TLS on Maya

on Classical Maya

Stephen D. Houston and Takeshi Inomata
THE CLASSIC MAYA
402pp. Cambridge University Press. £60 (paperback, £19.99). US $95; $28.99. 978 0 521 660068

Maya civilization flourished in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, the adjacent countries of Guatemala and Belize, and the western fringes of Honduras and El Salvador for more than a thousand years. Half a century ago, when most New World chronologies were a matter of intelligent guesswork, the Classic period was designated by the late Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips as beginning in ad 300 and lasting until 900: this was the span during which Maya rulers had dedicated monuments bearing hieroglyphic dates in the complex Long Count calendar, recording both the regular passage of time and specific historical events, and usually precise to the day.
Cities such as Tikal, Palenque and Copan, discovered in the tropical forest from the late eighteenth century onwards and explored in the nineteenth by scholars including John Lloyd Stephens and Alfred Maudslay, showed the Classic Maya to have been architecturally, artistically and intellectually creative. The period before 300, designated the Preclassic, was at the time thought to be an age of small farming villages, out of which, by some unexplained sociopolitical mechanism, Classic Maya civilization had emerged. The past four decades have seen two parallel strands of progress in Maya archaeology: in one, the Late Preclassic (400 bc-ad 300) has been shown to have been an age when the first Maya cities were established, with temple-pyramids at sites such as Nakbe, El Mirador and Calakmul exceeding in size anything constructed in the subsequent Classic period. The preceding Middle Preclassic, especially from 700 bc onwards, was when long-distance trade, ranked society, and the first monumental architecture were established.
read more Recent discoveries at San Bartolo in Guatemala show that Maya hieroglyphic script was already in use by the fourth century bc, along with the use of terms such as "ajaw" - "ruler, lord" - and was already distinctive enough to demonstrate a Middle Preclassic, and possibly autochthonous, origin.
The second strand has been a far broader understanding of the Classic period, based on the rapid decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs: by 1960, Yuri Knorosov's demonstration of a phonetic basis to the script allowed it to be analysed in terms of the surviving Maya languages, while Heinrich Berlin's identification of "Emblem Glyphs" established a historical geography, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff's detection of historicity in the inscriptions brought the Classic Maya out of prehistory. The texts dealt with real people living in a complex world of dynastic polities: they were not the cosmic speculations envisioned by an earlier generation of scholars.
Although the new realities appear in recent general books, these still tend to be dominated by the spectacular material culture of Classic Maya architecture, sculpture and vase painting, or by a bottom-up use of economic and demographic reconstruction capped by this cultural superstructure. Stephen D. Houston and Takeshi Inomata's book pushes much of this into the background, using instead often little-known objects for the purposes of illustration. This is probably the first general book on the Maya to lack illustrations of Tikal's great temples, Palenque's royal palace, the elaborately carved statue-stelae of Copan, and the spectacular structures of Chichén Itzá. The Classic Maya is, in the authors' summary, "structured by categories of the person in society - societies predicated on sacred kingship and varying political programs - societies bound by moral covenants". Like two other books in which Houston has recently taken a prominent role, The Memory of Bones: Body, being, and experience among the Classic Maya (2006) and Veiled Brightness: A history of ancient Maya color (2009), The Classic Maya seeks to enter the ancient Maya mind.
This new approach is evident in the ordering of chapters: after an introduction to who the Maya are, where and when their culture flourished, and how we have found out about them, there is a conceptually dense discussion of sociality, introducing the concepts of the "moral community" and the "divided society", harmony and conflict. The tension between these, we are told, "accounted in large measure for the dynamism and paradoxes of the Classic Maya world". Maya ideas of rightness do not necessarily accord with ours, the authors emphasize: humiliation and torture of captives were thought right, and "personhood did not hold the same meaning" as it does today. The Maya person was part of a continuum which reached back into the past and forward into the future, but also above and below to the cosmos and the chthonic beings of their over-populated underworld. Some of this analysis comes from ethnographic or ethnohistoric Maya and some other Mesoamerican sources, but much is elucidated from the recent decipherment of Classic texts and from sensitive readings of Classic sculptures and other works of art.
After this extended declaration of understanding, Houston and Inomata summarize in some sixty pages the current scholarship on the Preclassic, from the first sedentary communities in Belize and the adjacent Petén in the early first millennium bc to the established and impressive cities of the Mirador Basin at the millennium's end. This is laudably up to date, informed not only by the samizdat network of exchange between Mayanists in which discoveries circulate over the internet long before they appear in print, but also by Inomata's current excavations at Ceibal, where unexpectedly substantial constructions and offerings of the period 900-600 bc have been found.
Many of the instances and illustrations in the book come from the authors' separate projects at sites along the Usumacinta drainage, at Piedras Negras and in the Petexbatun, notably at Aguateca and Dos Pilas as well as Ceibal: while this might seem biased, it is in fact a timely corrective to the Petén-and, especially, Tikal-centric stance of many books, or others in which Copan or Belize are emphasized. This is also a region especially rich in well-documented and well-preserved monuments and texts, especially for the seventh and eighth centuries AD.
There is a succinct summary of Classic period dynastic history, architecture and artefacts, before a central section dealing with "social actors". Here the approach is topdown, from rulers and their consorts and the courtly society that surrounded and supported them in their palaces, to the nobility that both participated in courtly life and also lived and governed elsewhere in the realm. We know more about Maya kings than about any other group in their society, because monarchs were the dedicators and subjects of almost all the public monuments - standing stelae and altars, ball-court markers, friezes and murals adorning palaces and carved lintels over palace doorways; it makes sense to interrogate these and also portable sources of text such as painted vases and personal jewellery, often found in or looted from royal tombs.
Although royalty were a small fraction of the Maya population, they are almost the only people we can identify by name, and whose lives we can follow from (retrospectively noted) birth through accession and marital and martial adventures which included alliances and the taking of noted captives, to the day when they "entered the water" in death and were entombed. It is striking that we know more about K'inich Janahb Pakal, born in 603 and ruler of Palenque from 615 until his death in 683, than we do about King Arthur, his putative quasi-contemporary.
Houston and Inomata deal effectively, and less dramatically than some previous Maya iconographers, with the deities and supernatural entities, including deified but accessible ancestors, who linked the living Maya to the invisible spirit realm around them. They also give a good account of the anonymous majority - probably approaching 98 per cent - of the ancient Maya who were neither royal nor noble, whose lives were spent as maize farmers, craftsmen or merchants. Some few of these break out of their anonymity: at Piedras Negras, the court sculptors signed monuments, and seem to have worked in teams under a foreman; some vase-painters signed their work; some were women; but most, although their individual houses, fields and burials can be investigated and yield us extraordinarily detailed information about their ways of life, will remain people without personal histories.
The written record of the Classic Maya lurched to an end between the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the tenth: although the accepted scenario is of a drawnout and gradual cessation of elite life, and eventually of urban society, replacing the sudden-death "collapse" theory of an earlier scholarly generation (and still beloved of popular writers), Houston and Inomata perceive a more subtle pattern. They identify a period between 790 and 810 when many cities ceased to dedicate dated monuments, and note that few celebrated the "Maya millennium" at the end of the Ninth Baktun in 830. Then a few places resumed dedications, but with few monuments each.
Only Ceibal stands out, with more than a dozen stelae raised between 849 and 889, or perhaps even later; Tonina's Monument 101, dedicated in 909, has the latest known Long Count date. While cities in Yucatán such as Uxmal and Chichén Itzá flourished at this point, they, too, were in due course abandoned.
Stephen Houston and Takeshi Inomata close The Classic Maya by summarizing the explanations, from warfare to drought, that still contend for our acceptance: we now know much more about what happened, when and where, but why continues to elude and intrigue us.