The dedicated city: meaning and morphology in Classic Maya urbanism

STEPHEN HOUSTON AND THOMAS G. GARRISON

Classic Maya cities were dynamic places constructed throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent zones during much of the first millennium ce (see Map 3.1).

At the outset, certain consensual understandings about Maya cities bear repeating. Few scholars would now dispute that, at their core, such settle­ments housed royal courts of varying size and influence. These had their origin in the final years of the Preclassic period, c. 400 bce to 250 ce, when large settlements came into existence in the Maya region, within an area embracing most of what is now Guatemala, Belize, eastern Mexico, and parts of El Salvador and Honduras. Predicated on a novel, monumental scale of construction, the Preclassic settlements, some of vast size, such as El Mirador, in Guatemala, consisted of elevated platforms, possibly for resi­dences, along with two distinct types of building.

The first is the “E-Group,” so labeled because it was first discerned in a sector of that name at the ancient city of Uaxactun, Guatemala.

Map 3.i Map of Maya sites.

years of the Preclassic, achieves a bulk unsurpassed in later times. The pyramid has another notable feature, stairways on its four sides, each corresponding to the quadrants of Maya directional symbolism. To the east is a low platform running north-south. The E-Group occurs at many sites

Table 3.1 Chronological table of the Pre-Hispanic Maya

and appears to have been one of the first “civic” (monumental and community-wide) buildings of the Maya, materializing in many sites as early as c. 500 BCE. A common assumption is that it reflects solar orientations, especially with respect to the rising sun on the eastern horizon. But its motivation was doubtless more complex, growing out of a need to replicate sacred mountains at reduced scale under the control of certain commu- nities.^[47] In a sense, the Preclassic Maya introduced a timeless sacred moun­tain into a local, historically rooted setting.

The second kind of building, appearing some centuries after the E-Group, is the “Triadic” configuration.

An immense concentration of Preclassic communities, some connected by elevated causeways, along with moated precincts at the center of sites, bespeak a level of planning and labor management without precedent in the Maya world. Yet scholars have tended to emphasize such monumental constructions, impressive as they are, at intellectual cost. Relatively little is known about the more modest residences in Preclassic cities. Large

Meaning and morphology in Classic Maya urbanism populations can be assumed to exist, but their living arrangements and means of support remain an important target for future research.

Equally puzzling are the linkages between the Preclassic cities and those of the Classic period, a time lasting from about 300 to 850 ce. Large Preclassic buildings served as the footings for Classic buildings, but their respective functions most likely diverged during the ruptures and demo­graphic tumult at the end of Preclassic civilization. What can be affirmed is the continued focus, from the Preclassic into Classic times, on monumental symmetries, alignments, and rituals that accented cosmic centrality and processional engagement with multiple directions, including the sky, earth, and underworld supports. The causeways and elevated walkways, the emphasis on grandiose stairways, and the large plazas attest to an interest in channeling movement in formal ways. Certain plazas, patios, passage­ways, or landings punctuated these movements with places of interruption or momentary assembly.

Nonetheless, there are few secure records of rulers or elites in the Preclassic period, and the texts from that time are among the most opaque in the corpus of Maya glyphic writing. Most glyphs appear to extol gods. To take one example, the extraordinary Preclassic murals of San Bartolo, Guatemala, among the richest and most diverse known in the Maya region, do not clearly concern rulers, although the themes within them prefigure the later rituals of Classic dynasties. The existence of walls at sites like El Mirador, however, along with rare images of what may be war captives, hint at flesh-and-blood conflicts and human trophies from battle. But the historical texture that would deepen our understanding of the Preclassic has proved elusive.

Classic Maya cities are less mute in their motive and the identity of those who commissioned buildings. Scholars can often show that a certain king commissioned this expansion of a plaza or that construction of a pyramid or palace. The settlements can be described as courts in two senses, as social groups that focused on identifiable sacred kings, their consorts, and families, along with courtiers and servants, and as physical settings that housed the

royal court within clustered buildings and palaces across the city. These patterns held particular force in the central part of the Yucatan Peninsula; other zones might have had more heterogeneous or diverse organization, without the same emphasis on spiritually charged leaders.

Another feature should be mentioned. A fundamental problem in looking at Maya cities is the temptation to engage in analytical anachronism. This is a process by which ideas are applied outside their time, often to jarring effect. For Maya cities, anachronism often arises from the use of typological labels. Presumed at times to be universal, these terms actually pertain to the periods or places in which they were formulated. A good illustration comes from the models of urban layout that issue from the Chicago school of sociology and its attention to industrial cities of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States or Europe.^[48] On a vague level, the comparisons appear to be valid, but only in the sense that populations tend to centralize or to disperse at times into constituent clusters of varying function. The disadvantages of the labels are far stronger. For example, among the Classic Maya, no such groupings of population are industrial or capitalist; none are assisted by mass-transportation or automobiles, and, other than a small number of late cities such as Chichen Itza, Mexico - a city whose composition remains an enigma - few contain any evidence of distinct ethnic groups.

The value of urban typology is that it furthers comparison. It affirms a view that sustained concentrations of humans in any one place might coincide with general patterns. But the implication that similar urban plans reveal similar motivations requires knowledge about the decisions and processes behind those plans. To offer one example, pedestrian cities with­out benefit of other forms of transportation would fail to configure space in the same way as a city with vehicles. Other evaluative terms like “sprawl” (described by Michael Smith as “low-density, scattered, urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land-use planning”) or “squatters” (“informal settlements and their associated poverty”), which are said to characterize Maya settlement, are equally suspect in that they imply knowledge, frequently unavailable to scholars, about land-holding and other influences on settlement.^[50] The use of descriptive terms like “sprawl” and “squatters” encourages a general conversation about how to compare cities in different parts of the ancient world. But it must grapple in all seriousness with the historical and cultural contexts that generated those terms. At Maya sites, such low-density occupation probably results from the need to accommodate agricultural or horticultural production - hence the plausible suggestion by some, such as Arlen and Diane Chase, along with Christian Isendahl, that the Classic Maya lived in “garden cities.”^[51] Yet, despite the suggestion that horticulture existed in Maya urbanism, virtually nothing is known of how land rights were apportioned. The key point is that morphology, the shape of a city, serves as only one means of understanding Maya clusters of population. There are other dimensions, too: (ι) how the Maya labeled dense settlements, named the components within them, and bonded these to what the social constituents might have been; (2) how buildings and open areas functioned, and the linked question of the ways in which humans moved across spaces in daily and long-term patterns; and (3) how, over time, the varying wishes and commissions of royalty and other elites molded the layout of city design and use, especially with respect to that which could be seen and from where. These features open broader perspectives on the activities and meanings that informed Classic Maya cities.

Naming and social constituents

Any discussion of large settlements among the Classic Maya must begin with a paradox, that their inscriptions contain no known term for “city.” A common misconception is that a title for lordship equates to a label for urban settlement, a problem in general with perspectives that apply much later evidence from the Maya to periods a millennium before. This is an imprecise reading. The title instead refers to dominion over places (Figure 3.1a). Called an “Emblem glyph” by scholars, the title describes a ruler as the “holy (k'uhul) + ‘variable element' + lord (ajaw).” Where it can be understood, the variable element identifies a location, not a collection of people. In rare cases, rulers may claim sovereignty over two such locations, as in unusual examples of “twin Emblems” that occur in parts of the Usumacinta River drainage in Chiapas, Mexico, or at El Zotz, Guatemala. Even more unusual are instances in which rulers from different sites employ the same Emblem. This usage arises from the competing claims of quarrel­ing lines in a single dynasty, as at Tikal and Dos Pilas, Guatemala, or from a linked process by which a cadet line “hives” off from its parent dynasty. As a label, “hiving” derives from the analogy of a new bee colony, flying away to a new home. In human terms, it could begin amicably, as a mechanism by

Meaning and morphology in Classic Maya urbanism

Figure 3.1 Glyphic terms for rulers and components of cities: (a) k’uhul ajaw title from Dos Pilas Hieroglyphic Stairway 2 (photograph by David Stuart); (b) ch’e’n sign, Tikal Marcador (photograph by Stephen Houston); (c) witz, Rio Azul; and (d) ha’ from Rlo Azul Tomb 12 (photograph by George Mobley, courtesy George Stuart).

which potential competitors at royal courts left to represent dynastic inter­ests elsewhere. These new settlements might extend the influence of the parent dynasty. But, at Tikal and Dos Pilas, the experiment went awry, and the cadet settlement became an ally of the traditional enemies of its family.

The contrast with later words and concepts for “city” is puzzling. Sources from after the Spanish Conquest do offer such terms, as in chinam or noh kah (in Yukatek Maya, spoken in the northern part of the Yucatan Peninsula). The first is a relatively late loanword from central Mexico, the second a reference to a large settlement or population. A cognate term, tenamit or tinamit, also of Mexican (Nahuatl) origin, occurs in Highland Maya lan­guages. All such words carry the notion of a group of linked people, often living in close proximity, perhaps even as “territorial units.” Other diction­aries from after the Spanish Conquest mention “big pieces of ground”

(muk’taj-tek lum, Tzotzil Maya, from Chiapas, Mexico) or “many neighbors” (mucul ghculegh, Tzeldal Maya, also from Chiapas). Not a few lists of words point to a term for a “community” of indeterminate size (for example, popol, Ch'olti' Maya, a language closely affiliated to that of most Maya inscrip­tions). Glyphic texts from the Classic period demonstrate a markedly differ­ent concern, with specific locations within such settlement. The notion of settlement as a gathering of large quantities of people seems to have been irrelevant.

Most such words highlight the tangible and the practical, but with nuances of deeper, often unexpected meaning. The basic locational term, from a reading by David Stuart that remains under discussion, is ch’e’n, “cave” or “rocky outcrop” (Figure 3.1b). In tropical conditions, where water is both a resource and a seasonal nuisance, exposed rock presents an attraction to settlement, and is more likely to appear in conditions of good drainage. Another view, that this essential concept of “place” relates to the ritual caves (ch’e’n) underlying settlement - such have indeed been found - is less an alternative than a supplemental perspective. Both views, the practical and symbolic, emphasize a place of stony fixity, prominence and perman­ence, along with subterranean labyrinths of some complexity, whether conceptual or real. The term for ch’e’n is sometimes coupled with the glyph for “earth,” perhaps as an allusion to terrestrial firmament. Other texts appear to use ch’e’n in a poetic device, that of couplets, which juxtapose opposing elements so as to describe a greater totality. On one inscription from Tikal, Guatemala, a place is described as a “sky-ch’e’n, earth-ch’e’n,” while other texts may abbreviate this expression to “sky-ch’e’n” only. At Palenque, Mexico, the exclusive use of this expression may, by another explanation, refer to an exalted or elevated place within a city.

A related term is witz, “hill” (Figure 3.1c). This, too, applies to many places of settlement, reflecting both a common Maya avoidance of ill- drained locations for settlement and a preference for settings that are breezy, dominant, and defensible. As with many place names, the term often carries a suffix read nal. The glyph comes from an apparent depiction of a maize cob, nal in certain Mayan languages, but its meaning is more diffuse. Possibly, the sign refers in some way to a place of cultivation or to some unrelated homophone. A central feature of the witz glyph is its evident blurring of the natural and human-made, a feature going back to Preclassic antecedents. The inscriptions make no real distinction between labels assigned to large hills and artificial constructions, such as the bases of pyramids. In Maya thought, they appear to have been equivalent. This was more than metaphor - a pattern known also in central Mexico, where the great pyramid of Cholula was labeled the Tlachihualtepetl (man-made mountain). One persuasive theory holds that, in a sense, Maya cities “cap­tured” or replicated sacred features found in distant, undomesticated, notionally dangerous spaces - caves, hills - and brought them under central, elite control.^[52] This replication cloaks a human act, one of commissioning and constructing a building or set of tiered platforms, within a magical claim that a product of human ingenuity is in fact both natural and eternal. A hill has always been there, and yet has just rematerialized by royal or elite command, simultaneously ancient and new. The inclusion of sacred wilds into communities recalls a larger proposition of both the Classic and later Maya - that distant forests, hills, and desolate zones are categorically distinct from the domesticated, civilized spaces of city centers. Yet, in seeming paradox, the heart of Maya cities consists precisely of those features that encapsulate danger. This sense of concentrated if controlled peril, a men­acing unpredictability brought into the very core of settlement, is com­pounded by the “residents” of many Maya pyramids. Glyphic texts indicate that some of these buildings were wahyib, “sleeping places” for gods. In dormant, effigy form, these beings presumably occupied the pyramid summits until awakened by ritual. It is likely that their presence prompted awe from those who saw or approached such precincts. Visits to them would doubtless have been tightly regulated.

Another set of terms that refer to Maya settlements highlight a basic need, not for well-drained and defensible locations, but for water. Many place names refer to particular ha^,, “body of water” (Figure 3.id). Again, as with rocky outcrops or hills this involves more than mere convenience. Bodies of water were thought by the Classic Maya to contain snake-like spirits that were sometimes impersonated by Maya lords and ladies. The Maya clearly understood the relation of such sources of water to sustaining liquids deep underground and to expansive hydrological cycles that tied the ambient sea to storms overhead, and to run-off that entered the soil for eventual recyc­ling. The glyph for plazas themselves may refer to a concept of a hollowed- out, watery space. What appears today as a flat surface might have been, to Maya eyes and symbolic understanding, a cavernous opening that connected subterranean locales to levels above. The intent seems less to facilitate movement between these zones than to acknowledge the complex, some­times concealed layers of the city fabric, of things seen but remote or restricted in access, such as the top temple of a pyramid, along with features known to exist yet that remained invisible.

A notable attribute of many Maya cities is that later builders retained clear notions of what lay underneath, often in conditions of astonishing preserva­tion. Few Maya buildings of monumental size were destroyed to enable new construction. Instead, sculptures were ''deactivated,'' their nose, ears, mouths mutilated. The whole was covered carefully with sand, powdered limestone, and new fill. An effective illustration of this occurs at Copan, Honduras, where a succession of thematically linked buildings, most con­nected to solar aspects of a dynastic founder, occurs in and under Structure 10L-16, in a sequence of buildings that spans about four centuries, from c. 400 to 800 ce. In a sense, the same building was replicated over time, but in ever larger form and with new iconographic programs that emphasized different aspects of solar imagery.

Other named features of urban landscapes include pyramids and altars, neither, unfortunately, with fully accepted readings of their glyphic refer­ences. The pyramids emphasize frontal stairways, of the sort that occur in many examples of Maya graffiti. At the top are small summit buildings with what may be stylized incense burners. The stairways, some long and disposed into separate levels or sections, underscore a means of access and the steep and difficult ascent to a sacred space. The altars are often on stone pedestals, an arrangement that is in fact somewhat uncommon at Maya sites. What is striking is that the two signs combined, pyramid followed by altar, appear to serve as a Maya expression for settled, ritually observant locations, perhaps involving activities in sequence, a pyramid ascended, an offering made on an altar. A text at Copan ties their absence to the death, possibly in ambush, of a ruler of that site; the rather opaque inscription may, by one reading, refer to a wilderness where such an unthinkable act would take place. In much the same way, an interregnum at Palenque, Chiapas, employs a couplet, “lord” and “sacred lady,” to suggest the core of govern­ance and, in their loss or “disappearance” (satayi in the glyphs), the absence of royal rule.^[53] Nonetheless, it is doubtful that the Classic Maya reduced their royal courts to king and queen alone. Dozens of other figures appear in the

Figure 3.2 Building maquette, Mundo Perdido Complex, Tikal (Proyecto Nacional Tikal).

Bonampak murals, from the later ninth century ce, revealing a complex cast of persons that nonetheless lived in service and subordination to members of the royal family. It appears, from studies of bone isotopes, however, that the Maya could “vote with their feet,” with higher rates of mobility than previously suspected - in their demographic composition, Maya cities, like many elsewhere, were relatively fluid.

Other buildings in the Maya texts correspond to stairways, known as ehb, and ballcourts recorded by glyphs that are not yet deciphered. Both are tied to ball games, often marked by the inclusion of a bouncing rubber ball, or, in the case of platforms, to renderings of tribute and captives in displays that could be seen by this expedient from some distance away. One of the few surviving depictions, a maquette, of a Maya city, from Tikal, shows a dense cluster of ballcourts, pyramids, and platforms, but, perhaps because of the compressed format, with surprisingly little space in between (Figure 3.2). The inscriptions also mention buildings, known as naah, “structure,” or otoot, “dwelling.” The former refers to the superstructure of buildings, the latter to a place of occupation. The sign itself shows a platform supporting a perishable building with thatch roof and vertical supports. That the building was of stone and mortar mattered less than the invocation of an ephemeral, organic archetype. The question arises as to whether these terms corres­ponded to the actual remains of houses in Maya cities. To a notable extent, settlement in Classic Maya cities expressed a pattern of formal if not Iunctional replication. A square or rectangular space was delimited on all sides by buildings that faced inwards. A majority had a full complement of such constructions, yet some possessed only one detectable structure and a small platform at best. Contiguous blocks of patios proliferated in others. Regardless of scale and centrality, the patio defined in this way occurred in the most modest abodes all the way up to the central plazas of most cities.

The spaces accorded, too, with the many references in Maya texts to a field of peripheral vision, the ichon, that could be accommodated or framed in such enclosed areas.

A vexed question in Classic Maya cities is the social meaning of these patio groups (Figure 3.3). The likelihood is strong that they housed some discrete component of Classic society, whether of lineages or looser group­ings described by anthropologists as “houses” remains unclear.^[54] One text, from the site of Tamarindito, Guatemala, suggests that, in the seventh century ce, certain families or lineages drew their identity from “structures” or naah. The mother was linked to a building with a floral name, the father with another related to maize, although the possibility remains that these were actual physical entities, not merely a set of social categories. Another proposal matches a title, “banner” or lakam, with tributaries at royal courts that have come from smaller collections of patio groups, yet this, too, continues more as an intriguing possibility than an established connection: no such titles have been found in explicit connection with these groups.^[55]

Movement, obligation, and performance

A notable attribute of later Maya ideas about appropriate or correct behavior is that it conforms to movement and handed-ness. “Right” and “straight” correspond closely to concepts of “truth,” “virtue,” “cleansing,” even “prophecy.” The widespread nature of these notions today suggests their great antiquity, as does the emphasis in much indigenous ritual on visits to caves and high-points as necessary practices for the supplication of supernat­ural beings: that is, the movements constituted an obligation on the part of rulers and probably all other levels of society. Not surprisingly, Classic Maya evidence stresses the importance of this activity, in a variety of ways. Central to acts of dedication, most fire rituals involve a metaphor of “entering,” as do expressions that describe the voyages of the dead by water or by road. Caves such as Naj Tunich in Guatemala are painted with texts that describe visits by youths of various royal houses, perhaps as parts of rites

Figure 3.3 Patio Groups at Dos Pilas, Guatemala. Numbers represent designations of individual mounds within urban sectors (mapped and drawn by Stephen Houston).

Figure 3.4 Sakbih 2 from Ucι, Yucatan (photograph by Scott Hutson).

de passage; at least two other caves may refer to such visits as ahni, “running.” An object that has been suggested to be a dynastic effigy, litter, sedan chair, or shrine of a portable sort played a large role in battle, was seized at times by enemies and transported to other sites. Such focus on movement is consistent with the presence of cleared, relatively straight causeways, elevated or stone-lined paths or walls that show an investment in directed movement or segregated spaces within some Maya sites (Figure 3.4). Yet not all were only about local linkages or leading to and from points of centrality. The largest causeway system of all, across the Yucatan, may have been about larger patterns involving the dominant movements of sun and rain across the peninsula. The glyphic terms for these connective spaces were sakbih, “white” or “artificial paths,” so-named because of their prepared, stony, or plastered surfaces or possibly bituun, “road-stone,” although the latter might also have been a word for a “patio” or more enclosed space.^{[56] [57]}

In the Mediterranean and elsewhere, connective facilities - roads, corri­dors, plazas, and less formal paths - have been described as “urban arma­tures” by William MacDonald, but they are, among the Maya, both constraining in the sense of affecting future movement and insecurely obedient to any central, coherent purpose.¹¹ There is no single design or package of intentions behind any one Maya city, and the attempts to find cosmological orderings behind the layout of elements have not met with complete acceptance. But what the spaces do is both to channel how people move and to dictate by the space thus defined how many participants and viewers can be accommodated. Comparison between the postulated popu­lations of certain sites and the number of people that could stand in such areas suggests a high degree of civic involvement. The impulse to move had its random or unmarked aspects, yet it likely included highly organized motions that corresponded to key moments in the Maya calendar. The later, Postclassic Maya were much concerned with placing wooden effigies in sequence, and by cardinal orientations. There are hints that the Classic Maya did the same by setting stones on the first dates of certain years. The marking of time and space served as a reinforcement and maintenance of order and, probably, a commemoration of primordial acts that established that configuration through offerings of blood, fire, and flesh. Directions corresponded to “world trees” in which supernatural eagles perched and spread their wings. Cluttering these now bare spaces could well have been a large number of perishable banners, parasols, and other objects whose existence is hinted at in Maya graffiti and stone supports at sites like Bonampak, Mexico.

What is more plain is that the large spaces of many Maya patios, the central nodes of causeways, were marked with sculptures designed to depict the rulers in eternal dance, and sometimes as impersonators of deities brought to earth. The majority of Maya stelae, and many other sculptures besides, show rulers, lords, and a few ladies in attitudes of dance. These movements must have been stately and decorous. The dances themselves often appear as little more than a slightly bowed body, a lifted heel, and, above all, a majestic stolidity that would contrast with more energetic dance elsewhere; for the Classic Maya, muscular dances were probably more appropriate for sacred clowns and non-elites. An essential property of royal dance, however, was that it brought deities to earth in active, palpable interaction with humans. This occurred when deities or other spirits took temporary residence in the dancer's body. The rich regalia of dance marked and facilitated such concurrent identities, so that one body could house multiple energies. Demographers count people to arrive at populations, but this enumeration would be complicated if, in Maya thought, denizens of a city could include spirits, a multitude of gods or ancestors with which one could communicate, or, in yet more surprising configurations, as noted by David Stuart, rulers becoming one with visible and concrete units of time. Much royal depiction would represent permanent embodiments of these acts of impersonation and calendrical celebration.

Commissions and viewsheds of kings

A final, remaining theme is that Maya cities accord with general concepts of landscape features yet also remain a malleable work-in-progress. The view of any such city today would contain a certain arrangement of buildings and spaces in “urban armatures.” Archaeological excavations show time and again, however, that these views could change abruptly with new construc­tion. Another conclusion is that the shifts are neither gradual nor arbitrary, but that they respond to royal or elite wishes when involving monumental or civic constructions. Classic Maya cities have no ultimate desired form and little evidence of firm, comprehensive planning; in some respects, Preclassic settlements seem more tightly organized in this regard. Without question, however, large Classic settlements have dominant orientations that appear to shift from city to city, but these are not the same as seamless, integrated wholes. The suggestion that cities were crafted in large part to capture water, as proposed by some researchers, may transform a necessity in a land of torrential, seasonal downpours into a design principle. The builders did, to be sure, respond to the inertia of preexisting buildings, which were difficult to remove. In fact, some structures, as at Piedras Negras, Guate­mala, were probably left exposed and in advanced decay for centuries of otherwise robust activity around the site. Such decay must have been as meaningful as any program of periodic refurbishment.

If there is a characteristic of the final centuries of the Classic period, it is that buildings standing in distinct groups, not fully incorporated into flows of movement from one complex to the other, were enveloped by broader spaces. Cities like Palenque and Piedras Negras witnessed the construction of new temple sectors or the creation of large, connective spaces that buried earlier, less coherent groupings of buildings (Figure 3.5). Very likely, these occurred as ways to celebrate a crucial period ending in the Maya calendar, at 692 ce. Some of these new spaces, and courtyard compounds nearby, might have accommodated market facilities that become clearer. At Piedras Negras, this coincided with an attempt to create ever more restricted spaces in the royal palace - a process of closure that, on occasion, removed rulers, their families, and courtiers from general gaze.

Just as size mattered in Classic cities, so too did visual relations - the act of seeing and being seen. The operative concept here is that of a “visualscape,” the means by which, in the martial world of the Classic Maya, threats could be perceived in time for ready response and buildings detected from areas far distant. The premise, amply confirmed by testing, is that such

Figure 3.5 Plazas at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, north to top, 600 meters wide, showing massive leveled zone (generated by Zachary Nelson).

visualscapes were calculated and dedicated to the purposes of dominance. The analytical tool to study regional visibility is Geographical Information System (GIS) software packages. Although there are numerous problems associated with visibility analysis in GIS, many of these issues involved the distant ends of viewsheds (that is, edge effects and curvature of the earth). But, at such distances, people cannot be easily distinguished, nor can their intent.

Map 3.2 Viewshed of El Zotz, Guatemala (generated by Thomas Garrison).

One such settlement is El Zotz, Guatemala, located along the foothills of the Buenavista Escarpment, which defines the northern side of the Buena- vista Valley (Map 3.2).^[58] This corridor represents a major geophysical con­nection between the northeast and northwest regions of northern Guatemala and beyond. El Zotz is also situated immediately to the west of the southern terminus of a drainage that splits the escarpment to the north; this valley leads up into the Mirador Basin and its Preclassic commu­nities. Tikal, which was, at times an antagonist of El Zotz, lies about 21 kilometers to the east. The pyramids of Tikal are clearly visible from Structure F8-ι of the Diablo Group and slightly less visible from the main pyramid (Structure L7-11) adjacent to the El Zotz Acropolis.

The combination of a powerful aggressor nearby and a large natural travel corridor would have made visibility crucial at El Zotz. The city of El Zotz began to grow during the Early Classic period and its royal court was established, among other places, at the Diablo Group on top of the Buenavista Escarpment. In 2010, the tomb of the possible dynastic founder was discovered beneath a substructure of F8-ι. The exterior facades and roofcomb of the adjacent structure, which faced the valley, were decorated with monumental architectural masks, painted in red with polychrome accents, and representing different guises of the Maya Sun God. This courtly structure would have been visible from the valley below. Distinguished yet further by its red surface, it was sure to stand out against the sky, catching sunlight at daybreak and sunset.

A viewshed generated from the highest elevations at El Diablo shows that the group would have been visible over great distances. Sentries had a commanding view of the Buenavista Valley, over a distance of c. 8 kilo­meters, from El Palmar in the east to a southern outcrop of the escarpment in the west. Any undetected passage by El Diablo would have been difficult other than by night or in conditions of heavy mist or rain. In contrast, the Late Classic pyramid L7-11 and the El Zotz Acropolis show a greatly reduced viewshed. This could reflect a false sense of security on the part of El Zotz following the defeat of Tikal by Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico, in 562 ce. Also, the Late Classic would have been the period of maximum deforest­ation in the region, perhaps requiring less elevation while observing the valley. Alternatively, the hilltop location at El Diablo may have still been used as a prominent lookout (along with other points along the escarp­ment), while the royal court was situated in a lower, more open area that allowed for expansion of the site core. Either way, it appears that control of the valley was still important, but the visibility of El Zotz's architecture, at the regional level at least, had reduced priority.

A very different viewshed characterizes the city of Piedras Negras, located on the eastern bank of a bend in the Usumacinta River as it flows northwest toward the Gulf of Mexico (Map 3.3). The river cuts a deep channel through the hilly karst landscape of the Sierra Lacandon. For some of its stretches - there are treacherous rapids that require portage and rope guides - the river represents the fastest way to travel through the region in both past and present. Piedras Negras lies some 43 kilometers northwest of its major antagonist, Yaxchilan, Mexico. With such a high-relief landscape, visibility along the river would have been crucial to anticipate attack and receive traders.

The South Group of Piedras Negras was an Early Classic seat of the royal court. A viewshed generated from the highest point in the South Group

Map 3.3 Viewshed of Piedras Negras, Guatemala (generated by Thomas Garrison).

Meaning and morphology in Classic Maya urbanism shows a clear preference for visibility upriver in the direction of Yaxchilan, along with direct access to a side valley that would have been periodically replenished with agricultural nutrients from floodwaters. The viewshed covers 2 kilometers of the river, with 1.5 kilometers between the first visible point upriver and the South Group. During the Late Classic period the Piedras Negras royal court strongly focused in the West Group, located further downriver. The viewshed from the West Group covers 3 kilometers of the Usumacinta River and looks both up and downriver. Relocating the court inserted more distance between the heart of the city and possible attackers. The move may have been prompted by conflicts with Yaxchilan toward the end of the Early Classic. The acropolis in the West Group presented an intimidating sight as aggressors or merchants approached from upriver. The restricting nature of the geology appears to have made the river the focal point of local viewsheds. A viewshed from the highest point near Piedras Negras, on the hill behind Structure O-13, revealed that only an additional 100 meters of the river were visible compared to the viewshed from the South and West Groups.

Conclusions

For all the shared concepts and organizational principles, Maya cities showed the diversity that might be expected from complex, local histories. All had palaces and pyramids, most had ballcourts, none eschewed the massive leveling by which the subtle and sometimes dramatic gradations and declivities were flattened to provide spaces for civic movement, both casual and organized, individual and collective. What is notably lacking is any indigenous emphasis on demography as a determinant of labeling - the very term “city” had little bearing on their texts or representations. Rather, the Maya focused on places of worship, watered locations, prominent hilltops, individual structures and dwellings, and on blurred categories between the “natural” and the “artificial,” and between surfaces and under­ground labyrinths. The diverse pattern of elevated or demarcated roads or causeways, the sakbih, points to a grappling with a wish to connect against the inertial reality of preexisting construction. If Maya cities were impres­sive, to travelers approaching from afar by channeled routes, then they also commanded increasing resources for maintenance in areas beset by seasonal rains, baking heat, and destructive molds. Tending such large establishments confronted later occupants with hard choices and the dilemmas of deferred maintenance. Still, the Maya cities were dedicated ones. They served the

collective purposes of ritual and courtly service, at royal and elite levels; they framed the simplex and multiplex relations that made a city both grand and intimate; they sponsored the growth and harvesting of crops to feed the city, along with the making, trade, or distribution of goods to equip it. Underneath, in the waiting earth and masonry, they collected in final measure the bodies of those who came before, in a community of the quick and the dead, of ancestors in dialogue with the descendants who claimed them. The extent to which their social parts, their patio groups, the people who lived in them, articulated in smoothly functioning wholes remains a matter of debate. It is likely that the dedicated city was also, in most cases, a place like any another, torn by hope and tension, some needs met, but, in the main, most of them unfulfilled.

FURTHER READINGS

Ashmore, Wendy, “Some Issues of Method and Theory in Lowland Maya Settlement Archaeology,” in Wendy Ashmore (ed.), Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1981, pp. 47-54.

Ashmore, Wendy, and Jeremy Sabloff, “Spatial Orders in Maya Civic Plans,” Latin American Antiquity 13 (2002), 201-15.

Barrera Vasquez, Alfredo (ed.), Diccionario Maya Cordemex, Maya-Espaiiol, Espaiiol-Maya, Merida, Yucatan: Ediciones Cordemex, 1980.

Bruegmann, Robert, Sprawl: A Compact History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Chase, Arlen, Diane Z. Chase, and Michael E. Smith, “States and Empires in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Ancient Mesoamerica 20 (2009), 175-82.

Conolly, James, and Mark Lake, Geographical Information Systems in Archaeology, Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Fash, Barbara W., and Richard Agurcia Fasquelle, “The Evolution of Structure 10L-16, Heart of the Copan Acropolis,” in E. Wyllys Andrews and William L. Fash (eds.), Copan: The History of an Ancient Maya Kingdom, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2005, pp. 201-37.

Feldman, Lawrence H., A Dictionary of Poqom Maya in the Colonial Era, Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 2004.

Graham, Ian, Archaeological Explorations in El Peten, Guatemala, New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, 1967.

Houston, Stephen D., “Classic Maya Depictions of the Built Environment,” in Stephen D. Houston (ed.), Form and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998, pp. 333-72.

Hieroglyphs and History at Dos Pilas: Dynastic Politics of the Classic Maya, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

“Living Waters and Wondrous Beasts,” in Daniel Finamore and Stephen D. Houston (eds.), Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 66-79.

Houston, Stephen D., and Takeshi Inomata, The Classic Maya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Houston, Stephen D., and Patricia A. McAnany, “Bodies and Blood: Critiquing Social Construction in Maya Archaeology,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003), 26-41.

Houston, Stephen D., and David Stuart, “Of Gods, Glyphs, and Kings: Divinity and Rulership among the Classic Maya,” Antiquity 70 (1996), 289-312.

Houston, Stephen D., David Stuart, and Karl Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

Inomata, Takeshi, “Plazas, Performers and Spectacles: Political Theaters of the Classic Maya,” Current Anthropology 47 (2006), 805-42.

Inomata, Takeshi, and Stephen D. Houston (eds.), Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001.

Laporte, Juan Pedro, and Vilma Fialko, “Un reencuentro con Mundo Perdido, Tikal, Guatemala,” Ancient Mesoamerica 6 (1995), 41-94.

Laughlin, Robert M., The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantan, Washing­ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.

Llobera, Marcos, “Extending GIS-based Visual Analysis: The Concept of Visualscapes,” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 17 (2003), 25-48.

Looper, Matthew, To Be Like Gods: Dance in Maya Civilization, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

MacDonald, William L., The Architecture of the Roman Empire: An Urban Appraisal, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.

Martin, Simon, “Preguntas epigraficas acerca de los escalones de Dzibanche,” in Enrique Nalda (ed.), Los cautivos de Dzibanche, Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 2004, pp. 105-15.

Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya, London: Thames & Hudson, 2008.

Mathews, Peter, “Classic Maya Emblem Glyphs,” in T. Patrick Culbert (ed.), Classic Maya Political History: Hieroglyphic and Archaeological Evidence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19-29.

Maxwell, Judith M., and Robert M. Hill II, Kaqchikel Chronicles: The Definitive Edition, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

Miller, Mary E., The Murals of Bonampak, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Normark, Johan, “The Triadic Causeways of Ichmul: Virtual Highways Becoming Actual Roads,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18 (2008), 215-38.

Plank, Shannon E., Maya Dwellings in Hieroglyphs and Archaeology: An Integrative Approach to AncientArchitecture and Spatial Cognition, Oxford: BritishArchaeological Reports, 2004.

Rice, Don, “Late Classic Maya Population: Characteristics and Implications,” in Glenn R. Storey (ed.), Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches, Tusca­loosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006, pp. 252-76.

Robertson, John S., Danny Law, and Robbie A. Haertel, Colonial Ch^,olti^,: The Seventeenth­Century Moran Manuscript, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.

Ruz, Mario H., Vocabulario de lengua tzeldal segun el orden de Copanabastla de Fray Domingo de Ara, Mexico, DF: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1986.

Scarborough, Vernon L., “Reservoirs and Watersheds in the Central Maya Lowlands,” in Scott L. Fedick (ed.), The Managed Mosaic: Ancient Maya Agriculture and Resource Use, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996, pp. 304-14.

Sjoberg, Gideon, The Preindustrial City: Past and Present, New York: The Free Press, i960.

Smith, Michael E., “The Archaeological Study of Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Cities,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29 (2010), 137-54.

“Can We Read Cosmology in Ancient Maya Cityplans? Comment on Ashmore and Sabloff,” Latin American Antiquity 14 (2003), 221-8.

“Sprawl, Squatters and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues?”, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20 (2010), 229-53.

Smith, Monica L., “Introduction: The Social Construction of Ancient Cities,” in Monica L. Smith (ed.), The Social Construction of Ancient Cities, Washington, D.C.: Smithso­nian Institution Press, 2003, pp. i-36.

Spence, Michael W., “Tlailotlacan: A Zapotec Enclave in Teotihuacan,” in Janet C. Berlo (ed.), Art, Ideology, and the City of Teotihuacan, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, i992, pp. i9-88.

Stone, Andrea, Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Stone, Andrea, and Marc Zender, Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture, London: Thames & Hudson, 2011.

Stuart, David, “‘The Fire Enters His House': Architecture and Ritual in Classic Maya Texts,” in Stephen D. Houston (ed.), Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architec­ture, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, pp. 373-425.

“New Year Records in Classic Maya Inscriptions,” The PARI Journal 5 (2004), 1-6. “Reading the Water Serpent as witz,” Maya Decipherment (2007), accessed August 9, 2014, http://decipherment.wordpress.com/2007/04/ 13/reading-the-water-serpent/.

Ten Phonetic Syllables, Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research, 1987.

Stuart, David, and Stephen D. Houston, Classic Maya Place Names, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, i994.

Taube, Karl A., “Ancient and Contemporary Maya Conceptions of the Field and Forest,” in A. Gomez-Pompa, Michael F. Allen, Scott L. Fedick, and Juan Jimenez-Moreno (eds.), Lowland Maya Area: Three Millennia at the Human-Wildland Interface, New York: Haworth Press, 2003, pp. 46i-94.

Taube, Karl A., 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.

Tokovinine, Alexandre, “The Power of Place: Political Landscape and Identity in Classic Maya Inscriptions, Imagery, and Architecture,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 2008.

Tourtellot, Gair, “A View of Ancient Maya Settlements in the Eighth Century,” in Jeremy A. Sabloff and John S. Henderson (eds.), Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D., Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, i992, pp. 2i9-4i.

Vogt, Evon Z., and David Stuart, “Some Notes on Ritual Caves among the Ancient and Modern Maya,” in James E. Brady and Keith M. Prufer (eds.), In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican Ritual Cave Use, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005, pp. 157-63.

Wheatley, David, and Mark Gillings, “Vision, Perception and GIS: Developing Enriched Approaches to the Study of Archaeological Visibility,” in Gary R. Lock (ed.), Beyond the Map: Archaeology and Spatial Technologies, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2000, pp. 1-27. White, Christine D., Michael W. Spence, H. L. Q. Stuart-Williams, and Henry P. Schwarcz, “Oxygen Isotopes and the Identification of Geographical Origins: The Valley of Oaxaca versus the Valley of Mexico,” Journal of Archaeological Science 25 (1998), 643-55.