Maya Codices Research Articles

A Commentary to Christine Hernández's astronomical interpretation of Skybearer Almanac in Borgia 49a-52a

In a 1992 article, V. Bricker and H. Bricker detail their historical approach to dating and decoding codical almanacs in the Maya codices that lack explicit Long Count dates. Astronomical and seasonal imagery are the key to their methodology. In honor of their work, I apply their method to an almanac in the highland Mexican Borgia Codex. After a discussion of Venus iconography identified in the Maya and Borgia Group codices, I discuss how similar astronomical imagery in the almanac on Borgia 49a-52a, 53b can be used to propose a model that situates the instrument in real time.

Reshaping the World: Debates on Mesoamerican Cosmologies

Mesoamerican cosmology is characterized by three concepts: a universe consisting of layered realms, the sacred 260-day calendar, and the reciprocal relationship between gods and people. The concept of a multilayered universe has dominated modern scholarship, which has often depicted the cosmos as three separate, multilayered tiers. The authors of Reshaping the World: Debates on Mesoamerican Cosmologies challenge this long-standing pan-Mesoamerican model. This compelling collection of essays revises our understanding of the connections between the earth, sky, and underworld by emphasizing the fluidity and dynamic interplay between these spaces. As suggested by the volume subtitle's use of the plural (“cosmologies”) and the cover image (a muwieri, a relatively unexplored Wixarika object), Mesoamerican cosmological systems were varied and ever evolving.Within the evangelization process of New Spain, ancient cosmological structures were reconfigured by the Spanish in an effort to render them comprehensible within preexisting and dominant worldviews. In the early twentieth century, Eduard Seler proposed that the Mexica cosmos were composed of thirteen celestial layers and a nine-layered underworld, an interpretation that became the standard for the entirety of Mesoamerica. Using this historiographical context as a point of departure, Reshaping the World contains nine chapters split between three thematic parts, spanning from the Classic period (250–900 CE) through the twenty-first century. Ana Díaz's insightful introduction distills the volume's three objectives: redefine ancient Mesoamerican cosmological structures as put forth by the colonial documentary record, reevaluate the prevailing notion that the universe is composed of thirteen and nine vertically structured levels, and propose new cosmological models for this diverse region (p. 5). The authors support their arguments by skillfully connecting archaeological, anthropological, ethnohistoric, epigraphic, and iconographic evidence from across Mesoamerica. This refreshing approach to a long-debated topic reinforces and elaborates on existing insights into the processes of religious transformation in the Americas.The volume's first part explores central Mexico through the lens of early modern texts, both Indigenous manuscripts and European books. The first essay, by Jesper Nielsen and Toke Sellner Reunert, asserts that the prevailing interpretation of the Mesoamerican cosmos was heavily influenced by the Dantean worldview of Franciscan and Dominican friars in the sixteenth century. Sergio Botta's contribution transports readers to Italy by exploring the beguiling character who incorporated the Codex Vaticanus A's religious iconography into existing Renaissance works, in an effort to craft a global religious history. Ana Díaz's essay highlights the incongruities of cosmological descriptions in Nahua manuscripts. Díaz's most compelling point is her characterization of the Nahua cosmos as a living, dynamic entity with corporeal qualities.The inextricable connections between calendar systems and cosmological spaces are next discussed, with a strong emphasis on ritual structure. Gabrielle Vail's contribution disentangles the confluence of cosmological terminology and the shifting classification of deities in Postclassic Maya codices and colonial Yucatec sources. David Tavárez, addressing the extant corpus of Northern Zapotec material, identifies a direct correlation between the 260-day calendar and the three-tiered cosmographical structure. In direct opposition to previous essays, Tavárez argues that the celestial realm and underworld have nine fixed layers, which further underscores the variance of cosmology in Mesoamerica. (It is worth nothing that many studies on Mesoamerican conceptions of time are dominated by discussions of Aztec and Maya calendar systems; this makes Tavárez's work a necessary and welcome inclusion in the volume.) Kerry Hull's essay employs a linguistic and ethnographic methodology to produce an emic understanding of contemporary Ch'orti’ Maya cosmovision. Hull highlights how the Ch'orti’ Maya's ritual and daily activity is influenced by their cosmological structure.The final section features three distinct case studies. Pivoting from the time frames of the preceding chapters, Alexandre Tokovinine's contribution is the only one firmly rooted in ancient Mesoamerica. Through analyses of Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts, Tokovinine charts narratives of travel to mythic (“deep-time”) and historic locales in order to demonstrate how pilgrimage to these locations was often intertwined. Katarzyna Mikulska's essay, which zeroes in on Nahua worldviews of the Late Postclassic and early colonial era, argues that Nahua cosmological imagery only differentiates between primordial space and a human world, which is in diametric opposition to medieval cosmological schema. The volume concludes with a timely essay by Johannes Neurath. In urging readers to critically approach the relationship between cultural continuity and acts of resistance, Neurath suggests that the Wixaritari's cosmological structures are concurrently forming and formed by sacred acts.Like all well-coordinated edited volumes, these essays resonate with one another, especially in their attention to language and ritual performance. With its rich body of evidence and sharp analyses, this work breaks down the rigid boundaries between cosmologies, chronology, and cultures in Mesoamerica. We may never fully comprehend the totality of Mesoamerican cosmologies and worldviews; such reconstructions require material that has yet to be unearthed or has since been destroyed. The authors of this volume, however, considerably advance our current understanding.

A Comparison of Historical Evidence for Droughts in the Pre-Columbian Maya Codices with Climatological Evidence for Droughts during the Early and Late Classic Periods

Abstract An examination of several historical texts in the Maya codices reveals that droughts were a significant concern to the pre-Columbian Maya that ultimately resulted in the collapse of their civilization. The effects of such droughts mentioned in those texts include damage to crops, famine, and wildfires. The dates assigned to five droughts in the codical texts agree with dates obtained from the analysis of lacustrine cores and stalagmites in caves by climatologists.

THE “ECLIPSE GLYPH” IN MAYA TEXT AND ICONOGRAPHY: A CENTURY OF MISINTERPRETATION

AbstractThe “eclipse glyph,” as it is called by most people in our field, is not referring to eclipses, but rather to the darkened sun and moon associated with heavy rainfall or darkened skies. This glyph is composed of the sun sign or moon sign (occasionally others) between two flanking fields, usually one light and one dark, and is found principally in the Postclassic divinatory almanacs of the Maya codices. Evidence for this proposal comes from iconography as well as texts. Rain pours from “eclipse glyphs” in pictures accompanied by hieroglyphic captions explicitly dealing with rain; they also appear in calendrical sequences that could not possibly be referring to eclipses. Even in the lunar or eclipse pages in theDresden Codexthat deal with solar eclipses, the texts that accompany the “eclipse glyphs” are about rain. A search of Classic-period antecedents suggests a linguistic valueyihk'in, meaning “darkened” or “darkening.”

Extracting Maya Glyphs from Degraded Ancient Documents via Image Segmentation

We present a system for automatically extracting hieroglyph strokes from images of degraded ancient Maya codices. Our system adopts a region-based image segmentation framework. Multi-resolution super-pixels are first extracted to represent each image. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is used to label each super-pixel region with a probability to belong to foreground glyph strokes. Pixelwise probability maps from multiple super-pixel resolution scales are then aggregated to cope with various stroke widths and background noise. A fully connected Conditional Random Field model is then applied to improve the labeling consistency. Segmentation results show that our system preserves delicate local details of the historic Maya glyphs with various stroke widths and also reduces background noise. As an application, we conduct retrieval experiments using the extracted binary images. Experimental results show that our automatically extracted glyph strokes achieve comparable retrieval results to those obtained using glyphs manually segmented by epigraphers in our team.

Vail, Gabrielle, and Christine Hernández: Re-Creating Primordial Time. Foundation Rituals and Mythology in the Postclassic Maya Codices

Vail, Gabrielle, and Christine Hernández: Re-Creating Primordial Time. Foundation Rituals and Mythology in the Postclassic Maya Codices

World renewal rituals among the Postclassic Yucatec Maya and contemporary Ch’orti’ Maya

Archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric studies indicate that world renewal rituals were an important feature of prehispanic Maya society and continue to play a seminal role in indigenous communities throughout the Maya area today. Our discussion examines two examples of the multitude of such rituals that were performed to recreate the world by replicating the actions undertaken by the primordial deities at the beginning of the present creation. The first involves ceremonies performed by the Yucatec Maya during the Postclassic period (13th through 15th centuries) to ritually terminate the old year and begin anew by establishing a “tree” to mark the trees set up in the four quadrants at the creation of the present world, as documented in the prehispanic Maya codices and the colonial period Books of Chilam Balam, written by indigenous scribes in the alphabetic script introduced by the Spanish friars in the 16th century. The second involves Ch’orti’ speakers living in southern Guatemala today, who perform similar rituals that involve a series of ceremonies undertaken over the course of the rainy season to ensure agricultural fertility. Both ritual complexes involve foundation events, acts of sacrifice, petitions to the rain and earth deities, and an emphasis on sacred watery places.

Re-Creating Time: Foundation Rituals and Mythology in the Postclassic Maya Codices

Re-Creating Time: Foundation Rituals and Mythology in the Postclassic Maya Codices

Non-invasive investigation of a pre-Hispanic Maya screenfold book: the Madrid Codex

The Madrid Codex, one of only a few existing pre-Hispanic Maya codices that survived the Spanish destruction, has been analysed in situ at the Museo de América in Madrid by means of an array of non-invasive techniques. This investigation has provided information concerning the colouring materials used in its manufacture, namely calcium carbonate, red ochre, vegetal carbon black and Maya blue pigments observing bright blue to grey hues. A discussion of archaeological implications of the materials identified, as well as some comparative observations with those previously acquired on the Central Mexican Codex Cospi have been addressed.

Book Review: The Dresden Codex Venus Pages: Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing: New Translations of k'al, the Dresden Codex Venus Pages and Classic Period Royal ‘Binding’ Rituals

THE DRESDEN CODEX VENUS PAGES Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing: New Translations o/k'al, the Dresden Codex Venus Pages and Classic Period Royal 'Binding' Rituals. Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos (BAR S2239; Archaeopress, Oxford, 201 1). Pp. viii + 73. £27 (paperback). ISBN 978-4073-0803-6.Aldana' s study focuses on the Venus table in the Dresden Codex, with particular emphasis on the calendrical information recorded in the preface, and on the verb k 'al found in the hieroglyphic texts. As Aldana notes, k'al appears in a number of different contexts outside the Dresden Codex, where it has been read as 'tie', 'enclose', or 'bind' . His analysis suggests a new interpretation, that of a ritual 'enclosing' or 'loop-tracing' in space and (p. i). With this in mind, he relates the calendrical seen in both Maya and Mexican codices (on Madrid Codex pp. 75-6 and p. 1 of the Codex Fejervary-Mayer) to the idea of the loop created by moving through time and space. He further suggests that pecked crosses carved in stone embody the same concept and may have actually been used to count out the relevant period of time via a system of stone markers.I find this aspect of his argument persuasive, but I believe he dismisses alternative readings for k'al (see below) in the Dresden Venus table too quickly. In that context, he proposes that what is being looped is not Venus itself, but rather the east (or one of the other directions). Each of the table's five pages, therefore, involves the looping of the east, north, west, and south, replicating in textual format the structure laid out visually by the Madrid and Fejervary-Mayer cosmograms.Although Aldana's reading makes sense in this context, it does not adequately explain the iconography of the Venus pages, which portray a series of Venus deities holding weapons, along with their victims, who have been speared. As scholars have long recognized, this likely refers to a mythological episode in which the Mexican Venus deity ascends from the underworld at helical rise with its weapons at the ready to spear various unfortunate victims. Whether the Maya had similar narratives or this represents a central Mexican 'import' remains uncertain.There is good evidence to suggest that the meaning of k'al in this context relates to the actions of the warrior aspect of Venus. Several definitions appear especially relevant to this situation, including 'to nock an arrow', as discussed by Harvey and Victoria Bricker in their monograph Astronomy in the Maya Codices (2011), and others relating to 'arming' or 'preparing for battle'. Although they are mentioned, Aldana discounts these possibilities in favour of the idea of completing a directional circuit. …

Maya Numerology

One tends to think of the study of pure number as an esoteric pursuit. But for the ancient Maya, particularly when it came to temporal matters, numbers were more than mere devices to tally units of time. In stark contrast to the Western calendar, in the Maya realm of timekeeping the duration between ritual events seems to have mattered as much as the times when the events themselves occurred. Moreover, the manner in which the daykeepers of the Maya codices sequenced the intervals followed well-defined patterns, which reveal an array of motives for the Maya way of structuring time. Among these motives were the need to: a) arrive at or avoid particular lucky or unlucky days; b) accommodate changing seasonal or other astronomical events; and c) set up numerological mirror symmetries, a characteristic that resonates with the Pythagorean philosophy of number. Thus the long-neglected study of Maya number offers insight into the chronological structure underlying ritual process, which finds parallels in contemporary Maya culture.

Hybrid Cosmologies in Mesoamerica: A Reevaluation of theYax Cheel Cab, a Maya World Tree

During his visit to Nojpeten in 1696, Fray Andrés de Avendaño reported observing the Itzá Maya worshipping a stone column called yax cheel cab (the first tree of the world). Though claiming to recognize the yax cheel cab from depictions in pre-Hispanic Maya codices, Avendaño notes that the Itzá “want it to be understood that they give homage to it because this is the tree of whose fruit our first father Adam ate.” As no known pre-Hispanic source uses the term yax cheel cab, how are we to interpret Avendaño's report? Based on iconographic as well as primary textual sources from the Postclassic through Colonial periods written in Maya and Spanish, we document the transformation of pre-Hispanic Maya tree symbolism in response to contemporaneous European Christian myth and cosmology. We argue that, though having roots in pre-Hispanic iconography and practices millennia deep, the yax cheel cab known from the documentary record is a colonial amalgam, a world tree at the center of a hybrid cosmology emerging over the course of over a century and a half from processes of direct as well as indirect dialogue between Mayas and Europeans.

The Maya Codices

Research over the past decade has significantly advanced our understanding of the prehispanic Maya codices, both in terms of their content (i.e., hieroglyphic texts, calendrical structure, and iconography) as well as the physical documents themselves (where and when they were painted, and by whom). Recent avenues of exploration include a new emphasis on linguistic and textual analyses; novel methodologies for interpreting calendrical structure; and comparisons with other manuscript traditions, in particular those from highland central Mexico. As a result of these studies, researchers have found that some codical almanacs functioned as real-time instruments to document important astronomical events; others were used to schedule rituals as part of the 52-year calendar that guided civic and religious life in Mesoamerica during the Late Postclassic period (circa A.D. 1250 to 1520). Evidence of connections with central Mexico, documented in terms of interchange among codical scribes, suggests the need for a more thorough exploration of Maya–highland Mexican interaction during this time period.

The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript

This volume offers new calendrical models and methodologies for reading, dating, and interpreting the general significance of the Madrid Codex. longest of the surviving Maya codices, The Madrid includes texts and images painted by scribes conversant in Maya hieroglyphic writing, a written means of communication practised by Maya elites from the second to the fifteenth centuries AD. Some scholars have recently argued that the Madrid Codex originated in the Peten region of Guatemala and post-dates European contact. contributors to this volume challenge that view by demonstrating convincingly that it originated in northern Yucatan and was painted in the Pre-Columbian era. In addition, several contributors reveal provocative connections among the Madrid and Borgia group of codices from Central Mexico.

NAHUA IN ANCIENT MESOAMERICA: Evidence from Maya inscriptions

This paper examines Nahua words found in both the Maya codices and the monumental texts. These words, spelled with syllabic signs, occur for the most part in contexts associated with foreign influence: Nahuatl deity names and words for “helmet,” “tribute,” and “heart.” One word—“and then”—is a conjunction used frequently in discourse. Sound correspondences between these loan words and the Nahua sources suggest an Eastern Nahua dialect as the likely source during the Classic period. Thus, Mexican influence in the Maya area, frequently attributed directly to Teotihuacan, may in fact have come by way of Nahua-speakers settled in the Gulf region. The epigraphic evidence establishes that Nahua speakers were influential in Mesoamerica far earlier than previously believed.

Bilingualism in the Maya Codices and the Books of Chilam Balam

The bilingualism recently discovered in the Maya codices by Robert Wald and Alfonso Lacadena has parallels in the Colonial Maya Books of Chilam Balam, which show both linguistic and scriptural bilingualism — involving, on the one hand, the Maya and Spanish languages, and on the other, the logosyllabic and alphabetic scripts of these two cultures. The article explores the continuities and discontinuities in these language contact phenomena with respect to vocabulary, morphology, syntax, spelling conventions, style, and text format.

Issues of Language and Ethnicity in the Postclassic Maya Codices

Researchers have long attributed the prehispanic Maya codices to a Yucatecan provenience, based on their style and on the occurrence of Yucatec words spelled phonetically in the glyphic texts. This interpretation has recently been challenged by two studies that demonstrate the presence of Ch’olan vocabulary and morphological features in the Dresden and Madrid codices, alongside the better known Yucatec spellings (Wald 1994, Lacadena 1997). The present study identifies the linguistic affiliation of lexical items in the codical texts (Yucatecan, Ch’olan, or indeterminate), and charts the distribution of Yucatecan and Ch’olan terms in the Madrid Codex as a means of identifying patterns of usage. Several models are examined to account for the linguistic diversity of the manuscript, including (a) possible bilingualism of scribes; (b) lexical borrowing; (c) errors introduced by copying; and (d) the likelihood that certain glyphs were logographic, and could have different values depending on the language being recorded. It is argued that the Madrid Codex was drafted by Yucatecan scribes who were influenced in various ways by Ch’olan speakers — a situation comparable to the use of Spanish loanwords in the Colonial Books of Chilam Balam.

A Prehispanic Maya Katun Wheel

Much has been written on the calendrical achievements of the ancient Maya; however, little is known of the ancient Maya models for recording and conceiving of the passage of time. A carved stone turtle excavated at the site of Mayapan indicates that the Maya concept of circular calendar wheels is prehispanic in origin. Contextual information provided by archaeological excavation and representations in prehispanic Maya codices indicate that stone turtle sculptures were the locus of penitential blood offerings marking calendrical period endings, particularly that of the roughly twenty-year Katun. The ancient Maya had a number of distinct metaphors for conceiving of the world. Among both the Classic and Postclassic Maya, the turtle served as an important model of the rounded and circular earth.

Functional Variation of Maya Spiked Vessels: A Practical Guide

Ethnoarchaeological research has made valuable contributions towards our understanding of the functional variation of specific artifacts and features. The use of spiked vessel-forms among modern Maya groups, as well as the depictions of spiked vessels in the surviving Maya codices, suggest that spiked vessels have served a relatively wider range of functions (although invariably in a ritual context) than most Mesoamericanists have suspected. A critical review of the spiked vessel phenomenon, using the codices, the archaeological literature, and recent ethnographic data is presented as a guide for future archaeological interpretation.

Mushroom Symbolism in Maya Codices

SUMMARYThe 24-page Galindo Codex has been found to correspond closely with the figures and glyphs on 12 pages, entire or in part, of the Codex Madrid. A new interpretation, based upon evidence in the Dresden, Madrid and Galindo Codices suggests that a sacred mushroom cult existed among the Maya.