Mesoamerican Gallery @ the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The objects in this gallery are from "Mesoamerica," the area encompassing most of southern Mexico, all of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. In parts of this culture area farming villages grew into towns and cities, tribal chiefs were made kings and emperors, trade networks became more complex, stone monuments and pyramids were erected, a calendar and writing system developed, and devotion to nature spirits developed into state ceremonies in honor of the gods and ancestors. Sun God, Copan, Honduras, limestone, Late Classic Period, 750 A.D. This head of an important celestial deity has jaguar ears, scroll eyebrows, fish fins on his cheeks, and a single filed tooth. This god is often identified with Venus and the sun. Originally, this may have been a shield held by one of the figures on the Hieroglyphic Stairway in Copan, or perhaps a decoration for the building at the top. Mesoamerican culture history can be divided into four periods: I. Hunting/Gathering (ca. 10,000 B.C. - 1500 B.C.) II. Preclassic or Formative (ca. 1500 B.C. - A.D. 300) III. Classic (ca. A.D. 300 - A.D. 900) IV. Post-Classic (ca. A.D. 900 - A.D. 1500) Anthropologists recognize that civilizations such as those in Mesoamerica cannot develop without adequate agricultural surpluses. Excavations have documented growth of farming villages in the millennia before the first Olmec monuments were carved. Maize, beans, and squash became the domesticated staples of life, and these were supplemented by an enormous variety of fruits, roots, chilis, and other foods. The transformations toward civilization in Mesoamerica began in the Early Formative Period in several parts of the area. Perhaps the most famous of these early developments was the Olmec of Veracruz and Tabasco, with its earthen pyramids, great stone monuments, jade carvings, and exquisite figurines. When the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, Mesoamerica was divided into the Maya area to the east and the Aztec-dominated area to the west. The Aztec had not conquered the Maya, but they depended heavily upon Maya trade to supply them with the luxury goods -- chocolate, cotton, tropical feathers, and jade -- which helped to bind together their powerful state. This economic interdependence between east and west can be traced back to the Formative Period and was especially evident by the Classic Period as well, when Maya centers such as Tikal flourished in the east and the much larger site of Teotihuacan near Mexico City prospered in the west.

Maya Hieroglyphic Writing [Quiz Clue!] Examples of Maya hieroglyphic writing can be seen in this gallery on large stone stelae and altars from Caracol and Piedras Negras, on painted pottery from Guatemala, and on shells from a burial at Piedras Negras. Maya hieroglyphic writing is made up of drawings of recognizable objects such as hands, birds and animals. These signs can be ideographs, representing the meanings of whole words, yax "green" "blue" "new" "first" k'in "sun" "day" kan "sky" pakal "shield" or they can be syllables, representing the separate sounds that make up a word: mu "frog" + ka "fish" + ah, ha "water" = mu-ka-ah "he was buried" The earliest hieroglyphs in Mesoamerica date to about 600 B.C.; the earliest Maya inscriptions date to 36 B.C. Thousands of Classic Period (A.D. 250 - 900) Maya texts have survived on stone, bone, shell, pottery, stucco and wood, while four Maya bark-paper books devoted to astrology, divination, and ritual instructions have survived from the Postclassic Period (A.D. 900 - 1519). The Maya were still writing in hieroglyphs at the time of the Spanish Conquest in 1519; afterwards they continued to write Maya with the Spanish alphabet. Hieroglyphs as numbers The 1566 Spanish manuscript of Diego de Landa is the only known document in which a message in Maya hieroglyphs is repeated in alphabetic signs, making it the "Rosetta Stone" for deciphering Maya hieroglyphs. By now, over two-thirds of the contents of Maya inscriptions can be understood, thanks to the work of various scholars. In 1886 Ernst Foerstemann deciphered Maya numbers and dates from a Precolumbian bark-paper book kept in Dresden, Germany. In 1952 the Russian Yuri Knorozov showed that hieroglyphs could be read as phonetic syllables, and in 1960 Tatiana Proskouriakoff was able to read the names and exploits of the ancient Maya rulers. The stela that she used to decode Maya hiero-glyphs was Stela 14 from Piedras Negras (below), which now stands in this gallery.

Stela 14 at Piedras Negras In this masterpiece of Maya carving, a young ruler sits on his raised and curtained throne. Over his head stands the owl sent by the gods to observe the affairs of humans. The footprints of the ruler can be seen imprinted on a cloth draped over a wooden ladder. The woman standing in front of the throne in a finely-woven fringed robe is probably his mother, as she is mentioned prominently in the side inscription. At her feet, what looks like a hand holding the edge of the draped cloth is actually a large sacrificial altar over which a victim is laid out on his back. The small incised groups of hieroglyphs are probably names, but of whom we do not know. This stela helped to prove that the Maya inscriptions spoke of history. In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who had worked for the University Museum expedition in Piedras Negras, suggested that these "niche" scenes represented rulers newly seated on their thrones. She pointed out that the "niche" stelae always carried the earliest dates of their series and that a certain set of "inaugural" hieroglyphs followed those dates whenever they appeared in later texts. This breakthrough led to the recognition of birth and death glyphs, the name-glyphs of the rulers, parentage information, the capture of enemies, and other biographical items from the lives of the Maya rulers.

Life Among the Classic Maya The Maya populations were fed from slash-and-burn jungle agriculture, intense farming with terracing and raised garden beds, and orchards of tropical fruits. Trade of obsidian, jade, shell, chocolate, honey, salt, feathers, and cotton flowed through the Maya communities from farther south and west and were a vital support to the luxuriant lifestyles of the rulers. Central authority was focused on the personage of a semi-divine ruler, the head of the leading family, and the carved stone monuments recited his ancestry and achievements. Beneath the royal family were ranked the lesser nobility, merchants, shopkeepers, priests, teachers, artisans, landed farmers, landless commoners, and slaves. Warfare between towns was apparently common, but diplomacy and marital alliances served to create cooperation in trade and war.

Chama polychrome ceramic vase, Chama, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, 600 - 800 A.D.

The Maya upper classes lived a life of privilege, luxury, pageantry and battle, as can be seen in the famous murals at Bonampak, Mexico. Their costumes were colorfully ornamented with long quetzal feathers, jaguar skins, richly woven cotton fabrics, jade beads and shell. Metals were not known until the end of the Classic Period, so all craftsmanship and building was done with tools of stone, bone and wood. However, the obsidian blades were sharper than any modern surgical scalpel. There were no draft animals. All cargos were carried by boat or by human porter. A high premium was put on astronomy, mathematics, artistic endeavor, dynastic history, and prediction of the future through written texts. When the Spanish arrived and conquered, many of the great Southern Lowland cities of the Classic Period had been abandoned for 600 years, but new ones had sprung up in the Northern Lowlands of Yucatan and the Highlands of Guatemala and classical learning was not lost.

Maya Architecture Maya monumental architecture was first called to the attention of the Western world by two explorers, the American diplomat, John L. Stephens and the English artist Frederick Catherwood. Stephens published the Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, illustrated by Catherwood's drawings, in 1841. Many of the sites in the tropical rain forests had become lost since the time of the Spanish Conquest, and Stephens and Catherwood "rediscovered" them. Although never seen by Stephens and Catherwood, one of the greatest Maya ruins is Tikal, excavated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum between 1956 and 1970. The largest Maya cities were capitals of kingdoms ruled by a succession of kings. Smaller cities were often allied or subordinate to larger capitals. Most Maya cities include high temple structures and broad paved plazas, ball courts, market squares, platforms for dance and ceremony, and sightelines on solar and stellar risings. Palace compounds for royal and noble residence and administration were often raised and protected by enclosing buildings. The suburbs were made up of a great variety of house types, from large stone roofed buildings to small thatched huts. Wide causeways were built to lead the visitor through the outskirts into the temple center. At Tikal, a dry defensive moat and earthen wall was discovered about four miles north of the center. Maya architecture featured a v-shaped corbeled arch, made without a keystone. Stone was cut to fit closely together and was coated with lime plaster and often painted a bright red. The most famous Maya building is Temple I of Tikal. This was built to cover the tomb of one of Tikal's best known rulers, Hasaw Kan Kawil, who reigned from AD 682-673.

Ritual and Beliefs Mesoamerican religion reflects the belief that all things have a life force, and that ancestors and the gods can be invoked to help the living. Rituals included blood sacrifice, the burning of copal incense (an aromatic tree resin), drinking, music and dance. Maya rulers were also shamans who communicated directly with the gods, sometimes achieving trance with the help of hallucinogens, sometimes seeming to transform themselves into the gods or their animal counterparts. Archaeological understanding of Precolumbian beliefs is enriched by the Conquest period books written by Spanish priests and their native informants, and by the Popol Vuh, the Highland Guatemala Maya creation myth recorded in the 16th Century from what may have been a much earlier tradition. left: Aztec flute, Central Mexico, AD 1400-1519. Pottery. Music was an important part of all ritual. Musicians used rattles, drums, conch shell trumpets, whistles and flutes.

Adornment and Concepts of Beauty The Maya elite prized the effect of dental inlays, crossed eyes and artificially flattened heads. Throughout Mesoamerica body decoration, included tattooing and scarification, was common practice. Bracelets, pendants, necklaces, nose ornaments, lip plugs and ear plugs were made of jade, shell, jaguar teeth and claws, and obsidian. Lower classes used simple nose plugs, lip plugs, earrings of bone, wood, shell or stone. In the Postclassic, gold or copper was traded into the area and also used for adornment. Seated Maya female figurine from Yucatan, Mexico, in the Jaina Style (pottery, ca. AD 800). She wears an off-the-shoulder huipil (blouse) with traces of blue, pink and white pigments (added after the piece was fired). Also notice the large bead necklace, bracelets, earflares, and central disc on her headband. Figurines like these give us valuable and unique information about fashion and personal adornment. right: An earplug made of obsidian. Inside the circular border is an intricately cut design of interlocking birds. far right: An earspool made of obsidian. Earspools were fitted into the earlobe, and if needed, a stone would be placed behind the earlobe to 'pin' the spool in place. A 20th c. child's huipil (blouse) from Guatemala. The color and pattern of each huipil identifies the wearer's village. The fabric is woven on a simple backstrap loom, and the sides are sewn together without additional shaping. Textiles Cotton was cultivated, spun into thread, dyed with a rich array of vegetable and mineral colors and woven into garments. Men wore elaborate loincloths; women wore brightly embroidered blouses and openwork dresses, woven on simple backstrap looms similar to those used today. The clothing of the elite was richly adorned with exotic materials such as jade, turquoise, jaguar skins and brilliantly colored feathers.

The Mesoamerican Ball Game The ball game has been played in Mesoamerica for more than 3000 years, and a form of it is still played in areas of northwestern Mexico. Evidence of the broad distribution of the Mesoamerican ball game has been found in archaeological sites from the southwest United States to northern South America, and on the islands of the Caribbean, spanning a period of more than 3,000 years. Some scholars trace the origin of the Mesoamerican ball game to the Gulf Coast because of the many ball game related artifacts found there, and because rubber trees are native to the area. Rather than sport, the game had strong religious and ceremonial importance, and is central to much of Precolumbian architecture, art and mythology. In the Popol Vuh, the creation myth of the Quiche Maya of highland Guatemala, the protagonists (the Hero Twins), are ball players who compete with the Gods of the Underworld on the ball court. In one famous episode, the Hero Twins are aided by a rabbit, who helps them trick the Gods of the Underworld and win an important ball game. Teams of up to eleven players used their hips, knees and elbows to strike a heavy, solid rubber ball of varying size. Maya ball courts had sloping walls, with flat markers in the playing area, and used a large rubber ball. In the Mexican highlands and in northern Yucatan, a smaller rubber ball was used and points were scored when a player managed to knock the ball through a round stone ring anchored high up on vertical walls. Players wore protective belts and padding, with curved stones (called palma by the Spaniards, who saw a resemblance to the shape of palm trees) set into the belts. Ball Player Figurine from Panuco, Mexico AD 200-400 This pottery figurine illustrates one style of ball game dress. The belt was probably made of a wicker frame, stuffed with cotton and covered with animal skin. In the lowland Maya area, ribbed ball deflectors were broader and worn high on the chest. Some knee guards, unlike the narrow pad shown here, were extremely elaborate. This ball court at the Maya site of Copan, Honduras, was dedicated during the reign of Copan's 13th king, Waxaklahun Ubah K'awil (better known by his nickname, "18 Rabbit"), who ruled from July 9, 695 until his capture and death on May 3, 738 at the hands of Butz' Tiliw ("Cauac Sky"), ruler of the nearby site of Quirigua. Maya Folktales from the Alta Verapaz by Elin Danien

Guide to the Mesoamerican Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology by Elin Danien

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