Reading early Maya cities: interpreting the role of writing in urbanization

DANNY LAW

Ancient Maya cities have attracted the scholarly gaze of Westerners since at least the latter part of the eighteenth century (see map of Maya cities in Chapter 3, Map 3.1).

Parallel with the earliest evidence of cities, the Maya Lowlands also boast evidence, by the Late Preclassic, of a fully developed script tradition. Maya hieroglyphic writing, a complex system that combines logographic and phonetic signs to encode the complexity of language, has only recently been deciphered to the degree that it can be read with confidence. The earliest texts, however, continue to elude decipherment, in large part because of the small surviving corpus of texts. While the origins of Maya writing are perhaps lost in time, and the body of early texts is sparse indeed, what evidence does exist allows us to speculate about the role that writing had in the process of urbanization and in the implementation of the governmental appar­atus in these ancient cities.

The subject of this study is what would appear to be straightforward empirical questions about writing in early Maya cities: Where do we find texts, who wrote them, and why? However, the answers to these ques­tions are bound up in more complex theoretical ones: What does writing do in society (is saying that, “It encodes language in graphic form” an adequate answer?)? What social structures need to be in place for writing to be a viable practice? And how might the function of writing in society evolve over time? Thus, while one purpose of this paper is descriptive, simply reporting the “who,” “what,” and “why” of ancient Maya writing, that descriptive endeavor begs engagement with stickier questions about the nature of ancient cities and writing in general.

The development of writing - both its invention as a symbolic system of representation, and its extension to new and increased social, political, and economic spheres of use - seems in many places to have had a special relationship to the rise of ancient urban centers. Early Maya cities provide an interesting case study in the relationship of writing to processes of urbaniza­tion. The subject matter and presentation of texts in early cities, as well as the apparent trajectory of development of the semiotic system itself, appear to differ from what has been described for early urban centers of Mesopota­mia and elsewhere. The importance of writing in early Maya urban centers is certainly evident in the remains of Classic Maya cities (approximately 200-900 ce), where the written word graces everything from massive structures to minuscule carved shells, ceramic vessels, and jades. Writing in earlier Maya cities (approximately 300 bce to 200 ce) is generally less frequent and not so grand in scale, but was clearly integrated into the social and religious life of the city elite. A contextualized consideration of early Maya texts brings to the fore the intimate connection between writing and iconography, both in terms of form and function, as well as a disjunct between small, private texts, and large-scale public ones. The survey of early texts also begs careful attention to the accidental lacunae in the extant corpus of texts, and to how this unavoidably skewed sample has shaped our reading of text in early Maya cities.

Writing and culture

Before looking at the particulars of writing in early Maya cities, it is important to examine the relationship between writing and social and political structures.

It is perhaps worth noting for this volume that writing, with its hallmark capacity to fix meaning in durable form, has many parallels with other common features noted for modern cities and states. James Scott, in his influential critical study of the modern state, notes that much of what we might call statecraft is engaged in the simplification and delimitation of subjects and spaces of the state. Scott uses a textual metaphor to describe this process: simplification makes subjects “legible” for the state.^[104] Scholars of colonialism have noted that this process of “entextualization”^[105] is not simply descriptive, as it is often represented, but profoundly creative. New selves and new meanings are constituted in the act of definition. When we look at material culture, the “inscription” of urbanity on the landscape, from the earliest cities to the present day, could scarcely look less metaphorical. Earth and rock are shifted and reshaped to make new spaces, a new “field,” to use the concept developed by Bourdieu, with corresponding new subjects and new rules, or at least norms, of engagement.

Crucially, it is not just, and maybe not even primarily, the physical space that is reshaped in the definition of a new field: it is bodily dispositions, thoughts, beliefs, ways of speaking - the “habitus” of a people.

The ability to align and realign symbols and meanings is crucial for communication and exchange of any kind. Studies of face-to-face interaction have found that we have an extraordinary capacity to negotiate - to commensurate - symbols, linguistic and otherwise, on the fly. In the modern state, citizens yield some of that capacity for spontaneous negoti­ation of meaning to a government, which dictates, to a degree, what values or meanings are fixed (currency, codes of conduct, spelling conventions) or “entextualized,” and which remain fluid. The historical particulars of these “regimes of truth,” to use Foucault's language, vary from instance to instance, but at play is the erasure of variation and, consequently, the individuality of agents, thereby allowing a more contextually independent form to circulate. Scott provides a non-linguistic example of this in his discussion of the standardization of measurements and commodities to streamline production and trade. He notes that “Whereas artisanal products were typically made by a single producer according to the desires of a particular customer and carried a price specific to that object, the mass- produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all.”^[107]

Two themes, then, are significant in this discussion.

Writing in the state

From this perspective, the frequent association between the earliest cities and the development of writing takes on a slightly different hue. If writing requires regimentation of the type that states excel at providing, states can also benefit from the permanence of text: “To the extent that texts can move across contexts, they allow people to create the image of something durable and shared, independent of particular realizations such as readings, inter­pretations, or performances or their historical transformations.”^[108] A state can benefit from writing then, not only in terms of logistical considerations, but because it creates something that transcends particular contexts. It gives voice without allowing a response; the dictates and dictamen of a ruler transcend the immediacy of face-to-face interaction to become the will of the state.

Yet one can make the case that writing needs complex society more than complex societies need writing. After all writing requires just the types of control that complex political structures, like those in cities, excel at provid­ing: it requires a revolution of social practice to create a space for scribes and for text, but more crucially it requires carefully prescribed uniformity of sign values to be intelligible, values capable of being extracted from the context of their creation.

Urbanization and writing in the Maya Lowlands

With these questions in mind, we will now look at the particulars of the emergence of writing and cities in the Maya Lowlands. The available data for the origins and early use of writing in the Maya region, though incom­plete, are sufficient to allow us to explore both the implications of writing for the making of cities as well as the role of cities in the development of writing. I will first give an overview of Maya writing and a brief summary of current understanding of urbanization in the Maya Lowlands, followed by a discussion of how early writing and other modes of symbolic representation might have related to one another and to the project of ordering and maintaining order in ancient Maya cities.

The beginnings of Maya civilization are, not surprisingly, still shrouded in the mists of speculation, but an increased number of archaeological excav­ations, and improved techniques, are beginning to give form to some of its details. The conventional periodization of the Maya Lowlands is essentially a convenient relic from a much less advanced period of scholarship on the ancient Maya. Traditionally, pre-Columbian Maya history is divided into four major periods:

1. The Archaic period - around 6ooo bce (the earliest settled communities) until 2000 bce

2. The Preclassic period - from 2000 bce until 250 ce

3. The Classic period - from 250 until 900 ce

4. The Postclassic - from 900 ce until the arrival of the Spanish in the early sixteenth century.

The Preclassic, which is the focus of this chapter, is further subdivided into “Early” (2000-1000 bce), “Middle” (1000-400 bce), and “Late” (400 BCE-250 ce). In some cases, scholars also refer to a “Terminal Preclassic,” which generally includes the first two centuries ce, a period during which several major Preclassic sites were abandoned.

Maya writing

The corpus of Maya hieroglyphic texts includes somewhere in the order of 15,000 texts, most of them fairly short, consisting of a dozen or two hieroglyphs, though some texts have well over a hundred glyphs. These texts can be found on everything from cave walls to ceramic vessels to hairpins to staircases, door lintels, wall panels, and massive stone stelae several meters in height. Iconography shows that hieroglyphs were even painted onto clothing, though none of these have survived in the material record. Four bark paper codices survive, in different degrees of preservation, all dating to around the time of the conquest. All earlier paper texts have succumbed to time and the humid tropical climate, though traces of codices, utterly illegible, have been found in Classic period tombs. There are also several depictions on Classic period ceramic vessels of scribes writing and reading from codices, so their use in the Classic period is indisputable. The corpus of available texts is heavily skewed toward the Late Classic. Of thousands of hieroglyphic texts, only 300 to 400 texts are known from the Early Classic and perhaps a dozen are known for the Preclassic. The reasons for this are probably multiple but include the fact that these texts are often buried meters under the surface, whereas Late Classic texts can be on or relatively near the surface. In addition, there have been several documented instances of intentional destruction of texts in ancient times, including a round of intentional destruction of texts near the end of the Early Classic.

Even allowing for this, however, the lack of texts is very likely due to a shift in the materials and contexts in which texts were used. In the Classic, and particularly the Late Classic, we see an enormous increase in texts that seem to be for public display, that is, large scale and positioned in highly visible areas within a site. This suggests an expansion of writing into a public sphere that it did not appear to occupy in the Preclassic, though this does not mean that writing was less important to Preclassic society than it was at the height of the Classic period. The increasingly public nature of inscrip­tions in the Classic suggests a shift from Preclassic to Classic in the processes of control at play through texts. Throughout the history of ancient Maya writing, we can see a high degree of control and uniformity, but with different orientations. In the Preclassic not only was knowledge of writing apparently highly circumscribed, access to texts themselves was also clearly controlled. By Classic times, hieroglyphic texts were tools for public con­sumption, to be seen and appreciated by many, even if mastery of the glyphic system, and the close control of the connections between glyphic signifiers and their significations, remained under the purview of the privil­eged few. One could argue that in the Preclassic, texts were exclusionary, secret almost, while in the Classic, they were subordinating: public but only truly accessible to the right kind of person.

Unequal access to writing is evident in the archaeological contexts in which texts are found. Throughout ancient Maya history, writing was primarily and almost exclusively associated with elite residences, burials, and ritual centers, though in the Late Classic, non-elite ceramics occasionally had decorative “pseudo-glyphs,” usually a single sign or nonce glyph repeated over and over, which suggests a Late Classic fetishization of glyphic texts, perhaps deriving from increased public display of texts, not evident for earlier periods. Many Classic period inscriptions are signed by the author or engraver. The fact that many of the names in these signature statements include noble titles and epithets is consistent with iconographic evidence that writing itself was an elite specialization and highly valued in the royal court, though kings (k’uhul ajaw) themselves were not generally scribes. There is also some evidence that scribes and other artisans were exchanged and shared as tribute or to reinforce alliances with other cities.

Overview of urbanization in the Maya area

Our picture of the emergence of urban centers in the Maya Lowlands has been forced through several major revisions in recent decades, thanks primarily to the increase in high-quality excavations and the important discoveries these have generated. The received nomenclature for these periods clearly reflects the general sense of scholars of the day that the Maya Classic period was the apogee of Maya civilization. Following then current ideas about social evolution, the history of the Maya was decidedly linear: civilization in the region progressed slowly, scarcely achieving seden­tary agriculturalism in the Preclassic, until suddenly, in the first centuries ce, progress accelerated rapidly, likely due to outside influence, perhaps from the Olmecs, giving rise to the flowering of Maya sophistication in the Classic period. The civilization then collapsed around 900 ce pulling the Maya Lowlands into the dark ages of the Postclassic.

This simple linear evolutionary narrative, as well as the abruptness of both the Preclassic to Classic and the Classic to Postclassic transitions have been called into question. New discoveries of the last fifty years have steadily revised our understanding of the Preclassic to the degree that, at present, the division between Classic and Preclassic is increasingly meaningless in terms of the development of complex societies. While there is ample evidence of societal upheaval at the end of the Preclassic, particularly in patterns of site abandon­ment at that time, virtually all of the material traits that were thought to define Classic civilization have been found to have developed much earlier than 250 ce. In addition, excavations, led by Richard Hansen, at several massive Preclassic sites in the Mirador Basin of Guatemala have confirmed that Preclassic sites were equal, and, in some cases, even larger (both in terms of estimated population and architectural works) than many Classic period centers.

From currently available data, it seems that Maya civilization begins to coalesce in the Middle Preclassic, and relatively large urban centers are in place within a few centuries. Middle Preclassic ceramics begin to share greater similarities across the Lowlands with the appearance of Mamom (600-300 bce) and later Chicanel (300 bce to 200 ce) horizon ceramics. Around the same time as the emergence of Mamom ceramics, we begin to see the construction of major monumental architecture, including ballcourts and a special grouping of structures consisting of a pyramid facing a platform topped with one or three structures aligned with the rise of the sun on key days of the solar year,^[111] a configuration referred to as an E-Group. These E-Groups were important ritual complexes, as evidenced by the frequency of caches, and, in the Classic period, monumental stone stelae, associated with them, as well as their alignment relative to the zenith passage of the sun, a significant marker in the agricultural cycle. The agricultural cycle was the central theme of Maya ritual and cosmology through the Classic period.

Around the same time that we begin to find the above-mentioned markers of increased regional unity and a shared regional ideology, we find evidence of a dramatic increase in population density at several sites, at levels that meet or even surpass peak population estimates for the major Classic period centers.¹⁰ This time period, the Late Preclassic, is also when we see the earliest evidence of the institution of kingship, in a beautiful mural from San Bartolo showing a king seated on a scaffold accepting the accouterments of a k’uhul ajaw “Holy Lord.”¹¹ The recent discovery of Preclassic elite burials in residential areas at San Bartolo and Holmul emphasizes the highly stratified nature of Late Preclassic Maya society.

The construction of these large E-Group plazas, rich with ritual and cosmological significance, the adoption of new ceramic forms, and even the gathering evidence of kingship are not simply a matter of new rituals or beliefs, however. Estrada-Belli, referring to the construction of an E-Group in the Middle Preclassic site Cival, argued that this major construction project “marked a threshold moment in the creation of these broad com­munities: the foundation of regional polities within bounded landscapes which, once established, were constantly recreated through ritual prac- tices.”¹² Like Spaniards relocating sixteenth-century Maya to carefully organ­ized settlements around a central plaza and Christian church, the construction of E-Groups and related monumental architecture, the spread of new ceramic forms and technologies, and the portrayal of kings may only be the tip of much more dramatic changes in the social landscape of the time. Referring to the revolutionary nature of cities, Norman Yoffee noted that, “cities were not simply accretions on a stable rural base... In the evolution of states and civilizations, the landscapes of social life changed utterly.” “These new urban environments,” he argued, “were supernovas that exploded from the environment of village life that preceded them.”¹³ The leveling and building up of plazas, platforms, and pyramids in E-Group patterns and the incorporation of imagery relating to kingship go beyond

IO

II

12

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Richard Hansen, “Continuity and Disjunction: The Pre-Classic Antecedents of Classic Maya Architecture,” in Stephen D. Houston (ed.), Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), pp. 49-122.

Karl Taube William A. Saturno, David Stuart, and Heather Hurst, The Murals of San Bartolo, El Peten, Guatemala (Barnardsville, NC: Boundary End Archaeology Research Center, 20I0), Part 2.

Francisco Estrada Belli, The First Maya Civilization: Ritual and Power before the Classic Period (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 77.

Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 61-2.

Figure 8.i San Bartolo Pinturas Sub-I depiction of king. San Bartolo, West Wall mural detail (drawn by Heather Hurst).

the simple mechanical and technological know-how required to build such shapes. In a very real way these plazas, and the rulers that commissioned them, shaped new communities, formed new spaces and new ways of coming together - a new field of interaction in which the rules of play might have differed drastically from what preceded it.

Development of writing

In the context of the revolution of kings and courtyards, we cannot miss the innovation of writing. In a convenient case of serendipity, the early depiction of kingship mentioned above at San Bartolo is further clarified with one of the earliest hieroglyphic texts for the Maya Lowlands (Figure 8.i). While most of the text is opaque - differences with readable glyphs from some 500 years later have frustrated attempts to decipher most of the text - one clear sign, at the very bottom of the column of hieroglyphs, is a logograph for “king” ajaw. If the pattern amply attested in Classic period texts is applicable here, the signs immediately above the ajaw hieroglyph would include names and titles for the individual acceding to the throne, a caption that disambigu­ates the image, giving it a very specific, and likely historical referent.

Reading early Maya cities

Figure 8.2 Earliest Lowland Maya writing. Pinturas Sub-V, San Bartolo (drawn by David S. Stuart).

The use of early text to refer to rulers was apparently not new at the time that the Pinturas Sub-I mural was painted. A fragment of text from a now mostly obliterated wall mural in an earlier phase of the same pyramid, designated Las Pinturas Sub-V, which dates to between 400 and 200 bce, was discovered during excavations of the Las Pinturas pyramid, led by William Saturno in 2005. The text consists of ten hieroglyphs, one of which is clearly an early ajaw sign (Figure 8.2, glyph 7).

In addition to supporting the idea that the institution of kingship was in place at the beginning of the Late Preclassic, this text provides us with the earliest securely dated example of Lowland Maya writing. The find forced a reconsideration of previous ideas about the development of writing in Mesoamerica, since the San Bartolo text is roughly contempor­aneous with the earliest texts from Highland Guatemala (El Porton Monument ι - approximately 400 bce), Oaxaca (Monte Alban Stelae 12 and 13 - 500-300 bce), and the Gulf coast (the Olmec site of La Venta - 500-400 BCE based on stratigraphic context though a later date may be possible).

The fact that fully developed writing can be found in such geographic­ally diverse locations by 300 bce is evidence that the earliest writing must have been around already for at least several centuries before these early texts. A 2006 article in the journal Science by Rodriguez Martinez and colleagues reported the discovery of a small greenstone block with a lightly incised text consisting of sixty-two abstract symbols arranged roughly in horizontal rows.^[112] The block was found near the Olmec site of San Lorenzo, in Veracruz, Mexico, and was dated, based on accom­panying ceramics and stylistic considerations, to some time before 900 bce. The form and execution of these symbols seems decidedly less masterful than the texts from 300 bce, and, if authentic, likely represents a very early stage in script development. Formally, however, the Cascajal text has no clear parallels to Maya writing, or, indeed, to any other known script. If we are to think of it as a precursor to later script traditions, it seems that it would be in the order of the source of the concept of writing generally, rather than the mechanics of an individual writing system.

The picture that emerges of the earliest writing in Mesoamerica generally, then, is a single archaic script in the Olmec heartland in the Middle Preclassic, up until the rather abrupt Late Preclassic arrival of fully developed writing at roughly the same time in the Maya Lowlands (San Bartolo), Oaxaca (Monte Alban), the Olmec heartland (La Venta), and the Guatemalan Highlands (El Porton). In all of these cases, except, perhaps, La Venta, the writing system does not seem to be “proto” in any way, but each case represents what seems to be a well-developed script. In the Maya case,

the San Bartolo texts are long enough to reflect grammar and syntax of an actual language, though this must remain speculative until more signs have been deciphered.

Icons indexing symbols: the relationship between writing and iconography

Throughout its use, Maya hieroglyphic writing was inextricably tied up with image. The iconic origins of most signs never faded away from the minds of scribes, and even abstract signs with no clear iconic form were often embellished and played with by scribal virtuosos as though they were depictions of actual objects, or animated by the addition of anthropo­morphic features. And the border between writing and iconography was equally porous in the other direction: iconography often integrated hiero­glyphic spellings into an image, particularly in the headdresses worn by rulers and their ancestors. A beautiful Early Classic example can be found on Stela 31 from Tikal (Figure 8.3), which depicts the ruler Siyaj Chan K'awiil, “K'awiil is born of the sky,” identified not only in the accompanying texts, but also in the iconographic components of his headdress: an infant k’awiil (an important deity associated with kingship) emerging out of the hiero­glyph chan “sky” (Figure 8.3, B). Above him is a spectral depiction of his deceased father, Yax Nuun Ayiin “Green ? Crocodile”; while the meaning of nuun is still being debated, its hieroglyph, a knotted cloth, can be seen in the headdress of the figure, along with the other elements of his name, the abstract symbol yax “green,” and the curled snout of a crocodile (Figure 8.3, B).^[113]

The hieroglyphic nature of Maya iconography can also be seen at Copan, in an Early Classic shrine to the Copan dynasty founder, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' “Lord Green Quetzal Macaw” (Figure 8.4). The shrine is decorated with a frieze of two birds with intertwined necks, one a quetzal, the other a macaw. Out of their beaks emerges the head of the sun god K'in, used frequently as a logograph for the royal title k’inich. On the birds' heads, like a feathered crest, is the abstract symbol for yax “green.” Thus the

Figure 8.3 Iconographic names in Tikal Stela 31 (image by author based on drawings by William Coe [ChristopherJones and Linton Satterthwaite, The Monuments and Inscriptions at Tikal: The Carved Monuments, Tikal Report No. 33, Part A (Philadelphia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1982), Fig. 51]; courtesy the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).

components of the frieze provide all of the elements, in iconographic rather than glyphic form, for the name of the ruler, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'.

David Stuart has argued that this same mixture of art and writing can be seen in massive architectural masks found on many Preclassic structures. Often these masks seem to be portraying deities. In some cases, however, actual kings might be intended, with their names “spelled out,” so to speak,

Figure 8.4 Copan Stucco frieze with ruler's name (drawn by Lucia R. Henderson).

by their adornments. While these masks do not have the benefit of accom­panying texts that “prove” the connection with hieroglyphs, what is appar­ent is that Preclassic architectural masks and iconography clearly make use of a widespread and tightly structured repertoire of iconographic forms. The interplay between writing and iconography is possible because of this highly developed inventory of iconographic conventions, many connected with forms in other parts of Mesoamerica. In a very real sense, a “literate” elite would have needed to be as well versed in these iconographic conventions as they were in the logographs and syllabic signs that made up Maya writing.

The antiquity of this elite appreciation of symbols and iconography is evident on Pre-Mamom ceramics, dating to around 1000 bce, well before the first writing in the Maya area, and before the emergence of the massive Late Preclassic centers. While ceramics from this time period in the Lowlands vary wildly in terms of form and style, they are often embellished with post­slip incised symbols that are abstract in nature, but have clear parallels to later Maya hieroglyphic forms and to symbols found on ceramics and elsewhere throughout Mesoamerica. These forms are not hieroglyphs, but their mean­ing, where one can be reconstructed, is cosmological. They are elite symbols of power and authority. Francisco Estrada Belli argues that both knowledge of the meaning of these symbols and possession of the inscribed vessels would have been means of status distinctions in sedentary farming villages and, at around ιooo bce, might represent the first indication of social ranking in the Lowlands and the first step toward state organization.

While it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove that ancient Maya writing developed out of the highly conventionalized and widely dispersed inventory of abstract symbols found on Middle Preclassic ceramics throughout Mesoamerica, it is nonetheless unavoidable that knowledge of those esoteric symbols and the large inventory of iconographic con­ventions was part of the cultural and historical moment in which script was made, and would have effected its overall quality and perceived significance. While it is now widely accepted that script development can happen quite abruptly, or even be the invention of a single individ­ual, the fact that this invention took place in the context of a long­standing tradition of highly valued cosmologically and ritually meaningful sign inventories must have shaped how writing was understood by its inventor and the rest of the society that adopted it. If such examples are indeed a functional as well as formal precursor to Maya writing, it suggests the primacy of such ethereal representation over the kinds of mundane referents that would have been primary in contexts of administration and accounting.

Early texts

Aside from the early mural texts at San Bartolo, and the large stucco masks that are only indirectly connected to writing, the corpus of texts that clearly date to the Preclassic is surprisingly small. In spite of its obvious preemi­nence in the Late Preclassic, El Mirador has only yielded one fragmentary text, on El Mirador Stela 2, in the form of a small incised caption accom­panying a swirling Late Preclassic depiction of the Maya Principal Bird Deity, a common subject of Preclassic Maya art. While stylistically the stela is Late Preclassic, its exact date is unsure because its original context is unknown. In addition, due to the shallow incisions used to inscribe the text, all but the final three glyph blocks have long since eroded away and none of the surviving glyphs is readily recognizable.

Figure 8.5 Dumbarton Oaks jade pectoral incised image and text (drawn by Linda Schele, © David Schele, courtesy Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.).

Several other Late Preclassic texts from the Maya Lowlands have been found, all on small portable objects with no documented contemporary archaeological context, and can only be dated to the Late Preclassic on stylistic grounds. These include, for example, texts incised on a small jaguar figurine (also known as the Grolier Figurine), a greenstone axe head and clamshell­shaped earflare, found in an Early Classic tomb at Kendal, Belize, and a (Middle Preclassic) Olmec flanged jade pectoral with a Late Preclassic incised text and accompanying image of a Maya ruler on the back (Figure 8.5). All of the Preclassic-style texts on portable objects share the fact that they are on elite goods, probably looted from tombs, and often heirloom objects, that appear to have been in use long before they were deposited. The jade pectoral, for example, would have been an ancient artifact at the time that it was inscribed with a text. The Kendal axe head also shows signs of wear from long use.

In addition, these portable objects, as well as the early mural texts from San Bartolo, show common themes and scale. The scale of these earliest texts contrasts with later monumental inscriptions, and with the symbolic­ally rich and clearly public architectural masks common at contemporary Preclassic sites. All of these Preclassic texts are small, bespeaking intimate rather than public access.^[114] The size of texts on the portable objects was, of course, constrained by the small size of the objects themselves, but even the mural texts are only about 2 centimeters wide and visually very much subordinated to the iconography. Additionally, the placement of texts on the portable objects suggests that the texts were not for display. The jade pectoral currently at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C. (Figure 8.5), which was inscribed with a text and image, would have been worn for display, but the text is on the back and would have been hidden when the pectoral was actually worn. The Kendal earflare and the jaguar figurine also have texts on the back, so that they would not have been the primary focus of attention. David Stuart argues that the intimate scale and placement of text is an important clue to the early function of these texts. Far from being tools of public display or “propaganda,” the earliest texts were private, sacred, and powerful.

This does not mean, however, that these texts were unrelated to govern­ment and social complexity. Another commonality in these texts, though not universal, is the theme of kingship. In spite of the fact that these texts are mostly undeciphered, one recognizable glyph, ajaw, referring to kings and rulers, is mentioned twice in the San Bartolo Pinturas Sub-I mural, and a third time in the earlier Sub-V text dating to around 300 bce. The same sign appears on the Dumbarton Oaks jade pectoral (Column B, Row 5), and the Kendal earflare, and possibly, in a different form, on the Kendal axe head. This suggests a recurrent theme of kingship in Preclassic texts, something that reinforces the connection between writing and the emergence of complex society, if not through public spectacle, then through its association with a particular segment of society. This theme is continued in Classic inscriptions, which have the lives and ritual acts of rulers as their primary subject matter.

Lacunae

More striking than their common features are the characteristics that are lacking, not only from these earliest texts, but also from the entire corpus of Maya hieroglyphic writing. Perhaps the most apparent, because of its prevalence in Mesopotamian texts and its place in theories on the evolution of writing, is the utter lack of administrative themes. We have no records of accounting, monitoring of production or tribute, communications with outlying centers, pedagogical materials, and other essentials of a burgeoning state.

We have reason to believe that this lacuna in the corpus is due more to problems of preservation than actual ancient practices. There is ample evidence, as mentioned above, that the ancient Maya, at least during the Classic period, made frequent use of bark paper books for writing and notations, all of which have long since decayed and disappeared. Indeed, the only texts that might be considered to be “logistical” are the Postclassic codices, the only surviving bark paper books, which provide a sort of ritual almanac that might have been used as a handbook by ritual specialists to keep track of significant calendrical and astronomical stations and their corresponding cosmological significance. Other evidence of text being used for logistical or administrative purposes comes primarily from painted scenes of courtly life on Classic period polychrome ceramics. Several of these depict a royal figure receiving bundles of tribute: folded cloth, cacao beans, perhaps even grain, beans, and other foodstuffs. Several of these scenes (K5453, K2924) show bundles labeled with quantities. For example, one vessel (K5453) shows kneeled supplicants in front of the figure of the king on his throne.^[115] Next to him sits a large bundle of folded cloth and several long quetzal plumes. At the foot of the throne is a bag with a hieroglyphic label that reads ox pik “3 pik.” A pik is a unit of 8,000, and this quantity is apparently tripled so that the bag must hold 24,000 of some tribute item, perhaps cacao beans. A similar label, indicating y pik kakaw or 40,000 cacao beans, has also been found on the famous Late Classic murals of Bonampak.^[116]

With such an obviously gaping hole in the available data, what can we say about how writing developed in the service of city government? To a degree we simply have the tautology of common sense to guide us: the Maya probably used writing for all of the administrative purposes we find in other literate early civilizations because it would have worked very well to do so. In the absence of anything like a representative sample of early Maya writing, we can scarcely hope to conclusively counter the prevalent idea that writing develops out of the basic accounting and logistical needs of an emerging state.^[117] However, the cosmological and ritual significance of symbols from the Middle Preclassic on does seem to suggest that accounting as an impetus for writing in the Maya Lowlands does not seem very likely.

In the context of a pan-Mesoamerican tradition of highly structured iconographic conventions, the invention of writing - the binding of a set of abstract (or semi-abstract) graphic signs, to corresponding language forms in a particular language - was, perhaps, no great leap. What was required was the institutional support to make and enforce that link between signifier and signified. In the end, the processes that help make texts legible in society are the very ones that inscribe citizens and subjects, and make them “legible” to the state. If the emerging administrative complexity of large city-states was not the principal motivation behind the development of Maya writing, however, then why did writing seem to burst on to the scene at essentially the same time as large urban centers with large-scale monu­mental architecture and the institution of kingship? One possibility, as mentioned earlier, is that, for all it does in the service of state organization, writing needs a state more than a state needs writing. In other words, it was the emerging control offered by a powerful social and political structure, its program of “legibility,” that provided the kind of structured standardization that made writing possible. The benefits that Classic Maya rulers would have garnered from writing - its uncontestable solidity; its continuity across contexts - only seemed to be fully utilized in the Classic period. In the Preclassic, the control that allowed writing to emerge was also directed at controlling access to that potent and private technology.

further readings

Barth, Fredrik, “The Guru and the Conjurer: Transactions in Knowledge and the Shaping of Culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia,” Man 25 (1990), 640-53.

Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Caso, Alfonso, Calendario y escritura de las antiguas culturas de Monte Alban, Mexico, D.F.: Talleres de la Nacion, 1947.

Chafe, Wallace, and Deborah Tannen, “The Relation Between Written and Spoken Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987), 383-407.

Chase, Arlen F., and Diane Z. Chase, “External Impetus, Internal Synthesis, and Stand­ardization: E-Group Assemblages and the Cristallization of Classic Maya Society in the Southern Lowlands,” in Nikolai Grube (ed.), The Emergence of Lowland Maya Civilization: The Transition from the Preclassic to the Early Classic: A Conference at Hildesheim, November 1992, Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Sarwein, 1995, pp. 87-102.

Cheetham, David, “Cunil: A Pre-Mamom Horizon in the Southern Maya Lowlands,” in Terry G. Powis (ed.), New Perspectives on Formative Mesoamerican Cultures, Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2005, pp. 27-38.

Coe, William, The Maya Scribe and His World, New York: The Grolier Club, 1973.

Cooper, Jerrold, “Writing,” in Eric Barnouw (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communi­cations, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, Vol. ιv, pp. 321-31.

Drucker, Philip, Robert F. Heizer, and Robert J. Squier, Excavations at La Venta, 1955, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1959.

Errington, Joseph, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001), 19-39.

Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

Estrada Belli, Francisco, Investigaciones arqueologicas en la region de Holmul, Peten, Guatemala. Informe preliminar de la temporada 2008, Boston: Boston University, 2009, accessed November 21, 2013, www.bu.edu/holmul/reports/informe_o8_lay- out.pdf.

Estrada Belli, Francisco, Nikolai Grube, Marc Wolf, Kristen Gardella, and Claudio Lozano Guerra-Librero, “Preclassic Maya Monuments and Temples at Cival, Peten, Guatemala,” Antiquity (2003), accessed November 21, 2013, http://antiquity.ac.uk/ projgall/belli296 /.

Freidel, David, and F. Kent Reilly III, “The Flesh of God, Cosmology, Food, and the Origins of Political Power in Southeastern Mesoamerica,” in John E. Staller and Michael D. Carrasco (eds.), Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Mesoamerica, New York: Springer, 2010, pp. 635-80.

Hansen, Richard D., An Early Maya Text from El Mirador, Guatemala, Washington, D.C.: Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing, 1991.

“The First Cities - The Beginnings of Urbanization and State Formation in the Maya Lowlands,” in Nikolai Grube (ed.), Maya: Divine Kings of the Rainforest, Cologne: Koenneman, 2001, pp. 51-64.

Houston, Stephen D., “Writing in Early Mesoamerica,” in Stephen D. Houston (ed.), The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 2004, pp. 274-312.

Houston, Stephen D., and Hector Escobedo, “Descifrando la politica Maya: Perspectivas arqueol(5gicas y epigraficas sobre el concepto de los estados segmentarios,” in Juan Pedro Laporte and Hector L. Escobedo (eds.), X Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueologicas en Guatemala, Guatemala City: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, 1997, pp. 463-81.

Houston, Stephen D., and David Stuart, “The Ancient Maya Self: Personhood and Portraiture in the Classic Period,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 33 (1998), 73-101.

Justeson, John, “The Origin of Writing Systems: Preclassic Mesoamerica,” World Archae­ology 17 (1986), 437-58.

Law, Danny, “A Grammatical Description of the Early Classic Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions,” unpublished MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 2006.

Marcus, Joyce, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

“The Origins of Mesoamerican Writing,” Annual Review of Anthropology 5 (1976), 35-67. Pellecer Alecio, Monica, “El GrupoJabali: un complejo arquitectonico de patron triadico en San Bartolo, Peten,” in B. Arroyo, J. P. Laporte, and H. E. Mejia (eds.), XIX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueologicas en Guatemala, 2005, Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Asociacion Tikal, Fundacion Reinhart, 2006, pp. 937-48.

Restall, Matthew, “Heirs to the Hieroglyphs: Indigenous Writing in Colonial Mesoamer­ica,” Americas 54 (1997), 239-67.

Rodriguez Martinez, Ma. del Carmen, Ponciano Ortiz Ceballos, Michael D. Coe, Richard A. Diehl, Stephen D. Houston, Karl A. Taube, and Alfredo Delgado Calderon, “Did the Olmec Know How to Write?”, Science 9 (2007), 1365-6.

Schele, Linda, and Mary Miller, The Blood of Kings, Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986.

Sharer, Robert James, and David W. Sedat, Archaeological Investigations in the Northern Maya Highlands, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, pp. 49-73.

Stuart, David S., “Proper Names and the Origins of Literacy,” Working Paper, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 2001.

Taube, Karl, “The Rainmakers: The Olmec and their Contribution to Mesoamerican Belief and Ritual,” in Michael D. Coe (ed.), The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership, Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1995, pp. 83-103.

Urban, Greg, A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.

Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Willey, Gordon R., T. Patrick Culbert, and Richard E. W. Adams, “Maya Lowland Ceramics: A Report from the 1965 Guatemala City Conference,” American Antiquity 32 (1967), 289-315.