retained animacy.56 Bones were “conduits for communication with the souls of the dead” and were engaged through the close proximity of domestic burials and the practice of tomb reentry.57 Because of the ultimately monadic nature of the universe, the realms of the dead cannot be considered utterly separated from the land of the living. The correlative link between the underworld and the terrestrial world is illustrated in the Popol Vuh by the maize that the Hero Twins plant in the center of their grandmother’s house before they leave to challenge the Lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld. The plant dries up and sprouts according to the changing conditions of the twins during the course of their journey, providing a tangible link between these parallel realms of existence.58 Indeed, this connection between realms could be thought to exist even prior to death. For the Tzeltal Maya, the human soul, in the form of ch’ulel, has a dual existence both within and outside the body. A portion resides in a person’s heart and is the seat of memory, feelings, and personality, while another part is found in one of four mountains called ch’iibal, which contain fields of maize and fruit trees as well as abundant wealth. That is, a portion of the souls of living people already always exists in the “flowery mountain” of the paradisical otherworld.59 For the Aztecs, death is the inamic of life, meaning that the two form an inseparable pair belonging to a mutually constitutive and agonistic process that is part of the continual unfolding of teotl. As Maffie writes, Life and death are mutually arising, dependent, complementary, and completing as well as mutually competitive forces interwoven

with one another within a single cyclical process. Life struggles against death, yet at the same time arises from death. Death struggles against life, yet at the same time arises from life. Life is constantly flowing into death; death, constantly flowing into life. The two are continually creating, nurturing, competing, and overcoming one another. Life completes death, and death completes life. Only together do they constitute completeness and wholeness. What’s more, neither life nor death is wholly positive or negative. Life feeds off the death of other living things, and so has a negative aspect. Death makes life possible and so has a positive aspect. Each needs the other. Life contains within itself the fatal, disordering germ of death while death contains within itself the fertile, ordering seed of life.

Since life and death are not mutually exclusive it follows that life and death are neither contraries nor contradictories. Nothing is characterized exclusively by life; nothing exclusively by death. Nothing is wholly alive; nothing wholly dead. Rather, everything is characterized by both life and death (in one degree or another). Everything consists of an ineliminable mixture of life and death forces and is therefore ineliminably ambiguous.60 As the inseparable partner of life, death is not the extinction of being but an aspect of it. Within the unity of an animate cosmos, the dead continue to be present and to have the potential to exert influence upon the living. This same dynamic can be seen in relation to objects that were understood as animate, which could be said to have lived and died—or to have been activated and deactivated—but even in their deaths unambiguously retained a degree of potency. Portions of Maya stelae that were broken following conquests or regime changes were later incorporated into architecture, often with indications of ritual activities that demonstrate the continued attribution of life force—ch’ulel—to these fragments.61 Just as the bones of a deceased ancestor gave an identity to the architectural platform within which they were placed, these broken pieces of stone, once enlivened with the living image (baah) of the ruler, contributed to Perforated Vessels |

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the enlivening of the landscape.62 Leslie Cecil and Timothy Pugh have recently proposed that a similar transference of vital force was at play in the Lake Petén region during the Postclassic period. Chemical analysis of incense burners from that time indicates that pieces of old, Classic-period vessels were crushed and incorporated into the clay from which they were made, presumably to imbue them with the ch’ulel still retained by the broken relics of the past.63 To summarize, while descriptively divisible, Mesoamerican cosmology was ultimately unitary and correlative. Everything that exists is interconnected: seemingly independent things or beings are manifestations of a single underlying and connective force that is always in motion and in a state of becoming. Matter and spirit are mutually expressive; just as matter can be thought of as being infused with life and energy, spirit gains expression through modifications to and proper configurations of matter. Like abstract concepts, deities—specific named configurations of the divine energy-inmotion that constitutes the world—could be discussed as if they had a real independent existence, but, like holes, they were only manifested in relation to a material host. This was the world in which Mesoamerican people existed and interacted, transformed their environment and participated in social and economic activities, created artworks and engaged in ritual behavior, waged war and mourned the dead. Let us now return to the ritually perforated plates that were included in some Classic Maya burials to more concretely explore some of the implications of this worldview in the interpretation of material culture.

PLATES IN TOMBS, IMAGES ON PLATES

Burials are configurations of material things— human remains, offerings, and grave goods— located within the physical and social landscape. These arrangements are not random but exhibit consistencies that likely reflect specific beliefs and ideologies as they are manifested through social practices. Burial symbolism has often been discussed in terms of its relation to conceptions of 30

the afterlife and the transition of the deceased into death.64 Moreover, ancestors played an important role in the ongoing negotiation of social, economic, or political considerations—for example, by establishing lineal claims to agricultural plots or other aspects of the cultivated landscape. The physical presence of their remains was a material token of otherwise intangible legacies.65 Burials were therefore sites of contact between the living and the dead. Contact could be literal and direct, through tomb reentry rituals and interaction with material remains, for example, but also through proximity, with most Mesoamerican burials placed directly beneath the floors of houses occupied by their descendants, or, in the case of rulers, in funerary temples that were among the largest and most prominent architectural features of Classic Maya cities. That is to say, human remains continued to possess and exude a potency that was manipulated to make ideological claims.66 As discussed above, the same appears to have been true for stone and ceramic objects, which were treated as though they possessed ch’ulel even after they were broken. As noted, I am by no means convinced that the holes drilled through dishes like the Resurrection Plate were conceived as killing them—in the sense of releasing the ch’ulel that was animating them. But even if that element played a part in such perforations, they would have retained an affective presence through the mere fact of their ongoing if transformed existence. Furthermore, they were incorporated within the broader configuration of the tomb in a consistent manner, almost always having been inverted and placed either atop or beneath the head. This points to a relatively stable and uniform funerary role. Some authors have characterized this as a path of communication between the living and the dead comparable to the architectonic psychoducts known from several Maya tombs. Because of the placement of the plate beneath the head in a not insignificant number of burials, especially at the site of Tikal, this suggestion is less than compelling. The iconography of the Resurrection Plate and its identification of the Maize God as a world tree supports a different interpretation, in which these dishes were perforated in order to “establish the axis mundi within the burial space and to recall the

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split turtle carapace from which the Maize God emerges during his resurrection.”67 All this raises some questions. First, if the holes drilled in these plates created an axis mundi, how was this accomplished? The answer to this, I would argue, lies in the nature of the burial as a type of ub’aahila’n (the Maya equivalent of a teixiptla): a constructed image that, through the proper arrangement of materials, forms, and ritual behaviors, manifested or revealed a process of the unfolding of the cosmos.68 Just as living people impersonated (manifested) deities through their costumes and actions, in a burial the deceased was situated among an arrangement of objects and attributes that enacted their transformation into an ancestor who was actively embedded within the community. As McLeod has argued, through the process of embeddedness, the individual components of the baah of a deity—including the human impersonator—retained their discrete identities while together forming the divine image-presence.69 Second is the question of the images on the plates. I have argued that the image on the Resurrection Plate anticipated the eventual perforation made through the vessel and therefore helps us to understand the role that it played within the context of a burial. Several further instances of perforated plates (many of which are discussed at various points later in this book) show a direct congruence between image and hole, often in ways that suggest similar associations. Even when the holes do not precisely align with the imagery, other perforated plates were decorated with scenes or motifs that would seem thematically related to these ideas, most notably images related to the Maize God.70 However, many Classic Maya vessels were perforated in such a way that there is no congruence—or obvious thematic relationship—between the hole and the iconography. The corpus includes dishes with zoomorphic imagery, with depictions of nobles seated on thrones, and with images of human and supernatural scribes and sculptors, among other motifs. Indeed, many perforated vessels—particularly those from nonelite burials—lack any decoration at all, indicating that this ritual practice pertained to the dish regardless of what, if anything, was painted on it (fig. 2.8).

Figure 2.8. Perforated plain Nanzal Red plate from Naachtun, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, Late Classic Maya, ca. 600–800 CE, unslipped ceramic. An abandoned and recovered looted vessel designated Op 9A-02. Photograph courtesy of Debra Walker.

Yet this does not negate the possibility that the imagery found on perforated vessels was considered meaningful. In her extensive analysis of perforated funerary ceramics, Martínez de Velasco Cortina has noted that certain subjects commonly found on Maya ceramics—including ball-game and hunting scenes, Chahk, God L, and the Moon Goddess, among others—are absent from perforated vessels.71 She proposes that certain dishes were deliberately chosen for this treatment because of their iconography, which she sees as being related to fertility, creation, and rebirth. I agree that the iconography of perforated vessels can help us better understand the associations that this practice held. Pushing this idea further, I have also suggested that some artists intentionally decorated vessels with imagery that prefigured this ritual act. With iconography that points to the materiality of the ceramic vessel itself, the Resurrection Plate in particular could be understood as explicating an underlying metaphorical rationale for the Classic Maya practice of ritually piercing funerary ceramics, which holds true no matter what imagery (if any) was painted on the surface of any single dish. This, however, leads to something of a paradox: just as it is recognized as responding directly Perforated Vessels |

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to—and helping to explain—the material and contextual situatedness in which it is embedded, the image shows itself to be superfluous to the meanings that it helps to clarify. The plate as the living earth, the hole as portal between realms through which the deceased can pass, and the analogy of the burial of the dead with the planting of the maize seed all held equally for the ancient Maya even when the vessel used to enact this ritual was entirely undecorated, as was often the case. Such a distinction between visual representation and material presentation has sometimes been characterized in terms of the contrast between metaphor and metonym. In a discussion of Inca stones, for example, Carolyn Dean has distinguished metaphorical representation based on visual similitude from metonymical presentation based on material identity, showing that the substance of objects had primacy over their surface appearance in terms of their meaningfulness within an indigenous value system.72 As with the so-called echo stones at Machu Picchu, visual resemblance was sometimes sought, but even here the stoniness that they shared with the distant mountain peaks they were in dialogue with was at the heart of their perceived agency. Thus, while visual metaphor and material metonymy are often combined to reinforce notions of presence, Dean argues that the structural distinction between these types of meaning remains notable. While I agree that these terms provide a useful means for understanding the ways in which images and objects signified in ancient American contexts, I would argue that the opposition between them is more complex than the contrast between visual representation and material presentation discussed above. As outlined by the literary theorist Roman Jakobson, metaphors are expressions of similarity and tied to substitution, while metonyms are expressions of contiguity and tied to combination.73 The divergent ways in which they produce meaning is therefore analogous with the contrast between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language: metaphors are mutually exchangeable terms or ideas that can replace one another just as words with similar connotations can be substituted for one another in a sentence, while metonyms are 32

Figure 2.9. Diagram showing the relationship of metaphor and metonymy to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language.

constructed through adjacency just as meaning is created grammatically through the combination of sequential terms in a phrase (fig. 2.9). Thus, the Mesoamerican conflation between the life cycles of humans and maize forms an extended metaphor in that one is substitutable for the other. Yet the materialization of this metaphor in the form of dishes that were first used to serve food and later as grave goods arranges the individual terms of this metaphor into a sequence that is both temporally and spatially metonymical. In both cases, the dish is situated within broader sociospatial contexts that include adjacency with other materials (corn tamales or a human skull), while the separate moments are meaningful in relation to one another due to their sequential combination. While Dean emphasizes the contrast between visual representation as metaphor and material substance as metonym, images can also function metonymically, such as when they are placed into conversation with their surrounding contexts. As is suggested by their modern name, the representational quality of the Inca “echo stones” directly associates them with the mountains they resemble, with which they form a syntagm. A visual metaphor is made between the turtle and the Resurrection Plate through the similarity of their form, but the association of the turtle with the moist earth from which the vessel was made is one of adjacency—animal to habitat—and therefore of metonymy. Likewise, in light of the agricultural theme

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a

Figure 2.10. Photograph (a) and drawing (b) of an incised bone from the tomb of Jasaw Chan K’awiil (Burial 116) at Tikal, Guatemala, Late Classic Maya, late 7th–early 8th century CE. (a) Photograph by Linda Schele (77028) © David Schele; courtesy of Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org); (b) drawing by Janice Robertson.

of the image, the depiction of the burning torch beneath the crevice from which the Maize God emerges could relate both to the use of fire to clear garden plots and to the belief that seeds required heat to germinate (fig. 2.2). Yet, in relation to the plate on which it is painted, it also metonymically suggests the fire that has hardened the clay, a heat that is present in the transformed material of all ceramic vessels. Like the iconography on the Resurrection Plate, images can be metonymical by pointing to what can be found within: a sign outside a shop indicates what type of goods are sold inside, for example, but it is only meaningful in this way due to its adjacency.74 Any image can therefore

be understood as a metonym insofar as it points to meanings that inhere in the material whose surface it decorates or the social or spatial contexts in which it is encountered. If, as I have argued, the image on the Resurrection Plate is superfluous to the material meaning of the object, what does this say about its status? First, and perhaps most obviously, paintings like the one on this dish were certainly valued for their aesthetic properties, as well as being markers of culture and status. Classic Maya artists, who were themselves often members of noble lineages, occasionally signed their work. The distinctive styles developed at different localities suggest that, even Perforated Vessels |

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in the absence of explicit signatures, works were probably strongly associated with individual artists or workshops.75 Finely decorated ceramics often include inscriptions that proclaim them to be the personal property of rulers; their inclusion in burials far from the places where they were made suggests that these objects were exchanged or gifted.76 The paintings on their surfaces undoubtedly played an important part in producing the value associated with these objects and their accompanying role in establishing social relations between elites. The importance of the Classic Maya artist-scribe is reflected in the numerous depictions of such figures on ceramic vessels as well as on a unique object: a bone implement found in the burial of Jasaw Chan K’awiil of Tikal incised with a depiction of a hand wielding a paintbrush emerging from the jaws of a supernatural serpent (fig. 2.10). Esther Pasztory has interpreted this image as relating to Maya notions of the divine inspiration of the artist-scribe.77 Serpent jaws such as these were frequently depicted in Maya art as portals through which supernatural agents—including deities and ancestors—were summoned (for example, fig. 2.5). They functioned as points of access between otherwise distinct realms of existence or moments in time. The image on the bone from Tikal—which is often identified as awl-like, but which I propose could have been used as a pointer to aid in the reading of codices—suggests that the creative act of the artist-scribe was conceived as an ongoing event. It could become manifest in the present of the viewer as a living image and text that is constantly renewed and coming into being. Stephen Houston has compellingly argued that Maya writing—composed of hieroglyphs that frequently take the form of the heads and bodies of humans, animals, and supernatural beings—was understood to be animate.78 Depictions of codices on several Maya vessels feature supernatural faces emerging from their pages, showing them to be animate entities containing living images and texts rather than inert repositories of knowledge. The faces emerging from the books in figure 2.11a have been identified by David Stuart as Ux Yop Hu’n, the god of paper, while the vase in figure 2.11b features serpent maws opening across the hinges 34

of the pages, marking the books as conduits for supernatural agency.79 Thus, even as paintings in paper books and on ceramic vessels were clearly recognized and valued as the work of skilled individual artists, I would argue that they were also understood as emergent and ongoing phenomena, as ever-renewed expressions of the animate matter whose surfaces they decorated. Seen through the lens of metonymy, this apparent contradiction melts away. Like the sign in front of a shop or a proper name, images are both additive constructions subject to the contingencies and slippages of socially constructed systems of meaning and inextricably bound by their conceptual or physical contiguity with existing material contexts. Moreover, because the syntagmatic axis invokes both spatial and temporal adjacencies, these contexts need not be understood as fixed. The same name is typically used to refer to an individual when she is a newborn infant, a toddler, an adolescent, a mature adult, and an old woman. Likewise, inseparably linked to the identity of the object it adorns, a metonymical image like that on the Resurrection Plate relates equally to each successive material transformation and contextual transition that object undergoes and therefore has the possibility of folding these distinct temporal moments together into the material fabric of the tangible object. The substitutional metaphor equating the agricultural cycle with human life, death, and rebirth expressed by the image on the Resurrection Plate depended on metonymical associations of this imagery within the broader contexts in which the dish operated and the further syntagmatic relationship between multiple moments of contextualization: its use as a serving vessel and its subsequent placement within a grave. It is therefore not simply a matter of the combination of the representational, metaphorical imagery with the presentational, metonymical materiality of the plate. Rather, the imagery itself has metonymical properties in the way it self-referentially draws attention to material and social valences of the ceramic vessel on which it was painted. Indeed, metonymy’s value as an analytical concept lies precisely in the fact that, even as it points to the importance of an object’s material qualities, it insists that these always be understood

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as relational and culturally embedded rather than essential and fixed. Like the Resurrection Plate, other Mesoamerican objects were decorated in ways that metonymically pointed to their associative contexts. A by no means exhaustive list of examples includes the sculptural roof combs and stucco decorations on Maya funerary temples that served to identify the rulers buried within them; sculptural decorations on other buildings that were related to their functions or occupants; and images incised on Olmec and Maya greenstone celts related to the complex of associations that these symbolically laden objects held. The relationship between images and the objects and architectonic spaces they embellish appears to have been an important consideration: it suggests something of a Mesoamerican ontology of images as part of the animate field of relations in which artists, materials, and viewers all participated. The more superfluous an image—the more it points to

meanings pertaining to the material and social contexts of its mediality that would be understood to hold true even in its absence—the more it presents itself as an outward expression of an existing character or condition. Even less obviously superfluous images would never have been understood as separable from the actuality of their presentation, which therefore must always have played a part in their meaning. I believe that even as they were aesthetically valued and recognized as the creations of skilled artists, Mesoamerican images were also understood to arise in part from the living materiality of their situatedness. That is, part of the talent of the artist was to give form to and elaborate on the qualities and associations of the living material and the spatial and social settings in which it would be encountered. The image on the Resurrection Plate appears to support Scherer’s assertion that the perforation of Maya dishes in funerary contexts established the

Figure 2.11. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya codex-style vessels showing the animacy of books and writing, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, slipped ceramic. Photographs courtesy of Justin Kerr. (a) K760, height 14.9 cm (5 7/8 in.); (b) K1565, height 16.7 cm (6 7/12 in.).

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burial as an axis mundi. However, I do not believe that this captures the full picture. This multivalent image draws further connections between the hole that was drilled through it and a number of other ritual practices, thereby identifying it as a progenerative space of vitality and emergence. This proposal builds off an idea that was first put forward a generation ago by Clemency Coggins, who in a

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passing remark suggested that the practice of perforating ceramics relates to a number of concepts and practices, including rebirth, auto-sacrifice, and fire drilling.80 Each of the subsequent chapters explores a different aspect of the drilled hole as it was evoked by the image on the Resurrection Plate, beginning with the breaking open of the living earth to release the bounty it contains.

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CHAPTER 3

Cavities in the Living Earth

I

argue in the previous chapter that the turtle shell depicted on the Resurrection Plate was intentionally conflated with the dish through its formal and material properties and that both carapace and plate are metonyms for the earth itself. Both the original, deliberate alignment of the painted shell with the contours of the dish and the later decision to drill the hole through the convex underside of the plate suggest a sustained cognizance of the extended metaphor linking the representation of a zoomorphic entity with the materiality of the surface upon which it was painted and connecting both of these with a broader conception of the life-giving earth. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Classic Maya dedicatory inscriptions on many shallow dishes—including the one on the Resurrection Plate—refer to such vessels with the term lak, which can mean both “dish” and, more generally, “clay object.”1 Thus, even as its image makes these connections explicit, it is ultimately superfluous; the form and materiality of this plate and others like it were what ultimately mattered in the funerary context. Yet, in its superfluity, the image remains vital and important. Following the typical format of the Primary Standard Sequence, the inscription on the Resurrection Plate appears to be pointing to itself: the painting (including both writing and image) on the plate’s surface (yich) is being dedicated or instantiated, not the vessel as such.2 The assertion of possession is a performative act of writing in which the presence of the inscription

is co-extensive with its meaning: this is the plate of Titomaj K’awiil because it was painted with an inscription that states as much.3 The surface is the point of articulation between the material and the social. The inscription recognizes this by the dual possessive: the surface belongs to the plate (“its surface”), while the plate belongs to a person (“his plate”). The painting (both image and text) thus establishes itself as part of the identity of the dish, inseparable both from the object on whose surface it was made and from the object’s status as a possession belonging to a specific individual. As argued in the previous chapter, decorative elaborations of the superficies of objects therefore mediated between—and were expressive of—their inner qualities and their social valences. Just as the paintings on their surfaces identify themselves as possessions of vessels, the holes drilled through Classic Maya dishes should also be understood as being possessed by their host objects. By piercing through them, they extend these vessels’ surfaces into and through the material of their bodies. The image penetrated by the hole on the Resurrection Plate serves to prefigure the later ritual intervention and gloss it with mythological meaning. In this way, the real hole is shown to be a manifestation of a primordial aperture, the breaking open of the earth to free the first maize from within it. The bejeweled Maize God arises from the opening in the turtle shell–earth; representing the ripening plant, he is identified as Juun Ixim Ayiin (One Maize Crocodile), the manifestation 37

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of a world tree. He is flanked by a pair of named deities who assist the Maize God in his emergence from the earth. To the left is God S, whose body is marked with characteristic black spots; he holds his hand out in a delicate gesture, the exact nature of which has been obliterated by wear on the surface of the plate. To the right is God CH, whose body is marked with patches of jaguar pelage; he pours water from a round jar that he tips toward the cleft in the shell. These deities, which are also sometimes referred to as the Headband Gods, have commonly been identified as the Classic-period versions of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, whose exploits are described in the Popol Vuh.4 As such, the nominal inscriptions that accompany these figures are often read as Juun Ajaw and Yax Bahlam (or B’alun/B’olon), respectively. However, both the relationship between the Headband Gods and

the Hero Twins and the readings of their name glyphs have been questioned.5 While the Classicperiod Maize God, Juun Ixim, is usually identified with Hun Hunahpu, the father of the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh, the scene illustrated on the Resurrection Plate has no direct parallel in the later text. Moreover, it is the twins themselves who are most closely associated with maize in the Popol Vuh, both through the ear of corn that they plant in their grandmother’s house, which withers and sprouts in accordance with their condition in the underworld, and through the grinding of their bones on a metate following their death.6 Thus, while Classic Maya images of creation myths and the story recounted in the Popol Vuh almost a millennium later have some clear parallels, there are important differences as well. Like the plant’s roots within the earth, the

Figure 3.1. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya polychrome vessels showing the Maize God emerging from a turtle carapace, ca. 600–850 CE, slipped ceramic. Photographs courtesy of Justin Kerr. (a) K4681, height 16 cm (6 3/10 in.); (b) K4998, height 25.5 cm (10 in.).

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lower half of the Maize God’s body remains within the carapace. This is given further metaphorical meaning by the depiction of a skull at the base of the shell, which marks the inside of the earth as the underworld (Xibalba), the realm of the dead.7 The skull, with foliate scrolls curling off of it, doubles as the seed from which the Maize God has sprouted. Seeds and bones, both of which are hard and dry, were conflated in Mesoamerican thought as the seemingly inert but still vital remainders of once-living plants or bodies. When placed within the ground, both were understood to bring forth new life.8 Moreover, this flowering skull motif possibly refers to a specific mythological location: Five-Flower Place. This is the name of the setting

given on another vessel depicting the Maize God’s birth from a flowering skull as well as in inscriptions related to creation mythology as a site of the emergence of maize.9 The underworld is a watery realm, which is indicated in several ways in this image. The figure that emerges from the right back side of the turtle shell is an anthropomorphic witz’ (literally “water spray” or “splash of water”), the personification of the waters of the earth. 10 The gray smudges completely surrounding the turtle represent these earthly waters more directly. The Headband Gods are shown to be standing waist-deep in them, implying that they, like the Maize God, remain partly within the underworld.

Figure 3.2. Late Classic Maya plates showing the Maize God emerging from a flowering skull, ca. 600–850 CE, El Petén, Guatemala, slipped ceramic. (a) Codex-style plate, diameter 30.3 cm (1115/16 in.), © Musée du quai Branly— Jacques Chirac (70.2001.36.1), Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY; (b) polychrome plate, diameter 37.5 cm (14¾ in.), Princeton University Art Museum 1997-465; (c) codex-style plate, diameter 38.1 cm (15 in.), photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K7185).

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a

b

c

d

e

f

Figure 3.3. Late Classic Maya plates with imagery representing the place of the Maize God’s rebirth, ca. 600–850 CE. (a) Codex-style plate, diameter 34.5 cm (134/7 in.), photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5072); (b) codex-style plate, diameter 30 cm (118/10 in.), photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5073); (c) polychrome plate, diameter 42 cm (16½ in.), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 2010.70.5, Gift of Gail and J. Alec Merriam; (d) polychrome plate, diameter 31.8 cm (12½ in.), Chrysler Museum 83.640; (e) polychrome plate, diameter 36.2 cm (14¼ in.), Chrysler Museum 84.355; (f ) polychrome plate, diameter 39.4 cm (15½ in.), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 2008.73.4, Gift of Gail and J. Alec Merriam.

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Finally, a motif composed of stacked lobes found below the turtle signifies liquid in Maya pictorial convention. A waterlily grows from the place where this motif meets the underside of the turtle, with its still unopened blossom to the left and a lily pad to the right. The center of this element is marked by a checkerboard of wavy diagonal lines with dots in the rhomboid spaces formed by their crossing. This same pattern covers the upper surface of the turtle shell and is commonly found marking other reptilian animals in art from across Mesoamerica. While the pattern pictorially relates to the scutes of the turtle shell (or the scales of snakes or the armor-like skin of crocodilians), its common use on waterlilies suggests a more general connotation of the fertile earth.11 Maya elites are often shown wearing beaded net skirts made from jade, the very epitome of preciousness, closely associated with both vegetal abundance and the nourishing waters of the earth (for example, figs. 3.19 and 3.31). As part of costumes that conflated human rulers with the Maize God, these skirts were likely understood as marking the lower half of the body as being inside of the watered and cultivated earth, exactly as the Maize God is depicted on the Resurrection Plate.12 Although the Resurrection Plate presents the most accomplished and iconographically complex example, other Classic Maya vessels were decorated with imagery related to the rebirth of the Maize God. Slight variations among these images serve to enlarge our understanding of the various elements of this Classic Maya myth. As in the Resurrection Plate, he is often shown emerging from a split turtle carapace (figs. 3.1, 3.11, 3.14). Other examples show him rising from a skull (figs. 3.2, 3.13, 4.8a). Vegetal elements, particularly waterlilies, are often seen sprouting from or otherwise associated with these skulls, thereby explicitly conflating bones with seeds and likely identifying the location of the rebirth event as the mythological Five-Flower Place.13 Sometimes this flowering skull is shown alone, without the Maize God, whose presence is merely implied due to the association of the site with his birth (fig. 3.3a–e).14 In one intriguing example, a turtle shell with a hole in its middle is shown with a bird flying over it, but with no sign of the Maize God, attendant deities, or even the

a

b Figure 3.4. Late Classic Maya codex-style vessels depicting fireflies, ca. 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico. (a) Diameter 22.2 cm (8¾ in.), Kislak Collection, Library of Congress, PC 0013, photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K2226); (b) height 12.1 cm (4¾ in.), Princeton University Art Museum y1986-98 (K1003), photograph courtesy PUAM.

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Figure 3.5. Late Classic Maya polychrome plate depicting the Maize God in a fish. Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K3713).

Figure 3.6. Late Classic Maya codex-style plate depicting the dressing of the Maize God, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, diameter 28 cm (11 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1988.1251, photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure 3.7. Late Classic Maya polychrome plate depicting a dancing Maize God or impersonator, ca. 600–850 CE, region of Tikal, El Petén, Guatemala, diameter 34.5 cm (13 4/ 7 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5076).

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Figure 3.8. Late Classic Maya polychrome plates depicting the disembodied head of the Maize God, ca. 600–850 CE. (a) Diameter 37 cm (14 9/16 in.), photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1260); (b) diameter 30.5 cm (12 in.), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 2008.73.1, Gift of Gail and J. Alec Merriam.

turtle’s head (fig. 3.3f ).15 Thus, a single reduced motif could stand in for the entire narrative. In addition to conveying a complete narrative scene through the shorthand of a single iconographic element, Classic Maya artists could also use imagery to add layers of complexity through elaboration or substitution. We see the combination of a skull with a waterlily blossom and pad on the Resurrection Plate (in this case beneath the skull rather than sprouting from it), which appears to associate this scene with other depictions of flowering skulls as the site of the Maize God’s rebirth, Five-Flower Place. However, the Resurrection Plate is unique among these examples in that the skull is that of a firefly.16 It is infixed with the sign for “darkness” (ak’bal ) where its eyes should be; an eyeball— commonly used to denote stars and other glinting spots of light in Mesoamerican iconography—is attached to its forehead; and a torch rises from the top of its head. These features—often substituting a cigar for the torch—are regularly found in other Classic Maya depictions of this insect (fig. 3.4).17 Figure 3.4a, a bowl in the shape of a half-gourd, is especially noteworthy: the inscription around its rim associates it with Titomaj K’awiil, the nobleman to whom the Resurrection Plate belonged.18 The firefly on its base has a smoking cigar in its mouth

rather than a torch on its head, in place of which we see a sprouting maize plant. The inner rim of this gourd-shaped vessel is painted with a sky band from which four star signs hang, suggesting that the inverted bowl was meant to be understood as the dome of the night sky.19 In his analysis of fireflies in Maya art, text, and myth, Luis Lopes notes the close relationship between these phosphorescent insects and stars.20 However, as Matthew Looper has noted, they also appear to be related to holes in the earth: fireflies emerge from the nostrils of a personified mountain on Zoomorph P from Quiriguá.21 While the precise relationship of a firefly skull to the rebirth of the Maize God remains uncertain, the presence of this element on the Resurrection Plate possibly serves to identify this dark setting as being both telluric and celestial, simultaneously the underworld and the night sky. It will be noted that many of the examples of plates with imagery related to the Maize God’s rebirth were eventually perforated and that on some of them the hole aligns quite closely with the point of emergence, much as it does on the Resurrection Plate (fig. 3.3f; Robicsek and Hales 1981:155). Thus, a similar conflation would seem to have suggested itself to each of these artists. Even when there is no congruence between the hole and the image, plates Cavities in the Living Earth

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with iconography related to the broader mythological cycle of the Maize God were among the most commonly chosen for perforation at the time of burial.22 These include images of the Maize God inside a fish, likely relating to his journey through the watery underworld (fig. 3.5);23 his being dressed by maidens (fig. 3.6); solitary depictions of dancing Maize Gods or Maize God impersonators (figs. 3.7, 3.12, 4.10, 5.2a–c); and his disembodied yet still living head as the harvested cob (fig. 3.8).24 Depictions of any one moment from the story of the Maize God would automatically have evoked an awareness of the entire narrative, which was intimately bound up with indigenous experiences of temporality, in terms of both the annual agricultural cycle and the human lifespan. Time was often collapsed within a single image, with events that must be understood to have been successive or durational shown as occurring simultaneously—the splitting of the shell and the emergence of the Maize God from within, for example. Moreover, images implicate and point to preceding or subsequent events within the wider narrative. This is a common aspect of Maya images, and Mary Miller and Stephen Houston have referred to it by a musical term, resonance.25 The ability of a single image to collapse the time of the narrative within itself parallels the conflation or overlay of multiple temporalities that is often suggested in elite Maya art and texts: the mythological time of creation is recognized both as having happened in the distant past and as ongoing in the present, with rulers claiming access to these events as part of their source of legitimacy. Placed within the burial of Titomaj K’awiil (or, if he had gifted this object to a peer, within the burial of another Late Classic Maya noble), the perforation in the Resurrection Plate would have marked the tomb as Five-Flower Place, the site of the first emergence of the Maize God, paving the way for the ruler’s apotheosis as an ancestor. This should be understood as a true manifestation of mythological creation in the present, much as living rulers truly manifested the divine through their costumed performances. These ideas are explored in greater detail later, after first considering the act of opening that the perforating of the dish instantiates. 44

OPENING THE EARTH: AGRICULTURE AND THE ROLE OF LIGHTNING

Maize cannot emerge from the earth without outside assistance in breaking the soil open. Farmers must dig into the ground to create a space for the seed (fig. 3.9). Describing the work of the farmer, Bernardino de Sahagún says: He sets the landmarks, the separate landmarks; he sets the boundaries, the separate boundaries; he stirs the soil anew during the summer; he works [the soil] during the summer; he takes up the stones; he digs furrows; he makes holes; he plants, hills, waters, sprinkles; he broadcasts seed; he sows beans, provides holes for them—punches holes for them, fills in the holes.26

Planting was done in much the same way across Mesoamerica, by first establishing the boundaries of the garden plot and clearing it and then using sticks to make holes in the earth into which seeds were deposited.27 However, while these actions were commonplace, they were not understood to be mundane. They were a crucial interface between human society and the natural world, and much ritual thought and activity was associated with them. The setting of landmarks and boundaries was not a mere practical demarcation but a reference to the establishment of the garden plot as a cosmogram through rituals marking its center and the four cardinal directions—an apparently pan-Mesoamerican practice that is especially well documented in the Maya area.28 Note that the farmer in the illustration accompanying the above-cited passage from the Florentine Codex digs his stick into the corner of the image frame, drawing attention to the quadrilateral boundary of both the image and the garden plot. Much as the Resurrection Plate depicts the Maize God as a world tree, each garden was conceptually anchored on a central point, an axis mundi linking the underworld where the seed germinates with the heavens from which the nurturing rain falls. Because the earth was understood to be a living being, the act of penetrating it was potentially dangerous. In preparation for planting, offerings were made both to the seeds and to the earth.29

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Figure 3.10. Almanac with auguries for the tilling of the soil and sowing of crops, facsimile of page 12 of the Late Postclassic Codex Vaticanus B, central Mexico, ca. 1250– 1520 CE, 15.5 × 13.5 cm (6 1/ 10 × 5 3/ 10 in.). Originally published in Ehrle, Loubat, and Paso y Troncoso 1896.

Figure 3.9. Good and bad farmers: illustration from book X, chapter 12 of Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (the Florentine Codex), 1575–1577, ink and pigment on paper, page size approx. 31 × 21.2 cm (12 1/5 × 8 1/3 in.), Florence, Laurentian Library, MS Med. Palat. 220, f. 30v. By permission of MiBACT. Any further reproduction by any means is prohibited.

J. Eric S. Thompson recorded a K’ekchi’ Maya prayer said before sowing, alerting the earth of what was to come: Ay Holy God, my father, my grandmother, Holy Itzam, Sr. Kahwa, Sr. Coha, my grandfather, my father. I kneel before God Lord Cross. I have come to the heavens, Holy earth. I am going to strike your face. I wish to sow tomorrow. My grandfather, my grandmother, Ay God, Holy Kuh, I am penetrating your shadow, I am penetrating your shadow, Sr. Kesab.30

The act of penetrating the earth also appears to have had sexual connotations. Thompson recorded conflicting observances with regard to sex, which

he attributed to varying K’ekchi’ or Chol origins.31 Some farmers would abstain from sex for a period around the planting season, while others engaged in ritual intercourse in the four corners of the house on the night before seed was sown in the garden. In either case, sexual activity was directly implicated in the rituals associated with planting. James Taggart has identified carnal associations with planting among contemporary Nahuas, as has John Monaghan among the Mixtecs.32 For the Aztecs, the third month—the start of the rainy season and the time for sowing seed—was known as Tozoztontli (Small Perforation). The following month, which was associated with the cleansing of recently delivered mothers, was Huey Tozoztli (Great Perforation).33 Such beliefs emphasize the animacy of the fecund earth and the extended metaphor linking human and agricultural progenerativity. But digging into the earth could also be associated with death and burial. A unique almanac on page 12 of the Codex Vaticanus B, from Late Postclassic Central Mexico, appears to provide auguries related to the tilling of the soil and the sowing of crops (fig. 3.10). It takes the form of a grouped list of twenty-six days spread across three cells containing images of deities stabbing the earth, which is represented by the open maw of the earth monster, Tlaltecuhtli.34 The three mantic frames Cavities in the Living Earth

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Figure 3.11. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya polychrome vessel depicting the Maize God emerging from a turtle shell, ca. 600–700 CE, El Petén, Guatemala, height 22.1 cm (8 11/16 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1988.1178, photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K731).

Figure 3.12. Late Classic Maya polychrome plate depicting the Maize God or an impersonator, excavated from the burial chamber in Structure A-1, Uaxactun, El Petén, Guatemala, ca. 600–850 CE, diameter 35.2 cm (13 6/7 in.). Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala, inv. 532; painting by Louise Baker, courtesy of the Penn Museum, image number 165116.

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Figure 3.13. Late Classic Maya codexstyle dish (the Cosmic Plate) depicting a mythological scene of creation, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, diameter 31 cm (12 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1609).

are each presided over by a deity associated with a different realm: an anthropomorphic eagle representing the sky, the maize deity Centeotl representing the earth, and the death god Mictlantecuhtli representing the underworld.35 The inclusion of mortuary bundles in the upper frame, in which the presiding deity is the death god, suggests a direct conflation between the planting of crops and the burial of the dead, both of which involve opening a hole in the earth. Holes made in dishes placed in Classic Maya burials were intended to evoke the holes made to accommodate the planting of seeds and thereby link the interment of the dead with an agricultural process. This is implied by the imagery on the Resurrection Plate and other related vessels. Based on the scattering gesture that Juun Ixim is making, Karen Bassie-Sweet has proposed that in the scene in fig. 3.11 the Maize God should be understood as sowing seed into rather than sprouting from the carapace.36 But this is nowhere made more explicit than in a burial from the site of Uaxactun. In one of the handful of documented examples in which a perforated dish was not inverted in direct proximity to the body of the deceased, a plate painted with a dancing Maize God or impersonator was grouped

with several other vessels in a corner of a two-vault tomb containing multiple bodies (fig. 3.12).37 A greenstone bead was placed directly on the hole in this dish, duplicating the action of sowing a seed.38 Greenstone was closely identified with agricultural fecundity, and the hard, shiny beads made of this material were almost certainly equated with maize kernels.39 This arrangement of elements within the tomb directly links the hole in the vessel with the agricultural processes that produce the food that was served on plates like this, the metaphorical association of this cycle with the pattern of human life and death, and the underlying myths that gave meaning to these interrelated concerns. In numerous creation myths from across Mesoamerica, the breaking of the earth was necessary to free the agricultural bounty trapped within it. Specifically, lightning plays a key role in the liberation of corn from the earth; the relative consistency and wide distribution of this narrative detail suggest its substantial antiquity.40 According to the Legend of the Suns from the Codex Chimalpopoca (a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Nahuatl manuscript that recorded versions of pre-Conquest Aztec mythology and history), for example, the god Quetzalcoatl obtained the first maize seeds from Cavities in the Living Earth

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Tonacatepetl (Sustenance Mountain) by using lightning to split it open.41 Contemporary Maya and Huastec myths similarly relate how maize was obtained from a mountain split by lightning.42 The bolt of lightning in these origin stories combines elements necessary for successful crop cultivation— the labor of breaking the earth to make it hospitable for the seed and the nurturing rains that arrive in the same storm clouds. The use of lightning to free the bounty of the earth was certainly a feature of the Classic Maya Maize God cycle, as demonstrated on vessels with imagery related to the Resurrection Plate. In several images pertaining to this theme the rocky earth/ turtle shell is shown or implied to have been broken by an external force—lightning wielded by Chahk, the Storm God—that allowed the vegetation to burst forth.43 The rollout scene in figure 3.11 shows Juun Ixim stepping out of the cleft in a small turtle shell, carrying a bag of maize and a gourd of water. Behind him are three deities in small canoes whose presence is implied to have assisted with his emergence. In the first canoe, Chahk raises a hand stone, presumably used to strike open the carapace. A second storm deity, Yopaat, plays a turtle-shell drum in the canoe behind him, likely evoking the booming sound of thunder.44 The Maize God’s birth from Five-Flower Place is relegated to the edge of the composition on the dish in figure 3.13, while the center features an elaborate depiction of Chahk rising from “Black Hole Place, Black Water Place,” a mythological location likely alluding both to the underground waters within cenotes and caves that give rise to clouds and to the black thunderclouds themselves. 45 He sprouts further supernatural beings from his foliate head. The axe that he raises in his right hand manifests the sudden and destructive force of lightning, which is implied to have split the skull from which the Maize God emerges. A plate illustrated in The Maya Book of the Dead, which is otherwise very similar to the Resurrection Plate, shows the god K’awiil—who, among other associations, is thought to personify Chahk’s lightning axe—emerging from the back of the turtle shell rather than the witz’ deity, therefore implying that the opening in the carapace that freed the Maize God was made by a bolt of lightning.46 This is made most explicit on a Late Classic 48

Maya vessel where the Maize God emerges from a split turtle carapace flanked by storm deities rather than by Gods S and CH (fig. 3.14).47 Chahk raises his serpent-handled lightning axe above his head on the right, and the head of K’awiil emerges from the turtle shell at his feet. Collapsing the narrative, the fissure from which the personified maize plant emerges can thus be understood as the center point—and direct result of—the circuit between these electric nodes and therefore to have resulted from Chahk bringing down his axe. On the opposite side of this vessel, the Headband Gods face each other across a waterlily skull. The imagery on the Resurrection Plate would therefore seem to conflate these two scenes, which are here shown to be distinct moments or separate elements of the narrative.48 Other perforated vessels feature imagery related to Chahk and K’awiil without direct reference to the Maize God. The interior of one shallow codexstyle bowl is painted with a bust of K’awiil, who is identifiable by the smoking axe-head embedded into his elongated forehead (fig. 3.15). Other representations of K’awiil depict him with a torch or cigar—or sometimes only smoke itself—coming out of his forehead, but the object shown on this plate is infixed with a “shiner” motif, marking it as a polished stone rather than wood or tobacco.49 The large scrolls convey the energy exuded by the divine axe and the fires that can result from a lightning strike. Yet, as with the smoke from a torch or cigar, the smoke emitted by this axe was likely meant to evoke the dark storm clouds that bring lightning: the god is carried by the curls of smoke that partially encircle him, sweeping around the perimeter of the base of the vessel with thin tendrils rising up the side. On another example, the outside of a shallow bowl that has a hole drilled through its bottom features a narrative scene similar to those found on a number of related codex-style vessels (fig. 3.16).50 Here Chahk and a skeletal death god flank a witz (an animate mountain) on which is laid a human infant with a jaguar paw and tail. Chahk raises his axe as if to strike the stony mountain to free the infant from the grasp of the death god. Although the narrative depicted on this Classic Maya vessel remains unknown, it appears to share aspects with the creation story recounted in the Central Mexican Codex Chimalpopoca.

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Figure 3.14. Rollout drawing of a Late Classic Maya polychrome vessel depicting a scene of the Maize God’s emergence from a turtle shell, ca. 600–850 CE. Painting by Diane Griffiths Peck, photo courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Figure 3.15. Late Classic Maya codex-style bowl depicting K’awiil, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, diameter 13.5 cm (5 3/10 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K6708).

Figure 3.16. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya codex-style bowl depicting a mythological scene, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, height 8.5 cm (3 1/3 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1644).

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The antiquity of this mythical trope is attested by its relative consistency and wide distribution across Mesoamerica as well as by the Late Formative–period Maya wall painting at San Bartolo, whose imagery directly prefigures the image on the Resurrection Plate. In a detail from the west wall, we see the Maize God seated within the body of a massive turtle representing the earth (fig. 3.17). He is flanked by storm deities who will assist in his emergence; the basket on his back contains the harvest that he will bring to the world. Here the turtle’s body is in the form of a quatrefoil, a shape that was regularly used in Mesoamerica to invoke the four-part directionality of the terrestrial realm. It is also notable that the upper lobe of the turtle’s quatrefoil body was destroyed by being hacked with an axe at the time that the structure containing the paintings was subsumed within an expansion of the adjacent platform.51 Given that much of the mural program remained relatively undamaged during the decommissioning of this building, this specific and targeted iconoclastic act must be understood as being related to the image and therefore directly paralleling the perforating of the Resurrection Plate.

More generally, lightning and maize were conflated in the form of greenstone celts, which were potent objects of ritual authority both for the Olmecs of the Formative period and for the Classic Maya precisely because they combined these two complementary aspects (fig. 3.18). The color and shine of greenstone were associated with preciousness, fecundity, vegetal abundance, and the waters of the earth. In their size, shape, and coloration, celts made from this material resembled ripe ears of maize, the principal staple crop that by extension references the entirety of agriculture.52 As effigy axe-heads, they were almost certainly intended to evoke the cultivation of the landscape, for axes were used to clear garden plots in the Lowlands of Mesoamerica. Yet they were no ordinary axes and as such were likely further associated with the progenerative violence of the Storm God’s lightning axe. This understanding of the symbolism of greenstone celts has in large part been informed by the iconography occasionally incised into their surfaces. A number of Olmec examples are incised with imagery that directly equates these objects—whose size and color are nearly identical to an ear of corn—to sprouting maize plant (fig. 3.18a). In other examples, vegetation sprouts from a cleft in a figure’s

Figure 3.17. Illustration of the portion of the mural depicting the Maize God inside a quatrefoil turtle, from the west wall of Room 1, San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala, Late Formative period, ca. 100 BCE, height approx. 80 cm (31½ in.). San Bartolo Mural, illustration by Heather Hurst, © 2005.

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head. The consistent emphasis both on the cleft and on the vegetation that emerges from it appears to associate celts both with the plant and with the splitting of the earth to allow for its emergence. Olmec and Maya elites incorporated greenstone celts into their costumes, as evidenced by the suspension holes drilled in them and seen in images such as the one incised on the Early Classic Maya celt known as the Leiden Plaque (fig. 3.18b). When worn, these objects served both as a display of material wealth and to establish rulers as living embodiments of the Maize God, thereby emphasizing their role as sustainers of their communities. Moreover, the violence of the axe strike that clears the garden plot and frees the plant from the ground is often emphasized in such ruler images, such as with the presence of a prone captive beneath the ruler’s feet on the Leiden Plaque. One of the most common Maya terms for conquest is ch’ak (to chop), the hieroglyph of which depicts an axe. Through this dual symbolism, the rulers’ militaristic and agricultural roles were shown to be inseparably bound together. Warfare was both granted divine sanction and presented as inseparably bound to the bringing forth of the earth’s bounty.

b

Figure 3.18. Examples of incised greenstone celts: (a) Middle Formative–period Olmec celts from Offering 1942-C, Mound A-2, La Venta, Tabasco, Mexico, ca. 900–400 BCE, drawings by Linda Schele (detail of SD4513) © David Schele. Courtesy of Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org). (b) Early Classic Maya greenstone celt (the Leiden Plaque), 320 CE, region of Tikal, El Petén, Guatemala, height 21.7 cm (8 9/16 in.), photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K2909A).

Cavities in the Living Earth

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INSIDE THE LIVING EARTH: CAVES IN THE MESOAMERICAN WORLDVIEW

Figure 3.19. Stela H from Copan, Honduras, 731 CE, tufa, height 356 cm (140 1/7 in.). Photograph by Linda Schele (57033) © David Schele. Courtesy of Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org).

Some scholars have suggested that stelae— upright stone monuments most commonly erected to celebrate period endings—could have been conceived by the Maya and their Olmec predecessors as giant axes penetrating the earth (fig. 3.19).53 This interpretation is not necessarily incompatible with the more widely disseminated view that stelae presented Maya rulers as the (Maize God) world tree, linking the three levels of the cosmos and centering the four directions of the world.54 Thus, as with greenstone celts, stelae were likely understood to be manifestations of both the divine lightning that broke open the earth and the maize plant as an axis mundi linking the earth with the celestial realm and the underworld. We now turn to that underworld: the inside of the earth as a living space of origins and emergence as well as water and abundance. 52

As shown in the preceding section, the breaking open of the earth’s surface played an important role in liberating the bounty from within, in terms of both the regularly occurring labors of farming and the creation mythology and underlying worldview that gave meaning to these activities. Yet, even prior to this action of release, the earth held nourishing waters and the precious kernels of new life—seeds and the bones of ancestors— within itself. Caverns, cenotes, and other natural tellurian openings were places of egress and ingress. They were sites of emergence in mythological creation narratives as well as the continuing source of rain clouds. As liminal spaces that were considered to be spots where the potent forces of creation could be accessed, they were also frequently entered for ritual purposes. These roles and associations, which are largely consistent across Mesoamerica and date back to at least the Early Formative period, are well documented through the material remains recovered within caves, through their regular appearances in the iconographic and epigraphic records, and through ethnographic accounts. As access points to the inside of the earth, caves were shown to be sources of both maize and the rain clouds that watered the fields. Monument 1 from the Middle Formative Central Mexican site of Chalcatzingo is one of the best known and earliest images showing the interrelation between caves and rainmaking in Mesoamerican thought (fig. 3.20).55 This relief carved on the side of a large boulder depicts an elaborately adorned figure seated in a half-quatrefoil with an oval eye containing crossed bands at its top and foliage growing from its corners.56 This space can be read as a zoomorphic cave, the maw of the living earth. Scrolls pour out from its entrance, representing the clouds that were seen to form around mountains and were understood to be their exhalations. This is made abundantly clear by the three clouds depicted at the top of the scene, from which raindrops fall amid further plants and concentric circles likely representing greenstone jewels as tokens of fecundity and preciousness. Whether the figure in the cave

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represents a living ruler, an ancestor, or a deity, it seems clear that s/he is participating in the calling forth of the rain from within the earth. A zoomorphic cave also features prominently on the north wall of San Bartolo Structure 1, part of the same mural program in which the Maize God was depicted inside a quatrefoil turtle carapace. With its stalactite fang, kan-cross eye, and scrolls of moist air emerging as its breath, this cave is characterized as the monstrous mouth of the living earth (fig. 3.21). Standing before it, the Maize God is shown receiving the bounty of the earth in the form of a gourd and a dish of tamales, from Sustenance Mountain (or “Flower Mountain,” as it is often referred to among Mayanists), which can be identified by the abundant flora and fauna that teem across its surface.57 To the left of this scene, an axe-wielding Storm God has split open a gourd identical to the one presented to the Maize God, from which five infants arranged in a quincunx pattern have been born. This shows the necessity of puncturing in creation narratives, but here it is related to the emergence of the first humans rather than maize. These two are intimately linked, however, both in their first appearance and in their very substance, as the Popol Vuh relates: [The creator deities] sought and discovered what was needed for human flesh. It was only a short while before the sun, moon, and stars were to appear above the Makers and Modelers. Split Place, Bitter Water Place is the name: the yellow corn, white corn came from there. And these were the names of the animals who brought the food: fox, coyote, parrot, crow. There were four animals who brought the news of the ears of yellow corn and white corn. They were coming from over there at Split Place, they showed the way to the split. And this was when they found the staple foods. And these were the ingredients for the flesh of the human work, the human design, and the water was for the blood. It became human blood, and corn was also used by the Bearer, Begetter.58

Figure 3.20. Monument 1, Chalcatzingo, Morelos, Mexico, Middle Formative period, ca. 900–500 BCE, approx. 2.7 × 3.2 m (106 × 126 in.). Photograph by David C. Grove, 1978.

The discovery of maize within “Split Place”— which is subsequently described as being filled with rich foods and edible plants and can therefore be identified as a version of Sustenance Mountain— is the necessary prerequisite for the (fourth and successful) creation of humans, as this food is turned into their flesh. Across Mesoamerica, in addition to being linked to the emergence of maize and water, caves play an important role in the narratives of the origins of people. Most groups in Postclassic Central Mexico traced their beginnings to a place known as Chicomoztoc (Seven Caves). Depictions of this mythological place are found in several pictorial codices, including the Codex Boturini, the Codex Mexicanus, and the Codex Azcatitlan, but the most detailed depiction is from the Historia ToltecaChichimeca (fig. 3.22). In these accounts, seven tribes depart from Chicomoztoc, each emerging from a separate cavern with its own leader and patron deity. As a mythological place, Seven Caves thus represents the ultimate unity of people who see themselves as distinct. In both its name and the role it plays in origin narratives, the designation “Seven Caves” finds parallels among both the Maya and the Mixtecs. In the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh, the place where the newly created people go to Cavities in the Living Earth

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Figure 3.21. Illustration of the mural depicting a cave as the mouth of the animate earth and the birth of people from a gourd, from the north wall of Room 1, San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala, Late Formative period, ca. 100 BCE, height approx. 80 cm (31½ in.). San Bartolo Mural, illustration by Heather Hurst, © 2003.

await the first dawning is named Tulan Zuyua and given the epithet “Seven Caves, Seven Canyons.”59 On page 14 of the pre-Hispanic Mixtec historical manuscript known as the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, the lineage-founding couple Lord Five Flower and Lady Three Flint emerge from the central of seven openings in a corner made of layered bands of sky and stone (fig. 3.23).60 It is notable that in each of these accounts people existed prior to entering and then emerging from Seven Caves. Yet it is only through this stopover that they gain their identity as distinct lineages. Creation in Mesoamerica is never accomplished ex nihilo but always involves the transformation of something that came before.61 The episode at Seven Caves can therefore be understood as a moment of creation in that the people who emerge from this place do so with newly established social identities. It is no accident that this event is securely place-bound: to have a sociopolitical identity in Mesoamerica is to be from a place. Even as they all reside within a single cave, each of the seven groups 54

is associated with a separate cavern; thus, the seven tribes are constituted as distinct from each other yet unified as Chichimecs. As Dana Leibsohn has noted with regard to the depiction of Chicomoztoc in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, this shared Chichimec identity is emphasized through the sharp contrast that is drawn between them and their Toltec interlocutors through differences in clothing, skin color, and language.62 All mentions of Seven Caves in Mesoamerican creation narratives belong to the Postclassic period. It is likely that this specific mythological location was part of a broadly shared cultural ideology that arose in the wake of the hegemonic power claimed by Teotihuacan and the Classic Maya kingdoms.63 However, abundant evidence indicates the importance of caves for these and other earlier cultures, particularly with regard to the conception of place and group identity as sociopolitically significant categories. The association of caves with sacred authority dates back to the earliest period of Mesoamerican civilization. Olmec thrones from San Lorenzo and

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La Venta feature depictions of figures seated within niches, sometimes holding infants. Some of the niches have plants growing at the corners much like the cave opening depicted at Chalcatzingo. All this suggests a foundation of legitimized rulership based on claims of access to the sources of (human and vegetal) fertility within the earth and/or a direct line of descent traced back to an initial moment of ancestral human emergence.64 Artificial caves were important elements of the ritual landscape of the great Central Mexican metropolis Teotihuacan. The human-made cave cut into the bedrock beneath the Pyramid of the Sun— the largest structure at the site—has its mouth beneath the base of the stairway and ends in a fourlobed chamber at the end of a tunnel around 100 m in length. Two additional chambers branch off from the middle of the tunnel, bringing the total to six; counting the tunnel itself as a seventh chamber, some scholars have seen this as an early manifestation of Chicomoztoc.65 Putting aside the exact number, the general idea of a single cave with multiple chambers seems to be clearly indicated here. Because it was looted in antiquity, the exact function of this tunnel is still debated. However, a recently discovered human-made cave beneath

the Ciudadela is very similar to the one under the Pyramid of the Sun and may help shed light on its role. The Ciudadela tunnel is more than twice as deep but also runs a little over 100 m long, has two side chambers off the main tunnel, and ends in multiple chambers (three instead of four).66 Abundant offerings have been preserved within this tunnel because it was sealed with tons of rubble and dirt around the time when the Feathered Serpent Pyramid was completed above it. The available data show that the tunnel preexisted the later pyramid, that it was not a burial chamber, and that it was filled with offerings strongly correlated with ideas of the fecundity of the earth: shells, greenstone beads and figures, seeds of many varieties, and Storm God effigy vessels. Thus, in both cases these are clear ritual spaces connected to the underworld that were directly invoked by the construction of pyramids—artificial mountains—atop the east-west axes that they describe. The offerings within the human-made cave beneath the Ciudadela appear to mark this location as a source of water and vegetal abundance, associations that are echoed in the relief imagery covering the Feathered Serpent Pyramid that was later built atop it (fig. 3.24a). The undulating Cavities in the Living Earth

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Figure 3.22. Depiction of Chicomoztoc from the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, ink and pigment on paper, page approx. 30 × 22 cm (11 4/5 × 8 2/3 in.). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Mexicain MS 46–58, fol. 16r, photo courtesy BnF.

serpents covered with iridescent blue-green quetzal feathers evoke the flowing waters of the earth, and the shells that fill the spaces around their bodies mark this as a watery location. Moreover, the tenoned serpent heads that project from the façade are framed by flower petals. This image of a verdant, foliage-covered mountain from which water flows is reflected in a mural painting from the Tepantitla compound at the site, where life both emerges from and teems around what is undoubtedly a mountain of sustenance (fig. 3.24b). Yet it is intriguing to note that both the painting and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid itself—in conjunction with both the cave that it was built atop and the ability to flood the enclosure that surrounds it—form the image of an altepetl, a Nahuatl term that literally means “water-mountain” and was used in Postclassic Central Mexico to refer to a distinct polity.67 The consistent juxtaposition of symbolic water and mountain features in urban design strongly indicates that the ideas conveyed by the term altepetl were widespread across Mesoamerica, going back to the Formative period. Usually translated as “city-state,” altepetl refers to the ethnic identity of the people from a particular place as well as the place itself while linking both to creative forces in

Figure 3.23. Depiction of the emergence of Lord Five Flower and Lady Three Flint from the “Seven Caves” place, page 14 of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. Photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

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a

Figure 3.24. Architectural decoration from Teotihuacan suggesting the concept of a “water-mountain,” Classic period, ca. 200–550 CE. (a) Polychrome reconstruction of the façade of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropología. INAH-CANON. (b) Detail of mural from the Tepantitla compound. Photograph courtesy of Claudia Brittenham.

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the landscape.68 Kenneth Hirth has formulated this in political terms, as the territory and its inhabitants governed by a ruler.69 But the legitimacy of this authority ultimately derived from local or tribal patron deities, the divine personifications of the interrelationship between the people and the land.70 Across numerous Mayan languages, the word ch’en refers to a cave but also to an opening, hole, perforation, grave, ditch, well, canyon, valley, and cavity, among other terms.71 In addition to ethnographic accounts attesting to the continued importance of caves in modern Maya religious thought and practice, archaeologists have found abundant evidence within caves that demonstrates their ceremonial uses in pre-Hispanic times: the modification of natural features and addition of architectural elements, the presence of human remains, intentionally broken and intact pottery, and images and texts painted on the walls, among other material traces.72 David Stuart’s proposed decipherment of the logograph for ch’en suggests that many polities were closely associated with specific caves, long recognized as ritually important places in the Maya landscape.73 Examining the distribution of ch’en place names in the inscriptions, Alexandre Tokovinine has noted that they tend to occur at sites governed by autochthonous rulers, whereas rulers whose lineages originated at other sites do not mention the local ch’en in their titles.74 As with the later Seven Caves narratives of the Postclassic period, caves appear to have been closely bound up with group identity as it related to specific polities and to stories of emergence from within the natural landscape. Supporting the proposition that caves were important not only ritually but also politically, some authors have argued that they were desecrated as part of militaristic activity.75 It was the very creative potency of caves—as places providing access to the underworld realm to communicate with deities and ancestors and to retrieve the life-giving forces from within the earth as well as the legitimizing power that rulers attributed to this access—that marked them both as the hearts of communities and as targets to be attacked. The proposed relationship of caves to the identity of Maya polities can be rather oblique: it is 58

sometimes unclear exactly what a specific mention of ch’en refers to in the inscriptions. But this is not the case at Chichen Itza, a site whose identity was so thoroughly associated with its Great Cenote that it incorporates the term into its name, which can be translated as “At the Mouth of the Well of the Itza.” Unlike the usually modest or difficult-to-access entrances of caves in the southern Maya Lowlands, the cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula often have large circular openings at the surface. With a diameter of approximately 60 m the Great Cenote at Chichen was among the most notable. It is located around 300 m north of the site’s most impressive ceremonial architectural space, the North Terrace, to which it is connected by a paved road (sacbe). Objects dredged from the mud at the bottom of this water-filled hole, including carved greenstone plaques originating from Maya sites hundreds of miles to the south and gold objects from even more distant Central America, demonstrate the ritual importance of this cenote and suggest that it was a site of pilgrimage.76 While the Great Cenote is the most prominent cave at Chichen, it is not the only one. The radial pyramid variously known as the Castillo or the Temple of K’uk’ulkan is located midway between the Great Cenote and the Xtoloc Cenote, the two largest sinkholes at the site. Furthermore, recent studies utilizing three-dimensional electrical resistivity tomography have indicated that it was built directly above another, subterranean cenote.77 This placement seems too perfect to be coincidental, and the location of the underground cave may have been known to the builders through connections between it and other cenotes at the site. Indeed, the building variously known as the Osario or Tomb of the High Priest—a second radial pyramid at Chichen Itza with descending serpent balustrades, very similar in form to the Castillo—was built atop a natural cavern that was connected to the summit by a vertical shaft.78 This arrangement—an artificial mountain associated with feathered serpent imagery situated on top of an underground chamber associated with the watery underworld— directly parallels that found in the Ciudadela at Teotihuacan and strongly suggests a shared archetype of placemaking that cut across both time and space in Mesoamerica.

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ARCHITECTURAL VOIDS AS RITUALLY ACTIVE SPACES

As the preceding discussion demonstrates, the vital potency of natural caves was also appropriated as part of the built environment, including the construction of artificial caves such as the ones beneath the Pyramid of the Sun and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at Teotihuacan. The former of these was long thought to have been a modified natural lava tube and has only recently come to be recognized as being human-made, which shows how direct and literal a representation it is.79 There is good evidence, however, that many other architectural spaces were considered to be artificial caves.80 Although constructed, these spaces were marked through various means as existing within the living earth. They were therefore established as places to conduct rituals related to telluric fecundity and to access the gods and ancestors who resided in the underworld. This is probably the most explicit at the Central Mexican site of Malinalco, where an Aztec temple was carved out of the living rock of a hill, thereby blurring the distinction between architecture and the natural landscape. The entryway to this circular shrine is framed with a low relief in the form of a monstrous fanged serpent maw, with the ground carved in the form of a bifurcated tongue. Noting that in Aztec manuscripts similar frontal serpent faces substitute for the term oztotl (cave) in the construction of rebus-like place names, Walter Krickeberg has persuasively argued that this temple was conceived as a cave.81 A U-shaped bench inside runs partway around the wall, with three relief animal pelts carved onto it: a jaguar directly opposite the entrance flanked by two eagles. A third eagle is located in the center of the floor. These animals are associated with the two main military orders of the Aztecs as well as with the sun in its diurnal and nocturnal aspect, and the shrine has often been interpreted as having martial and/or solar overtones.82 In an interpretation that combines these terrestrial and solar associations, Manuel AguilarMoreno sees the temple as a manifestation of Coatepec (Serpent Mountain), a mythological place of creation and the birthplace of the sun.83 Of special interest is the round hole in the floor just behind the eagle relief. José García Payón suggested

this was a cuauhxicalli (a vessel for the hearts of sacrificial victims), while Richard Townsend has interpreted it as a receptacle for offerings to the earth by members of the nobility, simultaneously reaffirming their claims to authority in this conquered province and tying their legitimacy to the earth itself as a source of emergence and renewal.84 Even when they were not hewn directly into the hillside, many ceremonial structures across Mesoamerica were adorned with iconography that metonymically identified them as manifestations of the living earth and their architectural interiors as artificial caves. For example, Río Bec, Chenes, and Puuc-style buildings in the Northern Maya region often feature reliefs around their doorways that characterize the entrances as the gaping maws of monstrous fanged faces exhaling scrolls of breath (fig. 3.25). As Elizabeth Benson put it, “One goes into the cosmologically defined world when one enters the doorway; coming out through the god mouth, one re-enacts the ancient emergence from the primordial cave, from the earth.”85 Beyond fanged-mouth entrances, Classic Maya buildings often had entire iconographic programs that presented them as manifestations of locations from creation mythology.86 In addition to a fanged deity mouth doorway and stacked witz (mountain) masks at its corners, Temple 22 at Copan has busts of the Maize God sprouting in niches along the façade. This structure therefore appears to have been conceived as a version of Flower Mountain, the source of all sustenance: to enter it is to claim access to primordial creative forces.87 The stony materiality of buildings and the dark interior spaces that they enclosed make them obvious analogues for caves within the earth and allow them to participate in the same complex of associations. Thus, even with façades lacking extensive iconographic elaboration, architecture had the potential for profound cosmological symbolism inherent in its form and structure. This is evident in the mythological scenes painted on two Classic Maya vessels, whose content is related to the imagery on the Resurrection Plate (fig. 3.26). In both of these scenes, the Storm God uses his lightning axe to split open the earth—here depicted as a stone building rather than a turtle carapace—to free the maize contained within. Cavities in the Living Earth

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Figure 3.25. The façade of Structure 2 at Chicanna (Campeche, Mexico), with its doorway in the form of a monstrous maw, Late Classic Maya, ca. 600–850 CE. Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K8447E).

There are clear differences between these two scenes of architectural opening. James Doyle has argued that figure 3.26b is unrelated to the myth of the Maize God’s emergence, but I believe them to be slightly different versions of the same story.88 Figure 3.26a only depicts Chahk once, while figure 3.26b shows a pair of storm deities, an arrangement similar to the one in figure 3.14. Both vessels feature a serpent from whose maw an old god emerges, similar to the old god often depicted emerging from the split turtle carapace (fig. 3.1a and Robicsek and Hales 1981:155). In a configuration commonly found in Classic Maya iconography, figure 3.26b shows this serpent originating from the leg of Chahk; figure 3.26a, however, shows a more reductive version in which the conflation between these supernatural elements is implied rather than directly depicted. Finally, Doyle identifies the two kneeling figures in 3.26b as warriors, but there is no indication of this beyond their submissive attitude before the three noble ladies seated on the throne. Rather, the figure to the left has the same 60

black markings around his eye and mouth as the seated captive figure on 3.26a. While there is much consensus that the standing figure on 3.26a represents the Maize God, maize (or perhaps cacao) is depicted as a sack full of hard kernels (or beans) behind the kneeling figures on 3.26b.89 The depiction of the earth as a building rather than a turtle shell on these vessels was likely no idle substitution. Michael Carrasco and Kerry Hull have noted that the same word—áak—is used in several Mayan languages to refer to both turtles and the vaulting of houses: crossbeams are referred to colloquially as the legs of the turtle.90 Like garden plots, all Maya houses—even when made of the most modest materials—were literal cosmograms. Their four corners and central hearth establish the four terrestrial directions and the fifth, central direction of the axis mundi.91 In buildings made of stone, the corbel vaulting carried even more explicit associations with these concepts. The closings of vaults, and especially the centrally positioned capstones, were closely associated with the portal between

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a

b Figure 3.26. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya codex-style vessels showing maize being freed from buildings split by the Storm God, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico. Photographs courtesy of Justin Kerr. (a) K2068, height 19 cm (7½ in.), Metropolitan Museum of Art 2014.632.1; (b) K2772, height 21.5 cm (8½ in.).

realms, with lightning, and by extension with the opening in the center of the turtle carapace earth from which the Maize God emerges. This is seen in both the epigraphy and iconography associated with these architectural features. The central capstones of numerous building vaults in the northern Maya region were painted. This alone would seem to show the importance of this location within the architectonic space. Yet the content of the imagery points to consistent

associations for this spot. Many of the capstones feature paintings of the deity K’awiil, who is often shown with bags or bowls of maize seeds or cacao beans (fig. 3.27).92 The Maize God is found on several other examples, either alone or joined by K’awiil, who, as mentioned above, is a manifestation of the Storm God’s lightning axe. The implication is lightning striking open the earth—here represented by the building itself—to bring forth the “abundance of food” from within it.93 Cavities in the Living Earth

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Figure 3.27. Late Classic Maya painted capstones from Dzibilnocac, Campeche, Mexico, ca. 600–850 CE. Drawings by Christian Prager, CC-BY-4.0. https:// classicmayan.kor .de.dariah.eu.

K’awiil was also a patron deity of rulership: this multivalency suggests that it was the role of the ruler to open the earth ritually to obtain its bounty. The cosmological meaning of these capstones is further elucidated by the dedicatory texts painted on some of them, which describe their being set into place as the “closing of the portal” of the building.94 By specifically identifying this central point in the ceiling vault as a “portal,” it is claimed as an axis mundi, a passageway from the underworld inside the earth to the terrestrial realm at its surface to the celestial realm. Both the bolt of lightning striking open the earth and the Maize God rising up as a world tree function in this manner and were therefore prime signifiers of legitimate authority for Maya rulers. As discussed above, greenstone celts folded both of these ideas into a single object. If the corbel-vaulted interiors of stone buildings were metaphorically conceived as caves within the turtle-earth, the open-air spaces of ball courts were also understood to be nodes connecting the layered realms of the cosmos. In the Popol Vuh, the ball court is the place where both the Hero Twins and their twin fathers before them attracted the attention of the Lords of the Underworld, with the noise of their playing echoing below.95 Although there are significant differences between the stories recorded in the Popol Vuh and Classic Maya mythology, 62

the ball game appears to have consistently played a structural role as a site for conflict between the denizens of the upper world and underworld.96 Ball courts—liminal spaces between realms closely associated with decapitation sacrifice—were also the site of agricultural renewal. Linda Schele and David Freidel have argued that ball courts were ritual architectural settings that manifested a potent space of creation, “that watery place in the heart of the mountain, a ‘black hole’ [ek’ waynal ] surface of the Underworld, a portal to the Otherworld, where corn was first discovered and shaped into human beings and the place from which all agricultural abundance subsequently flows.”97 Reliefs from the walls of the South Ball Court at El Tajín, Veracruz, and from the Great Ball Court at Chichen Itza explicitly associate these locations with both decapitation sacrifice and vegetal abundance. As Carrasco and Hull have noted, on one Classic Maya vessel the Maize God is shown emerging from a stepped cleft representing a ball court rather than from a turtle shell (fig. 3.28).98 The ball game itself was a mundane entertainment played by commoners and kings alike, a more formal ritual with weightier consequences including death, and a sport with cosmological implications across Mesoamerica.99 The story in the Popol Vuh captures this multifaceted character of the ball game,

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which was played for amusement on the surface of the earth but decided the fates of the lives of the participants when played in the underworld. Likewise, ball courts likely hosted a variety of activities beyond the ball game, including ones with militaristic associations, such as establishing a detente or alliance between different political factions and conducting sacrificial rituals.100 Based on archaeologically excavated deposits related to food preparation and service as well as the iconographic and mythological associations between ball courts and agricultural abundance already noted, John Fox has suggested that the athletic competitions on the courts were followed by competitive feasting, in which hosts established their positions of respect and authority through generous distributions of the bounties of their harvests.101 As a manifestation of the cleft in the mountain of sustenance, the ball court holds associations with both militarism and ritual violence (the strike of the lighting axe of the Storm God) on the one hand and vegetal productivity (the freeing of the maize from the earth) on the other. So far, architectural voids—the cleft formed by the ball court, the spaces within buildings—have been discussed as establishing nodes of connection between the vertical layers of the cosmos. But these spaces also include secondary holes that mediate between horizontal oppositions: ball-court rings and windows. Ball-court rings (stone circles with holes through their centers) project from high on each of the side walls at the midpoint of the playing field. They are not found on all ball courts—the wide variety of shapes and sizes of courts points to

the existence of different versions of the ball game. The rings are most closely associated with the Terminal Classic in the northern Maya Lowlands and the Postclassic in Central Mexico. Given the height of these rings and the small diameter of their holes, launching a dense rubber ball through them using only the hips must have been an extremely rare prospect. In his sixteenth-century Memoriales, Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinía states as much, claiming that witnesses to such a goal being scored would say that the one who made it “had to be a thief or adulterer, or would soon die.”102 According to the chronicler Diego Durán, however, as soon as this happened the game was declared over and the scorer was feted: The man who sent the ball through the stone ring was surrounded by all. They honored him, sang songs of praise to him, and joined him in dancing. He was given a very special reward of feathers or mantles and breech-cloths, something highly prized. But what he most prized was the honor involved: that was his great wealth. For he was honored as a man who had vanquished many and had won a battle.103

This exceedingly difficult act cannot have been the only way that a game could be won. Durán hints at other methods of scoring, such as landing the ball in one of the corners of the opposing team’s end. Ramzy Barrois points to the absence of wear marks from repeated missed shots around the rings, which would be expected if this was the primary

Figure 3.28. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya vessel incised with a scene of the Maize God’s emergence from a ball court, ca. 600–850 CE, height 16.5 cm (6½ in.). Los Angeles County Museum of Art M.2010.115.480, photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5226).

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goal of game play and scoring involved so many missed shots, arguing that the players must have been focused on different ways of scoring.104 Even if the rings were not the main focus of game play, they seem to have been central to the identity of the courts as such. Motolinía recounts the dedication of an Aztec ball court: Once completed and plastered, on a day of good omen, at midnight, the heart of the court was put in with certain witchcrafts, and set into the middle of the court and at the center of the inside walls about one and a half estados [over eight feet] high some stones a little smaller than millstones: they each have a tenon that went inside the wall, by which it was held: each one of these stones had at its center a hole through which the ball could barely fit. Having done this, in the morning they adorned two idols and placed them over the walls of the tlachco, at the center, the one facing the other, and then they sang there in front and recited their poems to them, which each god had its song or poems, and other messengers went to the temples to make known to the priests how they had built a ball court, and in it completed all the solemnities and ceremonies, that nothing remained except for a priest to go there to sanctify and bless it. Some of the priests came, black as those who come from hell, and took the ball and threw it four times against the court. The lords then made certain ceremonies and sacrifices, and others entered to play as a pastime.105

The rings were identified as the “heart of the court,” and deity images were placed above them. The line between them, drawn with ground-up herbs, marked the center point across which the two opposing teams faced off.106 Setting them into place completed the court’s construction and belonged to a series of dedication rituals to establish it as a proper ball court: a correctly apportioned setting for the game. Even in its mundane character as a “pastime,” the game held deep cosmological associations and was a manifestation of the struggle between inamic forces within the unified field of teotl.107 Even if they were not the primary targets in regular 64

game play due to practical considerations, the holes within the rings manifested themselves as the ultimate spaces of mediation between the competing teams. Like the hole in Naranjo Monument 1 (discussed in chapter 1), the holes in the rings were the focal points where opposing sources of agency confronted each other. Rather than being manifested as the sightlines of extramissive vision, the agency in this case took the form of the ball and its back-and-forth movement between the sides. As the ultimate spaces through which the conflict was negotiated, the passing of the ball through one of the rings definitively determined the direction of agency and therefore immediately ended the match. Windows were relatively rare in Mesoamerican architecture. The one notable exception is at the Classic Maya site of Palenque, where dozens of windows are found in the buildings of the site.108 These holes through walls created openings that linked the interior spaces of buildings and the exterior environment. They allowed each to become visible to the other: the presence of the occupants of the rooms would be observable from outside, while they could themselves look out over the landscape. Most of the windows at Palenque are T-shaped, taking the form of the glyph for the word ik’, meaning “wind” (fig. 3.29). The windows thus made an explicit statement of their mediating role in allowing breezes to enter but also allowing smoke to leave. The latter not only made visible the ritual activities of the occupants of the building but was also likely conceived as the exhalations of the living building. There is significant evidence that, in addition to connoting “wind,” ik’ was also used to indicate breath and, by extension, life.109 Maya elites often filed their upper incisors into a “T” shape, marking their mouths as conduits of breath and—in view of the prevalence of singular central incisors possessed by some Maya deities—possibly of divine authority as well.110 In relation to architecture, the monstrous maws that frame the doorways to Chenes-style buildings discussed above are in the form of inverted ik’ signs that exhale scrolls of breath (fig. 3.25). Buildings are shown to be alive through their iconography. This animacy is emphasized precisely at those points where their façades are pierced: doorways and windows.

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Figure 3.29. Late Classic Maya ik’-shaped window from the Palace at Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, 600–750 CE. Photograph courtesy of the Maya Portrait Project.

BURIALS, DEDICATORY CACHES, AND OFFERING VESSELS

We are now ready to return to the burial chamber, itself a vital cavity within the built environment that encompasses many of the ideas discussed here. Just as bones were conflated with seeds and rulers claimed to be manifestations of the Maize God, elite burials were tantamount to the planting of the deceased in the earth. Whether excavated into bedrock or dug into an existing architectural platform, the creation of the space of the tomb was a form of placemaking equivalent to the agricultural act of sowing seeds within a garden.111 The burial became the center point—the axis mundi—of a quadripartite cultivated landscape anchored by the remains of the deceased. Several Early Classic tombs from the site of Río Azul were painted with directional glyphs at the center of each of the four walls. The directions are linked with four manifestations of the

Storm God, Chahk, in Tombs 2 and 5 and are associated with witz (mountain) signs in Tomb 25.112 Chahk’s home was within mountain caves, and his lightning bolt freed the seeds from Sustenance Mountain. Some royal tombs are explicitly identified as “Five-Flower Place” in monumental inscriptions: the mythological location associated with the emergence of maize.113 As architectural spaces, burial chambers incorporated the portal symbolism of corbel vaulting and capstones. Indeed, the central capstones of at least two royal tomb vaults at Tikal were painted with large spots of red cinnabar to indicate the importance of this location.114 This further emphasized the connection established between realms while associating the interred human remains with the theme of the renewal of the earth’s agricultural abundance. Royal tombs were frequently and explicitly identified as primal sources for rain and agricultural fecundity. Their location within large architectural platforms showed them to be the sources of abundance within locally manifested mountains of creation. The walls of the tomb of Siyaj Chan K’awiil at Tikal were covered with painted “glyph-like symbols” that—with the exception of the dedicatory inscription on the north wall—do not form a legible statement but instead surround the deceased with signs of preciousness and mark the space as the interior of Flower Mountain.115 Such burial symbolism appears to have been present at least a millennium earlier, among the Formative-period Olmecs of the Gulf Coast. La Venta Monument 6 is a sandstone sarcophagus with relief carvings around its exterior that mark it as a crocodilian earth monster with a mouth in the form of a half-quatrefoil cave entrance and vegetation sprouting from its back (fig. 3.30).116 Placed on La Venta’s central axis, this burial was aligned with the site’s ceremonial architecture and grouped with further elite interments as well as massive offerings of buried greenstone. These features were undoubtedly an expression of the material wealth of the site and its rulers but also a manifestation of the creative abundance within the earth, given the associations of greenstone with the fecundity of both earthly waters and verdant foliage. Both the iconography on the sarcophagus and its placement directly over one of these massive offerings Cavities in the Living Earth

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establish a direct association between the individual entombed in Monument 6 and this telluric vitality. The sarcophagus lid of the seventh-century Maya ruler K’inich Janaab’ Pakal at the site of Palenque is perhaps the best-known example of imagery related to this theme (fig. 3.31). Pakal is depicted in a recumbent pose, resting atop a flowering skull within a monstrous skeletal maw representing a cavity within the stony earth. Linda Schele and Peter Mathews have identified this maw as belonging to Sak Bak Nakan (White Bone Snake), a supernatural zoomorphic portal that “connects the world of the living to the world of ancestors . . . through which Pakal passed in death.”117 This configuration is the same one found at the bottom of the plate in figure 3.13, where the Maize God is born from a skull within the monstrous maw of the earth. Indeed, on the sarcophagus lid Pakal is adorned as the Maize God, with an elongated cranium topped by a tassel of jeweled hair, a net skirt made of greenstone beads, and further greenstone adornments, including a prominent turtle pectoral that was undoubtedly intended to evoke the resurrection narrative.118 A cruciform world tree rises behind his body. Rising from the underworld, with a bicephalic serpent from which a pair of deities emerge draped over its branches and surmounted by a celestial bird, it is an axis mundi that centers the cosmos. Around the sides of the sarcophagus are images of ten of Pakal’s ancestors, who, mirroring his vegetal apotheosis as the Maize God–world tree, take the form of productive fruit trees.119 Pakal has a smoking axe head protruding from his forehead, showing him also to be a manifestation of K’awiil, the lightning bolt that splits open the earth to free the maize. Glyphic signs of preciousness— similar to those found in the painted tomb of Siyaj Chan K’awiil at Tikal—fill the empty spaces of the background to suggest a place of abundance. Placed deep within the Temple of the Inscriptions, Pakal’s burial chamber was depicted on the sarcophagus lid as the personified cave in which his body rests.120 It is shown to be a living space of perpetual renewal within an artificial mountain of sustenance that replicates the original landscape of creation. Mesoamerican burials were images of renewal— of the landscape, of the agricultural cycle. This also extended to the realm of the social. The deceased 66

Figure 3.30. Middle Formative Olmec Monument 6 from La Venta, Tabasco, Mexico, ca. 900–400 BCE. Drawing by Linda Schele (detail of SD-4528) © David Schele. Courtesy of Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org).

was transformed into an ancestor whose material presence in the landscape anchored the community of his descendants through subsequent generations. The presence of the bodies of the deceased within massive pyramidal shrines at the hearts of cities reinforced lineal claims to land and authority: the ancestors remained venerated and active agents reborn within the landscape itself. The exterior iconography that adorned many funerary pyramids suggests that these structures were understood to have embodied—or to have been animated by— the individuals whose remains were buried inside of them. Roof combs towering above the forest’s canopy, such as the one surmounting Temple I at Tikal, featured massive images of the deceased rulers to whom the buildings were dedicated. Structure 16 at Copan consists of successive shrines built atop the tomb of the dynastic founder, K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, which featured polychromed stucco façades with imagery that functioned as full-figured hieroglyphs of the name of this progenitor.121 A tripod vessel known as the Dazzler Vase was recovered from the antechamber to a tomb in the Margarita shrine, presumed to contain the body of the wife of Yax K’uk’ Mo’ (fig. 3.32).122 It depicts a talud-tablero style building identical to the earliest structure in the architectural sequence. A goggle-eyed figure peers out from the doorway and arms sprout from the sides of the building,

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Figure 3.32. Early Classic Maya stucco and painted tripod vessel, known as the Dazzler Vase, Copan, Honduras, early 5th century CE, height 20.5 cm (8 1/14 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K6785).

Figure 3.31. Late Classic Maya relief imagery carved onto the lid of the sarcophagus of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, late 7th century CE. Drawing by the author.

apparently conflating the deceased founder with the structure in which he was buried and showing this ancestor-shrine to be animate. Some major Late Classic funerary pyramids such as the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque and Temple I at Tikal were built in a single campaign and were conceived to look much as they appear today. But Structure 16 at Copan—like most ancestral shrines, especially those dating to earlier generations of rulers—was enlarged in multiple construction events that completely encased the previous building within a grander edifice. This was an act of architectural renewal that both reaffirmed the importance of the ancestors to the identity of the polity and demonstrated the continued fecundity of their remains.

The Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan is perhaps the best known example of a building embodying state power in Central Mexico. Located at the heart of both the city and the empire, this twin pyramid had shrines dedicated to both Tlaloc (the Storm God) and Huitzilopochtli, the patron deity of the Aztecs, with both solar and militaristic associations. At least seven successive versions of the Templo Mayor were built between the establishment of the city in 1325 and the Spanish Conquest in 1521, each one subsuming the prior within its bulk.123 Dedicatory caches were placed within the foundations at each stage of the building’s construction. Much like the bodies of Maya rulers within their funerary pyramids, these offerings sanctified the structure through the vital potency inherent in their material presence.124 Furthermore, they re-created a microcosmic image of abundance that marked the temple as an axis mundi located at the center of both the world and the empire. Notable both for their quantity and for the diversity of materials collected in them, these caches continued a tradition of dedicatory offerings within the built environment found Cavities in the Living Earth

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across Mesoamerica and dating back to the beginnings of civilization in the early Formative period. By far the largest known caches come from the Olmec site of La Venta, where the term “Massive Offering” has been applied to multiple buried stacks of greenstone slabs each totaling dozens of tons.125 Situated in relation to the axis of the site, these large pits were filled with substantial blocks of greenstone organized in regular layers and set in greenish-blue clay. Two offerings flanking the axis were capped with mosaic pavements of large greenstone blocks, forming what are often described as deity masks. A third added during a later period straddles the axis and was topped by a cruciform arrangement of greenstone celts, while a fourth, also on the main axis of the site, was situated beneath the crocodilian earth-monster sarcophagus mentioned earlier.126 Although these depositions were not made contemporaneously, they were all placed with relation to the surrounding architecture, which was developed over several generations and includes an enclosed sunken court and an adjacent mound containing multiple burials and other dedicatory offerings. Its construction included numerous thin layers of different types and colors of earth.127 The clear relationship between La Venta Massive Offering 2 and the sarcophagus placed directly above it demonstrates the difficulty in drawing an absolute categorical distinction between burials and caches. Both functioned to activate the built environment through their ongoing material presence as well as through the past ritual activities that they indexed. Recognizing the inclusion of full or partial human remains within contexts that appear to have been more dedicatory than funerary, Marshall Becker has proposed that the differentiation between caches and burials is artificial and that the two are better conceived as existing on a continuum of “earth offerings.”128 Although Becker’s discussion pertained to the Classic Maya, I believe that his conclusions could be applied more broadly to all Mesoamerican cultures. Thus, five burial/offering complexes have been found on the central axis of the Moon Pyramid at Teotihuacan and associated with the various enlargements it underwent.129 Several of the interred individuals appear to have been sacrificial victims, based on the positions of their hands crossed behind their 68

backs, suggesting that they were bound. Yet they were accompanied by rich adornments and offerings of greenstone, shell, obsidian, figural sculptures, and carnivorous animals, some of which were apparently placed into the burial chamber caged and alive.130 Burial 4 consisted of seventeen severed heads—skulls with associated vertebrae indicating that they were fleshed at the time of deposition— thrown haphazardly into a pit. Yet Burial 5 was located at the top of a structure rather than at the base, and the individuals were placed unbound in a seated position, all possibly indicating their status as respected elites.131 We can therefore see that several different types of dedicatory burials were made during the course of the multiple expansions of the Pyramid of the Moon. All of these involved human remains, but the different treatments of the bodies suggest that some were sacrificed enemy elites, some were less illustrious sacrificial victims, and some were respected nobles. All of these interments, however, served as offerings to the earth within the architectonic landscape. There is nothing contradictory in incorporating the bodies of unwilling victims into the built environment along with the bodies of willing nobles. As mentioned in relation to greenstone celts, there were close associations between warfare and agriculture in the Mesoamerican worldview. If the ritual sacrifice of captives taken in battle was a spectacle that reaffirmed the victory of the community over its enemies, it was also a means to express the relationship of interpolity violence to the consumptive logic of the natural world. The blood and flesh of the victims provided sustenance to the gods in exchange for the continued fecundity of the natural world. Archaeological remains like those at Teotihuacan attest to the deep history of such beliefs and practices. Such evidence, however, is dependent on the survival of osteological material. Sahagún’s account of the Aztec festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli provides evidence of offerings to the earth that consisted solely of human flesh, which would therefore be nearly impossible to discover archaeologically. This springtime festival was dedicated to Xipe Totec (Our Lord the Flayed One), a god of agricultural renewal.132 After captives taken in war were sacrificed, their skins were removed and were worn for the entire twenty-day month, either

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by their captors or by those suffering from skin or eye diseases, for which this was thought to be a cure. At the end of this period, having not washed and with the husklike skins cracking and rotting as they wore them, the penitents went to the Temple of Yopitli. They made offerings of incense to the four directions, removed the skins, and “threw them into a cave” (fig. 3.33).133 Because this feature was located at the summit of a temple platform, it should probably be understood as referring to an artificial pit dug in front of the altar rather than a natural cave. Regardless of its precise identity, it emphasizes the role of a telluric cavity as the stated place for the interment of the skins of sacrificial victims. All materials buried as offerings within the earth across Mesoamerica—whether human or animal bodies, stone objects, perishable materials, or even different types and colors of soil placed in superimposed layers—functioned syntagmatically to produce a meaningful effect within the landscape. This was certainly the case with the offerings at the Templo Mayor, as Leonardo López Luján has observed.134 Any given cache could contain thousands of unique objects, and their placement followed a clear grammatical logic. Objects were grouped according to kind, often in cosmologically significant quantities, and arranged in successive layers. Objects were frequently organized along imaginary axes within layers, and the placement of offerings also followed such alignments within the architectural structure. As with the elements of a teixiptla, it was the proper configuration of forms and materials—both within any burial or cache as well as between them and the broader built environment—that established the desired teotl-image. While they were usually placed with reference to the surrounding architecture or landscape, both burials and caches tended to be self-contained and clearly demarcated, encased or enclosed within a bounded space. This act of enveloping or surrounding likely relates these features to a wider category of ritual wrapping and bundling practices, which are found across Mesoamerica and are particularly associated with sacred or potent objects and human remains.135 By limiting visibility and containing affective energies, bundles established or reaffirmed the power and significance of their contents as well as the status of those who had access

Figure 3.33. The wearing of the flayed skins of sacrificial victims and placing them into a hole at the Temple of Yopitli during the month of Tlacaxipehualiztli: illustration from book II, chapter 22, of Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (the Florentine Codex), 1575–1577, ink and pigment on paper, page size approx. 31 × 21.2 cm (12 1/5 × 8 1/3 in.), Florence, Laurentian Library, MS Med. Palat. 218, f. 80r. By permission of MiBACT. Any further reproduction by any means is prohibited.

to or knowledge of them. What was important was the act of surrounding, establishing a boundary and a containment. While paper and cloth were often employed as wrappings for bundles, the materials most commonly used to delineate graves and caches are notable for their telluric associations: stone-lined spaces—such as the vaulted burial chambers of the Classic Maya or the offering pits within the Aztec Templo Mayor—and lidded ceramic vessels. Because of their close connection to the earth, the negative spaces framed by these materials can be construed as artificial caves or terrestrial wombs. Furthermore, as with paintings on some tomb walls, cache vessels were sometimes decorated with iconography that can be understood as metonymically elaborating on their role. Cavities in the Living Earth

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Among the Maya this most often took the form of an anthropomorphism of the vessel, including the features of particular deities. Such decorative embellishments suggest the animacy of the vessels and their contents and even their identification as specific deity images. Yet other examples suggest a more general conception of the vessel as a node of connection between realms, with a symbolism similar to what has been attributed to the vaulted space of architectural interiors. A cache vessel with a plain exterior recovered from a looted structure at Caracol features black-on-red paintings on the insides of the base and the lid.136 The depiction of the severed head of the Maize God on the base marks this as the underworld, while the Principal Bird Deity—the avian counterpart of the creator deity Itzamna— marks the lid as the celestial realm. This is identical to the arrangement seen on the sarcophagus lid of Pakal, where a world tree grows between the image of the deceased ruler as Maize God below and the Principal Bird Deity above (fig. 3.31). Thus, the space enclosed by this cache vessel—along with any materials placed within it—was shown to form an axis mundi linking the layers of the cosmos. This same dual terrestrial-celestial symbolism is found on some Aztec cuauhxicalli (literally, “eagle vessels”), the offering vessels used for the hearts and blood of sacrificial victims.137 Decorated with eagle feathers around the side and a glyph naming the current sun, 4 Ollin, within its bowl, a greenstone cuauhxicalli in the Berlin Ethnological Museum has clear solar symbolism. Yet carved on the base is the earth monster Tlaltecuhtli, covered in the skulls of the dead and with a gaping fanged mouth ready to consume the life offered to her. The earth consumes the sun each evening and births it anew each morning, and the offerings made in this vessel and those like it were believed to sustain this process. Indeed, when Maya cache and offering vessels are depicted in images, they are often marked with the quatrefoil k’in sign, meaning “day” or “sun.” These solar vessels consistently contain a Spondylus shell, a stingray spine, and a bundle in addition to the k’in sign, which led Merle Greene Robertson to call this motif the Quadripartite Badge.138 These objects suggest bloodletting rituals but are also closely associated with actual cache contents, which, although they vary across time and space in the Maya region, 70

often contained shells, eccentric blades, and bloodletting implements.139 As with the example seen on the sarcophagus lid of Pakal (fig. 3.31), such k’in vessels are often shown as the crania of supernatural skulls. It is likely they were conceived as connecting the underworld and celestial realms and conveying sustenance to the gods or ancestors.140 Furthermore, by depicting the recumbent body of the deceased ruler resting in an offering vessel, this image directly conflates the practices of burial and caching. Just as burials and caches should be understood as a continuum of earth offerings, it is also likely that a sharp distinction does not exist between serving vessels and offering vessels. Although the latter often appear to have been custom made for that purpose, ordinary dishes placed lip to lip were also frequently used to form caches. Conversely, serving and storage vessels were often lidded for practical reasons, such as to keep food warm. Yet even in this case their iconography could explicitly link them to ideas of the enclosing earth, as is the case with vessels or lids in the form of turtles. Thus, the very quality of a vessel as a container, forming and surrounding a concavity, is always implicated in its metonymical relationship to its contents. It is likely that, for the Maya, the void itself had a vital ontological presence that was a necessary component of earth offerings, even when it was filled with objects or human remains. As argued in this chapter, it seems reasonable to suppose that the artist of the Resurrection Plate was drawing a direct parallel between the ritual perforation of ceramic vessels and panMesoamerican traditions equating the burial of the dead and their transformation into ancestors with the planting and emergence of maize. The piercing of the plate, with its formal and material affinities to the earth, replicated the primordial creation of a space through which life-sustaining vegetal abundance could emerge as well as the seasonal digging of holes in garden plots, a mundane and repetitive act given meaning by the mythology. An extended metaphor linking the agricultural and human life cycles—bones conflated with seeds and flesh with maize—linked these activities with the interment of the deceased. Yet, far from presenting a singular, stable meaning, the alignment of the hole with the imagery on the Resurrection Plate suggests additional associations, including the drilling of fire.

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CHAPTER 4

The Act of Drilling

T

he middle of a book on holes might seem to be an odd place to find a discussion about fire. Yet this is where the imagery on the Resurrection Plate leads us. A torch rises from the firefly skull at the bottom of the turtle shell, with curling scrolls of flame and smoke rising from a bundle of sticks.1 Indeed, these tongues of fire coincide precisely with the base of the cleft, thereby visually and conceptually merging these two elements. It is precisely this conflation between what appear to be two categorically different things that can provide a useful challenge to our expectations of what a hole is and where the boundaries of this concept might lie. The associations made by the artist who painted this dish help to illuminate a distinctly Mesoamerican understanding of holes in which they can share qualities with fire. This undoubtedly arises from the formally identical processes of drilling through which both are created (fig. 4.1). Friction produced by the rapid back-and-forth twisting of a vertical stick was used both to ignite combustible materials and to eat into the ceramic body of a dish. But holes and fire share further connections in terms of their attributed roles in bringing forth new life. Because of the conflation between the split in the turtle shell and the flames of the torch on the Resurrection Plate, the body of the Maize God can be understood to be emerging directly from the fire. This makes a clear allusion to the importance of fire in agriculture. In the forested Lowlands of Mesoamerica, garden plots are created

and renewed through the burning of overgrown vegetation, which not only clears space for the planting of crops but also returns nutrients to the soil.2 Additionally, heat plays a role in the germination of the seed. Rafael Girard observed modern Ch’orti’ rituals related to the planting season that included a journey to a mountain thought to be the birthplace of fire.3 Here offerings were made to the fire to ensure the successful germination of the maize planted in the fields, a process believed to require heat. Fire is also a necessary component in the transformation of the harvested crop into food. Prior to being ground into masa, maize kernels must be cooked in a solution of lime. This process, which is known as nixtamalization, aids in the removal of the tough pericarp and increases both the flavor and the nutritional value of corn.4 In addition to being needed to cook this alkaline mixture, fire is also required to produce the lime, which is obtained through the prolonged heating of limestone or shells. For the Nahuas of Central Mexico in the seventeenth century, this heating was a transformative process that brought the “White Woman” of the lime to life from the dead bones of the limestone.5 Finally, fire is a vital element in the production of ceramics, which are themselves essential for the cooking of food. Through the use of fire the raw, malleable clay is transformed into a hardened, durable vessel. As discussed in chapter 2, the depiction of a torch within the turtle carapace on the Resurrection Plate can therefore be 71

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Figure 4.1. Depictions of fire drilling from page 38 of the Postclassic Maya Madrid Codex, Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, ca. 1350–1500 CE, ink and pigment on stuccocoated amate paper, 23.3 × 12.2 cm (9 1/ 10 × 4 4/ 5 in.). Photograph courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid.

understood to refer back to the materiality of the dish itself. Andrea Stone and Marc Zender have discussed the scrolling, foliate forms that rise from the torch on the Resurrection Plate in terms of their multiple connotations—smoke and flames, water and blood, plant growth, and scent—all of which are thematically pertinent to the image.6 Although these are all distinct substances, they are depicted in very similar ways in Maya art. The determination of what any one scroll represents is often dependent on its relationship to the rest of 72

the image. In the context of the Resurrection Plate, the scrolls rising from the torch clearly represent fire and/or smoke. Nearly identical scrolls coming off of the skull below, however, suggest either the sprouting of foliage or the emanation of heat from this cranial seed. The representational ambiguity in which similar scroll forms can refer to different phenomena likely relates to the associations that they all share with (actual or metaphorical) sustenance. Andrew Scherer has excavated two burials from the site of El Kinel in the vicinity of Yaxchilan in which perforated plates inverted over the faces of the deceased individuals show signs of burning after the holes were made and their tripod legs were removed. One possible explanation for this is that incense was offered “to ‘feed’ the deceased,” a conjecture that links the hole with the conflated ideas related to scrolls proposed by Stone and Zender. Yet Scherer additionally suggests that in this context fire could have been intended to “replicate the sacred three stone hearth” of creation: that is, the initial fire that set time in motion.7 In the following discussion I explore the role of fire in Mesoamerican thought and ritual, paying particular attention to the association of fire with the cavities or hollows of enclosed spaces, including architecture and incense burners. The close relationship of fire to creation mythology, solar heat, and the establishing of the temporal order is then examined. I argue that the flames depicted on the Resurrection Plate can be understood to originate from ritual fire drilling related to the renewal of both the agricultural cycle and time itself as they are embodied by the Maize God as world tree.

HEAT, SMOKE, AND FIRE IN MESOAMERICAN THOUGHT AND RITUAL

As discussed in chapter 3, caches in the Maya region were often enclosed by two ceramic dishes placed one atop the other, lip to lip. David Freidel has characterized this configuration in two different ways. In an essay co-authored with Stanley Guenter, he asserts that “the iconography of lipto-lip caches includes some clear references to the rebirth place of the Maize God.”8 In addition to

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imagery from Classic Maya vessels, the authors make reference to imagery on several stelae from the Late Formative Isthmian site of Izapa. Stela 22 and the more fragmentary Stela 67 were carved with similar scenes that Julia Guernsey Kappelman has compellingly argued relate to the underworld journey and rebirth of the Maize God (fig. 4.2).9 This deity—here depicted with the same Olmecoid features as in the roughly contemporaneous mural from San Bartolo—is shown rising from between two stepped forms, the upper one tilted at a 45-degree angle. These shapes are identical to the profiles of shallow dishes like those used in caches. Positioned together—as two dishes placed lip to lip would be—they form a quatrefoil motif: the shape used to signify cave mouths and portals since at least the Middle Formative period. This motif is explicitly linked to the turtle-earth as the site of the Maize God’s emergence in numerous artworks.10 The lower half-quatrefoil sits flat in the water, as indicated by the wavy lines and fish that surround it, and therefore can be identified as the canoe that carries the Maize God through the watery underworld, as seen in other images. The narrative is thus condensed on these stelae, which present both the journey and the resurrection simultaneously as a single scene. Yet Freidel has also identified the lip-to-lip placement of cache vessels as a symbolic pib, the earthen oven of the Yukatek Maya.11 Given the frequent condensing of narrative in Maya images as well as the degree of ambiguity and conflation present in Maya representation and thought (including in the image on the Resurrection Plate), these two interpretations are not necessarily contradictory. Both the planted seed germinating in the soil and the preparation of food required heat. The process of cooking tamales in a pit dug into the earth would undoubtedly have resonated with the process of planting crops, two moments in an ever-recurring alimentary cycle. This dual role of the pib is seen in the Popol Vuh, where a pit oven is the site and method of the Hero Twins’ self-sacrifice. Per their instructions, their bones are ground up on a stone “just as hard corn is refined into flour” and poured into a river, which leads directly to their reappearance after “having germinated in the waters” for five

Figure 4.2. Izapa Stela 67. Drawing by Ayax Moreno originally published as figure 13.34 in Clark and Moreno 2007. Courtesy of the New World Archaeological Foundation.

days. Just a few pages earlier, the Hero Twins were unharmed when they spent the night in “a house of fire, with only fire alone inside. They weren’t burned by it, just toasted, just simmered.”12 Thus, fire alone did not kill them. Their deaths occurred specifically within the oven setting, a hot womb within the earth through which they achieved self-transformation. This episode from the Popol Vuh finds an intriguing parallel in a Yukatek Maya fire-walking ritual documented in several sixteenth-century accounts. Landa recorded one example, which took place as part of New Year’s ceremonies on Kawak years: [T]hey made a great arch of wood in the court, filling it on the top and on the sides with firewood, leaving in it doors for going in and out. After this most of the men then each took bundles of sticks, long and very dry, tied together, and a singer, mounted on the top of the wood, sang and made a noise with one of their drums. All danced below him with great order and devotion, going in and out through the doors of that arch of wood and thus they continued to dance until evening, when each one went home to rest and eat. When the night fell, they returned and many The Act of Drilling

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people with them, for this ceremony was held in great esteem among them, and each man taking his torch they lighted it and each one for himself set fire with them to the wood, which at once blazed up and was quickly consumed. When there was no longer anything but coals, they levelled them and spread them out wide, and those who had danced having come together there were some who set about passing over those coals barefoot and naked, as they were, from one side to the other, and some passed over without harm, but others got burned and still others were half burned up. And they believed that in this was the remedy for their calamities and bad omens and they thought that this service of theirs was very pleasing to their gods. This over, they went off to drink together and to get drunk; for thus the custom of the festival and the heat of the fire demanded.13

The Lords of the Underworld attempt to trick the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh by goading them into a contest of leaping across the oven, which they pretend is a fermentation pit for an alcoholic beverage. Recognizing the ruse, the twins nevertheless willingly meet their fate by going head-first into the oven. Both the myth and the sixteenth-century ceremony associate group drinking and dangerous feats of fire walking. Moreover, in Landa’s description of the construction of the pit of coals, the architectonic nature of the original structure is notable. It is the setting for a dance that involves the repeated entering and exiting of the space it encloses, with a singer seated at the apex, the point associated with both the capstone of a building and the place of emergence from the turtle carapace. This conflation of a building with a pit oven naturally evokes the type of structure known as a pib’nah (literally, “oven house”: a sweatbath). Generally consisting of a hearth and a steamroom connected by a small aperture, sweatbaths are found across Mesoamerica and are attested in modern ethnographies, colonial-era accounts, and Prehispanic codices as well as archaeologically.14 They were used by both men and women— Durán and other sixteenth-century priests were 74

scandalized by mixed-gender bathing. In addition to their role in cleansing the body they are particularly discussed in terms of their health and medical benefits.15 Although the sweatbath was apparently prescribed for a wide variety of ailments, including stiff necks, coughing, and poor circulation, it was especially associated with expectant or recently delivered mothers.16 This was likely a means to increase the body heat— the tonalli in Central Mexico—the vital life force that was understood to be entering into the infant and partially lost by the mother during the period around a birth. The Aztecs placed a newborn infant next to the hearth for the first four days of its life. Jill Furst has noted that this practice likely arose in response to the significant drop in an infant’s body temperature immediately following birth.17 The patron deity of Aztec sweatbaths was Toci (Our Grandmother)—who was also called “Grandmother of the Baths,” “Mother of the Gods,” and “Heart of the Earth”—who was prayed to by healers and midwives. Sahagún states that her image was “placed in the front of the sweat-house,” which can be seen on page 77 of the colonial-era Codex Magliabechiano. The goddess is readily identifiable by her adornment of “liquid rubber on her lips and a circle [of rubber] on each cheek” (fig. 4.3).18 Thus, in daily usage Mesoamerican sweatbaths were closely associated with birth, restoring vitality, and dispelling disease. Stephen Houston has persuasively argued that these connotations were the reason why each of the three temples of the Cross Group at the Classic Maya site of Palenque was named as a pib’nah.19 Although the form taken by these buildings, with a smaller inner chamber enclosed by a larger outer chamber, is similar to working sweatbaths excavated at Piedras Negras and other sites, this was clearly a symbolic designation: they have neither hearths nor evidence of burning in them. These structures were each dedicated to a creator deity. The extensive texts carved on panels within them recount the births and events in the lives of these gods thousands of years in the past.20 The texts further tie these mythical events to the present moment in which the structures were made and the life events of the ruler who commissioned them, K’inich Kan Bahlam.21

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in one direction and in another, thus taking possession of the home he built.24

Figure 4.3. Page 77 of the Codex Magliabechiano, showing an Aztec sweatbath with an image of the goddess Toci over the entrance. Mid-16th century, ink and pigment on European paper, 15.5 x 21.5 cm (6.1 x 8.5 in.). Image used by concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo/Biblioteca Nazionale Central, Florence.

Houston proposed that these structures were conceived, at least in part, as the natal sweatbaths of these creator gods, who were likely physically present in the form of mobile deity-image bundles and would visit these shrines to become reinvigorated with the metaphorical heat provided by offerings.22 Beyond the space of the sweatbath, the living and revitalizing heat of fire made it an integral part of a wide variety of rituals. David Stuart has identified numerous Classic Maya inscriptions documenting “fire entering” rituals (och k’ahk’ ) associated with specific buildings.23 While acknowledging that the exact nature and meaning of these rituals remain ambiguous, he notes the importance of dedication in Maya inscriptions and proposes that they were related to the instantiation or renewal of fires in buildings. Stuart points to numerous examples of fire used in house dedications in the ethnographic literature from the Maya region as well as further parallels from Central Mexico. Durán wrote of the sixteenth-century Aztecs: no one will enter [a new or newly renovated house] without first performing the calmamalihua, as this rite is called by them. On this occasion they eat, drink, dance, and pour pulque in all the corners, and the host himself takes a newly lighted firebrand and points it

The use of fire in dedication rituals can be understood as giving the house a heart in the form of a hearth, as the vitalizing or ensouling of a structure through the infusion of tonalli-heat or, by extension, as the feeding of a living structure.25 Some textual evidence indicates that Classic Maya tombs were reentered for fire rituals.26 Most intriguing in this regard are some monuments from Tonina that mention such ceremonies taking place 260 days after the passing of the deceased, the length of the tzolk’in. Observing that this span relates to both the period of human gestation and the time between the beginning and the end of the agricultural season, Scherer sees this as conflating the burial of the body in the tomb with the development of new life.27 Yet it is also demonstrative of the close association of fire rituals with the completion of temporal cycles (discussed more fully in the following section). Across Mesoamerica, different qualities were ascribed to the dates in the 260-day cycle, which played an important role in divination. It was understood that part of the soul—specifically, the animating force of bodily heat—was absorbed from the heat radiated by the sun. The fates of individuals were seen as being intimately bound up with the days on which they were born: people were initially named for the days of their births.28 Entering a tomb with fire on the 260-day anniversary of the death of its inhabitant clearly relates to the continued integration of individual identity with the ritual calendar. In addition to (re)dedicating structures including homes, temples, and tombs, fire instantiated actions, most notably warfare. Sahagún repeatedly describes war as brought into being through the drilling of fire: “verily warfare now taketh form, is born, stirreth, is inflamed, is bored with a firedrill.”29 The Aztecs referred to war itself through a metaphoric diphrasism: atl-tlachinolli (waterfire/conflagration) (fig. 4.4).30 As an inamic, this expression reflected an intertwining of opposed yet complementary forces and likely evoked the cycling of the rainy and dry seasons and the practices of agriculture and warfare that they structured. The “fire” half of this expression is typically The Act of Drilling

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Figure 4.4. An example of the Aztec atl-tlachinolli sign from back of the backrest of the Temple Stone. Drawing by the author.

understood to relate to violence. Fire was indeed used as part of “scorched earth” warfare tactics, such as the burning of buildings seen in the murals from the Upper Temple of the Jaguars and the Monjas at Chichen Itza and documented in early colonial accounts.31 Yet the relationship between these two terms is far from simple. As Janice Robertson has argued, both water and fire can be either creative or destructive.32 Comparing them with other examples of Aztec picture-writing, Robertson identifies the U-shaped elements of the torchlike “fire” portion of the atl-tlachinolli glyph as indicating cultivated fields. Burning them could certainly be seen as destructive. But, as previously discussed, fire was also used to prepare fields for planting and was therefore a creative act integral to agriculture. Thus, while fire was closely associated with warfare and was undoubtedly conceived as being a destructive force, it also played an instantiating role and held creative connotations. Consider, for example, the pairing of fire (oven) and water (river) in the ultimately generative demise of the Hero Twins in the episode from the Popol Vuh mentioned above, a pairing that is echoed in the Aztec story of the birth of the sun, which is discussed in the following section.33 As in its dedicatory and instantiating roles, fire was also produced in order to call forth deities. 76

The drilling of fire ( joch’ k’ahk’ ) that is identified as being possessed by specific deities—most commonly the Maize God—is mentioned with some frequency in Classic Maya inscriptions. David Stuart has suggested that this act “may somehow refer to the renewal of fires within temples or shrines associated with these deities.”34 However, an analysis of the long inscription in the Casa Colorada at Chichen Itza by Markus Eberl and Alexander Voss suggests that the act of drilling fire manifested deities as a part of public performance. The text documents four fire rituals that each took place around solstices or equinoxes, with 274 days between them. In the first of these events, two separate fires that belong to two deities were drilled on the plaza by the ruler K’ahk’-u-Pakal, who is explicitly said to have “conjured” (utzakja) them. Perhaps this fire was then placed within shrines dedicated to these gods, along the lines of what Stuart has proposed, but the presence of the deities within the smoke and flames is also clearly indicated. Intriguingly, 274 days later the fire is “thrown into the fire hole,” which Eberl and Voss suggest might have been one of the cenotes at Chichen, as part of this ritual cycle, which eventually included the fire’s second and third coming.35 Karl Taube has noted that “fire was the medium by which individuals conjured the gods through the offering of blood, copal, and other precious substances.”36 The conjuring verb tzak is indeed often associated with bloodletting rites, and it is possible that K’ahk’-u-Pakal’s conjuring of the deities in the fires drilled at Chichen was accomplished through offerings of his own blood. Although the use of this verb in Classic Maya inscriptions makes it clear that it was specific named deities who were conjured, the modern Yukatek term tsak has an association with the calling forth of clouds.37 Just as fire was connected to the sun through its heat, it was connected to clouds through its smoke. Deities were probably understood to have been manifested in the smoke of ritual fires, especially those fed with precious substances. We see this on Lintel 15 from the site of Yaxchilan, where a serpent accompanied by smokelike scrolls winds upward from a dish containing blood-spattered strips of paper as a kneeling noblewoman looks up to the deity emerging from its

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Figure 4.5. Yaxchilan Lintel 15, c. 755–770 CE, limestone with traces of pigment, 87.6 x 82.6 cm (34.5 x 32.5 in.). British Museum Am 1923, Maud. 1. Photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

mouth (fig. 4.5). The verb is tzak, and the inscription tells us that Lady Wak Tuun has conjured the Water Serpent, identified as the wahy (co-essence) of the deity K’awiil.38 This zoomorphic being is a conduit between realms.39 As discussed in chapter 3, we see him in anthropomorphic form on the Resurrection Plate emerging from the back of the turtle shell. Indeed, the Water Serpent is often present at scenes of the Maize God’s rebirth. This image appears to be no exception: the deity emerging from its mouth is none other than the

Maize God, whose distinctive profile is identifiable by the elongated forehead, the upswept hairdo, and the jewel (earflare) placed centrally at the top of the head. The serpent itself is iconographically conflated with the growing plant through the “corn curl” behind its head that sprouts an ear of maize and the smooth curls of foliage near the head. These, which contrast with the dotted curls likely representing smoke lower on the body, suggest leaves unfolding from the stalk.40 The vision that Lady Wak Tuun has conjured through the The Act of Drilling

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burning of her blood is precisely the one found on the Resurrection Plate: the birth of corn from the watery realm of the underworld.41 If fire and the things burned in it were used to conjure deities, they also served to feed them. Many authors have noted that the covenant in Mesoamerica between humans and the gods was conceived in alimentary terms.42 The gods sacrificed themselves to create the world and in turn required sacrifices for their own continued sustenance. That is to say, sacrifice entailed a transference of energies. Blood was a potent substance for sacrifice because of the life forces (ch’ulel, tonalli) that it contained. Other materials were similarly chosen for being materialized concentrations of vitality. Foremost among these was the resinous incense known as copal, the burning of which was ubiquitous in Mesoamerican ritual activity. Tree sap is analogous to blood in many ways: it is the vital fluid (itz) that circulates within and flows out of the arboreal body when it is cut, it is sticky and congeals when exposed to air, and it produces an intensely sweet smell when burned. The Popol Vuh makes this conflation explicit.43 Xkik’, the daughter of one of the Lords of the Underworld, becomes impregnated when the animate severed head of Hun Hunahpu spits into her hand.44 Thinking that the child she carries resulted from an illicit union, the Lords of the Underworld decide to sacrifice her and send messengers to do this and bring back her heart. She convinces these messengers to spare her and instead sends a substitute heart made from copal. The underworld gods are fooled by this sticky clump of resin and its fragrant smoke, thus establishing the interchangeability between incense and blood as offerings to the gods. The burning of itz substances—copal, blood, rubber—in braziers and censers was an integral part of Mesoamerican ritual practice. Within these containers, fire transmuted matter into the nourishing smoke that was consumed by the gods. Equating copal nodules with tamales, Taube sees incense burners as the cooking hearths of the gods, from which they received their sustenance.45 The hearth was the living heart and center of the house. As discussed in chapter 3, houses were understood to be cosmological models. As metaphorical 78

hearths, braziers were therefore equated with the axis mundi, as nodes of connection between the vertical layers of the universe. This is sometimes made explicit in their form: many Maya examples dating from the Formative all the way through to the Postclassic period were studded with rows of spiky protrusions that likely related to either (or both) the thorny trunk of the tall, straight ceiba or the ridged back of a crocodilian, both closely associated with the world tree (fig. 4.6).46 Yet, as symbolic hearths, incense burners are also synecdochic for the houses of ancestors and deities: temples. There appears to have been a two-way conceptual conflation between censers and buildings across Mesoamerica. As discussed in chapter 3, in addition to allowing wind to enter structures, ik’ windows at Palenque would have allowed smoke to billow out. As representations of the breath of the living buildings, the scrolls around monster-maw doorways of Chenes-style structures may have also related to the smoke from burning rituals that would have poured from these apertures. Vertical slits in the upper portion of the modeled and painted stucco façade of the Rosalila Temple at Copan are found on either side of framed faces. Taube has identified these as representations of incense burners: the entire building, whose interior contained numerous ceramic censers and was blackened with the soot of burning, functioned as a giant incense burner dedicated to the founder of the royal lineage at Copan, whose burial was inside an earlier structure encased within this platform.47 The opposite is also the case, with the iconography of incense burners identifying them as buildings. This is most common with the theatertype censers from Teotihuacan and its outposts in the Guatemalan highlands, which often feature a central mask representing a deceased ancestor within an architectonic frame (fig. 4.7). These tend to be adorned with customized configurations of mold-made plaques, including abundant floral and butterfly imagery that is suggestive of the flowery mountain of the afterlife.48 Although the frame is often abstract or even cavelike, some examples are clearly intended to represent architectural structures. Some incense burners have been recovered from the miniature platforms

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a

b

c Figure 4.6. Spiked incense burners as the world tree: (a) Stela 11 from Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala. Drawing © 2000 John Montgomery. Courtesy of Ancient Americas at LACMA (ancientamericas.org) (b) Page 39 of the Postclassic Maya Madrid Codex, Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, ca. 1350–1500 CE, ink and pigment on stucco-coated amate paper, 23.3 × 12.2 cm (9 1/10 × 4 4/5 in.), photograph courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid; (c) the thorny trunk of a ceiba tree, photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

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Figure 4.7. Teotihuacan-style incense burner, likely from the vicinity of Tiquisate, Guatemala, earthenware with traces of postfire paint, 43.5 × 43.3 × 28 cm (17 1/ 8 × 17 1/ 16 × 11 in.). Boston MFA 1988.1229a, Gift of Landon T. Clay. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

at the center of residential compounds, which strongly suggests that they were used as part of domestic rituals, likely directed toward a common ancestor, and that they were conceived as miniature temples surmounting these platforms in imitation of the grander versions in the city’s ceremonial center. Broken or disassembled incense burners have also been recovered from burials at Teotihuacan, further suggesting their association with the dead.49 A similar understanding of censers as architectural is found among the Maya as well. The bases of many Classic-period censers were decorated with frontal deity masks, which Taube sees as analogous to the large stucco masks that adorned the façades of pyramidal platform mounds supporting temples.50 The ethnologist R. Jon McGee posits a 80

strong correlation between the läkil k’uh (god pots) of the modern Lacandon Maya and the temples of the Classic-period elites, both of which house gods or deified ancestors. Lacandon god pots are ceramic, usually anthropomorphized incense burners that are the foci of ritual activities. They were activated through rituals and especially through the placing of small stones within them—previously often carved or plain greenstones, more recently usually pebbles obtained from sacred places in the landscape such as the ruins of ancient Maya cities.51 Just as ancient temples were periodically renewed, the same thing regularly occurs with god pots, with the stones being moved to new vessels that are then activated to become the external manifestation of the deity. Old god pots had their paint burned off and were considered “the bones of our Lords.” Even as deactivated vessels, they were still considered to retain a degree of potency and were left in caves and other ritually significant places, often accompanied by human bones, where offerings continued to be made to them.52 Thus, we see a close correlation between incense burners and the architectural spaces of temples in Mesoamerica. Both were enclosed spaces made alive through the entering of fire from which smoke billowed forth as offerings to the gods. Both buildings and censers could be further ensouled through the incorporation of charged materials (deity images, ancestral remains, sacred bundles, and so forth). This could be outwardly expressed through the iconography of their exteriors. Once activated, these enclosures themselves became the manifested bodies of ancestors or gods and were periodically renewed as such or, upon deactivation, were considered to retain a degree of potency equivalent to human remains.53 Beyond the importance of fire in regular ritual activities across Mesoamerica, especially in rituals associated with birth, instantiation, and the offering of sacrifice in the form of itz materials such as incense and blood, fire was also closely associated with creation mythology, time, and its renewal throughout the region. There are indications on the Resurrection Plate that the depicted torch relates specifically to the newly kindled fire of creation and temporality.

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a

b Figure 4.8. Rollout photographs of Late Classic Maya vessels depicting the Maize God’s birth from ajaw signs, ca. 600–850 CE. Photographs courtesy of Justin Kerr: (a) codex-style vessel (K2723), height 18 cm (7 1/12 in.); (b) Chocholástyle vessel (K634), height 17.8 cm (7 in.), Princeton University Art Museum 2016-14.

FIRE AND THE CREATION AND RENEWAL OF TIME

On several Late Classic Maya vessels with imagery related to the Resurrection Plate, the Maize God is seen emerging from a split ajaw sign rather than a turtle carapace (fig. 4.8).54 Ajaw was among the most common titles of nobility, and it is likely that the maize deity is being identified here as the first “lord,” the prototype for all future Maya rulers. In addition to ajaw, this sign can also be read as nik (flower), a meaning consonant with its use as a seed and its association with the birth of the maize deity and the agricultural cycle he represents.55 Such imagery could therefore represent the sprouting of an “animate or vital seed”—that is, a seed that possessed the heat necessary for germination.56 Ajaw also named the final day in the endlessly repeating sequence of twenty days—a point

of cyclical completion.57 The sign ajaw could therefore synecdochically connote a general idea of temporality, while it directly conflated the office of rulership (and the person of the ruler) with the marking of time. During the Postclassic period, the Long Count calendar fell out of use and was replaced by the Short Count, a repeating cycle of thirteen k’atuns or periods of approximately twenty years. As documented in both pre-Hispanic and early-colonial books, each k’atun was named for the day of its completion: by the combination of a numeral (1–13) and the day sign ajaw.58 A stone turtle found at the Postclassic site of Mayapan has thirteen ajaw signs carved around its circumference, prefiguring the later k’atun wheels illustrated in colonial-era manuscripts and demonstrating the association of this animal with k’atun endings (fig. 4.9).59 It is also noteworthy that the center of the carapace on the The Act of Drilling

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a

Figure 4.9. (a) Early Postclassic Maya stone altar in the form of a turtle with thirteen ajaw glyphs incised around its shell, from Mayapan, Yucatán, Mexico, ca. 1200–1450 CE. Gift of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1958. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM58-34-20/60405. (b) K’atun wheel from Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Drawing by the author after Tozzer (1941:167).

Mayapan sculpture is pierced by a cavity, likely a space to accommodate offerings.60 The composition undoubtedly refers to the emergence of maize, which it thus directly associates with the renewal of time within the cycle of k’atuns. The importance of k’atun endings in the Classic period is attested by the large number of monumental inscriptions documenting the completions of these periods. Altars carved with ajaw dates at Tikal, Tonina, Caracol, and other sites appear to have been made 82

for period-ending celebrations, and the TwinPyramid Complexes at Tikal were each built for k’atun rituals. Numerous Classic Maya dishes were painted with ajaw dates, including a perforated shallow bowl with the date 7 Ajaw on its bottom.61 Furthermore, a carving on a cliff-face near the city of Piedras Negras features the date 7 Ajaw on the side of a profile turtle carapace from which God N and K’awiil emerge, demonstrating that the association of mythological turtles with k’atun endings was present during the Classic period.62 As the personification of the annual agricultural cycle, the Maize God was intimately linked to the experience of temporality.63 This association is made explicit on one of the so-called Tikal Dancer Plates (fig. 4.10). Here the Maize God, splendidly adorned in greenstone jewels and quetzal feathers that are precious substitutes for the foliage of a mature plant, is surrounded by the twenty day signs. These are arranged in four groups of five, each beginning with one of the Classic-era Year Bearers, the only four day signs on which it was possible for the 365-day solar year to begin. Their quadripartite configuration therefore both forms a directional cosmogram and reflects the articulation of the 260-day ritual calendar (tzolk’in) with the solar year (ha’b).64 Without referring to a specific date, this plate features a general representation of temporal order with the Maize God at its center. The overlay of the 260-day ritual calendar with the 365-day solar year results in a 52-year period of uniquely named days. This cycle, which is commonly referred to as the Calendar Round, was widely used across Mesoamerica. The completion of a Calendar Round was fraught with uncertainty, as time was understood to begin again. Among the Aztecs, this point of temporal renewal was marked by the celebration of the New Fire ceremony (fig. 4.11). All fires in the realm were extinguished, and at midnight a new fire was drilled on the chest of a sacrificial victim atop a hill on the shore of Lake Texcoco called Huizachtecatl (now known as Cerro de la Estrella). Once this flame was lit, priests came to bring it to the Templo Mayor and the temples of each neighborhood in the capital and towns around the lake. Members of every household then renewed their hearths from these local fires.

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Figure 4.10. Late Classic Maya plate with the Maize God surrounded by the twenty day signs, region of Tikal, El Petén, Guatemala, ca. 600–850 CE, diameter 33 cm (13 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5379).

This ritual is recorded in two separate places in Sahagún, which contain intriguing discrepancies. In one version, the continuation of time is explicitly tied to the successful drilling of the fire: “it was claimed that if fire could not be drawn, then [the sun] would be destroyed forever; all would be ended; there would evermore be night. Nevermore would the sun come forth.”65 Yet elsewhere the lighting of the fire was only done after the continuation of the cosmos had been confirmed through observations of the heavens:

All of the priests and servants of the temple departed from here, the Temple of Mexico, during the first quarter of the night, and went to the summit of that mountain near Itztapalapan which they call Uixachtecatl. They reached the summit at midnight, or almost, where stood a great pyramid built for that ceremony. Having reached there, they looked at the Pleiades to see if they were at the zenith, and if they were not, they waited until they were. And when they saw that The Act of Drilling

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Figure 4.11. Page 34 of the Codex Borbonicus showing the Aztec New Fire ceremony. Mid-sixteenth century, ink and pigment on amate paper, 38.5 x 38.5 cm (15 3/20 x 15 3/20 in.). Source: Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, France.

now they passed the zenith, they knew that the movement of the heavens had not ceased and that the end of the world was not then, but that they would have another fifty-two years, assured that the world would not come to an end. At this hour a great multitude of people was on the mountains surrounding this province of Mexico—Texcoco, Xochimilco, and Quauhtitlan—waiting to see the new fire, which was the signal that the world would continue. And when the priests made the fire, with great ceremony, upon the pyramid 84

on that mountain, then it was seen from all the surrounding mountains. Those who were there watching then raised a cry which rose to the heavens with joy that the world was not ending and that they had another fifty-two years assured.66

Here the renewal of the temporal order is not brought about through the successful drilling of fire. Rather, fire was drilled as a sign to all the surrounding communities that the cycles of time would continue unabated. Yet, even if the creation of new fire was understood as a sign rather than a cause of

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temporal continuity, its creation and distribution enacted the integration of cosmic and social processes. Crucially, it manifested a claim for the singular central source of fire as the vital token of this integration in the state’s religion and hierarchy.67 A second discrepancy in Sahagún’s accounts of this ceremony involves the relationship of the fire to the sacrificial victim. One version says that when they drew the new fire . . . they drew it upon the breast of a captive, and it was a well-born one on whose breast [the priest] bored the fire drill. And when a little [fire] fell, when it took flame, then speedily [the priest] slashed open the breast of the captive, seized his heart, and quickly cast it there into the fire. Thus he revived and fed the fire. And the body of [the captive] all came to an end in the flames.68

The description in the following chapter differs slightly but meaningfully. After the new fire has been successfully drilled and seen by all, they make offerings of their own blood, which they spatter in the direction of the flames. “Thus, it was said, everyone performed a penance. Then [the priests] slashed open [the captive’s] breast. In his breast [cavity] the new fire was drawn.”69 In the first version, the chest of the victim was opened so that the heart could be fed to the fire. In the second version, the heart was removed so that the fire could be drawn within the chest cavity. While the heart was undoubtedly offered to the flames, the first passage states that the entire body of the victim was consumed by the fire. Moreover, the second passage makes clear that the chest was opened in order to make a space that could be occupied by the flames—so that the fire could be born(e) within the body.70 Best known through sixteenth-century textual accounts from Central Mexico, versions of the New Fire ceremony seem to date back to at least the Classic period and were widespread across Mesoamerica. At the summit of Cerro de la Estrella, the hill where the Aztecs conducted their New Fire ceremony, archaeological evidence demonstrates a continual occupation over many centuries. A platform in Teotihuacan’s signature

talud-tablero style dating to between the mid-fourth and mid-fifth centuries was recently found on the slopes of this hill.71 An Epiclassic-period petroglyph near a cave entrance on Cerro de la Estrella features two dates, one of which (10 Rabbit) has a looped cord through its cartouche while the other (6 Reptile Eye) is within a cartouche surmounted by a smoking Trapeze-and-Ray year sign, which Christophe Helmke and Ismael Montero García interpret as relating to a New Fire celebration.72 A boulder from the Epiclassic site of Xochicalco in the modern state of Morelos has a similar configuration of two dates in cartouches: the one on the left (1 Rabbit) is bound with a looped cord, and a fire drill with wavy lines of flame rises from a platform above them.73 Iconographic evidence from Teotihuacan demonstrates that fire-drilling rituals related to the renewal of time almost certainly took place there. Numerous sculptures related to the Binding of the Years and the drilling of fire have been recovered from the site, particularly in relation to the Pyramid of the Sun and its surrounding ceremonial precinct.74 Monumental depictions of fire drills— vertical rods with twisted cords wound around them and with tongues of flame behind them— served as architectural supports or embellishments, including fourteen merlon panels carved with this motif, suggesting that the drawing forth of fire held major significance at the site.75 The Calendar Round was important in the Maya region: Long Count dates were almost always followed by the corresponding Calendar Round date in Classic-period inscriptions. However, there is little evidence for New Fire ceremonies taking place in relation to this cycle, a notable absence considering the abundant textual documentation for similar events. The Maya of both the Classic and Postclassic periods appear to have been much more interested in celebrating the completions of k’atuns or at least in recording these events in their monumental texts. Yet, even if we lack evidence for such ceremonies at the ends of Calendar Rounds, the drilling of new fire played an important role in Maya rituals accompanying other cyclical endings. Nikolai Grube has identified a “fire sequence” in numerous Initial Series inscriptions from Classicperiod monuments, the vast majority of which The Act of Drilling

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occurred on k’atun, half-k’atun, or quarter-k’atun endings, demonstrating a close connection between these rituals and temporal periods.76 In the sixteenth century Diego de Landa recorded that new fire was drilled by the Yukatek Maya as part of rituals that took place on the first day of the year.77 Whatever the period being marked, the drilling of new fire at moments of cyclical completion was an act of temporal renewal. Indeed, fire was understood to have played a crucial role in the dawning of the current era. According to both Maya and Aztec mythology, the sun and moon first rose following the selfimmolation of a pair of deities. The gods from the Maya version of this myth are the Hero Twins, whose death in an oven is discussed above. Following the defeat of the Lords of the Underworld, “the two boys ascended this way, here into the middle of the light, and they ascended straight on into the sky, and the sun belongs to one and the moon to the other. When it became light within the sky, on the face of the earth, they were there in the sky.”78 The Classic-period versions of these gods are depicted on the Resurrection Plate on either side of the turtle shell, suggesting the rising and setting of the sun and moon beyond the horizon.79 As in the case of the Maize God, only the upper half of the body of each is shown, suggesting that this is the initial moment of their appearance and that they remain between the heavens and the underworld. As with the plate in figure 4.10, the image on this plate situates the Maize God at the center of time: the moment of his birth from within the earth is the same as the first appearance of the celestial bodies and thus the beginning of time. The Aztec account is similar in many respects to the version recorded in the Popol Vuh. The connection between the self-immolation of the deities and the first rising of the sun is made much more directly, with no additional events intervening.80 The gods gather to bring forth the lights of the world, the sun and the moon. The two who sacrifice themselves in the fire—Nanahuatzin and Tecuciztecatl—do so specifically for this purpose. According to Sahagún, “And after this, when both had cast themselves into the flames, when they had already burned, then the gods sat waiting [to see] where Nanahuatzin would come to rise—he 86

a Figure 4.12. Depictions of the celestial turtle carrying the three hearthstones of creation on its back: (a) page 71 of the Postclassic Maya Madrid Codex, Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, ca. 1350–1500 CE, ink and pigment on stuccocoated amate paper, 23.3 × 12.2 cm (9 1/ 10 × 4 4/ 5 in.), photograph courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid; (b) painting from the north vault closing of Room 2 at Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. Illustration by Heather Hurst and Leonard Ashby, courtesy of the Bonampak Documentation Project.

who first fell into the fire—in order that he might shine [as the sun]; in order that dawn might break.”81 A direct connection is made between the self-sacrifice of the deities and the first rising of the celestial bodies, with which they are explicitly identified. As discussed in the previous section, the fire that consumes the Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh

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b was specifically identified as an oven. This was also the case for the fire into which the Aztec deities Nanahuatzin and Tecuciztecatl threw themselves, which is referred to as the teotexcalli.82 In this context, the term translates as “divine oven”: the prefix teo- means divine, while texcalli can mean oven, cavern, rock, or escarpment.83 One version of the narrative expresses multiple meanings of texcalli: it is said that the gods “lit a fire in the hearth which was made on a crag (which now they call teotexcalli).”84 This conflation between rocks and fire was also present among the Maya, for whom hearths consisted of three stones. In the mythological narratives recorded in several Classic Maya inscriptions, the setting into place of the three stones of the cosmic hearth was one of the pivotal acts of creation, which took place on day zero of the current era.85 The very concept of time was inextricably bound up with stones: the

360-day period was named tun (stone), and each larger iteration qualified this term with a quantity (for example, k’atun = 20 tuns). David Stuart sees the Maya practice of erecting stone monuments to mark period endings as replicating the initial setting into place of the hearthstones at the beginning of the current era.86 Moreover, suggestive iconographic evidence associates turtles with the three hearthstones. Page 71 of the Madrid Codex includes a depiction of a celestial turtle beneath a pair of eclipse signs and a sky band with three stones on its back (fig. 4.12a). In the Late Classic murals that cover the interior of Structure 1 at Bonampak, the rightmost of four cartouches at the apex of the north vault of Room 2 contains a turtle that has three stars on its back (fig. 4.12b). Both of these examples likely represent a constellation corresponding to our Orion. Like Western constellations, they also represent The Act of Drilling

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mythological imagery, in this case the hearth of creation.87 As already discussed, there is also reason to consider the hearth the site of the Maize God’s rebirth. Thus, the torch within the turtle shell on the Resurrection Plate can be associated with the newly lit hearth of creation. The emergence of the Maize God world tree from the torch at the base of the split carapace represents the foundational act of creation at the beginning of time (or, by extension, the renewal of time at the start of a new cycle). With this in mind, the drilling of the hole through the center of the vessel can be understood

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as a replication of the formally identical and ritually potent act of fire drilling that both germinates the seed and sets time in motion. In painting the imagery on this plate, the artist appears to have anticipated the eventual act of drilling that would intrude upon it and to have characterized it as being related not only to the breaking of the earth that frees the divine substance of maize from within it but also to the drilling of fire that plays an important role in both creating and renewing the world. But the overlay of image and hole on the Resurrection Plate suggests yet another association: the perforation of the body.

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CHAPTER 5

Perforating the Body

I

n addition to the opening of the earth and the drilling of fire that have already been discussed, the metaphorical associations of the perforation on the Resurrection Plate would appear to extend even further, to the practice of auto-sacrificial bloodletting.1 This ritual act is well attested both in sixteenth-century ethnohistorical accounts and in pre-Hispanic iconography.2 It has already been alluded to multiple times in previous chapters, which shows its close associations with the themes discussed. According to the Popol Vuh, regular offerings of human blood were demanded of all people by the gods as a form of worship, as an expression of gratitude or penance, and to provide the deities with sustenance.3 Specifically, the coinciding of the hole in the Resurrection Plate with the groin of the Maize God suggests the piercing of the phallus. This common subset of Maya blood offerings both carried progenerative connotations and was explicitly gendered. This gendering, however, plays on ambiguity: males imitated or appropriated the reproductively potent menstrual blood of women. Some scholars have characterized this in terms of gender domination, with men claiming the creative powers of the female body as their own as they simultaneously monopolized roles of social authority.4 Others, however, have noted that elite Maya women were also depicted in male costumes or roles and have suggested that a degree of fluidity existed in Mesoamerican conceptions of gender and gender roles or that certain costumes were intended to evoke an encompassing or dual gender

belonging to some deities during the primordial time of creation.5 The genitals of the Maize God shown on the Resurrection Plate are covered by a shell ornament placed beneath an agnathic shark head, a standard part of the costume of this deity.6 Spondylus shells, with their red color and pointy spines, have a natural association with blood and bloodletting. Examples containing traces of human blood have been recovered archaeologically.7 Furthermore, Maya women were often depicted with shells covering their pubic region. The use of such an ornament as part of the costume of the Maize God may have held explicit associations with both menstrual and penile blood as progenerative fluids.8 Andrew Scherer notes that Classic Maya burials often included Spondylus shells, sometimes perforated, that were placed over or beneath the heads of deceased individuals, a positioning commonly seen with perforated ceramic dishes. In other burials, they were placed over the genitals of both male and female individuals.9 Furthermore, the mythological imagery on some Classic Maya vessels suggests associations between the perforation of conch shells, sexual intercourse, and birth or procreation. One Classic Maya vase depicts a mythological scene in which God S (who is also seen on the Resurrection Plate) stabs a conch shell with a spear, drawing forth blood, as an amorous old god fondles a maiden nearby. A scene incised on an alabaster bowl from Bonampak shows a male figure drilling into an oversized conch shell from which a 89

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Figure 5.1. Late Xoo phase Zapotec unslipped ceramic urn depicting a seated figure passing a cord through his maizecob phallus, ca. 600–800 CE, Oaxaca, Mexico, height 21.9 cm (8 5/8 in.). bpk Bildagentur/Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany (Ident. Nr. IV Ca 28354)/photo by Claudia Obrocki/Art Resource, New York.

second male emerges, assisted by a female figure.10 It is likely that the artist of the Resurrection Plate intentionally situated this shell ornament—and the phallus of the god—to coincide with both the place where his body emerges from the turtle shell earth and the place where the plate was drilled as an intentional evocation of these themes.11 Penile bloodletting, which is formally similar to the Mesoamerican practice of dehusking an ear of corn by inserting an awl into it, evoked the dynastic bloodlines of the Maya elite, who envisioned the Maize God as an archetypal ancestor and thus as a source of legitimacy.12 A Zapotec urn in the form of a seated figure passing a cord through his penis, which is depicted as a corncob, shows that this conflation between genital bloodletting and maize was widespread across Mesoamerica (fig. 5.1).13 In addition to the Resurrection Plate, several 90

other examples of Classic Maya vessels that feature images of the Maize God or Maize God impersonators were perforated such that the holes align with the groins of the depicted figures (fig. 5.2a–c and fig. 3.12). In an additional instance involving a courtly scene rather than Maize God imagery, such placement seems clearly intentional (fig. 5.2d). The image shows a ruler receiving a kneeling subject; the hole, which was drilled from the front, was placed slightly off-center here to coincide more precisely with the nobleman’s groin. These examples suggest that the distinct ritual practices of piercing a ceramic dish and piercing the human body could be conceptually conflated. Furthermore, there is a metonymical association between plates and bloodletting. Shallow dishes were commonly used as receptacles for the cords and paper strips that were bled upon during auto-sacrificial rituals and then burned, converted into smoke to feed the gods (for example, fig. 4.5).14 As is seen on a Late Classic painted drinking vessel from Motul de San José, Maya nobles perforated their genitals as part of group ceremonies, letting blood drip onto long white loincloths as they danced with flaglike wings projecting from their sides (fig. 5.3). A similar, albeit much more expansive scene is painted on the south wall of Room 3 of Structure 1 at Bonampak, where the dance accompanies the sacrifice of a prisoner taken in battle (fig. 5.4).15 On the east wall, some noblewomen also engage in auto-sacrificial bloodletting, drawing cords through their tongues, but in a more private interior setting. Due to its multiple, often overlapping associations, bloodletting was practiced by Maya elites for a variety of reasons and in different contexts. These included royal accession, conjuring or communing with deities or ancestors, and the celebration of calendrical period endings.16 The bleeding of the penis replicated an initial act of creation attested in myths and iconography from across Mesoamerica. According to an Aztec creation story, the god Quetzalcoatl, who appears in multiple traditions from the Late Classic period through the Conquest, engendered the current race of humans by bleeding himself on the ground-up bones of a prior failed creation.17 Although this myth was recorded in the sixteenth century, it was clearly based upon pan-Mesoamerican ideas that

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a

b

c Figure 5.2. Late Classic Maya polychrome plates with perforations that align with the groins of Maize God figures and a nobleman, ca. 600–850 CE, region of Tikal, El Petén, Guatemala. (a) Diameter 36.8 cm (14½ in.), Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University 1984.49.1, photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5375); (b) diameter 28.7 cm (113/10 in.), photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5880); (c) Colección del Museo Popol Vuh (0435), Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala; (d) photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K6187).

have a great time depth. The scene on the centersouth panel of the South Ball Court at the Epiclassic site of El Tajín, Veracruz, which was carved over half a millennium prior to the Aztec account, appears to recount a very similar story (fig. 5.5). A deity, identifiable as such by his fang, upcurled lip, and superorbital plate, squats over a water-filled enclosure housing a man with a fish head, upon whom he bleeds from his penis. When

the fourth sun is destroyed in a flood in the Aztec myth, the people are turned into fish. Quetzalcoatl retrieves their bones from the underworld to make the current race of humans. Four figures offer genital blood in front of world trees in a Maya scene representing the unfolding of creation on the west wall of Structure 1 of the Late Formative site of San Bartolo (fig. 5.6).18 Despite the repeating structure of the composition, the Perforating the Body

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Figure 5.3. Rollout photograph of a Late Classic Maya polychrome vessel depicting a group bloodletting dance, ca. 750 CE, region of Motul de San José, El Petén, Guatemala, height 22.3 cm (8¾ in.). Kimbell Art Museum AP1985.10, photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1452).

Figure 5.4. Illustration of the mural in Room 3 from Structure 1 at Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico, 792 CE. Illustration by Heather Hurst and Leonard Ashby, courtesy of the Bonampak Documentation Project.

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individual figures, the trees before them, and the offerings they make are all different: the leftmost figure stands in water and offers a fish; the rest stand on land and offer respectively a deer, a turkey, and the scent of a flower. This arrangement closely mirrors the four-part New Year’s almanac on pages 25–28 of the Dresden Codex, where offerings of incense, a turkey, a fish, and a deer leg are made in front of trees.19 This strongly suggests that the scene represents the four-part ordering of time and space as it was derived from the continual unfolding of creation. The auto-sacrificial figures at San Bartolo are part of the same mural program that features the image of the Maize God within a quadripartite turtle carapace, as discussed in chapter 3 (fig. 3.17). The birth of the Maize God as the world tree as depicted on the Resurrection Plate condenses this narrative and would have natural associations with auto-sacrificial bloodletting. Penile auto-sacrificial rituals are also directly associated with turtles in some Postclassic Maya imagery. A group of twenty-five clay figurines

recovered from a cache in Structure 213 at the site of Santa Rita Corozal, Belize, includes four in the form of males standing on turtles as they draw blood from their penises.20 These nearly identical figures were arranged around a central (lidded) ceramic vessel that contained further figures, an evocation of directionality that is echoed by an illustration from page 19 of the Madrid Codex (fig. 5.7). Here a single cord is passed through the phalluses of five figures representing the four cardinal directions and the fifth, vertical direction of the axis mundi at the center. The latter figure is perched atop the roof of a structure where he guides the rope as it emerges from the back of a turtle. Kerry Hull and Michael Carrasco noted this configuration in their discussion of the cosmic symbolism of corbel vaults and the association of turtles with house roofs in Maya thought.21 At the center of the main plaza of the Initial Series group at Chichen Itza is a circular platform that is zoomorphized through sculptural embellishments: the head, tail, and feet of a turtle. 22

Perforating the Body

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Figure 5.5. Relief from the center-south panel of the South Ball Court at El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico, Epiclassic period, ca. 700–1000 CE. Drawing by Michael Kampen, courtesy of the Mint Museum Library.

Figure 5.6. Illustration of a scene of auto-sacrificial bloodletting from the west wall of Structure 1, San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala, Late Formative period, ca. 100 BCE, height approx. 80 cm (31½ in.). San Bartolo Mural, illustration by Heather Hurst, © 2005.

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Figure 5.8. Ixtlán del Río–style sculpture depicting a group bloodletting ritual, Nayarit, Mexico, c. 200 BCE–300 CE, slipped ceramic, diam. 24.1 cm (9 ½ in.). Art Institute of Chicago 1997.475. Photograph courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Figure 5.7. Page 19 of the Postclassic Maya Madrid Codex, Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, ca. 1350–1500 CE, ink and pigment on stucco-coated amate paper, 23.3 × 12.2 cm (9 1/10 × 4 4/5 in.), photograph courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid.

At other times they performed an obscene and painful sacrifice, those who were to make it gathered in the temple whereafter they were placed in a row. Holes were made in the virile member of each one obliquely from side to side and through the holes which they had thus made, they passed the greatest quantity of thread that they could, and all of them being thus fastened and strung together, they anointed the idol with the blood which flowed from all these parts; and he who did it the most was considered the bravest; and their sons from the earliest age began to practice it.24

A range-style building just to the south of this platform is known as the House of the Phalli due to the large three-dimensional stone phalluses tenoned into and projecting from the walls of many of its rooms. At least fourteen relief panels in this structure feature images of pairs of deities offering blood from their penises into bowls from which serpents rise. The abundance of this imagery and its close proximity to the turtle platform have led Laura Amrhein and Matthew Looper to suggest that group performances of genital bloodletting may have taken place there.23 Diego de Landa witnessed one such group ritual in Yucatán in the sixteenth century:

This account emphasizes the group nature of the ceremony, with the participants literally bound together by the cord passed through their genitals. A West Mexican ceramic sculpture in the Iztlán del Río style shows a similar collective bloodletting ritual with a shared perforating cord, which in this case runs through the cheeks of the participants rather than through their genitals (fig. 5.8). It is notable that the rope passed through the penises on page 19 of the Madrid Codex is marked with a k’in sign, associating it with the sun and its passage through the sky. The image thus illustrates a unified conception of directionally ordered space Perforating the Body

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Figure 5.9. Frontispiece of the Late Postclassic Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, central Mexico, ca. 1250–1520 CE, pigment on deerskin, 17.5 × 17.5 cm (6 7/8 × 6 7/8 in.). National Museums Liverpool M12014. Photograph courtesy National Museums Liverpool (World Museum).

Figure 5.10. Detail from page 53 of the Late Postclassic Codex Borgia, central Mexico, ca. 1250–1520 CE, pigment on deerskin, 27 × 27 cm (10 5/8 × 10 5/8 in.). Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Borg. Mess. 1, facsimile originally published in Loubat 1898.

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and time similar to the calendrical cosmogram found on pages 75–76 of the same codex as well as to the more elaborated example from the frontispiece of the Central Mexican Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (fig. 5.9). There time is shown to originate from and be centered upon the fire god, Xiuhtecuhtli, as blood from the dismembered deity Tezcatlipoca flows inward from the corners to fuel its continued movement. Each of the four directions contains a different tree to which deities make sacrifices, much like the configuration seen at San Bartolo. Pages 49–53 of the Codex Borgia contain a directional almanac with four large cells, each containing different cosmic trees, temple rituals, fire drilling, marriage, and other mantic imagery, again showing a quadripartite division of qualified space-time. These are followed by a fifth, smaller cell representing the center direction (fig. 5.10).25 Only the cosmic tree is represented there, growing from a prone skeletal figure, surmounted by an eagle, and flanked by a pair of deities who feed it with offerings of blood from their penises. This tree of the center, the axis mundi, is shown as a maize plant with anthropomorphized ears of red and yellow corn growing from it. It seems likely that the closely related imagery on the Resurrection Plate, with its maize world tree growing from bones resting upon a reptilian earth and flanked by a pair of gods, would also have evoked the ritual activity of penile bloodletting, even if this was not explicitly depicted in its imagery. The preceding evidence from the wider iconographic and ethnohistoric record strongly suggests that the alignment of the hole in the Resurrection Plate with the groin of the Maize God was intended to evoke penile bloodletting rituals as part of an overlay of associations related to creation. Because the hole made through this dish appears to have been conceived as analogous to the perforating of the body, this chapter explores somatic holes, beginning with a more thorough consideration of auto-sacrificial rites. This is followed by an examination of piercings made to accommodate bodily adornments. Finally, I turn to holes and cavities made in anthropomorphic sculptural representations. Although these three topics are usually discussed separately as different categories of perforations, I argue that they reflect similar concerns

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Figure 5.11. Illustrations of auto-sacrificial bloodletting from appendix of book II (left) and book III, chapter 3 (right) of Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (the Florentine Codex), 1575–1577, ink and pigment on paper, page size approx. 31 × 21.2 cm (12 1/5 × 8 1/3 in.), Florence, Laurentian Library. By permission of MiBACT. Any further reproduction by any means is prohibited. (a) MS Med. Palat. 218, f. 189r; (b) MS Med. Palat. 218, f. 211r.

and therefore should be understood as a continuum of related interventions into the material substance of human or humanlike bodies.

AUTO-SACRIFICE IN MESOAMERICA

Perforating the body and offering one’s own blood appears to have been one of the most widespread ritual acts in Mesoamerica, dating back at least to the Middle Formative period.26 It is attested by the presence of implements used for this purpose in the archaeological record, by imagery depicting auto-sacrificial activities, by textual references in the Classic Maya inscriptions, and by sixteenthcentury accounts as well as more recent ethnographic records. Various materials—cactus spines, thorns, obsidian needles, stingray spines—were used to puncture the flesh at different points in the body, including the ears, tongue, elbow, penis,

thighs, shins, and calves (fig. 5.11). The blood that was produced in this manner was understood to feed the gods as part of a consumptive cosmology. The gods had sacrificed themselves to create the world and in turn required continual nourishment to sustain it. Thus, auto-sacrifice was an obligation on both sides within the constant and reciprocal flow of life energies.27 The Nahuatl word nextlahualli (payment) was used to describe sacrifice of all sorts, making explicit its status as a remittance of a debt.28 Another Nahuatl term closely associated with bloodletting is tlamaceualiztli, which means “to merit or deserve something.” Cecelia Klein sees this as relating to the inherent reciprocity that underlay this act, both between the humans and the gods and between the lower classes and the elites.29 This term was also translated as “penance” by the sixteenth-century Spanish friars, likely as the closest fit to convey Christian doctrine to the newly converted indigenous population. Michel Graulich Perforating the Body

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has argued that for the Aztecs sacrifice was at its core an expiatory cleansing of sins.30 The Maya word most closely associated with bloodletting is ch’ahb, a complex term for which it has proven difficult to find an entirely adequate translation into English. Ch’ahb roughly means penance or penitence and is used specifically to refer to fasting in a number of Maya languages. A literal link between fasting and bloodletting may be posited. Certainly, it must have been the case that the practice of drawing cords through tongues would have resulted in a reduced intake of food, just as the drawing of a cord through the penis would have created a wound necessitating a period of sexual abstinence. Stephen Houston, however, understands this term as conveying a more general sense of “ritual abnegation leading to a desired outcome,” that is, a form of “spiritual preparation.”31 Complicating things, the Yukatek cognate for this word, ch’ab, means both “to abstain” or “to do penance” and “to create” or “to make from nothing.”32 Finally, ch’ahb was used as part of parentage statements in some Classic inscriptions. This overlay of usages has led Timothy Knowlton to propose “genesis” as the English word that best captures its nuances.33 Through the interrelated meanings associated with this term, we can begin to get a sense of what ch’ahb indicated in statements related to auto-sacrificial bloodletting. According to Jessica Munson and her colleagues, sixty-nine out of eighty-nine identified instances of this word in Classic Maya inscriptions “appeared to be directly associated with blood letting.”34 There is thus a close but imprecise association with its usage and bloodletting rituals: ch’ahb is used to refer to nonbloodletting contexts slightly less than a quarter of the time. It is used with reference to both figures on Lintel 24 at Yaxchilan: the ruler Shield Jaguar III, who stands to the left holding a torch, and his wife Lady K’abal Xook, who kneels to the right as she draws a thorny cord through her tongue (fig. 5.12). The text related to the ruler states in part that “it is his image in penance [ch’ahb] with the fiery spear. It is the penance [ch’ahb] of the four k’atun lord, Shield Jaguar III,” while the inscription related to Lady K’abal Xook simply states that “it is her image in penance [ch’ahb]” before giving her name and titles.35 Thus, 98

Figure 5.12. Late Classic Maya, Lintel 24 from Yaxchilan, Chiapas, Mexico, 723–726 CE, limestone, 109 × 78 × 6 cm (42 11/ 12 × 30 7/ 10 × 2 1/ 3 in.). British Museum AM1923, Maud.4, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

while the autosacrificial ritual of the noblewoman is referred to as ch’ahb, Shield Jaguar III, who is not depicted engaging in bloodletting, is twice associated with the same term, once explicitly in reference to the torch that he holds. The deictic marking of the text—the claim that “it is his image in penance” (u-baah ti-ch’ahb)—strongly implies that the inscription refers specifically to what is shown in the associated image. Ch’ahb was often paired with the term ak’ab (darkness) to form a diphrastic couplet that further complicates an understanding of its meaning. Following Ralph Roys, Marc Zender sees ch’ahb ak’ab (genesis-darkness) as conveying the potential to sire children.36 It was something that captives were said to lack or be denied: “his image without creation, without darkness.” The progenerative capacity to which it referred might be better understood as agency more broadly.37 The phrase appears to have designated the individual as a source of

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potency capable of bringing forth children, fire, or blood. Captives were placed in a state of abstinence and their blood was often spilled in sacrifice, but these conditions did not reflect their ch’ahb because they were inflicted from outside rather than originating within. First penance/creation (yax ch’ahb) was a rite of passage undertaken by young Maya nobles during the Classic period. The event was important enough to have been performed in front of dozens of witnesses, as recorded on a number of stone monuments. As Stephen Houston observes, children as young as five years old, both male and female, entered into a new social status and age of responsibility through this ritual. Monumental records of these ceremonies tend to relate to unusual or fraught claims to dynastic succession, such as an individual who would ascend to the throne following the death of his childless half-brother.38 If such yax ch’ahb events were therefore seen to bolster claims to legitimate authority, it is likely that this was not simply a matter of the bloodletting itself, which was almost certainly much more widely practiced by adults in Mesoamerica. Rather, it is likely that communion with deities and ancestors was accomplished through this act, which would have provided young nobles with privileged access to powerful tutelary gods and forebearers that served to legitimize authority.39 This is clearly seen on the so-called Hauberg Stela, on which a Maya noble is engaging in yax ch’ahb tu k’uhil, the “first penance [or, genesis] for his god” (fig. 5.13). The young lord is depicted with marks of divinity—a curl in his pupil, a curling element at the side of his mouth, and a central shark-tooth–like fang—and is shown in communion with supernatural beings. These miniature anthropomorphic forms climb along the ropelike serpent that is held in his arms and rises in front of him. Serpents are frequently depicted as portals of communication with the spirit world, as indicated by the face that emerges from within this serpent’s wide-open maw. The head gazes down upon the lord below in a position often occupied by deities and deceased ancestors in Maya ruler portraits.40 At the point where the body of the serpent rises, a crenellated stream of blood flows downward in front of and apparently emanating from the figure.

Figure 5.13. Early Classic Maya Stela (the Hauberg Stela), ca. 300–500 CE, limestone, 83.8 × 37.7 × 9.4 cm (33 × 14 3/16 × 3 11/16 in.). Princeton University Art Museum 1999232, Gift of John H. Hauberg, Class of 1939, in honor of Gillett G. Griffin.

Within this outpouring are the upper bodies of three small figures, with scrolls of blood flowing from their severed torsos. In performing his “first penance/genesis” this ruler has both become the baah (manifested image) of a deity and summoned or conjured (tzak) further divine manifestations through the shedding of his blood. Auto-sacrificial bloodletting performed by Aztec nobles appears to have functioned in ways Perforating the Body

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analogous to what has been proposed for ch’ahb events among Maya nobility. At the time of their election to the office, Aztec rulers underwent a period of fasting and penance that included the piercing of their flesh to offer blood to Huitzilopochtli.41 Moreover, several important monuments prominently depicted the rulers themselves engaging in this act in the presence of a deceased predecessor or a deity. The Dedication Stone, a relief carved onto a large slab of greenstone, features a pair of profile figures perforating the upper portions of their ears with bone awls (fig. 5.14a). Copious streams of blood flow down past the incense burners placed at their feet and into the open mouth of the earth monster on which they stand. Both figures are identified by the name glyphs behind their heads. To the right is Ahuitzotl, the ruler at the time when this monument, which likely commemorated the rededication of the Templo Mayor, was made. On the left is Tizoc, his deceased brother and predecessor. A similar composition is found on the backrest of the monument variously referred to as the

a

b Figure 5.14. Drawings of Aztec reliefs depicting auto-sacrificial bloodletting, courtesy of Emily Umberger: (a) upper portion of the Dedication Stone, 1487–1488, greenstone, width 62 cm (24 2/ 5 in.); (b) backrest of the Throne of Moctezuma (also known as the Temple Stone or the Teocalli of Sacred Warfare), 1502–1520 CE, basalt, width 100 cm (39 3/ 8 in.).

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Temple Stone, the Teocalli of Sacred Warfare, or the Throne of Moctezuma (fig. 5.14b). Here the figures flank a central solar disk containing the glyph 4 Movement, the date associated with the current sun. They hold perforators in front of themselves in preparation to offer their blood. The figure on the right is the current ruler, Moctezuma II, named by a glyph in front of his head. The figure across from him is not named but has the attributes of at least two Aztec deities closely associated with rulership: the hummingbird headdress of Huitzilopochtli and the serpent foot of Tezcatlipoca. Thus, on both these monuments, bloodletting is shown to be an important obligation of the ruler—nourishing the earth and feeding the sun—an obligation that served to connect him to his predecessors and to the gods themselves, who were made present through this act. Further Aztec monuments prominently featured bloodletting as their subject in ways that extended beyond a direct connection with rulership and the legitimization of authority. This is usually conveyed through the representation of a ball of grass into which perforators have been placed, such as the one seen between the Tizoc and Ahuitzotl in figure 5.14a. This imagery appears to have been especially associated with the military orders and warfare.42 A similar thematic link is also found among the Classic Maya, where Munson and her colleagues “identified antagonistic statements about warfare and conflict to be the primary contexts in which bloodletting is mentioned” in monumental inscriptions.43 Drawing on signaling theory, these authors have proposed that auto-sacrificial activities were “costly signals”—painful and demanding great willpower as well as being potentially damaging to the body—and that permanent records of them on monuments served to advertise the personal commitments of the elites within a social milieu demanding significant sacrifices from lower-status individuals in war. Certainly, many images depicting nobles appear to exaggerate the ordeal. The rope that Lady K’abal Xook draws through her tongue on Yaxchilan Lintel 24 is as thick as one of her fingers and has large thorns projecting from it (fig. 5.12). And the amount of blood gushing from the cartilaginous ear tissue of Ahuitzotl and Tizoc on the Aztec Dedication

Stone begs credulity. This is all to say that such records are representations and must be analyzed as such. Indeed, this discussion has focused primarily on the bloodletting activities of elites because they are the best documented; monumental artworks and inscriptions tend to have rulers and nobles as their subjects. However, there is significant evidence that auto-sacrifice was practiced by most or all Mesoamericans, at least at the time of the Conquest. Early Spanish accounts mention bloodletting as a universal aspect of Mesoamerican religious activity, occurring among commoners as well as the nobility. For example, Sahagún records that on the feast day of the sun, Nahui Ollin (4 Movement), “all the people bloodied themselves, and no supplications were then made. But everyone drew blood; straws were passed through tongue or ear-lobe, and incense was offered. Everyone [did so]; none were negligent.”44 As oidor Tomás López Medel states in his Relación of 1612, It was very usual, as I have already said, among the Mexicans and Guatemalans (for all had certain sacrifices and rites) to sacrifice to the idols that they found on the roads, anointing the face of the idol with blood they drew right there, either from their ears, piercing them, or from their nostrils or tongue, and even from their private parts, according to what others say, so that anyone who passed by any idol and did not offer him any portion of blood drawn there from his own body was not considered devout or good, in the same way that we do reverence when we come upon any cross or image on any journey.45

Thus, we see individual bloodletting as a fundamental act of worship practiced by or expected of all members of contact-era Mesoamerican society and not limited to the elites. While we have a limited number of records documenting some Maya elites celebrating their yax ch’ahb, first bloodletting was an important ceremony for all Aztec children, no matter what their social standing. As recounted by Diego Durán, recently born infants were brought to the Templo Mayor during the month of Huey Tozoztli (Great Perforation), where the Perforating the Body

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priest of Huitzilopochtli would lightly incise the ears and, if the child was male, the penis.46 This aspect of Huey Tozoztli celebrations was not recorded by Sahagún, who instead situates the ritual first piercing of children in a quadrennial ceremony during the month of Izcalli, as part of the festival in honor of the fire god, Xiuhtecuhtli.47 All Aztec children who had been weaned since the last time the ritual was performed were taken to the temple, where their ears were perforated by the priest (fig. 5.15). This ceremony ushered these young children—notably at an age similar to the age of many Maya nobles for whom yax ch’ahb ceremonies are recorded—into a new status of personhood, marking their transition toward maturation and socialization.48 The piercing of their ears initiated the children into the practice of auto-sacrificial bloodletting, a ritual obligation of all Mesoamerican adults.49 Alfred Tozzer also observed bloodletting among the Lacandon Maya in the early twentieth century as part of an elaborate ceremony accompanying the dedication of a new “god pot” brazier.50 Tozzer, however, speculated that this practice was dying out, as it was only the old men who engaged in it. R. Jon McGee, who conducted fieldwork with the Lacandones during the 1980s, observed that god pots were painted with dots of a red dye that was explicitly identified as a substitute for human blood and that “older men in the village all remember making ritual offerings of their own blood to their god pots.”51 The Lacandones, one of the only indigenous groups that remains unconquered and unconverted, live in relatively egalitarian villages in what is now Chiapas. Thus, self-bleeding, which likely represented a survival of pre-Hispanic religious practice, cannot be characterized solely in terms of elite strategies for legitimizing power. The ubiquity of auto-sacrificial activities across classes suggests that the potential for infection or permanent damage was relatively low. Certainly, some bodily treatments had greater potential for risk than others, and some overzealous penitents engaged in self-mortifying acts that left their bodies in tatters.52 Yet this was not the case for the majority of Mesoamerican people. Several herbs were known that could have been used to staunch bleeding, treat inflammations, and sterilize both 102

Figure 5.15. First bloodletting ceremony during Izcalli, illustration from book II, chapter 37, of Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (the Florentine Codex), 1575–1577, ink and pigment on paper, page size approx. 31 × 21.2 cm (12 1/ 5 × 8 1/ 3 in.), Florence, Laurentian Library, MS Med. Palat. 218, f. 158v. By permission of MiBACT. Any further reproduction by any means is prohibited.

instruments and wounds.53 The Spaniard Egidius Gonzales witnessed this in Nicaragua in the sixteenth century: When the priests give a signal, each man takes a razor, and cuts his tongue, turning his eyes towards the divinity; some pierce the tongue, others cut it in such wise as to cause a great flow of blood. Each man then rubs the lips and beard of this odious idol, with his blood, as we have said in our first description of sacrifices, after which the powdered herbs are sprinkled on the fresh wounds. Such is the virtue of this powder, that the wounds close in a few hours so that no trace of them is ever again visible.54

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Perhaps the best evidence that bodily perforations were commonly made without significant adverse health effects throughout all periods and cultures of Mesoamerican civilization is the presence of body ornaments in the material record. Large holes made to accommodate the oversized earflares in evidence throughout all periods, as well as the nasal and lip piercings worn by a number of elites, would have required regular attention after they were made as they healed and were slowly stretched. Indeed, as I argue in the following section, there is good reason to believe that, in addition to the practical similarities related to their production and care, a significant conceptual overlap existed between the practice of piercing the flesh in bloodletting rituals and the production of somatic holes intended to accommodate jewelry.

BODY PIERCING AND ORNAMENTATION IN MESOAMERICA

In a letter written to Pope Leo X in 1519 or 1520, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera described the six Totonac Indians he encountered in the Spanish court of King Charles V, where they had been sent by Hernán Cortés along with his first letter: Both sexes pierce the ears and wear golden pendants in them, and the men pierce the extremity of the under lip, down to the roots of the lower teeth. Just as we wear precious stones mounted in gold upon our fingers, so do they insert pieces of gold the size of a ring into their lips. This piece of gold is as large as a silver Carolus, and thick as a finger. I cannot remember ever to have seen anything more hideous; but they think that nothing more elegant exists under the lunar circle. This example proves the blindness and the foolishness of the human race: it likewise proves how we deceive ourselves. The Ethiopian thinks that black is a more beautiful colour than white, while the white man thinks the opposite. A bald man thinks himself more handsome than a hairy one, and a man with a beard laughs at him who is without one. We are influenced

by passions rather than guided by reason, and the human race accepts these foolish notions, each country following its own fancy.55

This account is notable for prefiguring by over two and a half centuries Immanuel Kant’s recognition that, although they are experienced and expressed as universal truths, aesthetic judgments are subjective and reflect culturally specific sentiments.56 What disgusts Peter Martyr is not the practice of adorning the body with precious stones, which he notes is also done in Europe, but rather that the Totonacs wear these jewels embedded within the flesh of their faces. Marveling at the contrast between the Indians’ standards of beauty and his own, he nevertheless stops short of probing these different aesthetic responses, instead writing them off with appeals to other examples based on natural conditions such as skin color or the presence or lack of hair. However, divergent attitudes toward body modifications do not arise from innate differences in appearance; nor are they mere matters of taste or preference. Rather, they can be understood in relation to the underlying worldviews of these two civilizations. Peter Martyr’s repulsion at the sight of facial piercings derives from a Judeo-Christian theology and morality in which humans, having been created in the image of God, sin against their maker by permanently altering the appearance and integrity of their bodies.57 In contrast, as discussed in chapter 2, Mesoamerican cosmology sees all things—organic and inorganic, including human beings—as participating within an emergent field of relations that are in a constant state of renewal and transformation. The practice of bodily adornment in Mesoamerica can only be fully understood with respect to this worldview, which means that particular attention should be paid to the articulation of jewelry with the human body. The piercing of the flesh was not simply a means to accommodate ornaments but an integral and meaningful aspect of adornment. Interventions within or upon the flesh could both enact and reflect the changing configurations of material relations in which people participated. As in Europe, the wearing of jewelry in Mesoamerica was a means to demonstrate wealth Perforating the Body

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and social status. Sumptuary laws enforced by the Aztecs, and possibly by other groups, declared that certain types of adornment were allowed to be worn only by select categories of people, making them visible metonyms for rank, standing, or personal achievement.58 Raw materials such as gold, greenstone, turquoise, and rock crystal, among others, were relatively rare and often only obtainable through long-distance trade or tribute. Yet these materials were not only valued for their scarcity but also for their physical properties, sensual attributes, and qualitative associations.59 Their glinting surfaces gave the impression that they possessed active properties, while their colors were identified with aspects of the natural world associated with life and growth: the green of foliage and abundance, the golden yellow of the sun, or the clear of fresh water. These qualities were not merely metaphorical but were understood to be intrinsic to the essence of these materials. In discussing the ways deposits of precious stones were located, Sahagún’s informants state that those who know what to look for know where it is: they can see that it is breathing, [smoking], giving off vapor. Early, at early dawn, when [the sun] comes up, they find where to place themselves, where to stand; they face the sun. And when the sun has already come up, they are truly very attentive with looking. They look with diligence; they no longer blink; they look well. Whenever they can see that something like a little smoke [column] stands, that one of them is giving off vapor, this one is the precious stone. Perhaps it is a coarse stone; perhaps it is a common stone, or something smooth, or something round. They carry it away. And if they are not successful, if it is only barren where the little [column of ] smoke stands, thus they know that the precious stone is there in the earth. Then they dig. There they see, there they find the precious stone, perhaps already well formed, perhaps already burnished. Perhaps they see something buried there either in stone, or in a stone bowl, or in a stone chest; perhaps it is filled with precious stones. This they claim there. 104

And thus do they know that this precious stone is there: [the herbs] always grow fresh; they grow green. They say this is the breath of the green stone, and its breath is very fresh; it is an announcer of its qualities. In this manner is seen, is taken the green stone.60

This passage describes precious stones as possessing qualities that were manifested even when their surfaces were unpolished or when they were still buried within the earth. Despite the material being hidden or invisible, greenstone had an inner vitality—exuded as its “breath”—that could be detected as the rising mists at sunrise and caused the foliage in the surrounding earth to grow fresh and green (fig. 5.16). The living stone was understood to interact with its environment and affect its surroundings. Once extracted and worked, the vivid coloration and hard, glistening surface of polished greenstone—as well as the floral forms into which it was often carved—visibly manifested qualities that the material had exuded even when it remained unworked and unseen. As with other aspects of the natural world, the external visible attributes of greenstone were understood to arise directly from the internal character of the material. According to the categorization devised by Charles Sanders Peirce, this type of relationship between a sign and its referent is indexical. In contrast to the icon, which signifies through similarity or resemblance, and the symbol, which signifies through a purely arbitrary convention and usually denotes a general concept, the index is a concrete sign that “denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object [to which it refers].”61 Beyond being mere qualities, the external features of precious materials such as greenstone resulted from—and served as indices of—the inner life and vitality of these substances. In the Mesoamerican mind, a dynamic, indexical relationship existed between visible appearances as signs and the invisible attributes that they pointed to. Moreover, in their affective materiality, objects were understood to belong to an unfolding chain of indexical signification as they exerted influence upon—or were further influenced by—their surroundings. Based on early colonial accounts and more recent ethnographies, we can be more precise about

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Figure 5.16. Locating precious stones at sunrise, illustration from book XI, chapter 8, of Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (the Florentine Codex), 1575–1577, ink and pigment on paper, page size approx. 31 × 21.2 cm (12 1/5 × 8 1/3 in.), Florence, Laurentian Library, MS Med. Palat. 220, f. 355r. By permission of MiBACT. Any further reproduction by any means is prohibited.

the ways the invisible, agentive life forces that imbued the material world were conceptualized in Aztec thought. Precious stones buried within the earth were looked for at sunrise, drawing a correspondence between the potency attributed to them and tonalli, a Nahuatl term referring to the heat given off by the sun but also the heat present in the blood of living creatures.62 Tonalli was understood to be an animating force that bound together the fates of terrestrial beings and celestial bodies. Constantly in flux, it could be concentrated, as in highly charismatic individuals, or dissipated, as with the waning of vigor toward the end of life. It also infused inorganic materials, especially those whose surfaces shone brightly when touched by the light (and heat) of the sun. Gold—teocuitlatl (divine excrement)—was particularly associated

with tonalli: thought to be deposited within the earth by the sun as it rose, it was a material condensation of vital solar energy.63 Gold ornaments were often formed with numerous facets or moving parts to accentuate their glittering surfaces, as visual demonstrations of the tonalli they possessed. Just as the ways in which gold and precious stones were worked revealed qualities inherent within the material, a tautological equivalence was established between elites and the noble materials with which they were adorned: jewels served to identify the wearer as noble because they were understood to be indexically correlated to—or even manifestations of—the tonalli contained within the body of the individual.64 Sahagún’s informants tell us that this association between the precious materiality of jewels and the noble character of the adorned held true even if they were worn in a superficial manner, such as necklaces or bracelets. The embedding of ornaments within the body, however, undoubtedly made this conflation all the more explicit. Piercing the flesh to open a hole for this purpose would inevitably result in the drawing of blood, the precious fluid that, in its warmth and movement through the body, was closely identified with the solar heat of tonalli. Following the ritual first bloodletting of young children by the Aztecs during quadrennial Izcalli ceremonies (discussed in the preceding section), cords of unspun cotton were placed through the holes that were produced.65 This ensured that they were kept open and began the slow process of widening them to accommodate ear ornaments later.66 The spaces in which jewels were to be placed were thus closely associated with the holes from which sacrificial blood was offered. The adornments themselves both kept these artificially made orifices continually open and, being made from materials that were themselves infused with tonalli, served as permanent tokens of the potency flowing from the living body. This indexical, representational role played by ornaments is only part of the picture, however. There was a reciprocal relationship between flesh and jewelry, such that the beneficial emanations from the materials the ornaments were made from could also be absorbed by the body. Corporeal holes were conceived as not only releasing Perforating the Body

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tonalli through the blood but also allowing for its entrance. Discussing the persistence of “superstitions” among the recently converted Aztecs, Durán noted the following: They have introduced magic beliefs even in the perforating and the placing of earrings in the ears of women and girls. Let the truth be told. One day I entered a home to visit and console some ailing people during the great plague which raged in this year. I found a sick old man seated, wearing some earrings which he had donned on the orders of a deceitful doctor, who had made him believe that if [he placed them in his ears] he would not die. And therefore you will see these [earrings] worn by old women who have almost turned into dust, who believe . . . that their life will be prolonged by wearing them.67

Looking past Durán’s polemics, this passage points to an indigenous understanding of ornaments as exerting a vivifying effect upon the bodies within which they were worn. Thus, the holes made to accommodate them allowed the ingress of animating forces into the body. This is also seen in Sahagún’s description of the initial piercing ceremony. Immediately following the perforating of the ears of Aztec children during the Izcalli rites dedicated to the fire god, Xiuhtecuhtli, the children were passed over a fire: And when they pierced the ears [of the children], thereupon they took the little ones to singe them; they laid and made a fire, and scattered much incense over the flames. And hence it was said: “They are singed.” The old men of the tribal temple seized all of them. They took the small children and dedicated them over the fire.68

This suggests that the holes were made in part to allow the infusion of the vital heat of the fire into the children, just as newborn infants were placed next to the hearth for four days following their birth to saturate them with tonalli heat (see chapter 4). Indeed, holes in the body—the natural orifices that serve as the interface between inside 106

and outside—were understood as a sine qua non for life: the production of them was a metaphor for birth itself. This is seen in birth almanacs from several central Mexican codices, which include depictions of deities piercing infants with bone awls (fig. 5.17). The infants are depicted full-bodied in the Codex Borgia, and the fates associated with each cell are indicated by the different deities doing the perforating. In all cases, the awl is held to the eyes of the children, suggesting their initial eye-opening at birth. The version in the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, which shows only the heads of the infants held in the hands of the gods, includes one cell in which the awl is aimed at the mouth, from which a scroll ending in a maize cob emerges. In this case, both breath and the intake of food are implicated. Markus Eberl sees the perforation imagery in the birth almanacs as potentially relating to actual treatments of the infants, including ceremonies in which priests drew blood from the ears of children to initiate them into the pain of the world and the obligation of all people to sacrifice to the gods as well as the healing of a clouding of the eyes sometimes experienced by infants.69 Yet he also discusses these images in relation to the final forming of infants into fully human beings. Based on a passage from Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, Elizabeth Boone also interprets these scenes metaphorically, seeing them as reflecting the painful act of parturition as well as the initial boring and breathing of life into a newborn child by the creator deities.70 Addressing the newly born infant she was bathing, the midwife would say: “Thy mother, thy father, Ome tecuhtli, Ome ciuatl have sent thee. Thou wert [breathed], thou wert bored in thy home, the place of duality.”71 That is to say, the body must first be perforated to allow animating forces—breath, life, the soul—to enter it. Likewise, the insertion of precious jewels into holes made in the flesh was undoubtedly understood to have had a fructifying effect on people. The wearing of ornaments by Mesoamerican elites was done in part to conflate the adorned individuals with the qualities attributed to the precious materials from which the jewels were made, thereby naturalizing their societal claims of authority. However, these objects were recognized to be signs that, like language, could be manipulated and

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potentially used to misrepresent reality. That is, while jewels were commonly worn as tokens proclaiming of the status and power held by an individual, they were not themselves understood to be agents of legitimacy. This is made explicit in the Popol Vuh through the story of Vuqub Caquix (Seven Macaw). Prior to the current age of humankind, Vuqub Caquix was a false god who claimed the role of sun and moon. To substantiate this assertion of divine status, he points to his glittering, adorned features:

a

I am great. My place is now higher than that of the human work, the human design. I am their sun and I am their light, and I am also their months. So be it: my light is great. I am the walkway and I am the foothold of the people, because my eyes are of metal. My teeth just glitter with jewels, and turquoise as well; they stand out blue with stones like the face of the sky.

But these ornaments are false signs that do not reflect any actual transcendence:

b Figure 5.17. Late Postclassic Mixteca-Puebla birth almanacs that include infants being perforated, ca. 1250–1520 CE, pigment on deerskin. (a) Page 15 of the Codex Borgia, 27 × 27 cm (10 5/8 × 10 5/8 in.), Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Borg. Mess. 1, facsimile originally published in Loubat 1898; (b) page 23 of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, 17.5 × 17.5 cm (6 7/8 × 6 7/8 in.), National Museums Liverpool M12014, photograph courtesy National Museums Liverpool (World Museum).

It is not true that he is the sun, this Seven Macaw, yet he magnifies himself, his wings, his metal. But the scope of his face lies right around his own perch; his face does not reach everywhere beneath the sky. The faces of the sun, moon, and stars are not yet visible, it has not yet dawned.72

As a pretender to celestial greatness, Vuqub Caquix must be defeated to set the stage for the first true dawn, a deed that is accomplished through the extraction of his adornments following a crippling blowgun wound delivered by the Hero Twins. Although this myth was recorded in the sixteenth century, images carved on Late Formative period stelae at the site of Izapa and painted on Classic Maya ceramics appear to relate similar stories many centuries earlier. On a dish now known as the Blom Plate, for example, a pair of blowgunwielding figures flank a central avian creature perched atop a world tree in the form of a sprouting monstrous skull draped with a bicephalic serpent Perforating the Body

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Figure 5.18. Late Classic Maya polychrome dish (the Blom Plate), region of Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico, ca. 600–750 CE, slipped ceramic, diameter 44.5 cm (17½ in.), Museo Maya de Cancún 10-425136, photograph by Ximena Arellano Núñez, reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

(fig. 5.18). Atop a long-nosed head, this supernatural bird has a second head that rises on a sinuous neck formed by linked jewels. Various additional jewels are vomited from the long beak of this upper head, signifying the downfall of this creature at the hands of the blowgunners. Although this and similar scenes cannot be taken as directly illustrating the myth of Vuqub Caquix as it is told in the Popol Vuh, the parallels are striking. Of particular note are both the central importance of jewels to the identity of this celestial bird and the removal of these as the cause of its downfall. In the Popol Vuh, the distinction made between Vuqub Caquix’s illegitimate claims to superior status and actual lack of spiritual potency is mirrored by the differentiation between the soulless wooden people that existed in the predawn world and the current creation of humans with vital flesh molded from ground maize. Lacking true divinity, Vuqub Caquix was an appropriate celestial being to rule over the wooden people, who lacked any spiritual understanding, a deficiency further reflected in their physical dryness. As the Popol Vuh tells us, “they had no blood, no lymph. They had no sweat, no 108

fat.”73 Without these fluids closely associated with bodily heat and vitality, the people made of wood also lacked an awareness of the debt they owed to their creators, to whom they therefore did not offer sacrifices. This displeased the gods, who eventually destroyed the world with a great flood; the wooden people became the chattering monkeys of the forest, a downfall that parallels that of Vuqub Caquix. Thus, although it was expected that bodily ornaments announced their wearer as noble—both in the sense of possessing or channeling a concentration of vital energies and in a hierarchical sense related to the political authority associated with such personal potency and charisma—this correspondence was not fixed or absolute. In the case of Vuqub Caquix, the wearing of jewels did not correlate to actual divine power: as a result, he was stripped of his undeserved and misrepresenting finery. This mythological tale can be understood to prefigure the actual removal of jewelry from captives taken in war, who in their defeat no longer possessed either spiritual or political agency. Ornaments were recognized to be symbols used to point to ineffable qualities that resided within the flesh of the adorned, with an abiding desire to bring the outward appearance into accordance with the inner condition. The ornaments placed in bodily perforations could therefore be read as indexical signs—attesting to the legitimized sanctity and authority of their wearers—only as long as they were understood as perpetuating the initial (sacrificial) act of piercing. The opening of the flesh of the individual provides egress for the flow of blood and its associated vitality: the very substance and quality that the wooden people lacked in the predawn era presided over by Vuqub Caquix. That is to say, in the adorning of the Mesoamerican body, the hole was as important as the ornament, whose role was to keep this somatic passage open while providing a material form to the immaterial forces emerging from it. This relationship between a body ornament and the hole it occupies is unambiguously demonstrated in the use of piercing as a legitimizing ritual. The Relación de Cholula tells how the priests of this important pilgrimage city in Central Mexico granted the right to rule to lords from distant places by piercing their noses, lips, or ears, as

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was the custom where each was from.74 A similar bestowal of authority occurs in the Historia ToltecaChichimeca, when the Toltec rulers of Cholula travel to Chicomoztoc (Place of the Seven Caves) to bring forth Chichimec warriors to aid them in defeating their enemies (fig. 5.19). Following their emergence from Chicomoztoc, several Chichimecs are granted status as lineage heads, acknowledged as possessing legitimate authority, by having their nasal septa pierced by the Toltecs at Cholula.75 These sixteenth-century accounts help us understand images depicting similar legitimizing rituals that occurred several centuries earlier. Several Mixtec historical codices recount the life of the twelfth-century ruler of Tilantongo, Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, including how he was granted the right to establish his own ruling lineage by priests from Tollan, the Place of the Reeds (fig. 5.20).76 This toponym is associated with a number of ritually important centers in the ancient Mesoamerican political landscape. Multiple possibilities have been proposed for its identity in this instance, including Tulancingo and Cholula (which was explicitly identified as a Tollan in a number of sources).77 Polities carrying the designation “Tollan” were widely recognized as having a special religiopolitical status associated with the Feathered Serpent that attracted pilgrims of many ethnic groups from long distances.78 A similar nose-piercing ceremony is shown on a relief in the North Temple of the Great Ball Court at Chichen Itza, likely another Tollan serving the elites in eastern Mesoamerica.79 The nose jewel that Eight Deer received was emblematic of his legitimacy, but only insofar as it indexed the sanctioning of his right to rule by a recognized authority. Thus, it is precisely the moment of the piercing ceremony itself, which marked the transference of status, that was depicted in the pre-Hispanic codices. At around the same period in Europe, religious leaders also played a role in recognizing the legitimate authority of rulers (fig. 5.21). Yet, while the crowning of the Holy Roman Emperor by the pope reflects a superficial and entirely symbolic placement of jewels on the head of a king, the ceremony performed by Mesoamerican priests involves a transformation of status that is brought about through a material intervention in the flesh of the

Figure 5.19. Depiction of a ritual nose-piercing ceremony from f. 21r of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, 1545–1565, ink and pigment on paper, page approx. 30 × 22 cm (11 4/ 5 × 8 2/ 3 in.). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Mexicain MS 46–58, fol. 21r, photograph courtesy BnF.

newly recognized ruler. Not simply a matter of the aesthetic sensibilities of the cultures in question, these different approaches toward the ritualized and meaning-laden adornment of the kingly body should be understood as reflecting the contrasting worldviews held by the two civilizations.

CAVITIES IN MESOAMERICAN FIGURAL SCULP TURE

In addition to the insertion of jewelry into holes made in the human body, precious stones were also placed in some anthropomorphic sculptures, apparently with the intention of producing a similar vivifying effect. This is most observable among the Aztecs, but it is also seen in some Postclassic-era Huastec figures as well as a number of Classic-period examples from Teotihuacan, Perforating the Body

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a

b Figure 5.20. Illustrations from early Postclassic Mixtec codices showing the ritual nose-piercing of Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, ca. 1250–1450 CE, pigment on deerskin. (a) Page 57 of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, page approx. 23.5 × 19 cm (9¼ × 7½ in.). British Museum AM1902,0308.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved. (b) Page 13 of the Codex Colombino, page approx. 26 × 19.5 cm (10¼ × 7 2/3 in.). Photograph provided by the Archivo Digitalizado de las Colecciones Arqueológicas del Museo Nacional de Antropología Secretaria de Cultura.-INAH.MNA.-CANON.-MEX., reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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Figure 5.21. Illustration (attributed to Mahiet) of Charlemagne being crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III, from Grandes chroniques de France, 1332–1350, pigment on parchment, page approx. 39 × 28 cm (15 17/20 × 11 in.). Photograph © British Library Board 06/11/2019. Royal MS 16 G VI, f. 141v.

where this practice possibly originated. In a situation inverse to the piercing of the human body, which is attested to through the survival of durable ornaments, this practice is best known through the cavities excavated in the centers of the chests or abdomens of statues that were typically made from basalt or a similar volcanic stone. It is presumed that these openings were produced to accommodate the placement of inserts made from greenstone or other precious materials, but only in rare cases have these been recovered. Several standard-bearer figures that were placed along the staircase of Stage III of the Templo Mayor at the time of its encasement within the next expansion of this structure have holes in their chests within which pieces of greenstone were placed.80 While most similar cavities in sculptures of standing or seated human figures were found empty, their consistent siting in the center of the body has led to their being commonly discussed as spaces to accommodate “hearts” made of greenstone.81 This use of small precious stones to animate anthropomorphic sculptural representations parallels the treatment of human remains as recounted in the Florentine Codex: “And when the chiefs and princes died, they laid in their mouths green stones. And those who were only peasants [they

provided] only a [common] greenish stone or [a piece of ] obsidian. It was said that these became their hearts.”82 Centuries earlier, greenstone beads were also placed in the mouths of the dead by the Classic Maya, and this practice appears to date back at least to the Late Formative period.83 The visual qualities of shell, obsidian, and turquoise—particularly their coloration and the way they glinted in the light—resulted in their being inlaid into shallow recesses in the volcanic stone of Aztec figural sculptures to more naturalistically depict physical features such as eyes, teeth, and jewelry (fig. 5.22). These elements served to enliven the statues through their representational qualities, but their materiality was likely of equal importance in this regard. As with the discussion of Central Mexican birth almanacs and the boring and breathing of infants, the creation of cavities in these sculptures into which precious materials that were closely associated with life energies were inserted would have vivified them. This was typically done at precisely the places associated with the metaphorical or literal boring of the infant— the eyes, which were opened in this manner; the mouth, opening a space for breath; the ears, which were perforated as an initiation into bloodletting; and the “heart,” which strongly suggests that the Perforating the Body

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a

b

Figure 5.22. Aztec figural sculptures from Coaxcatlan, Puebla, Mexico, 1400–1520 CE. Basalt with inlaid shell, obsidian, and turquoise elements and chest cavities. Photographs provided by the Archivo Digitalizado de las Colecciones Arqueológicas del Museo Nacional de Antropología Secretaria de Cultura.-INAH.-MNA.-CANON.-MEX., reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. (a) Skeletal Goddess (Cihuacoatl), 115 × 40 × 35 cm (45¼ × 15¾ × 13¾ in.); (b) male deity (Xiuhtecuhtli or Xelhua), 111 × 36 × 30 cm (43 7/ 10 × 14 3/ 16 × 11 4/ 5 in.).

treatment of some statues and that of human subjects was analogous. Consider a Huastec sculpture that, as with many examples from this regional style, features a standing figure with a smaller skeletal figure on its back (fig. 5.23). Whether this smaller element represents an ancestor, a reminder of the main 112

figure’s mortality, or some other idea entirely, the central theme of the sculpture is the complementary opposition of life and death. In this regard, the contrasting modes of representing similar features are notable. The living figure has a circular hole at the center of its body, as well as holes in the large ear ornaments he wears, all three of which were

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a

b

Figure 5.23. Front (a) and back (b) views of a Huastec sculpture (Life-Death Figure), ca. 900–1250 CE, sandstone with traces of pigment, 158.4 × 66 × 29.2 cm (62 3/8 × 26 × 11½ in.). Brooklyn Museum, Frank Sherman Benson Fund and the Henry L. Batterman Fund, 37.2897PA.

likely made to hold inserts made of greenstone or some other semiprecious material. The eyes were also made as recesses to accommodate shell and obsidian inlays. On the reverse, the skeletal figure is shown with a heart descending from its ribcage at the center of its body as well as large ear ornaments like the ones worn by his counterpart. However,

rather than having had spaces left in which pieces of greenstone could be placed, these are all sculpted from the sandstone itself. The eyes of the skull were carved to accommodate inlays, and the deep hole of the nasal cavity would likely have been lined (but not filled) with orange-red Spondylus shell, as is the case in other examples (such as figure 5.22a). These Perforating the Body

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elements suggest an animacy of the deceased of a different type from that of the living. The skeleton has a heart and jewels, but these are only representations rather than materially affective emanations. The ancestor has life but, with feet that do not reach the ground, it is entirely dependent on the living figure to carry it as a burden on his back. The foregoing analysis is based on the assumption that the holes in the side of the sculpture representing the living person, especially the cavity in the chest, were intended to contain inserts made from precious and efficacious materials. However, this interpretation is complicated by the cavities that were sometimes drilled into the chests or abdomens of figures that were already made of greenstone themselves. A notable example of this is the Aztec carving known as the Stuttgart Figurine (fig. 5.24). Like several of the standard-bearer figures recovered from the Templo Mayor, this skeletal figure has a pair of holes in the center of its body, one just beneath the breastbone and the other directly below it on the lower stomach. The placement of these holes is suggestive of the heart and the navel.84 The heart was the pulsing, animate center of life, while the navel was akin to the axis mundi: “The central point in the body, the area of the navel, is one of the most important in magical thought. It is linked to the idea of the central point on the earth’s surface, the house of the fire god, a place through which the cosmic axis permitted communication with the celestial world and the underworld.”85 Eduard Seler suggested that the holes in the Stuttgart Figurine were made with the intention of incorporating additional pieces of stone into this sculpture, and indeed we see red Spondylus shell inserted into the mouth and cheeks and yellow shell in the nasal cavity.86 These areas of contrasting color set off and draw attention to the places of breath and life. This would also have been the case for the heart and navel, where other materials such as obsidian or gold may perhaps have been used. Yet the entire object is already made from the precious, breathing, teotl-saturated material of greenstone, a substance that was itself used to vivify sculptures made of volcanic stone. Thus, in addition to having been created as a means to accommodate vitalizing inserts, it is likely that the drilling of the holes themselves contributed 114

Figure 5.24. Aztec figurine of a skeletal deity (the Stuttgart Figurine), 1400–1520 CE, greenstone inlaid with shell, 29.7 × 12.3 × 8.3 cm (11 7/10 × 4 17/20 × 3¼ in.), Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart, E1403, photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

to the enlivening of these figures as much as the insertion of the presumed supplementary material. Indeed, a drilled passage connects the upper hole in the chest of the Stuttgart Figurine with the figure’s mouth, suggesting a conduit for breath or sustenance unrelated to any visible qualities.87 Similarly, Karl Taube has argued that the difficult drilling of holes through the septa of Olmec greenstone figurines “may have constituted a ritual bestowal of breath or life to the carving.”88 Such an enlivening might be exactly what is shown on a perforated Classic Maya dish painted with the image of

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a supernatural sculptor pointing to an already fully delineated carved head (fig. 5.25). The vitality of the carved image would have been further indicated by any ornaments suspended through these apertures (as illustrated by the jewel in front of the nose of the head in this and other images). Nevertheless, it was the drilling itself that instantiated it. Taube later extended this argument to all drilling of greenstone, including the nonrepresentational holes made in beads and other adornments.89 The production of these functional holes, which allowed the worked objects to be suspended and worn, was analogous to giving life to these jewels. Just as the initial boring of the ears of Aztec youths was an important part of their formation into socialized, fully human beings, the drilling of holes into beads and pendants established the worked material as social objects, creating a metonymical exchange between the noble humans and the noble stones that adorned them. Therefore, while the cavities made in the chest of the Stuttgart Figurine as well as in other Aztec, Huastec, and Teotihuacan figural sculptures were likely made to accommodate vivifying inserts, the creation of the holes themselves also played an important role in giving life to these images. One related example further complicates things: a plain greenstone stela from the Quetzalpapalotl Palace at Teotihuacan.90 This object is rough and uncarved, lacking any imagery or anthropomorphic qualities beyond its upright positioning and relative proportions. Yet a rectangular cavity identical to those found in numerous human figures at this site was made in its center, at the place where a heart would be located. It is possible that the stela was at one time elaborated with further perishable or removable anthropomorphizing elements. A crudely formed and featureless clay bust with a rectangular cavity in the chest was found with a detachable mold-made ceramic mask in a tomb in the Ciudadela complex.91 Yet, even in the absence of representational features, the hole itself strongly suggests an anthropomorphic quality to the stela, as this feature is otherwise almost exclusively found in sculptures of human figures and presumably played a role in endowing them with life. The cavities in anthropomorphic sculptures discussed so far are superficial, in that they are

Figure 5.25. Late Classic Maya codex-style dish with image of a supernatural sculptor holding a carved head, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, slipped ceramic, diameter 29.5 cm (11 5/ 8 in.). bpk Bildagentur/Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany (Ident. Nr. IV Ca 50119)/photo by Claudia Obrocki/Art Resource, New York.

excavated into the surfaces of these objects. Another category includes holes that are entirely surrounded by and enclosed within a hollow figure. The vital symbolic potential of these internal cavities is perhaps most explicitly invoked in the so-called host figures most closely associated with Teotihuacan culture but found at a number of Classic- and Epiclassic-period sites across Mesoamerica (fig. 5.26). These ceramic figures typically have removable panels in their chests, sometimes encompassing the fronts of the arms and upper legs. Their hollow bodies contain smaller, solid mold-made figurines applied to the inner walls of their body cavities. The host figures, which are almost always depicted seated, are relatively plain and even amorphous, with their gender often indeterminate, limbs lacking hands or feet, and, in one example, a head lacking any facial features.92 The smaller figurines, however, are densely attired with elaborate headdresses, jewels, and clothing, which serve to identify their varying social roles and statuses. Indeed, their generic qualities—they are typically mold-made—suggest that they represented embodiments of these social roles rather than specific individuals. Perforating the Body

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During the Classic period, the inner figures were almost always adults. The hosts appear to have been male as well as female (although this identification is not usually definitive), suggesting that these assemblages conveyed ideas related to the reproduction of societal relations. A series of slightly different host figures made during the Epiclassic period, immediately following the decline of Teotihuacan, was placed as an offering in the fill of the large pyramidal mound at Xochitecatl, in the modern state of Tlaxcala. Unlike the earlier examples, these figures were more clearly marked as female through their costumes. Rather Figure 5.26. Teotihuacan-style hollow ceramic figurine with than having large removable panels in their chests, removable chest plate, Tiquisate region, Escuintla, Guatemala, they have smaller openings in their lower abdo5th–7th century, height 37.5 cm (14¾ in.). The Metropolitan mens, into which removable figures of children Museum of Art, New York 2015.226a&b, partial and promwere placed.97 The gender of the host figures, the ised gift of Linda M. Lindenbaum, from the Collection of womblike location of the holes in their bodies, and Samuel H. and Linda M. Lindenbaum. the youthfulness of the small figures all strongly point to progenerative associations for these objects A number of different interpretations have been and the cavities within them. proposed for these enigmatic assemblages. Several This chapter has focused on the conflation scholars see the larger figure as a deity, typically of the hole made in the Resurrection Plate with identified as a goddess, and the smaller figures as perforations in the human body and its repreher human subjects. Janet Berlo conceives this rela- sentations, including auto-sacrificial bloodletting tionship as a protective one, with male warriors rituals, the piercing of the body to accommodate “carried safely inside” their Great Mother.93 Esther adornments, and the creation of anthropomorPasztory believes that the host figures embody ideas phic sculptures with a variety of cavities in their of social organization and hierarchy: “There is an surfaces or interiors. These notionally distinct overwhelming sense of the distance in size between activities share an underlying metaphysical and the deity and the people. However richly people material logic related to the permeable interface are attired, they are minuscule in comparison to the between the individual being and the living cosbeing within whose body they are found.”94 Brigitte mos as well as between self and society. Holes in Faugère sees the small figures as representing the the body facilitated the exchange of vital forces, variety of natural forces that animate both the which were materialized in the release of tonallihuman body and the natural world.95 And, based on saturated blood or the insertion of external objects the contexts in which they have been found, Anne- often made from potent substances and/or worked Carole Preux argues that host figures at Teotihuacan into symbolically laden forms. The hole in the were related to the veneration of ancestors, while in Resurrection Plate aligns with the groin of the the Maya region they were connected to more pub- Maize God and therefore alludes to the common lic ceremonies of political legitimization through ritual activity of penile bloodletting and its assoassociation with the central Mexican metropolis.96 ciations with creation and fecundity. Moreover, Whatever the precise referents of these figures, they this conflation of ceramic and fleshy holes marks are powerful structural statements. The enveloping the perforation in the plate as a conduit for the host figure contains smaller individual entities—as flows of life forces, akin to bodily piercings enacted few as one or as many as a dozen—within it, uni- within both living human flesh and anthropomorfying them within the larger frame of meaning that phic sculptures. it embodies. 116

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CHAPTER 6

Conclusions

Beyond the Resurrection Plate

I

n the preceding chapters I have argued that the iconography of the Resurrection Plate anticipated the hole that would be drilled through it and related this intervention to at least three distinct but interrelated concepts: the opening of the earth to obtain maize, the drilling of fire, and the puncturing of the body to offer blood as a sacrifice necessary for future fecundity. These actions are all essentially procreative; each is associated with the mythology surrounding initial acts of creation but also belongs to ongoing practices connecting the living Maya with the continual unfolding of the cosmos. Rather than “killing” this vessel, the cavity at its center reinvigorated it, infusing its iconography with new life. The hole made through the ceramic fabric of the vessel is not simply an extension of the metaphorical imagery depicted on the plate but its fulfillment: the hole manifests ideas that the imagery merely represents. Within the context of a tomb, the hole performs the role of a conduit between realms, a space for the ongoing emergence of vital forces associated with life and creation. The perforated dish thus actively participates in a broader Maya mortuary symbolism that transforms the burial chamber into a vital space of regeneration. Each of the three aspects of the hole in this dish has been explored in relation to broader and widely shared conceptions that I have argued tie together a variety of material culture and the ritual behaviors that it indexes across Mesoamerica.

Holes in the living earth were not only necessary elements of recurrent agricultural practice but were conceived as essential sites of creation and emergence. Humans, seeds, and nourishing water were all understood to have been born(e) out of caves in the living earth, both in the mythological past and as part of a ceremonialized orientation toward the landscape related to the continual unfolding of the cosmos. The drilling of fire, an action formally identical to the creation of a hole, is related to agriculture in a number of ways, from the clearing of the field to the heat necessary to germinate the seed to the cooking of the harvested foodstuff. But fire was also a cosmologically potent element that played a central role in the communion with deities and ancestors, in creation narratives, and in the renewal of time and its cycles. The opening of holes in the human body as part of bloodletting rituals was related to a range of corporeal perforations that allowed for the transference of vital forces and thus blurred the distinctions among individuals, society, and the cosmos. Through the careful construction of this image, the artist of the Resurrection Plate simultaneously associated the centrally placed perforation with three distinct concepts or practices. Such conflations, which give rise to a multiplicity of layered meanings, are a mainstay of Mesoamerican art and thought. Consider how Maize God imagery, which conflated the life cycles of humans and corn, was equally appropriate to the different contexts 117

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in which a dish like this could be expected to take part: the serving of food and later the tomb. Substitutional metaphors like this were commonly used across Mesoamerica to present different ideas, processes, or domains as being connected or analogous.1 As discussed in chapter 5 in relation to greenstone, for example, Sahagún’s informants identified this material as belonging to the elite not on the basis of its rarity but rather due to the noble qualities that aristocratic humans shared with this mineral. The intentional alignment of the perforation and the imagery on the Resurrection Plate strongly suggests that the production and presence of holes across diverse media and within a variety of contexts similarly carried a conflated association with ideas of creation, fecundity, and the emergence of vital life forces and material abundance. Because the imagery on the Resurrection Plate invokes the materiality of the plate itself (see chapter 2), it can help to explain the symbolism of Classic Maya funerary perforations even when plates were painted with unrelated imagery or were entirely unpainted, as was often the case. Yet in some instances plates were perforated in such a way that the alignment of the holes with the images suggests further associations beyond or tangential to what has already been discussed. This is also the case with other examples of cavities and voids in Mesoamerican material culture, which sometimes suggest meanings not easily assimilated into the discussion of holes as categorized in the preceding chapters. However, even in these cases voids remain strongly characterized as progenerative spaces, thus adding further support for the thesis of this book. A brief examination of a selection of holes related to vision, respiration, and music makes this clear.

HOLES OF SIGHT, BREATH, AND SOUND

The holes on several Classic Maya plates drilled as part of funerary practice are perfectly aligned with the eyes of supernatural beings painted on them. These perforations literally opened the eyes of deities by removing the occluding ceramic material to form an unobstructed visual aperture. This suggests an act of instantiation or inauguration, perhaps similar to what was intended with the eye-boring 118

Figure 6.1. Late Classic Maya polychrome plate perforated through the eye of a supernatural head, ca. 600–850 CE, slipped ceramic, diameter 30 cm (11 4/5 in.). Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K1497).

imagery from the Central Mexican birthing almanacs, as discussed in chapter 5. Such is the case with a vessel featuring a depiction of a monstrous agnathic head, with a hole made in the center of its circular eye-ring (fig. 6.1). This motif, which includes scrolls emerging from its jawless mouth, a curling element projecting upward from its nose with a pendant jewel, and a crest running along its pate, is often found in the costumes of Maya rulers, particularly in militaristic contexts. The armed figure emerging from the serpent conjured by Lady K’abal Xook on Lintel 25 from Yaxchilan has this element in front of his face, likely as a mask, as does the war captain Three Deer in the Battle Mural at Cacaxtla. This supernatural being is usually identified either as the War Serpent or as the Central Mexican Storm God.2 However, a more naturalistic version on a plate illustrated in The Maya Book of the Dead, which was also drilled through its goggle eye, shows a creature that combines ophidian and vegetal elements and appears to be an example of the Waterlily Serpent.3 Known for its associations with earthly waters and depictions of the Maize God’s emergence (see chapter 3), the Waterlily Serpent is also sometimes textually identified (as on Lintel 15 at Yaxchilan, discussed in

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Figure 6.2. Late Classic Maya codex-style plate perforated through the eye of an anthropomorphic figure emerging from the maw of a supernatural serpent, 680–750 CE, Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, or Campeche, Mexico, slipped ceramic. Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K3702).

chapter 4) as the wahy (co-essence) of the deity K’awiil, the personified lightning axe of the Storm God, Chahk. There is likely much overlap between these supernatural beings. As discussed in chapter 2, despite the appearance of fixed and clearly identifiable personalities generated by the use of proper names and the iconographic conventions related to their depictions, Mesoamerican deities are probably best understood as being fluid, shifting, and recombinatory. That is to say, this motif

was possibly related to the Maize God theme, but the location of the perforations through the eye points to a distinct meaning of the hole as related to vision.4 A further plate is perforated through the eye of a supernatural figure shown emerging from the mouth of a Vision Serpent (fig. 6.2). The serpent, which extends from the leg of K’awiil to the left and is therefore shown to be the wahy of this deity, is wrapped around and faces toward a Conclusions

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seated woman, suggesting that she has conjured it through the burning of blood-spattered strips of paper in the incense burner to the right. The hole in this plate is slightly off center, suggesting that the individual who drilled through this vessel intentionally made the perforation with reference to the iconography.5 The multiplicity of vessels with a congruence between the drilled hole and depicted eye suggests that ritual perforations may have held eye-opening associations related to the mortuary contexts into which these vessels were incorporated, in addition to the other connotations discussed in previous chapters. Placed over the face, the holed vessel may have served to open the eye of the deceased; his or her vision was conflated with the vision of the depicted divinity: the combined, extramissive gaze was directed vertically along the axis mundi to activate the portal at its apex.6 Indeed, holes function as mediators of the gaze in a variety of contexts in Mesoamerica. As discussed in chapter 1, Naranjo Monument 1 is an early example of this. The monument choreographed sightlines to demonstrate the participation of the site and its social order in the cosmic cycles of the celestial realm: earthbound people observed the sky, while the sky returned their gaze to bear witness unto them. In later periods of Mesoamerican civilization, such mediated vision appears to have been claimed by certain individuals as part of their positions within society. Eye rings like the one worn by the zoomorph in figure 6.1 were common costume elements at Teotihuacan, where they were worn by a variety of figures, including some with supernatural attributes (deities or deity impersonators), some performing rituals such as scattering (priests), and some holding weapons (warriors).7 As both prominently visible attributes and mediators of the vision of those wearing them, these rings invoked the bidirectionality of the gaze: to wear them was to be marked as one who is seeing. By drawing attention to the eyes, they identified the sight of the individuals who wore them as somehow special. Although the precise nature of this markedness remains an open question, it was likely understood to have been qualitatively different from normal human vision. Some Aztec deities and deity embodiers wielded staffs surmounted by disks that Sahagún 120

identified as “viewers.” These were sometimes pictured as covered in mosaic pieces likely representing mirrors, but Sahagún also specifically mentions that the tlachialoni of Tezcatlipoca “has a hole through which he watches people.”8 As a pictorial confirmation of this, Byron Hamann has pointed to an illustration in the Codex Magliabechiano that illustrates a tlachialoni with a hole through its center rather than a mirror.9 Martine Vesque also sees the hole in the tlachialoni as a symbolic eye. She argues that this object held militaristic connotations due to the various martial deities with whom it was associated.10 Such evidence is not limited to the Postclassic Aztecs: Annabeth Headrick provides pictorial evidence for similar viewing staffs from the Classic-period Teotihuacan, Zapotec, and Maya cultures.11 Another type of ritual staff, the chicahuaztli, was an attribute wielded by several Aztec deities, including Chalchiutlicue and Xipe Totec, who are fertility deities. Patrick Hajovsky argues that the chicahuaztli was related “to the strengthening of the reproductive function, to fertilizing.”12 In some depictions as well as in stone effigy versions excavated from the Templo Mayor, the chicahuaztli is composed of a pierced circle framed above and below by horizontal bars and surmounted by a spear point. Because both the chicahuaztli and the tlachialoni have holes at their centers, Headrick has interpreted them as objects for ritual viewing: as with scrying in a mirror, “the act of peering through the hole was a means of looking into the supernatural world. When a ritual participant, dressed like a god, held the staff up to his face and looked through the hole, all who watched knew that he was looking into the strange and mysterious world of the supernatural.”13 Just as the tlachialoni was sometimes depicted with a mirror instead of a hole at the center of its disk, the chicahuaztli was also sometimes shown without a perforation. By using the term chicahuaztli (rattle staff ) to refer both to a staff sometimes shown with a flat disk perforated at its center and to a hollow-orb rattle, Sahagún demonstrates an interchangeability or conceptual conflation between these components.14 I believe that this conflation is related precisely to the hole or hollow that each contains at its core, both of which

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articulate with the domains of the senses as productive and procreative. Keeping this in mind, let us now turn our attention to holes associated with sound as a manifestation of breath and life. As noted in chapters 3 and 5, breath and wind were closely associated with life across Mesoamerica. Breath became audible as speech and as music, and identical scrolls were used to represent all of these invisible tokens of life and animacy in Mesoamerican pictorial conventions. Scent, such as the smell emerging from flowers, was also represented in the form of scrolls. Houston and Taube have noted the close association between flowers and the human soul across Mesoamerica.15 Several perforated Classic Maya dishes were painted with imagery that relates to these themes, including a quadripartite arrangement of ik’ signs and floral motifs exuding scent scrolls (fig. 6.3). In all of these instances, the hole made at the center point of the plate aligns with the middle of a radial image, thereby identifying it as the source of the exhalations. Other dishes were perforated through images of conch shells: their naturally occurring cavities were closely associated with wind, breath, and sound (fig. 6.4). An Early Classic Maya incised conch shell trumpet features the profile head of an elaborately adorned ruler (fig. 6.5). The imagery wraps around the curving and knobby surface of the shell, with the nobleman’s head centrally placed on the widest portion of the object. Directly in front of his mouth, from which a scrolling form emerges, a finger hole is drilled through the shell trumpet as a means to modulate the tone it produced. Thus, the noise emitted by the instrument was directly equated with the breath blown into it and was indeed likely conceived as breath transformed into sound. As discussed in chapter 3, breath and life were closely equated with wind in Mesoamerican thought. One of the costume elements consistently worn by Postclassic-period wind deities was a cut cross section of a conch shell, undoubtedly invoking the spiraling voids within these objects that served as resonator chambers for the deep tones that they produced.16 The association of wind, breath, and life with the sound of music appears to have significant time depth in Mesoamerica.

A wide variety of Mesoamerican ceramic figurines functioned as musical instruments, including whistles, ocarinas, and rattles.17 In all cases, it is precisely the hollow interiors in which sound, which was likely understood as the voice of these animate objects and a component in manifesting divine forces or deities, was produced.18 In this regard, all musical instruments could have been considered alive, even when they were not elaborated with iconography. Arnd Both, for example, has discussed specific Aztec shrines in the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan in which shell trumpets and other wind instruments were stored and instruction in their use took place. He notes a large stone sculpture of a conch shell found not far from the Templo Mayor as an indication of the ritual importance of these objects.19 Yet, as with the imagery on the Resurrection Plate, the iconography used to elaborate musical instruments often interacts with their functional elements in ways that give insight into their possible associations. A deer femur flute recovered from a Late Formative burial at the site of Yugüe, on the Pacific coast of what is now western Oaxaca, was incised along the shaft with a skeletal figure. From its mouth emerges a scroll fronted by a fleshed face wearing an elongated buccal mask closely identified with wind deities.20 The conflation of the imagery with the object itself is made explicit by the alignment of one of the finger holes with the eye socket of the figure’s skull, which faces in the same direction as the wind-breath that would pass through the object. The bone materiality of this instrument, the skeletonized figure carved into it, and its inclusion within a burial all suggest associations with death. However, the breath scroll/wind deity emerging from the figure’s mouth and the actual breath that would have produced sound from this flute when it was played both suggest a continued living vitality. It should be remembered that in Aztec mythology people were engendered by the wind deity bleeding onto the bones of a previous race of humans. Many musical instruments across Mesoamerica were iconographically elaborated with anthropomorphic (as well as zoomorphic) imagery. These images likely alluded to the animate vitality that the instruments were understood to possess, which was made manifest through the sounds they produced. Conclusions

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a

b

Figure 6.3. Perforated Late Classic Maya polychrome plates with ik’ signs and floral motifs exuding scent scrolls. (a) Colección del Museo Popol Vuh (0435), Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala; (b) photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K5378).

However, in some instances, particularly among the Late Classic Maya, it is perhaps better to speak of figurines that also functioned as instruments. That is, rather than being obvious whistles or rattles with added iconography, these objects are first and foremost sculptural. Their sound-making capabilities are often inconspicuous and only discernible upon close inspection. Moreover, the mouthpieces of whistle-figurines were often placed at the bottom rear of the figures, functioning both as a third leg to help them to stand upright when they were not in use and to ensure that they were held upright and facing toward an audience when they were.21 It seems likely that in these cases the breath of the musician was understood to animate the figure, to make it “speak” as part of a theatrical performativity, rather than the iconography reflecting the animism of the figure. The shaking action used to play rattles would have been analogous to the wind-breath that sonically activated whistles and flutes. Karl Taube has identified numerous Classic Maya depictions of rattles that are infixed with an ik’ sign denoting wind as well as depictions of the wind god holding rattles.22 Music generally—not just instruments played with the breath—appears to have been closely associated with wind. As Both notes, 122

playing music was not differentiated from singing in Mesoamerica; in Nahuatl, “all musicians were considered to be ‘singers’ (cuicanimeh) . . . the designation of the slit-drum player, ‘singer of the slit drum’ (teponazcuicani), reveal[s] that he did not ‘play’ but ‘sang’ on his instrument.”23 In addition to being conceptualized as the voice of the musician, music could manifest the breath-voice of deities.24 Indeed, many Classic Maya illustrations of musical performances involve deity impersonators or supernatural beings dancing to the accompaniment of rattles and drums.25 Whistles are almost never depicted in such scenes. These smaller instruments were likely used in less elaborate, more intimate settings. In contrast with the exclusively male musicians in depictions of deity impersonation rituals, archaeological evidence from some Late Classic Maya sites suggests that whistles may have been used by women. The majority of figurines (including all of those representing females) at Aguateca, which underwent a rushed abandonment during the Late Classic that left many objects in their daily contexts, functioned as whistles.26 Moreover, these were typically found in areas of elite residences associated with women’s work—such as food preparation and storage and cloth production—and were absent from areas

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a

b

Figure 6.4. Late Classic Maya plates perforated through images of conch shells, ca. 600–900 CE. (a) Plate from Itzincab, Yucatán, Mexico. Gift of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1958. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM58-34-20/53791. (b) Diameter 32.1 cm (12 5/ 8 in.), Chrysler Museum of Art, Nortolk, VA, Gift of Edwin Pearlman and Museum purchase, 86.437.

related to men’s work—such as stone tool manufacture.27 While this distribution represents practices of storage rather than usage, it is suggestive of a close association between women and whistles. Based on archaeological context and iconography, Lisa Overholtzer argues that rattle figurines in the Postclassic Basin of Mexico were associated with female procreativity.28 These objects almost always depict women of reproductive age, sometimes with round, pregnant abdomens or accompanied by small children. Other than refuse contexts, they have been found exclusively in domestic rooms or sweatbaths. As discussed in chapter 4, sweatbaths held close associations with the treatment of pregnant and recently delivered mothers. Sahagún recounts the admonitions that Aztec midwives would make to new mothers: The midwife commanded that she eat very well [after having given birth], that she drink well; that she eat what was good, warm, soft, especially at the time when, as was said, “the feet of the baby are washed”—when blood flowed from the mother—so that the baby not be formed like a pottery rattle, so that it not result as a gourd rattle, so that it not sicken.29

Overholtzer interprets this passage as emphasizing dryness and hollowness as negative qualities to be avoided and interprets the use of rattle figurines as an apotropaic protection against such developments: “the hollow and dry rattle may have substituted for any possible emptiness in the baby and/or womb.”30 However, in a different context Sahagún writes that the drum and the rattle were “the means of awakening the city, and the source of joy for our lord of the near, of the nigh”—an epithet of the god Tezcatlipoca. In the preceding paragraph he is identified as a provider of agricultural fertility, who “will create [food] in time of famine.”31 Thus, it seems just as likely that these rattles associated with human procreativity were intended to awaken or renew the fecundity of the womb through the pulsing rhythms they produced, which were pleasing to Tezcatlipoca. Regardless of whether they were conceived as warding off an undesirable dryness and emptiness or promoting a desirable moistness and fullness, however, the effect is the same. Writing elsewhere with coauthor Elizabeth Brumfiel, Overholtzer states: “These rattle-figurines and the reproductive concerns that they addressed are related to the many fecund cavities that were Conclusions

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Figure 6.5. Early Classic Maya conch shell trumpet with incised imagery, ca. 250–400 CE, length 29.3 cm (11 9/ 16 in.), Kimbell Art Museum AP 1984.11. Photograph courtesy of Justin Kerr (K2825).

regarded as sources of creation and transformation in Mesoamerica. . . . Bodies, containers, and other hollow objects enabled the Aztecs to reflect upon the conditions that determined the success or failure of production efforts.”32

THE VALUE OF HOLES

Brumfiel and Overholtzer’s phrasing succinctly encapsulates the central thesis of this book. 124

As with their treatment of Aztec rattle figurines, I have argued that the holes drilled in the Resurrection Plate and other Late Classic Maya funerary ceramics were related to “the many fecund cavities that were regarded as sources of creation and transformation in Mesoamerica.” This assertion is supported with numerous examples drawn from several millennia of this region’s material culture. I would tentatively suggest that this characterization of holes pertains across the indigenous Americas, though that topic is beyond the scope of this book. Creation narratives that include the emergence of the first humans from a cave or other opening within the earth are found in South and North America, a widespread distribution of a mythic structure that demonstrates the antiquity and centrality of this trope to the indigenous cosmovision. Thus, Pacarictambo, the Inca cave of origins, and the sipapu, the hole in the floor of the subterranean ritual spaces of the Hopi and other Puebloan peoples of the southwestern United States that symbolizes the navel of the world and the place of emergence of the first people, likely can be understood as manifestations of a broadly shared Amerindian conception of holes as spaces that propagate vitality, creative forces, and material abundance. Of particular note in relation to the Classic Maya practice of placing perforated plates adjacent to the heads of deceased individuals is the similar mortuary ritual of the Mimbres culture of what is now New Mexico. During the Classic Mimbres period (ca. 1000–1130 CE), a majority of burials included a hemispherical ceramic bowl inverted over the head and punctured through the base, often in situ (fig. 6.6). Exactly what the meaning of punching a hole through the bases of these bowls would have been for the ancient Mimbreños will likely never be known, as there are no direct cognates for this practice in the archaeological or ethnographic record. Possible interpretations of the perforating of bowls in relation to burials have been proposed by a number of scholars based on analogies with Modern Puebloan and/or Mesoamerican cosmology and rituals, although these have often been adapted from different contexts. Similar to the interpretation often made of perforated Maya plates, Rina Swentzell has suggested

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Figure 6.6. Drawing of a typical Classic Mimbres burial, with body in a flexed position, the head covered by an inverted hemispherical bowl that has been punctured through its base. Drawing by the author, adapted from Fewkes (1914:11) with reference to the critique made by Shafer (2003:139) of the inaccuracy of the upright position of the figure in the original drawing.

that the holes were created to release the spirit or breath of the vessel.33 Harry Shafer has proposed that the inverted bowls functioned as mortuary masks, with the holes serving as apertures of communication between the living and the dead.34 And Barbara Moulard interprets them as symbolic passages—perhaps equivalent to the sipapu, found in the floors of ancient and modern kivas, which serves as a navel connecting the surface world with the underworld—through which the spirits of the dead could ascend.35 This last view is particularly intriguing, given its close similarity with my interpretation of the roles of the perforations of Maya dishes that were placed in funerary contexts adjacent to the heads of the deceased. There are, of course, important differences between Mimbres and Maya burial practices. Given the thousands of kilometers and hundreds of years that separated them, it is almost certain that no direct connection between them existed. However, the formal similarities of these independently developed funerary configurations are noteworthy, both in the repurposing of utilitarian ceramics as grave goods and in the holes made in them as part of this transformation. I argue in this book that the Maya artist of the Resurrection Plate anticipated its eventual drilling and placement within a burial context and have argued elsewhere that some Mimbres artists did the same.36 A bowl whose interior was painted with an agricultural scene, for example, clearly invokes the source of the food that the vessel would have

Figure 6.7. Punctured Classic Mimbres Black-on-White bowl depicting an agricultural scene, ca. 1000–1130 CE, ceramic with slip, diameter 25.1 cm (9 7/ 8 in.). Princeton University Art Museum 2017-114, photograph courtesy PUAM.

been used to serve (fig. 6.7). Six male figures and a banded animal stand around a square garden plot with regular rows of growing crops and dots representing holes for the planting of seeds, apparently produced by the digging sticks the farmers wield. Considered in relation to the opening that was later made through the center of the vessel—a common treatment and fate for these objects in Classic Mimbres culture that the artist could be expected to anticipate—the action of making holes in the soil is directly equated with the puncturing of the earthen bowl: the burial of the deceased is thus equated with agricultural processes. Despite the significant differences between the relatively egalitarian Mimbres culture and the starkly hierarchic Classic Maya, and the great distances between them, this is very similar to the symbolism of the Resurrection Plate discussed here and therefore suggestive of widespread and commonly held ideas about holes and the necessity for further research into their presence in the material culture of peoples beyond the boundaries of Mesoamerica. In their discussion of rattle figurines, Brumfiel and Overholtzer state that “hollow objects enabled the Aztecs to reflect upon the conditions that Conclusions

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determined the success or failure of production efforts.”37 I would like to conclude by suggesting that a similar condition of thinking with or through objects pertains to holes in relation to modern interpretation. The structural and ontological characteristics of holes, as discussed in chapter 1, are usefully allegorical for the ways meaning becomes articulated with or ascribed to material culture. Much like meaning, holes are immaterial yet inextricably bound to the objects that give them form. This relationship is difficult to pin down. Is a hole (is meaning) reducible to being a property of an object, or can it be considered to have its own existence? As a number of theorists have concluded, regardless of the ontological nature of holes, we consistently behave and speak about them as though they are distinguishable things. Such is also the case with meaning. We often interpret the remaining material traces of past cultures as if they were evidence for meanings that existed prior to and external to being expressed through objects, as if meaning had its own existence divorced from matter. Yet, as with holes, the relationship between objects and meaning is far more entangled and complex: it demands constant reflection and renegotiation, as much by ancient peoples as by modern scholars. The negative character associated with holes in Western thought is expressed by the Latin term lacuna (hole or pit). The word is still used with this meaning in the biological and physical sciences but is now commonly used to mean “a gap, void, want,” to denote something missing, such as an eroded portion of an inscription.38 To invoke a lacuna implies an ideal but incomplete whole. Something is recognized as missing when there is an expectation of what the whole should look like: for example, through an underlying structure or grammar. The ideal “wholeness” of the Resurrection Plate has led to this state of its existence being treated as of primary concern. The hole that was drilled through its center is seen as an afterthought, and an intrusive one at that. Such a perspective is communicated in the term “kill hole” that has often been applied to this perforation and others like it. While such holes enacted a transformation of the

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dishes in which they were made, this was often likely conceived as a fulfillment of the objects’ meaningfulness, rather than a negation of it (see chapter 2). I have made this case through recourse to data external to the holes themselves: the context of burials in which such perforated objects were placed, the imagery on some vessels—particularly the Resurrection Plate—that appears to have prefigured their eventual drilling, and the wider body of holes, cavities, and voids found in a variety of Mesoamerican material. That is how, in the face of an immediate absence of knowledge, arguments about meaning are regularly constructed. It also neatly parallels the structure of a hole, which gains definition solely and entirely through the material that surrounds it. As intangible materialities, holes, cavities, and voids usefully problematize ontological and categorical distinctions, and I would argue that this is precisely the reason these features were associated with the emergence of creative forces in the Mesoamerican (and, more broadly, Amerindian) mind. This same quality is what makes holes a fecund topic of investigation for modern researchers. Further study of this aspect of the material record offers the possibility of reconstructing increasingly nuanced accounts of Indigenous metaphysics and philosophies of being. Moreover, the structural properties of holes directly parallel the ways in which meaning becomes articulated with matter, both with regard to the past and in the present of the modern researcher. Rather than being stable and autonomous, meaning is an emergent property largely dependent on the surrounding context. Scholarship that attends to this dynamic is both critically self-reflective about the processes of interpretation and open to objects in a manner that more closely mirrors the ways in which they were encountered by the people who produced them. Viewing holes as generative spaces—not just as topographic qualities, practical features, or lacunae that disrupt the intact and ideal object—therefore holds the potential to revitalize our engagement with material culture.

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Notes CHAPTER 1

What’s in a Hole? 1. Kubler 1961. 2. See, for example, Willey 1973; Grieder 1975; Wylie 1985; Stahl 1993; Lightfoot 1995; Klein 2001b:374–379. 3. Kubler’s warning about cultural disjunction was not confined to the break caused by the Spanish Conquest but also applied to the different eras and regions of the ancient past as well. See Kubler 1970. 4. Quilter 1996:307, 314. 5. López Austin 2001. 6. Dolar 2013. 7. Lacan 1981:104ff. 8. Aveni 2000; Taube 2000; Mathews and Garber 2004. 9. McLeod 2018:57–97 (quotation on 71). 10. Lewis and Lewis 1970:206, 207 (emphasis in the original). 11. Casati and Varzi 1994:3 (first quotation), 5 (second quotation; emphasis in the original), 6. 12. Wake et al. 2007. 13. K. Miller 2007. 14. Meadows 2013. 15. Giralt and Bloom 2000. 16. Palmer et al. 2008. 17. Nelson et al. 2014. 18. Bertamini 2006; Bertamini and Croucher 2003; Bertamini and Helmy 2012. 19. Rubin 1958:194–195, 197. 20. Derrida 1987:9, 60–67 (quotation; emphasis in the original). 21. Derrida 1987:61 (emphasis in the original). 22. Derrida 1987:59.

23. Pereira et al. 2007:1063; Pereira 2009:104. 24. Pereira 2009:86–87, 99–100. 25. Arroyo 2007:17; Pereira 2009:86. 26. Pereira 2009:78, 88–91. 27. Pereira et al. 2007:1063. 28. Pereira 2009:100. 29. Arroyo 2007:19. 30. Just 2005; O’Neil 2013; Harrison-Buck 2016. 31. Žižek 2012:665. 32. Muybridge titled the image “Ancient Sacrificial Stone, Naranja [sic], Guatemala,” so by placing the head in the hole he may have intended to evoke an understanding of this monolith similar to that described by George Williamson in the first written description of Naranjo: This hole is just large enough to admit the insertion of a small man’s shoulders and the passage of the head. That part of the hole toward the east is cut so that the face has to be horizontal when the head is passed through, and there is a notch or cut in it, so that if the head were once passed through; the insertion of a piece of wood or stone in the notch would render it impossible to move or withdraw the head. On the same side (east side) there is a working which, if the stone was so used, would make the blood flowing from the neck of a person whose head was passed through the stone, and was beheaded in that attitude, distribute itself nearly all over the lower part of it. (Williamson 1877:420). Yet it seems equally likely that, by posing his subject where he did, the photographer was drawing a comparison between the hole and the aperture of a camera.

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33. “I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I, I am in the picture.” Jacques Lacan, quoted in Foster (1996:108), who corrects a notable error in the Sheridan translation. 34. J.-A. Miller 2007:25. 35. To be clear, I am here referring strictly to the image, not to the individual who was its subject. 36. Pereira 2009:164, 167–177. 37. On materiality: Stuart 2010; Houston 2014. On landscape: Vogt 1981; Tokovinine 2013. 38. Nagao 1985:48–50; Broda 1987:217–224; also see chapter 3. 39. Houston and Taube 2000:281. 40. Stuart 2010:297. 41. Houston and Taube 2000:282–283. 42. Tedlock 1996:162. 43. McCafferty 2001:291. 44. The Resurrection Plate has the accession number 1993.565 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It can be found in Justin Kerr’s Maya Vase Database (www.mayavase .com) as K1892 and has been numbered MS1840 by the Maya Polychrome Ceramics Project. 45. Velásquez García 2009:1. 46. Reents-Budet et al. 2011:833. 47. The full dedicatory inscription reads a-ALAY-ya T’AB’-yi yi-chi u-la-ka ti-to-ma-ja K’AWIL-la SAK-WAY, Alay t’ab’[aa]y yich ulak Titomaj K’awiil Sak [O’] wahy[is], with the boldfaced text being the direct transliteration of the glyphs (logographic elements in all caps, syllabic elements in lowercase) and the italics being the proposed verbalization (with implied missing syllables inserted in brackets). This is roughly translated to English as “Here it is prepared [or made ready/inaugurated], the surface of the plate of Titomaj K’awiil, Sak [O’] Wahy[is].” For the transliteration, see Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:26. For the current understanding of the component terms of the dedication formula, see Boot 2014. Sak [O’] Wahy[is] (“white nagual,” referring to an extracorporeal familiar spirit-being) functions as a title claimed by Titomaj K’awiil as well as a number of other nobles from the Mirador Basin. Velásquez García and García Barrios (2018:18) have proposed that this title— which implies hard-earned supernatural knowledge and power—and the title k’uhul Chatahn winik (holy Chatahn lord) were both claimed by descendants of a now-defunct line of rulers from the Mirador Basin and that the use of Sak [O’] Wahy[is] alone on the Resurrection Plate is an abbreviation that also implies k’uhul Chatahn winik. 48. Lopes 2002. 49. Tokovinine 2013:57–86.

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50. Hansen et al. 2006:743; Reents-Budet et al. 2011:837; S. Martin et al. 2015. 51. Velásquez García and García Barrios 2018. 52. These figures are accompanied by nominal inscriptions, which have usually been read as Juun Ajaw and Yax B’alun (or Yax B’olon). They have often been seen as Classic-period versions of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are the protagonists of the later K’iche’ Maya creation myth recorded in the Popol Vuh. However, Chinchilla Mazariegos (2017:170–183) has demonstrated that the reading of these names is far from secure. As stated above, caution should be taken in seeing too close a correlation between texts and images separated by almost a millennium. 53. See, for example, Robicsek and Hales 1981; Taube 1985; Quenon and Le Fort 1997; Just 2009. These ideas are explored in greater detail in chapter 3. 54. See, for example, M. Miller and Samayoa 1998; Bassie-Sweet 2000; Tokovinine 2013:115–122. 55. Taube 2005:25–30; S. Martin 2006:163–168. 56. Tedlock 1996:145–146. 57. Girard 1995:192. 58. McAnany 1995; Fitzsimmons 2009:67.

CHAPTER 2

Perforated Vessels 1. Newsome 1998; O’Neil 2010; Just 2012; WernessRude and Spencer 2015. 2. Even though the identity of the artist remains unknown, the male pronoun is used here because most iconographic and epigraphic evidence seems to indicate that Classic Maya artist/scribes were predominantly male members of the nobility; see Houston and Inomata 2009:264. 3. Welsh 1988:64; Culbert 1993; Fitzsimmons 2009:92. 4. Boot 2016:15–16. 5. Reents-Budet 1994:339; Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:249. 6. Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2012, 2014; Scherer 2015:117–121; Boot 2016:15–17. 7. Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:20–24. Even in the absence of archaeological data, stylistic and material analyses can often be used to determine the approximate place and period of manufacture. 8. Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:74. 9. Mock 1998:114; Suhler and Freidel 2003:139. 10. The serving of solid foods appears to have been an important function of this type of vessel. Several images from Justin Kerr’s Maya Vase Database (such as K1599,

Notes to Pages 8–22

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K5172, K5450, K5492) show courtly scenes that include plates heaped with tamales, and some Classic Maya plates were labeled as we’ib or we’em, “tamale [food-service] plates” (Zender 2000:1044). 11. Loughmiller-Newman (2012:303–307) has made a similar observation as part of a larger argument, based on chemical analysis of residues from Maya ceramics, that many cylinder vessels were never used to hold or consume liquids at all. Rather, she suggests they could have instead been used as containers for dry cacao seeds and/or as contracts affirming rights of consumption related to social status. 12. Reents-Budet 1998. 13. Reents-Budet 1994:339. 14. Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:249–250; recognizing the multivalency of ritual activities, she acknowledges that the release of a vessel’s animating spirit by perforating it might have overlapped with other intentions, including deactivating its functionality, serving as a psychoduct placed over the face of the deceased, or sending a prized possession into the afterlife with its owner. 15. Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:39–53. 16. Welsh 1988:64. 17. M. Coe 1982:86; also see M. Miller 2001:86. 18. Like Coe, Scherer (2015:117) states that perforated vessels are usually found “over the face” of the deceased. However, perforated vessels at Tikal were often placed beneath the head. Of 41 archaeologically documented perforated vessels from Tikal, 25 were located beneath the head of the deceased (Becker 1999; Haviland 1985, 2014; also see Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:159–160). This observation, however, does not affect Scherer’s larger argument that the piercing of these vessels was related to the centering of the burial and the establishment of an axis mundi. 19. Scherer 2015:117–119; for an example of vessels with crosses painted on them that were inverted over burials at the Late Formative Maya site of K’axob, see McAnany 1995:55–60, 85; and Headrick 2004. 20. See Chinchilla Mazariegos (2017:96) for a rollout photograph of a codex-style vessel now in the Museo Vigua de Arte Precolombino y Vidrio Moderno in Antigua, Guatemala, with a similar depiction of a crocodilian world tree growing from a ceramic dish. 21. Palka 2018:294, 297. 22. Bird-David 1999; Halbmayer 2012; VanPool and Newsome 2012. 23. Although there were some earlier descriptions of animistic belief, the Western identification and characterization of animism became firmly established through Edward Tylor (1871); see Harvey 2006:3–29 for a historiography of the idea. 24. DeMarrais et al. 2004:2.

25. Vivieros de Castro 1998:472–474; Boivin 2004; Alberti and Bray 2009:338–339. 26. Henare et al. 2007; Alberti and Marshall 2009; Halbmayer 2012. 27. Ingold 2006:10 (emphasis in original). 28. Sprenger 2017. 29. Boltanski and Chiapello 2005:138–151; Wood 2016:131–132. 30. Gell 1998:19–21; Lindstrøm 2015:221–222. 31. See, for example, the comment by Vivieros de Castro in Bird-David 1999:S79–S80. 32. Maffie 2014:21–31 (quotation on 22), 85; also see Burkhart 1989:36–37. 33. Maffie 2014:2, 115 (quotation). 34. See Monaghan 2000:25–30. 35. McLeod 2018. 36. León-Portilla 1988:54; Maffie 2014:84–85. 37. Sandstrom 1991:255. 38. López Austin 1988:204–230; Furst 1995:63–130. 39. Houston and Stuart 1996:292. 40. McLeod 2018:117–118. 41. Vogt 1965:34. 42. Houston 2014:81–87 (quotations on 81–83). 43. Houston and Stuart 1996:292–295. 44. Nicholson 1971; Gillespie and Joyce 1998; Vail 2000. 45. Farriss 1984:294–295. 46. Hunt 1977:55 (emphasis in the original). 47. Maffie 2014:88, 102. 48. Townsend 1979:23–31. 49. Boone 1989:4; Bassett 2015:132–140. 50. Maffie 2014:114. 51. Houston and Stuart 1996:297–300, 1998:85–92. 52. Fields 1989; Houston and Stuart 1996. 53. Houston 2014:123. 54. Carlsen and Prechtel 1991; McAnany 1995:26–55. 55. López Austin 1988:313–343; Fitzsimmons 2009:17–60. 56. Vogt 1965:33. 57. Scherer 2015:173; also see Fitzsimmons 2009:142–169. 58. Tedlock 1996:116; also see O’Neil 2009:119. 59. Pitarch Ramón 1996:187. 60. Maffie 2014: 137–183 (quotation on 157–158). 61. O’Neil 2009. 62. Fitzsimmons 2009:131–133. 63. Cecil and Pugh 2018. 64. Schele and Miller 1986:265–279; Coggins 1988. 65. McAnany 1995, 1998; Gillespie 2002; Scherer 2015:171–229. 66. Fitzsimmons 2011. 67. Scherer 2015:117. Noting that in some burials plates appear to have been placed over the centers of the

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bodies rather than the heads, Scherer (2015:125–126) has proposed that in these cases the axis mundi was identified with the umbilicus. 68. Houston and Stuart 1996:297–300; Houston 2006:145–149; Knub et al. 2009. 69. McLeod 2018:157. 70. M. Miller 2001:86–87. 71. Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:259–260. 72. Dean 2006. 73. Jakobson 1971:90. 74. Like my example of a sign outside of a shop, Fash and Fash (1996) propose that the iconography on the exteriors of Classic Maya buildings was related to their functions or occupants, a metonymical relationship of imagery to architecture. 75. Reents-Budet 1998:74–77; Just 2012:64. 76. Reents-Budet 1998:73. 77. Pasztory 1996:323. 78. Houston 2014:102–123. 79. Stuart 2012. 80. Coggins 1988:80.

CHAPTER 3

Cavities in the Living Earth 1. Barrera Vásquez 1980:433; Houston et al. 1989:722. 2. See note 47 in chapter 1 for the full dedication; for yich as “writing surface,” see MacLeod 1990:249–264. Boot (2014:21, n. 12) notes that the use of yich in dedicatory statements remains problematic but also states that MacLeod’s proposed reading often appears to be correct. 3. Austin 1962. 4. M. Coe 1989:177–178. 5. Chinchilla Mazariegos 2017:170–183. 6. Braakhuis 2009:4. 7. M. Coe 1989:177–178. 8. Carlsen and Prechtel 1991:28. 9. Looper 2003:68–72; M. Carrasco 2010:617. 10. Stuart 2007; Coltman 2015. Maya iconographic studies have often referred to this category of being variously as the Water Serpent, the Waterlily Serpent, or the Waterlily Monster. 11. Webster et al. 2006:320–325. 12. Le Fort 2001; Bassie-Sweet 2008:165–166; for a discussion of similar ideas in Central Mexico, see L. Martin 2017:203–205. 13. Also see Robicsek and Hales 1981:91, 155. 14. For a further example that was excavated from a burial at the site of Uxul, see Delvendahl and Grube 2013. 15. Although this carapace is depicted without any of

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the fleshy parts of the turtle, the scroll emerging from the right side shows it to be breathing and therefore alive. 16. Matthew Looper, personal communication, 2019. 17. Also see K521, K793, K8007, and K8608 in Justin Kerr’s Maya Vase Database (www.mayavase.com). The iconographic identification of fireflies in Maya art was first made by M. Coe (1973:99). 18. Lopes 2002:2. 19. Dunkelman 2007:25–26. 20. Lopes 2004. 21. Looper 2007:148–149. 22. Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:173–192. 23. Although I have called it a fish, this identification is by no means secure. With regard to similar images carved on Chocholá-style vessels, Tate (1985:127) has suggested the cartouches represent bones. Indeed, the head of the “fish” appears to be a version of the waterlily skull, suggesting that the Maize God will be born from this seed-bone conflation. The body of the “fish” is rather flowerlike, and the Chocholá vessels discussed by Tate are even more so, suggesting that the zoomorphic form is a manifestation of the waterlily monster, witz’. Regardless of the exact identification, the theme is certainly the Maize God’s journey through the watery underworld prior to his resurrection. 24. The dancing Maize God is by far the most common image on perforated plates. Further examples can be found in the following museum collections: Mint Museum 1984.217.14; Denver 1983.362; San Francisco 2002.84.1.66; Museo Popol Vuh 0444; Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología de Guatemala 17.7.63.97; and two plates from the Museo Juan Antonio Valdés at Uaxactun (Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:294). 25. M. Miller and Houston 1987:50–52; also see Brittenham 2011. 26. Sahagún 1953–1981:11:41–42 (book X, ch. 12). 27. Tozzer 1941:97; Monaghan 1995:115–116. 28. Bassie-Sweet 2008:43, 60. 29. Bassie-Sweet 2008:44–47. 30. J. Thompson 1930:51. 31. J. Thompson 1930:49–50. 32. Taggart 1983:59; Monaghan 1995:115. 33. Durán 1971:418–425. 34. Boone 2007:249. 35. Seler 1902–1903:74. 36. Bassie-Sweet 2008:296. 37. It is perhaps notable that the two other secure instances of perforated vessels being located at some distance from the body are from some of the richest burials at the site of Tikal. Burial 116, which was found in Temple I and held the body of the late seventh- to early eighth-century ruler Jasaw Chan K’awiil, contained a ceramic dish

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for ink in the form of a halved, rounded conch shell placed at least a foot away from the skull (W. Coe 1990:605 and fig. 260). Burial 196, located in structure 5D-73 and possibly containing the remains of Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s son or grandson, had a large polychrome tripod plate with a radial design likely representing stylized feathers drilled through the kan-cross at its center and placed at least two feet beyond the head of the deceased (Hellmuth 1967:171–172; S. Martin and Grube 2008:50). 38. Smith 1932. Although this greenstone bead is not mentioned in the description of the burial, its position at the center of the dish is indicated in the diagrammatic illustration (p. 5). 39. M. Miller and Samayoa 1998:58. 40. Taggart 1983:88–96; Taube 1986:56–57; Staller and Stross 2013:160–163. 41. Bierhorst 1992:146–147. 42. Thompson 1970:348–354; Alcorn et al. 2006:604–607. 43. Taube 1986:56–58; Zender 2005:8–10; S. Martin 2006:172. 44. The third canoe contains a god with jaguar features who holds a paddle, which has a form similar to the digging sticks used to plant maize. 45. Looper 2003:83–85; Doyle and Houston 2017. 46. Robicsek and Hales 1981:155. On K’awiil as lightning, see Baudez 1992:43–47; Staller and Stross 2013:143–144. 47. While most scholars identify the figure to the left of the turtle as another version of Chahk, S. Martin (2006:172) has tentatively identified him as “Yopaat, a closely related god of storms.” This figure wields a rounded hand stone and can certainly be understood as contributing equally to the production of the crack. Perhaps he is meant to represent thunder, while the axe-wielding figure of Chahk to the right represents lightning—two clearly related but nevertheless distinct natural phenomena. 48. Based on what appears to be a misreading of the imagery on this vessel, in which he only observes the handstone held by Chahk and ignores the axe wielded ready to strike, Braakhuis (1990:142, n. 45) has suggested that these gods are producing rain for the emergence of maize but that lightning was not needed to free it from the earth. Although I disagree, he does make the useful point that the first emergence of the ripening plant from the watered earth and the freeing of dried maize seeds from the stony Mountain of Sustenance are temporally distinct episodes in many myths from across Mesoamerica. However, the condensation of multiple points in a narrative is a common feature of Mesoamerican imagery. 49. On the “shiner” motif, see Stuart 2010:291–296. 50. For a discussion of other vessels depicting this and related imagery, see Doyle 2016.

51. Taube et al. 2010:5. 52. Taube 2000:300–303. 53. Porter 1996; Stuart 2010:295–296. 54. For example, Schele and Freidel 1990:64–95. 55. Grove and Angulo V. 1987:115–117. 56. A similar profile depiction of the earth monster is found on Chalcatzingo Monument 13. Compare these with Chalcatzingo Monument 9, which has a frontal version of an identical monstrous earth maw with oval eyes and corner foliage. It is carved in relief and surrounds a large quatrefoil opening through the stone slab, which likely served as an entry into a ritual space (Grove and Angulo V. 1987:122–125; Angulo V. 1987:141). 57. Saturno et al. 2005. 58. Tedlock 1996:145–146. 59. Tedlock 1996:151. 60. An apparently related supernatural location—chan ch’en (Sky-Cave)—is also mentioned in Classic Maya inscriptions. See Tokovinine 2013:38–43. 61. Maffie 2014:433. 62. Leibsohn 2009:45. 63. López Austin and López Luján 2000. 64. Grove 1973. 65. Heyden 1975:140–141. 66. Gómez Chávez 2017. 67. Kowalski 1999:86–88. 68. Lockhart 1992:14. 69. Hirth 2003:61. 70. Fash and López Luján 2009:7. 71. See Tokovinine 2013:25 for a compilation of the meanings of ch’en in various Mayan languages. 72. Bassie-Sweet 1991, 1996; Stone 1995; Brady and Prufer 2005; Helmke 2009; Moyes 2012. 73. Vogt and Stuart 2005:162. 74. Tokovinine 2013:28. 75. Brady and Colas 2005; Helmke and Brady 2014. 76. Coggins 1984:27; Ringle et al. 1998:203. 77. V. Miller 2018:178. 78. Although natural, the cave appears to have been modified. E. Thompson (1938:30) records it having “seven small passages or ramifications extending in different directions,” perhaps marking this as a Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic Maya version of Chicomoztoc. 79. See Moyes and Brady 2012:156–157 for an account of other sites with natural or artificial caves directly associated with the built environment. 80. Brady 2012. 81. Krickeberg 1949:160–166. 82. García Payón 1974; Mendoza 1977; Galindo Trejo 1990. 83. Aguilar-Moreno 2009:75. 84. García Payón 1974:29; Townsend 1982:135–136.

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85. Benson 1985:185. 86. Schele 1998:487–499. 87. Von Schwerin 2011:281–283. 88. Doyle 2016:60, n. 28. 89. Bassie-Sweet (2008:146) identifies these as small stones, likely due to the infixed kawak motif resembling a bunch of grapes that is often used to mark stone. However, this motif was likely used to indicate the quality of stoniness, in this case the hardness of the seeds or kernels. S. Martin (2006) has shown that Classic Maya imagery apparently related to the story of the Maize God’s death and rebirth sometimes depicts a cacao tree as a world tree. He proposes both that there was a conflation between the two and that the mythological freeing of this bounty from the underworld established an archetype for the tribute of sacks of cacao beans often seen depicted in scenes of Maya courtly life. 90. M. Carrasco and Hull 2002; also see Hull and Carrasco 2004. M. Carrasco (2015:387–388) usefully unpacks the valences of the portal glyph T591/769 (way), showing how it “names sinkholes and architectural features, describes mythological locations, and figures as a component of the month Wayeb,” which strongly suggests that it connotes something like a “space,” “gap,” or “opening.” Furthermore, mythological names containing way— such as the “Black Hole Place” on the Cosmic Plate (fig. 3.13) discussed above—appear to be “conceptually tied to birth and the movement from one realm to another” (Carrasco 2015:387–388). 91. Taube 2013:91–92; for an account of the modern Nahua house as a cosmogram, see Lok 1987. 92. For a catalog of the painted capstones and a discussion of their imagery, see Staines Cicero 2001. 93. Capstone 3 from the site of Dzibilnocac, Campeche (fig. 3.27b), includes a glyphic description of the ox wi’il (abundance of food) that K’awiil is surrounded by (S. Martin 2006:173). This strongly suggests that the food, whether it is maize or cacao that is shown in any one instance, is intended to be synecdochic for all of nature’s bounty. 94. M. Carrasco and Hull 2002:27. 95. Tedlock 1996:91, 112–113. 96. Barrois and Tokovinine 2005. 97. Schele and Freidel 1991:308. 98. M. Carrasco and Hull 2002:27. 99. M. Miller and Houston 1987:47. 100. Koontz 2009:45–47, 49–51. 101. Fox 1996:493–494. 102. Motolinía 1903:338. 103. Durán 1971:315. 104. Barrois 2006:112. 105. Motolinía 1903:337–338. 106. Durán 1971:315. 107. Maffie 2014:197–199.

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108. Peterson 1985. 109. This association appears to be pan-Mesoamerican, as ethnographic accounts from across the region show a consistent conflation of breath with the soul. See Furst (1995:138–139) and Hanks (1990:86). 110. Tiesler 2001:59 and passim; Scherer 2015:32–35. 111. O’Neil 2009:120. 112. Adams 1999:94–101. 113. Looper 2003:69. 114. Trik 1963:8. Four tombs from Caracol have capstones that were painted red with black glyphs, with historical inscriptions. The most legible of these apparently refers to the placement of the capstone itself (A. Chase and D. Chase 1987:96). Andrew Scherer sees the use of cinnabar in tomb and cache contexts as carrying solar symbolism (Scherer 2015:76–79; Scherer and Houston 2018:136). 115. S. Martin and Grube 2008:35–36 (quotation on 35); Taube 2004a:79. 116. Reilly 1999:33. 117. Schele and Mathews 1998:113. 118. Schele and Mathews 1998:116. 119. Schele and Mathews 1998:119–125; also see S. Martin 2006:160–163. 120. It is noteworthy that the burial chamber was given the same capital-I layout used by ball courts, likely further identifying the tomb as a node connecting the vertically stacked underworld, terrestrial realm, and heavens and facilitating the apotheosis of its occupant (Matthew Looper, personal communication, 2019). 121. Fash 1998:227. 122. Sharer et al. 1999:11. 123. Matos Moctezuma 1999:211. 124. The cremated remains of Aztec rulers are thought to have been interred within the Sacred Precinct at the center of Tenochtitlan, but so far no royal burial has been definitively identified. 125. Drucker et al. 1959:93–97, 128–133. 126. Reilly 1999:22–25. 127. Gillespie and Volk 2014. 128. Becker 1993; also see D. Chase 1988:84. 129. S. Sugiyama and López Luján 2007. 130. N. Sugiyama 2017:91–92. 131. S. Sugiyama and López Luján 2007:132. 132. Markman and Markman 1992:174–182. 133. Sahagún 1953–1982:3:56 (book II, chapter 37). 134. López Luján 1994:137–145. 135. Guernsey and Reilly 2006; Duncan 2014:257–263. 136. A. Chase and D. Chase 1987:46–47. 137. Taube 2009. 138. M. Robertson 1974. 139. W. Coe 1965; Joyce 1992. 140. Freidel et al. 1993:216–219.

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CHAPTER 4

The Act of Drilling 1. Rather than being sticks, this may be a bundle of dried cornstalks, which Bassie-Sweet (2008:27) mentions as being used to start the burning of garden plots in the Maya region. In this regard, it is pertinent that creation never occurred from nothing in Mesoamerica, so it would not be paradoxical for maize already to have existed prior to its paradigmatic, mythological emergence. 2. Nigh and Diemont 2013; Sandstrom 1991:120. 3. Girard cited in M. Carrasco 2010:627. 4. Cheetham 2010:346–349. 5. Ruiz de Alarcón 1984 [1629]:87–88, as cited in Eberl 2018:55. 6. Stone and Zender 2011:23; see also Scherer and Houston 2018:113–115. 7. Scherer 2015:120. 8. Freidel and Guenter 2006:73. 9. Guernsey Kappelman 2002:69–75. 10. These include Izapa Stela 8, the mural from the west wall of San Bartolo Structure 1, El Perú Altar 1, and K4998. A crocodilian animal sits atop the upper halfquatrefoil of Izapa Stela 22, thus equating it with the earth monster in a manner similar to the sandstone sarcophagus (Monument 6) at La Venta. 11. Freidel et al. 1993:240–241. 12. Tedlock 1996:125, 130–132. 13. Tozzer 1941:148–149. 14. Cresson 1938; Alcina Franch et al. 1980; Matarredona Desantes 2014. 15. Durán 1971:269–272. 16. Sahagún 1953–1982:11:149–150 (book X, ch. 28), 8:151–152, 155, 160 (book VII, chs. 27–28); Houston 1996:139. 17. Furst 1995:96–102. 18. Sahagún 1953–1982:2:4–5 (book I, ch. 8); for a nearly identical image, see page 62 of the Codex Tudela. 19. Houston 1996. 20. Schele and Freidel 1990:237–261; Stuart and Stuart 2008:189–215. 21. Clancy 1986. 22. Houston 1996:145. 23. Stuart 1998. 24. Durán 1971:149. 25. Stuart 1998:393, 417–418. 26. Stuart 1998:396–399, 407–408. 27. Scherer 2015:57–58. 28. In an effort to avoid especially bad outcomes, the naming ceremony was sometimes postponed. See Boone 2007:29. 29. Sahagún 1953–1982:7:21, 53, 75 (book VI, chs. 3, 10, 14).

30. Tlachinolli is often translated as “burnt” or “scorched.” Siméon’s Nahuatl dictionary indeed translates it as an adjective or as a verbal substantive, as “quemado, incendiado” (burnt, set fire to) (Siméon 1992 [1885]:568). Garibay, however, translates it as a pure substantive, as “hoguera, quemazón” (bonfire, fire), which fits better with the diphrastic construction of paired terms (Garibay 1989:370). 31. Chuchiak 2018:153–154. 32. Robertson 2017:189–192. 33. Eberl 2018:63. 34. Stuart 1998:404, n. 16. 35. Eberl and Voss 2006:26. 36. Taube 1998:449. 37. Barrera Vásquez 1980:850. 38. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Online: https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/cmhi/detail .php?num=15&site=Yaxchilan&type=Lintel. 39. McDonald and Stross 2012. 40. For examples of the “corn curl,” see Taube 1985:173. 41. Of course, the Maize God here might also have been understood to be a manifestation of a specific royal ancestor, much as the person of Pakal was conflated with the Maize God on his sarcophagus lid at Palenque. 42. D. Carrasco 1999:164–187; Monaghan 2000:36; Pasztory 2010; Scherer and Houston 2018:110. 43. Tedlock 1996:98–102. 44. While the placement of the head of Hun Hunahpu in a calabash tree and its role in both bringing this tree to life and impregnating Xkik’ are often cited as an example of the same linkage between the agricultural cycle and human life as expressed in Classic Maya Maize God mythology, it is intriguing that the calabash is not an edible fruit. Rather, it is a gourd that is dried and used as a container. Hun Hunahpu’s head is a dried, defleshed skull, and even his spittle is immaterial, “just a sign” (Tedlock 1996:99). Moreover, the name Xkik’ combines the feminine prefix x- with the word kik’, meaning blood but also the sap from trees, including copal and rubber (Tedlock 1996:262, 264). Thus, although the impregnated Xkik’ carries Hun Hunahpu’s children (the Hero Twins) from the underworld to the surface of the earth inside her body, this story can be seen as establishing the inverse of this relationship: the role of the offering vessel in transporting sacrificial substances (blood, incense) between realms. On the identity of the xicalli—the Aztec offering bowl for sacrificial hearts—as a cut gourd, see Taube 2009:92. 45. Taube 1998:446. 46. Rice 1999:34–36; Scherer and Houston 2018:113. 47. Taube 2004c; also see Agurcia Fasquelle 2004. 48. Taube 2004a:88. 49. Berlo 1982:90–92.

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50. Taube 1998:447–448. 51. Tozzer 1907:87–89; McGee 1998:43. 52. Palka 2018:306. 53. At Teotihuacan and at Maya sites such as Palenque, broken incense burners were incorporated into building constructions, likely as a means to imbue these structures with their potency. See Rands and Rands 1959:233; Berlo 1982:90–91. 54. For a similar vessel depicting the Maize God’s birth from a skull with an infixed ajaw sign that was excavated from Calakmul, see Finamore and Houston 2010:260–261. 55. Macri and Looper 2003:65. 56. Scherer 2015:15. 57. The day that occupies the same position in the calendars of Central Mexico was “flower,” showing that the dual readings of this sign are not random. Maya rulers spoke of themselves with vegetal metaphors, including by presenting themselves as manifestations of the Maize God. Young nobles were referred to with the title ch’ok, which literally means “sprout” but in this context designated an individual as a youth (Houston 2009:154–157). A version of the ajaw-face glyph with a split head appears to be read as xo, which Macri (2000) has proposed was derived from the Nahuatl xochitli (flower) and would therefore be evidence for interaction between the Maya and Nahuatl speakers from at least the early Classic period. 58. Tozzer 1941:166–169; Love 1994:17–32. 59. Taube 1988:186–187. 60. Similar stone turtles with holes at their centers but lacking ajaw glyphs have been found at Mayapan (Proskouriakoff 1962:330–334), Santa Rita Corozal (D. Chase and A. Chase 1988:26), and Topoxte (Finamore and Houston 2010:258). For a stucco example found at Caye Coco, see Masson 1999:290; for a ceramic example from Tancah, see A. Miller 1982:7. 61. This is the same vessel illustrated in figure 3.16. For an image of the bottom, see Robicsek and Hales 1981:239. The early colonial Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel recounts the setting of the plate and cup of a k’atun, which Roys (1967:101) sees as making “reference to the ceremonies connected with the so-called idol of the katun.” 62. Taube 1988:188–189; Scherer 2015:217. 63. Mariani and Rebrej Pradas 2015. 64. Stuart 2011:144. 65. Sahagún 1953–1982:8:27 (book VII, ch. 10). 66. Sahagún 1953–1982:5:143–144 (book IV, appendix). 67. D. Carrasco 1999:102–103. 68. Sahagún 1953–1982:8:25–26 (book VII, ch. 9). 69. Sahagún 1953–1982:8:28 (book VII, ch. 10). 70. The ambiguous use here of the terms “born/borne” relates to imprecise use of the term “draw” in Sahagún.

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Since the fire has already been drilled, to draw fire in the breast suggests a carrying or “entering into” the cavity, similar to the och k’ahk’ rituals of the Classic Maya. Yet “draw” is consistently used throughout this section to refer to the drilling: that is to say, the bringing forth of fire. 71. Nielsen and Helmke 2018:95–96. 72. Helmke and Montero García 2016. 73. The different dates associated with New Fire ceremonies could reflect local differences of observation or broader regional shifts that occurred over time. Just as the naming ceremony following a birth could be postponed until a more propitious day, evidence from some sixteenthcentury accounts indicates that the Aztec New Fire ceremony was fungible and its year of celebration was both shifted due to political circumstances and later intentionally and permanently transitioned (from 1 Rabbit to 2 Reed). See Elson and Smith 2001:170. 74. Von Winning 1979:20–22. 75. Sarabia González and Núñez Rendón 2017:65; Robb 2017:290–291. 76. Grube 2000. 77. Tozzer 1941:151–153. Although Landa was describing an annual ritual rather than one that took place every fifty-two years, his account of the Yukatek Maya New Year’s activities has many parallels with Sahagún’s account of the Aztec New Fire ceremony. In both cases, old household items such as dishes and clothes were replaced with new ones and homes were swept clean. 78. Tedlock 1996:141. 79. Bassie-Sweet 2000:180. 80. Bierhorst 1992:147–149; Sahagún 1953– 1982:8:3–7 (book VII, ch. 2). 81. Sahagún 1953–1982:8:6 (book VII, ch. 2). 82. Bierhorst 1992:148; Sahagún 1953–1982:8:5 (book VII, ch. 2). 83. Siméon 1992 [1885]:541. 84. Sahagún 1953–1982:8:44 (book VII, appendix ch. 2). 85. Freidel et al. 1993:79–82; M. Carrasco 2010:611–616. 86. Stuart 2011:267. 87. Milbrath 1999:266–267.

CHAPTER 5

Perforating the Body 1. Parts of this chapter have been previously published as an article: Finegold 2019b. 2. Joralemon 1974; Stuart 1984. 3. Tedlock 1996:156–157. 4. Stone 1988:75–76; Gustafson 2002:162. 5. Hewitt 1999:260; Joyce 2000:79–82; Stockett 2005:570.

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6. On the identification of the belt ornament, which includes a shark head as well as a shell, see Quenon and Le Fort 1997:887–891. 7. M. Miller and Taube 1993:153; also see M. Miller and Brittenham 2013:112. 8. Staller and Stross 2013:187. 9. Scherer 2015:114–116. 10. Chinchilla Mazariegos 2017:97–103. 11. Staller and Stross (2013:186–187) also point to a likely association between Spondylus shells and lightning among the Maya, adding another layer of meaning to this ornament’s placement within the cleft in the carapace from which the Maize God emerges. 12. Taube 1985:180–181. 13. Sellen 2011:72–74; a nearly identical urn is found in the collection of the British Museum (1946/AM 19/6). 14. Joralemon 1974:61; Schele and Miller 1986:178. 15. Looper 2009:72–81; M. Miller and Brittenham 2013:129–146. 16. Schele and Miller 1986:175–196; Taube 1988:189–193. 17. Bierhorst 1992:145–146. 18. Saturno 2009. 19. Taube et al. 2010:28. 20. D. Chase and A. Chase 1986; Finamore and Houston 2010:142–143. During earlier excavations, Thomas Gann (1918:60 and plate 9) recovered similar auto-sacrificial figurines in caches at the same site. 21. Hull and Carrasco 2004:134. 22. Schmidt 2007:192–193. 23. Amrhein and Looper 2015:150–153. 24. Tozzer 1941:114. 25. Boone 2007:121–132. 26. Nuttall 1904; Klein 2001a; Graulich 2005. 27. Clendinnen 1991:73–75; Read 1998:123–155. 28. López Austin 1988:380–381; cf. Köhler 2001, who takes issue with the term “debt-payment” because of its one-sidedness (that is, humans owed the gods), while nevertheless drawing the similar conclusion that sacrifice was owed to the gods as part of a reciprocal obligation. 29. Klein 1987:350–360. 30. Graulich 2000. 31. Houston 2018:98. 32. Barrera Vásquez 1980:120. 33. Knowlton 2010:24. As Knowlton (2010:32) notes, while the compilers of Maya-Spanish dictionaries assigned ch’ab the meaning “to create from nothing,” Maya creation did not occur ex nihilo: ch’ab instead relates to procreativity and engendering. 34. Munson et al. 2014:4. 35. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Online: https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/cmhi/detail .php?num=24&site=Yaxchilan&type=Lintel.

36. Zender 1999:125–127. 37. Helmke and Brady 2014:212. 38. Houston 2018:100–105. 39. Stuart 1984; Schele and Miller 1986:175–185. 40. Schele and Miller 1986:84. 41. Sahagún 1953–1982:9:62–64 (book VIII, ch. 18). 42. Klein 1987:298–317. 43. Munson et al. 2014:10. 44. Sahagún 1953–1982:3:202–203 (book II, appendix; also see Sahagún 1953–1982:5:6–7 (book IV, ch. 2). 45. Tozzer 1941:222 (appendix). 46. Durán 1971:423–424. Durán (1971:419) states that during the previous month (Tozoztontli) “all children under twelve were bled, even breast-fed babes. Their ears were pierced—their tongues, their shins.” But this is explicitly characterized as taking place “in honor of the coming feast,” Huey Tozoztli (Great Perforation), so it is likely that newborns were first pierced during the fourth month. Children between one and twelve were subsequently bled during the third month of each year. 47. Sahagún 1953–1982:2:12, 3:34, 41, 152, 156 (book I, ch. 13; book II, chs. 18–19 and 37–38). Noting the quadrennial status of this ritual, Sahagún 1953– 1982:3:35 (Book II, ch. 18) states that “there is conjecture that when they pierced the boys’ and girls’ ears, which was every four years, they set aside six days of Nemontemi [the normally five unnamed days at the end of the solar calendar], and it is the same as the bissextile which we observe every four years.” 48. Clendinnen 1991:189–192; Joyce 2000:151–153. 49. Eberl 2013:464. 50. Tozzer 1907:136. 51. McGee 1990:88. 52. Díaz del Castillo 2008:81. 53. Cruz 2000; Gronemeyer 2003:10. 54. d’Anghiera 1912:2:232. 55. d’Anghiera 1912:2:38–39. 56. Kant 1987 [1790]:79–84 (§17). 57. This view was made explicit in the sixteenth-century writings of John Bulwer, cited in Geller 2006:281. 58. Anawalt 1980; Clark and Colman (2014:184–185) have suggested that Early Formative elites claimed the exclusive right to wear ceramic ear ornaments, based on their limited presence in the archaeological record beginning around 1400 BCE. 59. Taube 2005; Houston 2012; Caplan 2014; Filloy Nadal 2017. 60. Sahagún 1953–1982:12:221–222 (book XI, ch. 8). 61. Peirce 1932:143. 62. López Austin 1988:204–228; Furst 1995:63–130. 63. Sahagún 1953–1982:12:232–233 (book XI, ch. 9). 64. Olko 2014:313–314.

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65. Sahagún 1953–1982:12:223, 3:156 (book XI, ch. 8; book II, ch. 38). 66. Joyce 2000:152. 67. Durán 1971:150. 68. Sahagún 1953–1982:3:152 (book II, ch. 37). 69. Eberl 2013:464. 70. Boone 2007:140. 71. This quotation is Boone’s modified translation of a passage from Sahagún 1953–1982:7:202 (book VI, ch. 37), which Anderson and Dibble have as “thou wert cast, thou wert bored.” 72. Tedlock 1996:73–74. 73. Tedlock 1996:71. 74. Rojas 1927 [1581]:161. 75. Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca 1976:171–172 (folios 20v–21v). 76. Hermann Lejarazu 2008:129–133. 77. Byland and Pohl 1994:138–150; Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2007:222. 78. Kristan-Graham and Kowalski 2007:22–25. 79. Villela and Koontz 1993; Ringle 2004:190–191. 80. Hernández Pons 1982. 81. McEwan and López Luján 2009:48; also see page 43 of the same catalog for a relatively large Aztec sculpture of a heart carved from greenstone, an object that directly equates this living, breathing material with the beating center of animal life. 82. Sahagún 1953–1982:4:43 (book III, appendix). 83. Scherer 2015:73–76. 84. Coltman 2007:70. 85. López Austin 1988:173. 86. Seler 1908:394. 87. de Castro 2019:157. 88. Taube 2004b:23–24. 89. Taube and Ishihara-Brito 2012:140. 90. Acosta 1964:33 and fig. 50; Robb 2017:321. 91. Berrin and Pasztory 1993:209. 92. Pasztory 1997:173–174. 93. Berlo 1992:144. 94. Pasztory 1997:176. 95. Faugère 2014:36–37. 96. Preux 2016:125–130; also see Ball 1974. 97. Serra Puche 2001:264–265.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusions 1. Montes de Oca Vega 2004. 2. Robicsek and Hales 1981:215; Martínez de Velasco Cortina 2014:215–231. 3. Robicsek and Hales 1981:247.

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4. K5877 features this motif twice in a dualistic composition. It is perforated, but the hole does not align in any meaningful way with the imagery. 5. This is also the case with a plate that was sold at Christie’s in 2006. There the slightly off-center hole perfectly corresponds with the eye of the Maize God, whose disembodied (yet living) head represents the harvested ear of corn. https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2006/NYR /2006_NYR_01775_0185_000().jpg. 6. Maline Werness-Rude, personal communication, 2016. 7. Some elites in the Maya region, such as K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, the founder of the Copan dynasty, also wore eye rings as part of their diagnostic regalia. In these instances— as with much later examples such as at Chichen Itza and in Aztec imagery—this costume element was likely intended to invoke a real or fictive connection with a Central Mexican culture distant in either space or time. 8. Sahagún 1997:95. 9. Hamann 2018:637. 10. Vesque 2017. 11. Headrick 2003. 12. Hajovsky 2015:126. 13. Headrick 2003:35. 14. Sahagún 1997:102. 15. Houston and Taube 2000:265–273. 16. Taube 2001:111–112. 17. Not only figurines served as instruments, but vessels as well. Many Classic Maya dishes had hollow legs containing ceramic pellets that functioned as rattles, including some plates that were later perforated and placed in burials such as the one found in Uaxactun A-1 (fig. 3.12). Other perforated dishes had their legs— whether rattles or not—broken off prior to their placement in the tomb, including many from Tikal and those excavated by Andrew Scherer at El Kinel. 18. Barber et al. 2009:100–101. 19. Both 2007:97. 20. Barber et al. 2009. 21. Triadan 2007:274, 288. 22. Taube 2004a:73. 23. Both 2007:94. This seems to be the case in Mayan languages as well; the Yukatek term k’ay refers to music but is more specifically associated with songs and vocalizations, including “music,” “song,” “poetry,” “proclamation,” “the singing of men and the chirping or singing of birds” (Barrera Vásquez 1980:391). 24. Both 2007:95. 25. See, for example, the mural from Room 1 at Bonampak, where the musicians are clad as supernatural beings, as well as vessels K791, K3040, K4120, K4824, and K6888 from Justin Kerr’s Maya Vase Database, where

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music is shown as being played by supernatural beings or accompanying the dancing of deity impersonators. 26. Triadan 2007:278. 27. Stöckli 2007:25–28. 28. Overholtzer 2012. 29. Sahagún 1953–1982:7:157 (book VI, ch. 27). 30. Overholtzer 2012:76. 31. Sahagún 1953–1982:7:74 (book VI, ch. 14).

32. Brumfiel and Overholtzer 2009:313. 33. Brody and Swentzell 1996:20–21. 34. Shafer 2003:214. 35. Moulard 1985:92–95. 36. Finegold 2019a:235–237. 37. Brumfiel and Overholtzer 2009:313. 38. Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etym online.com/word/lacuna.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate information contained in images or image captions. áak, meanings of, 60 abundance and renewal: agricultural/vegetal, 41, 50, 62–63, 65–66, 70; and ball court iconography, 62; glyphic description of ox wi’il (abundance of food), 132n93; precious stones/jewelry, symbolism of, 41, 50, 104–105; propagation of and empty spaces, 1, 52–58, 118, 124; and tomb iconography, 65–66 activation concept: and drilling of holes, 19, 22–24, 120; and life/death dynamic, 29–30; and offerings, 68. See also emergence concepts agriculture. See cultivation/planting Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel, 59 Ahuitzotl (Aztec ruler), 100, 101 ajaw sign, meanings and interpretations, 81–82 ak’ab/ak’bal (darkness), 43, 98 alignment: of burial offerings, 68–69; of burial sites, 65; of human-made holes to iconography, 15, 31, 43, 70, 96, 118, 121. See also positioning of funerary objects altepetl (“water mountain,” city-state), 56, 58 Amrhein, Laura, 95 animacy and nature of animism, 25–26. See also animism and life force concepts animism and life force concepts: and death, 28–30; gods/ deities, manifestations of, 27–28; and Maya writing, 34; and Mesoamerican ontologies, 25–27; and piercings as point of ingress/egress, 106–109; vivification of sculptures/figures, 109, 111–116 anthropomorphization vs. animism, 25–27 apertures. See perforations architectonic spaces, relationship of iconography to, 11, 17, 35, 61, 74

architectural voids (man-made spaces): ball-court rings and windows, 63–64, 65; buildings, 59–62; and incense burners, correlation to, 80; open-air spaces, 62–63; tombs, 65–70 art, iconography as, 33–34 artificial/human-made cavities. See under cavities artists/scribes, 33–34 astronomical associations and mythology, 10–11, 43, 53, 68, 83–84, 86, 87–88. See also cosmological symbolism; sun symbolism atl-tlachinolli (water-fire/conflagration, war), 75–76, 133n30 authority and rulership (sacred): and bloodletting rituals, 98–101; caves and sociopolitical identities, 54–58; imbued by piercing and ornamentation, 108–109, 110, 111; signifiers of, 62; and tomb/burial symbolism, 65–66 auto-sacrificial practices. See bloodletting rituals; Hero Twins narrative axis mundi: architectural spaces as portal/conduit, 60–61, 62; burials/tombs as, 65; and cultivation concepts, 44, 52; definition of concept, 3; hearths and braziers as, 78; navel as, 114; perforated funerary vessels as portal/ conduit, 23, 30–31, 35–36, 120; shrines/cache offerings as, 10, 67, 70; world/cosmic tree as, 14, 96 Aztecs, metaphysical overview, 26–30 baah (image), 28, 29–30, 31 ball court and game symbolism, 62–64, 65, 109 Barrios, Ramzy, 63–64 Bassie-Sweet, Karen, 47, 132n89 Becker, Marshall, 68 becoming and being, metaphysics of, 26–29, 28 Belize, iconographic examples from, 70, 93, 132n114

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Benson, Elizabeth, 59 Berlo, Janet, 116 Bertamini, Marco, 5 bird symbolism, 47, 59, 70, 96, 101, 107–108 birth rituals and almanacs, 74, 106, 107, 111, 118, 123 “Black Hole Place, Black Water Place,” 48 Blom Plate, 107–108 blood, symbolism of, 27, 53, 70, 78. See also bloodletting rituals bloodletting rituals: and conjuration, 76–78, 99, 120; first bloodletting (children), 99–101, 101–102, 105, 106, 107, 115; genital, 89–97, 101–102; as penance, spiritual perspective, 85, 97–103; and renewal of fire ritual, 85; sacrificial victims, 70; and transference of vital forces, 78, 117–118 body perforations. See bloodletting rituals; jewelry/ ornamentation Bonampak site, Chiapas, 87, 89–90 bones, associations and symbolism: as conduits between living and dead, 29; and creation myths, 90–91, 121; and cultivation/seeds, 39, 41, 52, 65, 70; as musical instruments, 121; rebirth and renewal, 73, 80; skull symbolism and iconography, 39, 41, 43, 48, 66, 130n23; tools made from, 33, 34, 100, 106, 107 Boone, Elizabeth, 106 Both, Arnd, 121 braziers. See incense and braziers, symbolism/iconography of breath/wind (ik’) symbolism: abundance and holes in the earth, 53, 54; animacy of buildings, 78; and birth rituals, 106; and emergence myth, 59, 65; ik’ symbol, interpretations of, 64; music/sound/speech and life forces, 121–123; and vivification concepts, 104, 111, 114 broken objects and life forces, 19, 21–22, 29–30, 80. See also kill holes theory Brumfiel, Elizabeth, 123–124 bundling and wrapping, 69 burial and offering sites: burial offerings, placement of, 68–69; and placemaking concept, 10; planting/burial conflation, 32, 45, 47, 65–66, 70; symbolism/iconography of, 65–70, 72–73, 74–75. See also funerary objects, symbolism/iconography of cacao beans, symbolism of, 60, 61, 132n89 Cacaxtla site, Mexico, 118 caches/dedicatory offerings, symbolism/iconography of, 69–70, 72–73, 74–75 Calendar Round cycle (52-year period), 82, 85 calendars, 45, 81–82, 85 calmamalihua ritual (house dedication ritual using fire), 75 Campeche (state), Mexico, 21, 35, 60 capstones, symbolism/iconography of, 60–62, 65 Caracol site, Belize, 70, 132n114

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Carrasco, Michael, 60, 62, 93 Casati, Roberto, 4 Castillo/Temple of K’uk’ulkan, Chichen Itza, 58 caves. See under cavities cavities: in the earth, 21, 37–38, 52–58, 65–70; in objects, 4, 109, 111–116. See also architectural voids (manmade spaces) Cecil, Leslie, 30 ceiba tree, 78, 79 celestial realm. See astronomical associations and mythology celts, greenstone, 50–52 cenotes, 21, 58 censers and incense, 78–80 central world tree. See world tree Cerro de la Estrella site, Mexico, 82, 85 ch’ahb, meanings and interpretations of, 98–100 Chahk (Storm God), 48, 50, 53, 55, 59, 61, 63, 65 ch’ak (to chop), 51 Chalcatzingo site, Morelos, Mexico, 52, 53 Chalchiutlicue (fertility deity), 120 chan ch’en (Sky Cave), 131n60 Chatahn (identity of ), 13 ch’en (cavity, hole, perforation), 58 Chenes-style structures, 59, 60, 64, 78 Chiapas, Mexico sites: Bonampak, 87, 89–90; Izapa, 23, 24, 73, 107; Yaxchilan, 72, 76–77, 98, 101, 118 chicahuaztli (rattle staff ), 120 Chicanna site, Campeche, Mexico, 60 Chichen Itza site, Mexico, 21, 58, 62, 76, 93, 95, 109 Chichimecs. See Tolteca-Chichimeca people Chicomoztoc (Seven Caves), 53–54, 55, 56, 58, 109 children: birth rituals and almanacs, 74, 106, 107, 111, 118, 123; first bloodletting ritual, 99–101, 101–102, 105, 106, 107 Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo, 128n52 ch’ok (“sprout”/youth), 134n57 Cholula region, 11, 108–109 Christianity and cultural bias, 103 ch’ulel (life force, spirit), 27, 29–30 chultuns, 21 cigar imagery and symbolism, 43, 48 cinnabar, symbolism of, 132n114 Ciudadela (Teotihuacan), 55–56, 58, 115 cloud symbolism, 48, 52–53, 76. See also rain, rituals and myths concerning Coatepec (Serpent Mountain), 59 Coaxcatlan site, Mexico, 112 Codex Borbonicus, 84 Codex Borgia, 96, 106, 107 Codex Chimalpopoca, 47–48 Codex Colombino, 110

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Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, 96, 106, 107 Codex Florentino. See Florentine Codex Codex Magliabechiano, 74, 75, 120 “codex-style” vessels, 12, 13 Codex Vaticanus B, 45 Codex Zouche-Nuttall, 54, 56, 110 Coe, Michael, 23 Coggins, Clemency, 36 colors, and symbolism of precious objects, 50, 89, 104, 111, 114 conch shells, 89–90, 121, 123, 124 conjuration, 76–78, 99, 118, 120 Conquest (Spanish), impact of, 1–2 constellations, 83–84, 87–88 constructed images, god impersonators, 28, 31, 42, 46, 47, 90, 120, 122 continuity of form, 2 cooking, associations and symbolism, 71, 73, 78, 114. See also ovens/sweatbaths copal (tree resin incense), 76, 78 Copan site, Honduras, 52, 59, 66, 67, 78, 136n7 cosmic tree, 96. See also world tree cosmograms, 3, 60–61. See also quadripartite motifs, associations and symbolism cosmological symbolism: and architectural structures, 59–64; of blood offerings, 97; hearths, 60, 72, 75, 78, 86, 87–88; and holes, nature of, 6; interpretation perspectives, 11–12, 17, 124–125; of Mesoamerica, overviews, 3, 6, 30; of perforated funerary vessels, 23, 103–104 creation symbolism and mythology, 47; and architectural voids, 59–60, 62; and bloodletting, 90–91, 93; and celestial realm, role of in placemaking, 10–11; and fire, 81–86; and holes, role of, 1–2, 6, 117–118, 124; of humans, 14, 53–54, 90–91, 108, 124; Maize God, emergence/rebirth of, 14, 37–44, 46, 48–52, 59–62, 63, 73, 77, 81–82, 85; and maize in iconography, 14, 52–53; and opening of the earth, 37–39, 47–48, 52, 117–118; progenerativity concepts, 45, 50, 89, 98–99, 116, 118; resonance and time relevance, 44; and royal tombs, 65–66; and sociopolitical identity, 54, 56–57, 58; of the sun, 59, 76, 86; of time, 72, 87–88; vivification practices, 109, 111–116. See also emergence concepts; Hero Twins narrative; progenerativity concepts cremation urns, 23–24 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 5 crocodilian imagery and symbolism, 14, 24, 41, 65, 66, 68, 78. See also Juun Ixim Ayiin (One Maize Crocodile) cuauhxicalli (vessel for hearts of sacrificial victims), 59, 70 cultivation/planting: abundance and renewal symbolism, 41, 50, 62–63, 65–66, 70; bones, associations and symbolism, 39, 41, 52, 65, 70; death/burial symbolism,

32, 45, 47, 65–66, 70; and fire, relationship to, 71–72, 117; and opening of the earth, 37–39, 44–45, 47–48, 52, 117–118; puncturing of vessels as, 125. See also Maize God, emergence/rebirth of; maize in Mesoamerican cultures cultural bias and subjectivity, 5, 103 D’Anghiera, Peter Martyr, 103 Dazzler Vase, 66, 67 deactivation concept. See kill holes theory Dean, Carolyn, 32 dedications: dedicatory burial caches, 65–68, 74–75; inscriptions, 12, 37, 62, 100–101, 128n47; rituals, 64, 75–76, 102, 106 Dedication Stone (Aztec greenstone plaque), 100–101 deities/gods, overview, 27–28 depressions/hollows, 4 Derrida, Jaques, 5, 6 “Descripción de Cholula” (Rojas), 108–109 destroyed objects and life force dynamics. See broken objects and life forces doorways, symbolism/iconography of, 59, 60, 64, 66–67, 78 Doyle, James, 60 Dresden Codex, 93 drilling of fire (joch’ k’ahk’), 72; and cyclic rituals, 85–86; and holes, nature of, 71; perforation of vessels as symbolic of, 36, 72, 88; and relation to agriculture, 117; and renewal of fire, 82–85; and renewal of time, 82–83, 84–86; and summoning/conjuring deities, 76–78; and war, invocation of, 75–76 drilling of holes in vessels/figures: cavities in objects, 4, 109, 111–116; perforations in vessels/plates, 19, 21–25, 30–31, 35–36, 47, 122, 123, 124–125; as symbolic of drilling fire, 36, 72, 88 drums, symbolism/iconography of, 48, 73, 122, 123 Durán, Diego, 63–64, 75, 101–102, 106 eagle symbolism, 47, 59, 70, 96 ears, piercing of, 103, 106, 108. See also first bloodletting ritual (children) earth, holes in. See cavities; cultivation/planting Eberl, Markus, 76, 106 echo stones, Machu Picchu, 32 Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, 109, 110 El Kinel site, Guatemala, 72 El Petén, Guatemala: Mirador Basin, 12, 13–14; Motul de San José site, 90; San Bartolo site, 50, 53, 54–55, 91, 93, 94; Tikal site, 33, 34, 65, 66, 67, 82; Uaxactun site, 46, 47 El Tajín site, Veracruz, 62, 91 embeddedness concept, 31 emergence concepts: and holes, association with, 3, 24, 70,

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117–118; humans, appearance of, 14, 124; of Maize God, 14, 37–44, 46, 48–52, 59–62, 63, 73, 77, 81–82, 85. See also activation concept enclosed cavities in objects, 115–116 eye rings, 118, 120 eyes/sight and symbolism of holes, 8, 11, 106, 113, 118–121, 136n7 fanged mouth iconography and symbolism, 53, 59, 70, 91, 99 Farriss, Nancy, 27 fasting and penance, 98, 100 Faugère, Brigitte, 116 Feathered Serpent Pyramid (Teotihuacan), 55–56, 57, 59, 109 fecundity. See abundance and renewal figure-ground relationships, 4–5, 17–20 firefly imagery and symbolism, 41, 43, 70 fire mythology and iconography: fire and water dichotomy, 75–76; fire gods, 96, 102, 106, 114; fire-walking rituals, 73–74; heat and vital life force, 106; New Fire ceremony, 82–85; overviews, 15, 72–80; and temporal renewal, 81–88. See also drilling of fire (joch’ k’ahk’) first bloodletting ritual (children), 99–101, 101–102, 105, 106, 107, 115 fish symbolism, 42, 44, 130n23 Five-Flower Place, 39, 41, 43, 44, 48 Florentine Codex: on auto-sacrificial bloodletting, 101, 102; planting, depiction of, 44; on precious stones, searching for, 105; and renewal of fire ritual, 83–85. See also Sahagún, Bernardino de flower imagery and symbolism: flowering skull imagery, 39, 41, 43, 48, 66; and scent scrolls, 93, 121; verdancy, 48, 53, 56, 65, 78. See also waterlily symbolism/iconography Flower Mountain, 48, 53, 65 food and sustenance, 53, 61, 68, 78. See also cooking, associations and symbolism Fowler, Gregory, 4 Fox, John, 63 Freidel, David, 62, 72–73 funerary objects, symbolism/iconography of: and kill hole theory, 21–25; perforated funerary vessels as portal/ conduit, 23, 30–32, 35–36, 120, 125; planting/burial conflation, 32, 47; positioning of funerary objects, 23, 30, 47, 72, 124, 125, 129–130n67; transformation into by intentional intervention, 19, 21. See also burial and offering sites Furst, Jill, 74 García Barrios, Ana, 128n47 García Payón, José, 59 Garibay K., Ángel María, 133n30

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gaze, holes as mediators of, 8, 11, 120 gendering and cultural concepts, 89, 122–124 genital bloodletting, 89–97, 101–102 Girard, Rafael, 71 God CH, 14, 38, 48. See also Headband Gods god pots, 80, 102 God S, 14, 38, 48, 89. See also Headband Gods gods/deities, concepts of, overview, 27–28 gold, properties and symbolism of, 58, 103, 105 Gonzales, Egidius, 102 Graulich, Michel, 97–98 Great Ball Court, Chichen Itza, 62, 109 Great/Sacred Cenote, Chichen Itza site, 21, 58 greenstone: celts, 50–52; in dedicatory offerings, 68; intrinsic properties of, 104; locating deposits of, 104; and planting symbolism, 47; sculptures/figures carved from, 114; as symbol of abundance/preciousness, 41, 50, 51, 66; in tomb iconography, 66. See also stones, precious ground-figure relationships, 4–5, 17–20 group rituals/ceremonies, 74, 90, 92, 95 Grube, Nikolai, 85–86 Guatemala, sites in, 6–12; El Kinel site, 72; Mirador Basin, 12, 13–14; Motul de San José site, 90; Río Azul site, 65; San Bartolo site, 50, 53, 54–55, 91, 93, 94; Tikal site, 33, 34, 65, 66, 67, 82; Uaxactun site, 46, 47 Guenter, Stanley, 72 Guernsey Kappelman, Julia, 73 ha’b (solar year), 82 Hajovsky, Patrick, 120 Hales, Donald M., 48 Hamann, Byron, 120 Hauberg Stela, 99 Headband Gods, 14, 38, 39, 48. See also Hero Twins narrative Headrick, Annabeth, 120 healing/medicine, 74, 102–103, 106 hearths: cosmological symbolism of, 60, 72, 75, 78, 86, 87–88; and emergence of Maize God, 88; mythological narratives and, 86–88. See also ovens/sweatbaths hearts, associations and symbolism: and copal/incense, 78; hearths and braziers, 74, 75, 78; as life center, 29, 114; precious stone representations of, 15, 111–112, 114; of sacrificial victims, 59, 70, 85, 133n44 Helmke, Christophe, 85 Hero Twins narrative, 38, 73–74, 76, 86, 107, 128n52. See also Headband Gods Hirth, Kenneth, 58 Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Sahagún). See Florentine Codex Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (P. Kirchhoff, L. Odena

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Güemes, L. Reyes García, eds.), 53, 54, 56, 109 hole-lining interface, 5 holes in Mesoamerican culture: interpretive overview, 1–3; ontological analysis, 3–6, 126; and parallels across North/South American cultures, 124–125. See also architectural voids (man-made spaces); cavities; drilling of fire (joch’ k’ahk’); drilling of holes in vessels/ figures; perforations; piercings Honduras, iconographic examples from, 52, 59, 66, 67, 78, 136n7 Hopi people, 124 House of the Phalli, Chichen Itza, 95 Houston, Stephen: on concept of “eye,” 10; on deity “impersonators,” 28; on first penance rite, 99; on flowers and souls, 121; on life force terminology, 27; on Maya writing as animate, 34; on meaning of ch’ahb, 98; on resonance of images, 44; on symbolism of sweatbaths, 74 Huastec people/culture, 48, 109, 112–113 Huey Tozoztli (Great Perforation), 45, 101–102 Huitzilopochtli (patron deity of Aztecs), 67, 100, 101, 102 Huizachtecatl/Cerro de la Estrella (Lake Texcoco), 82, 85 Hull, Kerry, 60, 62, 93 hummingbird symbolism, 101 Hunahpu (Hero Twin), 38. See also Hero Twins narrative Hun Hunahpu (father of Hero Twins), 38, 78 Hunt, Eva, 27–28 iconography, aesthetics of, 33–34 ik’ (wind/breath), 64, 65, 121–122. See also breath/wind (ik’) symbolism impersonators (god), 28, 31, 42, 46, 47, 90, 120, 122 inamic (opposing forces in constitutive dynamic pairs), 29, 64, 75 Inca stones, 32 incense and braziers, symbolism/iconography of, 78–80, 102. See also hearths indexical relationship of sign/referent, 104–105 Ingold, Tim, 25, 26, 28 inverted funerary objects, 23, 30, 47, 72, 124, 125 itz (cosmic essence), 27, 78 Izapa site, Chiapas, 23, 24, 73, 107 jaguar symbolism/iconography, 38, 48, 59 Jakobson, Roman, 32 Jasaw Chan K’awiil, 33, 34 jewelry/ornamentation: materiality and intrinsic properties of, 104–105; properties of and vivification of wearer, 105–109, 110; as symbol of wealth/status, 103–104. See also stones, precious joch’ k’ahk’. See drilling of fire (joch’ k’ahk’) Juun Ajaw, 38

Juun Ixim Ayiin (One Maize Crocodile), 14, 23, 37–38, 48 K’ahk’-u-Pakal, 76 kan-cross symbols, 53, 130–131n37 Kant, Immanuel, and subjectivity, 5, 103 k’atuns (twenty-year periods), 81–82 kawak, meaning of, 132n89 K’awiil (lightning deity), 48, 49, 61–62, 66, 77, 119 k’ay (vocalization, music), 136n23 Kerr, Justin, 128–129n10 kill holes theory, 15, 19, 21–25, 117, 125 k’in (sun, day), meanings and interpretations of, 26–27, 70, 95–96 K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, 66, 67. See also Pakal tomb, Palenque, Mexico K’inich Kan Bahlam, 74–75 K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, 66 Klein, Cecelia, 97 Knowlton, Timothy, 98 Krickeberg, Walter, 59 Kubler, George, 1–2 k’uh/k’uhul (“god/godly,” animating force), 27 k’uhul chatahn winik (holy/sacred Chatahn person), 13, 128n47 K’uk’ulkan (feathered serpent god), 58 Lacan ( Jacques) and Lacanian theory, 2, 8, 11 Lacandon Maya, 80, 102 Lady K’abal Xook, 98, 101, 118 Lady Three Flint, 54, 56 Lady Wak Tuun, 77–78 lak (clay object), 37 Lake Texcoco, 82 läkil k’uh (god pots), 80 Landa, Diego de, 73–74, 86, 95 La Venta site, Tabasco, Mexico, 51, 55, 65–66, 68 Leibsohn, Dana, 54 Leiden Plaque (celt), 51 León-Portilla, Miguel, 26 Lewis, David, 4 Lewis, Stephanie, 4 life forces: and agentive materiality, 104–105, 108–109, 111–116; and body perforations, 106–109; and fire/heat, 74–75, 105, 106; and holes, role of, 1–2, 15, 117–118; music/sound/speech and life forces, 121–123; ritual and life force flows, 28; and time, associations and concepts, 26, 27; transference/transmission of life forces, 1, 29–30, 78, 117–118. See also animism and life force concepts; broken objects and life forces lightning: K’awiil (lightning deity), 48, 49, 61–62, 66, 77, 119; and liberation of maize from the earth, 47–48,

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50, 52; and symbolism of shells, 135n11. See also Chahk (Storm God); storm deities line drawings of iconography, 17–18 lip-to-lip caches, 70, 72–73 Long Count calendar, 81 Looper, Matthew, 43, 95 Lopes, Luis, 43 López Austin, Alfredo, 2 López Medel, Tomás, 101 Lord Five Flower, 54, 56 Loughmiller-Newman, Jennifer Ann, 129n11 Macri, Martha J., 134n57 Madrid Codex, 72, 80, 86, 87, 93, 95 Maffie, James, 26, 28, 29 Maize God, emergence/rebirth of, 14, 37–44, 46, 48–52, 59–62, 63, 73, 77, 81–82, 85 maize in Mesoamerican cultures: bringing forth from earth, 53, 61; conflation with genitals, 90; and earth openings associations, 52, 117–118; and greenstone celt iconography, 50–52; Mesoamerican mythology of, overview, 14. See also Maize God, emergence/rebirth of Malinalco site, Mexico, 59 Martínez de Velasco Cortina, María Alejandra, 21, 22–23, 31 “massive offerings,” 65–66, 68 materialism vs. materiality, 25, 26 materiality: and agentive life forces, 104–105, 108–109, 111–116; creation of ceramics and fire, 71–72; of holes, 4; vs. materialism, 25–26; of perforated vessels and contextual situatedness, 17, 31–32, 34–35; relational, 17–20 Mathews, Peter, 66 Maya Book of the Dead, The (Robicsek and Hales), 48, 118 Maya Vase Database (Kerr), 128–129n10 McCafferty, Geoffrey, 11 McGee, R. Jon, 80, 102 McLeod, Alexus, 3, 26, 27, 31 Meadows, Phillip, 4 medicine/healing, 74, 102–103, 106 Memoriales (Motolinía), 63 metaphor and metonym, 32–35 Mictlantecuhtli (death god), 47 Miller, Kristie, 4 Miller, Mary, 44 Mimbres culture, 124–125 Mirador Basin, El Petén, Guatemala, 12, 13–14 mirrors, 120 Mixtecs, 27, 45, 53, 107, 109, 110. See also Codex Zouche-Nuttall Monaghan, John, 45 monoliths, 6–12. See also stelae

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Montero García, Ismael, 85 moon, symbolism and mythology of, 10–11, 68, 86 Moon Pyramid, Teotihuacan, 68 Morelos, Mexico, 52, 53, 85 Motolinía, Toribio de Benavente, 63, 64 Motul de San José site, El Petén, 90 Moulard, Barbara, 125 Munson, Jessica, 98, 101 musical instruments, 121–124 Muybridge, Eadweard, 8 Nahuas, 26–27, 28, 45, 47–48, 71 Nanahuatzin, 86–87 Naranjo Monument 1 study, 6–12 navel. See umbilicus, symbolism of New Fire ceremony, 82–85 nextlahualli (payment), 97 nik (flower), 81 nixtamalization, 71 nose piercing, 109, 110 nothingness/emptiness concept, 1, 2–3 objet petit a concept, 2, 8 och k’ahk’ (“fire entering” rituals), 75 offerings. See bloodletting rituals; burial and offering sites; sacrifices/offerings (human) Olmecs, 50, 51, 54–55, 65–66, 68 ovens/sweatbaths: and cooking symbolism, 71, 73, 78, 117; and healing/life-giving symbolism, 74–75; and rattles, symbolism of, 123; and self-immolation/rebirth narratives, 73, 74, 86–87. See also hearths Overholtzer, Lisa, 123–124 ox wi’il (abundance of food), 132n93 oztotl (cave), 59 Painting the Maya Universe (Reents-Budet), 22 Pakal tomb, Palenque, Mexico, 23, 66, 67, 70 Palenque site, Mexico, 23, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 74 Palka, Joel, 23–24 paradigm/syntagm, analysis and definitions, 2, 32, 34–35, 38 parergon concept, 5–6, 11 Pasztory, Esther, 34, 116 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 104 penance, self-sacrifice as, 85, 97–103 penile bloodletting, 89, 90–96, 101–102 Pereira, Karen, 8, 11 perforations: ball-court rings and windows, 63–64, 65; cavities in objects, 4, 109, 111–116; in monoliths/stelae, 6–12; tunnels, 4, 55; in vessels/plates, 19, 21–25, 30–31, 35–36, 47, 122, 123, 124–125. See also bloodletting rituals; jewelry/ornamentation; piercings

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Petén (department), Guatemala. See El Petén, Guatemala pib (earthen oven), 73 pib’ nah (“oven house,” sweatbath), 74 Piedras Negras site, Guatemala, 74, 82 piercings, 15; ears, 103, 106, 108; first bloodletting ritual (children), 99–101, 101–102, 105, 106, 107, 115; nose, 109, 110. See also bloodletting rituals; jewelry/ornamentation; perforations placemaking concepts, 8, 10, 58, 65 placement analyses: alignment of human-made holes with iconography, 15, 31, 43, 70, 96, 118, 121; burial offerings, 68–69; and creation of tomb space, 65; funerary objects, positioning of, 23, 30, 47, 72, 124, 125, 129–130n67 Place of the Reeds, 109 planting. See cultivation/planting Pleiades (star cluster), 83–84 Popol Vuh: and ball game/court symbolism, 62–64; and blood offerings, 89; creation narrative in, 10–11, 14, 53–54; and link between realms of living and dead, 29; Vuqub Caquix narrative, 107–108. See also Hero Twins narrative positioning of funerary objects, 23, 30, 47, 72, 124, 125, 129–130n67 preciousness, 41, 50, 52, 65, 66. See also abundance and renewal; stones, precious precious stones. See stones, precious Preux, Anne-Carole, 116 Primary Standard Sequence, 37 progenerativity concepts, 45, 50, 89, 98–99, 116, 118 psychoducts, 23, 30, 129n14 Puebloan peoples, 124 Pugh, Timothy, 30 puncturing. See drilling of holes in vessels/figures; perforations; piercings Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, 55, 85 pyramids of Chichen Itza, 58 quadripartite motifs, associations and symbolism: breath/ wind, 121; and cultivation, 44–45; and cycles of time, 82; and definition of cosmogram, 3; and emergence symbolism, 73; four-part ordering of space-time, 93, 96; four-part ordering of terrestrial realm, 50; and tombs/caches, 65, 70 qualified space-time, 4, 96 Quetzalcoatl (feathered serpent god), 47–48, 90–91 Quetzalpapalotl Palace, Teotihuacan, 115 Quilter, Jeffrey, 2 rain, rituals and myths concerning, 21, 52–53. See also cloud symbolism rattles, 122, 123

rebirth: and burials, 66, 67; fire, role of, 71; of fire, 76, 82–85; and iconography of funerary objects, 14, 23, 31; temples and vessels, 80, 102. See also abundance and renewal; Maize God, emergence/rebirth of Reents-Budet, Dorie, 22 release of souls/spirits through holes. See activation concept repair holes in vessels, 22 resurrection narratives, 14, 66, 73. See also rebirth Resurrection Plate: artistry analysis, 43–44; and body perforations, 89–90, 116; conclusions, 117–118, 125–126; detailed analysis of iconography, 17–20; introduction to, 12–14; and opening of the earth, 37–39; and representations of fire, 71–72 Río Azul site, Guatemala, 65 Robertson, Janice, 76 Robertson, Merle Greene, 70 Robicsek, Francis, 48 rocks/stones, symbolism of, 87. See also stones, precious Rojas, Gabriel de, 108 roof combs, 66 Roys, Ralph, 98 rubber, 74, 78 Sacred/Great Cenote, Chichen Itza, 21, 58 sacrifices/offerings (human), 59, 62, 68–70, 78, 82–85, 84–85. See also bloodletting rituals; Hero Twins narrative Sahagún, Bernardino de: on drums and rattles, 123; on finding precious stones, 104; on opening of the earth, 44; on patron goddess of sweatbaths, 74–75; on ritual staffs, 120; on war and fire symbolism, 75. See also Florentine Codex Sak Bak Nakan (White Bone Snake), 66 San Bartolo site, El Petén, Guatemala, 50, 53, 54–55, 91, 93, 94 Sandstrom, Alan, 26–27 Santa Rita Corozal site, Belize, 93 scent scrolls, 72, 93, 121, 122 Schele, Linda, 62, 66 Scherer, Andrew: analyses of funerary objects, 23, 25, 35, 72, 89; on association of funerary objects with umbilicus, 129–130n67; on cinnabar, symbolism of, 132n114; on timing of burials and ritual calendar, 75 scribes/artists, 33–34 scroll symbols, interpretations of: blood, 99; breath, 59, 64, 106, 121; clouds, 52–53; foliate, 72; scent, 72, 93, 121, 122; smoke/flames, 71, 76, 78 sculptures/figures, cavities in, 4, 109, 111–116 Seler, Eduard, 114 self-immolation symbolism, 86–87. See also Hero Twins narrative self-sacrifice themes. See under bloodletting rituals; Hero

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Twins narrative serpents, symbolism/iconography of: and Chahk (Storm God), 60; as conduits/portals to spirit world, 34, 76–78, 99, 118–119; and emergence of Maize God, 77; Serpent Mountain (Coatepec), 59; verdancy and water imagery, 56, 58; War Serpent, 118; Water Serpent/Waterlily Serpent, 77, 118–119, 130n23 Seven Caves (Chicomoztoc), 53–54, 55, 56, 58, 109 sexual symbolism, 45, 89 Shafer, Harry, 125 shells, marine, 89; conch shells, 89–90, 121, 123, 124; Spondylus (spiny oyster) shells, 70, 89, 90, 113, 114 Shield Jaguar III, 98 Short Count calendar, 81 sight/eyes and symbolism of holes, 106, 113, 118–121, 136n7. See also gaze, holes as mediators of signaling theory and iconography, 101 signifiers vs. signified, 3, 28 Siméon, Rémi, 133n30 sipapu (aperture between realms, Hopi), 125 situatedness of images (contextual), 17, 31–32, 34–35 Siyaj Chan K’awiil tomb, 65, 66 skins, human, 68–69 skull symbolism and iconography, 39, 41, 43, 48, 66, 130n23 Sky Cave (chan ch’en), 131n60 smashed vessels (intentional), symbolism of, 21 smoke symbolism: and clouds, 48, 76; and fire, 71, 72; and incense, 78 sociopolitical identity and relationship to caves, 54, 56–57, 58 solar associations and symbolism, 27, 59, 67, 70, 82, 105. See also sun symbolism sound and music, 121–124 South Ball Court, El Tajín site, 62 space-time concepts, 3, 4, 96 Spencer, Joshua, 4 “Split Place,” 53. See also Sustenance Mountain (“Flower Mountain”) Spondylus (spiny oyster) shells, 70, 89, 90, 113, 114 staffs, for “viewing,” 120 Staller, John E., 135n11 standing stones. See monoliths stars, 10–11, 43, 83–84, 87–88. See also sun symbolism stelae: conceptual interpretations of, 52; Hauberg Stela, 99; Izapa Stelae, 23, 24, 73, 107; Kaminaljuyi Stela 11, 79; monoliths, 6–12; Quetzalpapalotl Palace, 115 Stone, Andrea, 72 stones, precious, 103–105, 109, 111–116. See also greenstone; jewelry/ornamentation storm deities, 48, 59–60, 61–62, 67, 118–119. See also Storm God (Chahk) Storm God (Chahk), 48, 50, 53, 55, 59, 61, 63, 65

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Stross, Brian, 135n11 Stuart, David: on ch’en logograph, 58; on deity “impersonators,” 28; on fire symbolism, 75; on life force terminology, 27; on monuments as period markers, 87; on upright monuments, 10 Stuttgart Figurine, 114 sumptuary laws, 104 sun symbolism: birth of sun narratives, 59, 76, 86; and connection to gods, 101; and creation narratives, 26–27; k’in (sun, day), meanings and interpretations of, 26–27, 70, 95–96; and life forces, 75, 105; and renewal of fire rituals, 76, 83, 85–86. See also solar associations and symbolism Sustenance Mountain (“Flower Mountain”), 48, 53, 65 sweatbaths. See ovens/sweatbaths Swentzell, Rina, 124–125 syntagm/paradigm, analysis and definitions, 2, 32, 34–35, 38 Tabasco, Mexico, 51, 55, 65–66, 68 Taggart, James, 45 talud-tablero style of building, 66, 85 Taube, Karl, 10, 76, 78, 80, 114–115, 121, 122 Tecuciztecatl, 86–87 teixiptla (“image,” god impersonator), 28, 31. See also impersonators (god) telluric spaces. See under cavities Temple of K’uk’ulkan, Chichen Itza, 58 Temple of Mexico. See Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque site, 66, 67 Temple Stone, 76, 100, 101 Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, 10, 67, 82, 83, 101–102, 111, 114 Tenochtitlan, Mexico, iconographic examples from, 10, 67, 82, 83, 101–102, 111, 114, 121 Teocalli of Sacred Warfare, 76, 100, 101 teocuitlatl (“divine excrement,” gold), 105 teotexcalli (divine oven), 87 Teotihuacan, Mexico, iconographic examples from, 55–56, 57, 58, 59, 68, 80, 85, 109, 115–116 teotl (“energy-in-motion,” ultimate animating force), 26–29 Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror,” patron deity of kings and warriors), 96, 101, 120, 123 Thompson, J. Eric S., 45, 131n78 Throne of Moctezuma, 76, 100, 101 Tikal site, El Petén, Guatemala, 33, 34, 65, 66, 67, 82 Tilantongo, 109 time, associations and concepts: creation narratives, 72, 87–88; and life force mythology, 26, 27; relativity and resonance of imagery, 44; renewal of time narrative and ritual, 81–88; space-time concepts, 3, 4, 96; stelae/monoliths and marking of time, 10, 11; temporal

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cycles and ritual, 75 Titomaj K’awiil, 12–14, 37, 43 Tizoc, 100, 101 Tlacaxipehualiztli, festival of, 68–69 tlachialoni (device for seeing), 120 tlachinolli, meanings of, 133n30 Tlaloc (Storm God), 67 Tlaltecuhtli (earth monster), 45, 70 tlamaceualiztli (“to merit or deserve”), 97 Toci (patron deity of sweatbaths), 74, 75 Tokovinine, Alexandre, 58 “Tollan” polities, 109 Tolteca-Chichimeca people, 53, 54, 56, 109 tombs/caches, symbolism/iconography of, 65–70. See also funerary objects, symbolism/iconography of Tonacatepetl (Sustenance Mountain), 48, 53, 65 tonalli (animating force), 27, 75, 105, 106 tongues, piercing of, 90, 98 torch imagery and symbolism, 33, 43, 48, 71–72, 80, 88 Totonac Indians, 103 Townsend, Richard, 59 Tozoztontli (Small Perforation), 45 Tozzer, Alfred, 102 transference/transmission of life forces, 1, 29–30, 78, 117–118 tree sap, symbolism of, 78. See also copal (tree resin incense) “T” shape in Maya symbolism, 64 Tulan Zuyua (“Seven Caves, Seven Canyons”), 54 tunnels, 4, 55. See also perforations turtle iconography, 12, 14, 38, 46, 50, 73, 87 tzak (conjuring), 76–78, 99 tzolk’in (260-day ritual calendar), 75, 82 Uaxactun site, El Petén, Guatemala, 46, 47 ub’aahila’n (god impersonator), 31. See also impersonators (god) umbilicus, symbolism of, 114, 124, 125, 129–130n67 Ux Yop Hu’n (god of paper), 34 Varzi, Achille, 4 vaulted structures, symbolism of, 60–61, 62, 65, 70, 93 Velásquez García, Erik, 128n47 Veracruz, Mexico, 62, 91 verdancy and abundance imagery, 55–56, 65. See also abundance and renewal Vesque, Martine, 120 “viewers” (staffs used as), 120

vital forces. See life forces vivification of sculptures/figures, 109, 111–116 Vogt, Evon Z., 27 Voss, Alexander, 76 Vuqub Caquix (Seven Macaw), 107–108 wahy (co-essence), 77, 119 Wake, Andrew, 4 warfare symbolism, 51, 59, 68, 75–76, 101, 118 War Serpent, 118 waterlily symbolism/iconography, 41, 43, 48, 77, 118–119, 130n23. See also water symbolism/iconography water symbolism/iconography: and abundance symbolism, 41, 62; and blood, 53; and underworld, 39, 41; “water mountain” concept, 55–56, 57; Water Serpent/ Waterlily Serpent, 77, 118–119, 130n23 Welsh, W. Bruce M., 23 Western philosophy: colonization of indigenous ontologies, 1–2, 25–26; holes, negative connotations of, 2–3, 6, 126 whistles, 122–123 Williamson, George, 127n32 wind. See breath/wind (ik’) symbolism windows, symbolism/iconography of, 63–64, 65, 78 witz (animate mountain), 48, 59, 65 witz’ (water serpent, waterlily monster), 39, 48, 130n23. See also water symbolism/iconography wooden people in myth, 108 world tree, 23, 24; as axis mundi, 14, 70, 96; and blood offerings, 91, 93, 96; incense burners as, 78, 79; Maize God as, 14, 30, 37–38, 44, 62, 66, 72 wrapping and bundling, 69 Xbalanque (Hero Twin). See Hero Twins narrative Xipe Totec (Our Lord the Flayed One), 68–69, 120 Xiuhtecuhtli (fire god), 96, 102 Xkik’ (daughter of underworld lord), 78 xo, meaning and interpretation of, 134n57 Xochicalco site, Morelos, Mexico, 85 Yax Bahlam (B’alun/B’olon), 38 yax ch’ahb (first penance/creation), 99–101 Yaxchilan, Chiapas, 72, 76–77, 98, 101, 118 yich, meaning and uses of, 37, 130n2 Yopaat (storm deity), 48 Yopaat B’ahlam, 12–13 Yukatek Maya, 73, 76, 86, 98 Zender, Marc, 72, 98

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