Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture

This is an extract from: Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture Stephen D. Houston, Editor Published by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection Washington, D.C. © 1998 Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University Washington, D.C. Printed in the United States of America www.doaks.org/etexts.html The Iconography of Maya Architectural Façades during the Late Classic Period LINDA SCHELE† UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN he façades of Maya architecture served as a stage front for ritual and carriers of important religious and political symbolism from the be- Tginnings of public art in the Late Pre-Classic period. These fundamen- tal roles of public architecture remained throughout the history of the Classic period and beyond, into the Post-Classic period. From the beginning of Maya public architecture, the builders favored the substructure of buildings as one of the principal locations to display symbolic and narrative information. This em- phasis on the substructural terraces may be the result of historical accident, because only in rare cases have elements of the temples above the substructures been preserved in buried buildings. Excavations in Group H at Uaxactun by Juan Antonio Valdés (1988, 1989) indicate that Late Pre-Classic buildings also had architectural sculpture on the entablature of the temples on top of sculpted platforms. This pattern of use continued throughout the Classic period, and by the Early Classic period builders also used vertical bearing walls as sites for imagery. The repertoire of locations, thus, included the terraces of substructures, vertical bearing walls in the form of both solid walls and piers, the entablature above the bearing walls, and roof combs. I suspect Pre-Classic buildings also sported roof combs, but, to my knowledge, no archaeological evidence for them has yet been uncovered. Late Classic buildings continued to use these same zones, although sculptors rarely used all of these surfaces in any one building, and artists at different sites came to favor particular decoration patterns because of local architectural and historical traditions. For example, Palenque’s buildings usually have sculpture on the front piers, on the eaves, on the four entablatures, on the roof combs, and 479 Linda Schele more rarely on the balustrades and substructural terraces. At Tikal, sculptors favored the entablatures and especially emphasized the huge roof combs; they more rarely used the terraces on the pyramidal substructures. Thanks to Barbara Fash’s excellent work with the disarticulated sculpture of Copan and to recent excavations by the various projects in the Copan Acropolis Archaeological Project, we can now identify its pattern as one incorporating pairs of small window slits into sculptural sequences arranged on the vertical bearing wall. Copan sculptors also modeled the corners of buildings and regularly used the entablatures, roof combs, stairways, and speakers’ platforms projecting from the stairs. Earlier buildings inside the acropolis have plaster mask sculptures on the substructural terraces in the central Peten tradition, although this practice was abandoned by the Late Classic period. The builders of Yaxchilan and Bonampak concentrated on stairways, entablatures, and roof combs. In the Chenes and Río Bec regions, builders treated the entire front façade of the building as a single sculptural sequence, with the image of a huge mask flowing from the vertical walls onto the entablature. Sculptors at Copan also used this kind of masked façade on Temples 11 and 22, and at Uxmal it appears on the upper temple on the west face of the Pyramid of the Magician. The Puuc and Northern Yucatecan styles of architectural decoration used all of the areas discussed above but tended to emphasize the balustrades of stairways instead of the substructural terraces. The prominent exception to this pattern is the Osario at Chichen Itza. Peter Schmidt has found that the upper three of the seven terraces on this building carried sculptural panels on all four sides of the building. The tableros (panels) of the Temple of the Warriors hold relief panels, as do most of the platforms and many of the benches at Chichen Itza. These sculptural programs were rendered in one of two major techniques: plaster modeled over stone armatures or relief mosaic sculpture covered with a thin layer of plaster. Sculptors used two techniques in the second kind of sculpture: to sculpt the stones before they were set in the wall or to carve in the relief after the stone was set in the wall. At Copan, it seems clear that some of the very deep relief and three-dimensional forms were sculpted before the stones were set in the wall, with the fine detailing done after the wall was set. Copan offers the only well-documented example of the sustained use of both techniques. Most of the architectural sculpture on buildings buried inside the acropolis was modeled in plaster, whereas the sculpture of later building (after approximately a.d. 650) used stone relief. Most of the buildings at sites in the Peten, Chiapas, and Belize have modeled stucco relief, whereas the use of stone mosaic relief is characteristic of Copan, Quirigua, the Chenes and Puuc regions, and Northern Yucatan. 480 Iconography of Maya Architectural Façades In preparing this paper, I assembled every published drawing or photograph of Late Classic architecture decoration that I could find and then sorted them into types on the basis of the programs of symbolism their builders used. Obvi- ously, in a paper like this, I cannot discuss every one of these sculptural programs, but as I worked with the corpus of examples I had assembled, I detected repeated themes and strategies that appeared at many different sites. I concen- trate on the most important and dominant of these programs as they appear in their various forms. Although this inventory is not intended to be exhaustive, it will provide a useful look at the kinds of functions and meanings that can be documented for the architectural sculpture of the Classic period. THE MASK PROGRAMS The most ancient and widespread of all architectural decoration in lowland Maya architecture are the mask façades, so named because they depict heads without bodies under them. Such façades are known from the beginning of the Late Pre-Classic period until the architecture of Tulum at the time of the Euro- pean invasion. The earliest versions of the masked façade were created from plaster modeled over stone armatures, but by the Late Classic period they were also rendered in stone mosaics, especially in the Chenes and Puuc regions as well at Copan and Quirigua. Although sculptors represented many different supernatural beings in these images, they used a standard template for the presentation that varied little after its first appearance in the third century b.c. The main head could be a historical portrait, an anthropomorphic supernatural, or a zoomorphic supernatural, but regardless of the particular being represented, the images set around it were usually the same. A set of earflares with appended accoutrements including maize foliation, flowers and associated foliation, knots, mat signs, mirrors, and other symbols are normally found in these assemblages. Often the most critical element is the headband or headdress worn by the mask, because many mask heads, including the famous “long-nosed god,” are anonymous without the detail of the headgear or earflares. On the north façade of the Palenque Palace, the mask very probably represented K’an Hok’ Chitam, a historical ruler. In an unusually complex represen- tation of the theme, the central head is flanked by the heads of a serpent bar (Fig. 1), with K’awils emerging from its mouths. Late Pre-Classic and Early Classic examples of similar masks have framing bands with double-headed ser- pents, but in the Palenque example, the Cosmic Monster holds this structural position. Elsewhere, I (Schele 1992; and Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993) have identified the double-headed serpent as the ecliptic and the Cosmic Monster as 481 Linda Schele Fig. 1 Restoration drawing of the panels from the north façade of the Palenque Palace (restored areas are stippled). one form of the Milky Way. The presence of either symbol in the contexts of the mask façade located the contexts as that of the heavens. Many Early Classic examples of the anthropomorphic heads are now known to represent one or the other of the Hero Twins in their roles as planets, but representations of the Principal Bird Deity, a jaguar god, mountain monsters, and many others also occur. The masked substructure that was particularly characteristic of the Late Pre- Classic and Early Classic architecture became less popular during the Late Classic period. Instead, Late Classic buildings concentrated on using the mask on the superstructures in new and imaginative ways. The most extraordinary develop- ment was in the Río Bec, Chenes, and Puuc regions (Gendrop 1983). One of the most impressive techniques was to treat the entire façade as a great monster head with the door as its mouth, as on Homiguero Structure 5 and the Pyramid of the Magician at Uxmal (Fig. 2a). People entering such buildings appeared to be walking into the gullet of the monster. At Chicanna and Dzibilnocac, builders combined profile views of the eye and forehead on the side of the door with a front view of the head above it. The effect was the same. Other styles, such as at Xkickmook and Chicanna, limited the mask components to the entablature so that the head did not have a lower jaw. Many of these façades 482 Iconography of Maya Architectural Façades a b c Fig. 2 (a) West façade of the Magician at Uxmal, with a front view of monster head (after Seler 1917); (b) façade at Tabascaño, combined front and side view monsters; (c) entablature of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque.

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