Material Culture: A Channel for Ideological Expression

Material Culture: A Channel for Ideological Expression How Ancient Mesoamerican Cultures Expressed Their Views on Life and Death Through Art

Anne Chen CHASE PROGRAM - Perspectives in World Art & Design Final Paper December 17, 2012

Archaeologists, historians, and members of other fields of research have long been interested in how cultural values, beliefs, and attitudinal orientations have expressed themselves through the material culture of a group of peoples. In the words of Laura G. Turgeon, “an increase in the number of publications and journals specializing in material culture mirrors the growing interest in the object as a vehicle for new and innovative ways of understanding societies past and present.”1 A specific realm of a culture’s ideological positions that has drawn particular attention is its view on the afterlife – how the culture approaches the impending fate of all men and women: death. And whether a society of ancient people choose to embrace or fear the mortality of human beings, what they elect to believe in can more than often be discerned by academics via the material artifacts they leave behind. The civilizations of Mesoamerica, which flourished in the region which extended from central Mexico down to the southern portions of North America before the Spanish conquest of the area in the 16th century, held an especially interesting perspective of the afterlife which has fascinated scholars. Through the examination and analyses of these ancient civilizations’ art, monuments, tools, and even human remains, researchers have been able to develop more knowledge concerning the Mesoamerican peoples’ conception of death, and how their particular view was manifested in their bloody practices such as ritual blood-letting, self-mutilation, and human sacrifice.

A brief snapshot of the Mesoamerican empire, particularly the complex civilizations which were birthed from the region prior to the 1300s, would include three key cultures: the Olmecs, the Mayans, and the Aztecs. Interestingly, despite their lack of interaction, these three cultures shared four main cultural aspects: a belief in a feathered-serpent deity; an elaborate calendrical system based upon two-hundred sixty and three-hundred sixty-five day cycles; ritual ball games; and the practices of human sacrifice and ritual blood-letting. The latter feature

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included acts of human heart extraction, flaying, self-scarification and other bodily-mutilation, and even emulation. Women, for example, would often pierce their ears and/or tongues with the tails of sting rays, allowing the blood to drip onto a sheet of paper to be later lighted as a ritualistic sacrifice to the gods. Yet although these bloody customs are viewed today by many individuals as strange, irrational, even barbaric, they were not, at least for the ancient Mesoamericans, without justification, and here the Mesoamerican belief in “animism” may be introduced. In essence, these ancient peoples followed an ideology in which all things, living and non-living, housed a spirit – from rocks to trees to maintains to humans and the humblest animals and plant-life, all that which existed in the physical world are “interpenetrated by spiritual forces – both personal and impersonal – to the extent that objects carry spiritual significance and events have spiritual causes.”2 Consequently, Mesoamerican cultures viewed nature as naturally violent; for instance, the natural world could be best represented through images such as a jaguar pouncing upon its prey. Nature, if then bloody by evolution, required inherent adaptations for the sake of survival – a quite rational justification for violence within a culture. It is of little surprise, then, that such an understanding of their natural surroundings was expressed in the ancient Mesoamerican’s material culture.

As Terje Oestigaard succinctly put it in his summarizing of a key concept in Valerio Valeri’s Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, “through the performance of rituals, people learn to believe in the cultural experience in which they apprehended.”3 It so follows then that many of the ritualistic practices performed by Mesoamerican peoples were manifestations of their particular beliefs in the afterlife. Firstly, the question of “How exactly did these ancient cultures view life and death?” should be answered. According to the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, “many Andean cultures of South America

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had a more optimistic view of the afterlife.”4 Indeed, as the Museum continues, to the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec peoples, “death was not a final state, but served as the soul’s transition from one realm of existence to another.”5 One could thus successfully infer that these cultures did not so much as fear dying as they embraced it – the end of one’s life was not conceived as some horrific, ultimate end, but as the next chapter in one’s soul’s multidimensional journey. Of course, this did not mean that everyone would ascend to some seraphic heaven when passing on from the world of the living – only those who were noble and pure of heart during their time spent on earth reserved a rightful place in the Mesoamerican people’s celestial paradise. In fact, as evident from many of the architectural structures which remain from the Maya civilization, this culture’s conceptualization of heaven involved it being divided into thirteen levels – a similar ideology was held by the Aztec, as “documentary evidence [from Copán’s Hieroglyphic Stairway] indicates that the thirteenth and highest level of Heaven was reserved for warriors who died on the field of battle in the service of the state.”6 As for those who fell on the other side of the spectrum of goodness and integrity, they would be condemned to one of the nine levels of the Maya Underworld, which were also represented in the architectural constructions of the Maya.

A closer look at some examples of these Maya architectural creations will allow for a further understanding of how the ideological beliefs of a civilization can be experienced via its material culture. Temple I, located at Tikal, features the aforementioned thirteen and nine level configuration in order to express the hierarchical nature of both Heaven and the Underworld. A Maya creation of Petén-style, made from stone during the Late Classic Period, the monumental structure serves as a burial place for Tikal ruler Jasaw Chan K’awiil, who reigned during the period which stretched from 682 to 734 AD.7 Another Maya architectural masterpiece which utilizes the symbolic levels is the Temple of Inscriptions, found in Palenque and also made

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during the Late Classic Period. The Temple of Inscriptions was the funerary site of Lord Pakal, who ruled over Palenque during the 7th century.8 Again, the vaulting arrangement of the temple was representative of the thirteen levels of Heaven and the nine levels of the Underworld, emphasizing the Maya belief in how Heaven, the world of the living, and the Underworld were all enmeshed. Another notable feature of the Temple of Inscriptions include the fact that Pakal’s tomb itself, constructed from a ten-thousand pound slab of stone, would have been too colossal to fit through the tomb’s doorway – it has been deduced that the tomb was thus built first, and the temple then constructed around it. Pakal’s sarcophagus too is worthy of further mentioning – the image of a world tree etched upon the sarcophagus, emerging from the ruler’s stomach, is believed to symbolize his soul’s rise to the heavens while the Underworld below him swallows his physical body.9 Architectural constructions, such as the two Maya temples mentioned above, are not the only material evidence academics and researchers can analyze in order to understand how material culture reflects the fundamental ideological beliefs of a culture. Art, including architectural decorations, effigies, vessels, and tapestries are also valuable artifacts which house a wealth of information. Lintel 24, discovered at Yaxchilan, is such an example from the Maya civilization. Made from limestone, the carving shows the Maya queen Lady Xoc threading her tongue with a cord as she commits the ritualistic act of blood-letting, a devotional performance of self-mutilation commonly practiced by the Mayans in order to show the high reverence they held towards their deities. Lady Xoc is depicted besides her husband the Shield Jaguar, to whom she is committing the blood-letting to. And a closer examination of the lintel provides an example of another Maya self-mutilating act: scarification. Mary Miller thus describes Lintel 24 as “a stone carving from the city of Yaxchilan [which] portrays the powerful Lady Cock with

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tattoos or scars around her mouth”10. Miller reflectively continues: “Beauty was a way to display a social, if not moral, value among the Maya. The wealth they invested and pain they endured to create bodies that reflected their social beliefs make our modern-day obsession with beauty seem less excessive. Like us, the Maya indulged in self-deception about appearance, preferring to let artistic depictions conform to their ideals rather than reality.”11 Indeed, whether it was blood-letting or scarification, it seems that the bloody, ceremonial practices of the Maya were well-justified in their minds because these often gory performances were fundamental to expressing one’s devotion to the gods. Even the genitals, perhaps part of the body’s most sensitive region, were susceptible to mutilation: “…other times they [the Maya] performed an obscene and painful sacrifice … holes were made in the virile member of each [male worshipper] obliquely from side to side and through the holes which they had thus made, they passed the greatest quantity of thread that they could, and all of them thus fastened and strung together, they anointed the idol with the blood which flowed from all these parts; and he who did this the most was considered the bravest; and their sons from the earliest age began to practice it, and it is a horrible thing to see how inclined they were to this ceremony.”12 And if the exploration into the Maya ceremonial customs used for the worship of their deities were to continue, the subject of human sacrifice must be acknowledged. In the words of Kristin N. Romey: “By the time the Spanish arrived in the Yucatán and recorded the practices in the sixteenth century, the Maya had been performing human sacrifice for at least a thousand years. It was a practice necessary to ensure, among other things, the balance of the universe, a king’s preservation of authority, and in a land too often prone to drought, the continuation of rain.”13 Evidently, again, the presence of important justifications to the Maya’s belief systems and bloody traditions – and here, when discussing human sacrifice, perhaps the ultimate example of a

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what can be described as a brutal, violent performance by a cultural people, there were a multitude of rational justifications.

Of course, it was not just the Mayans who practiced human sacrifice. As mentioned earlier, the practice of human sacrifice is one of the four shared features of among all Mesoamerican cultures. It is unsurprising, then, that many of the material artifacts that have been discovered in the region may have been used in sacrificial performances. The statuesque stone Lanzón, for instance, which is a creation of Peru’s Chavin de Huantar culture, is believed to have a role in human sacrificial practice. The object itself is embedded into the earth, and it has been hypothesized that the opening at its top was used to pour blood down.

A common type of Mesoamerican sculptures is the chac-mool, which are essentially figurines, representative of seated humans, which have been discovered in many Maya temples.

These figures are another example of how the ancient Mesoamericans created physical objects which not only expressed their beliefs, but could be used in the performance of practices which iterated such beliefs. Lawrence G. Desmond describes the chac-mool as “a sculptural figure seated on the ground with its upper back raised, the head turned to a near right angle, the legs drawn up to the buttocks, elbows rest on the ground, and hands hold a vessel, disk, or plate on the stomach where offerings may have been placed or human sacrifices carried out.”14 A human heart, for instance, could be easily placed on a chac-mool’s repository as a sacrificial offering to the gods.

It is also interesting to examine how Mesoamerican deities themselves were actually depicted, as they were the ones who all of these bloody practices were being devoted to. More than often, these gods were portrayed wearing the skins of flayed humans; Mesoamerican priests, as well, were well-known to clothe themselves with the skins of others. The Aztec god of death

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and rebirth Xipe Totec, for example, is commonly shown wearing flayed human skin as he wields an assemblage of weapons. In fact, flayed skin was actually a symbol of rebirth to the Aztec peoples – a representation of shedding off the old to prepare for the new – and was also believed to hold curative properties.15 And thus arises the question of how exactly, if the ancient Mesoamericans so often performed such bloody processes – many of which would require surgical precision – did these peoples actually accomplish these acts? Evidence of thin, surgical obsidian blades of the sharpest precision, discovered at numerous Maya archaeological sites, provide an explanation – many scholars believe that the Mayans held a keen pharmaceutical knowledge as well as skills of high surgical prowess, which would have been quite useful when skinning a human being.

Some cultures believe in an afterlife – that an individual’s spirit continues on to some mysterious, other-worldly realm after its time on this Earth has come to an end – while others posit that once one dies, there is nothing else, no Heaven or Hell or some strange in-between.

And while the views of life and death, the mortality of the human being, and the universe in general vary between cultures, whatever ideology is coveted by a particular peoples can more than often be discerned through the material culture created by those peoples. Whether it be through architectural constructions, art, or even functional tools, diverse cultures, even if they do not share the same beliefs and values, undoubtedly do have one thing in common: they enjoy expressing their chosen ideas in physical objects and customary practices.

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Images

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Temple I Culture: Maya Site: Tikal Material: stone Period: Late Classic

Source: Tikal (Guatemala), Temple 1 August 11, 2006 self-photographed by Raymond Ostertag Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tikal_Temple1_2006_08_11.JPG

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Temple of Inscriptions Culture: Maya Site: Palenque Material: stone Period: Late Classic

Source: Palenque (Chiapas), Temple of Inscriptions 2008 self-photographed by Jan Harenburg Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palenque_temple_1.jpg

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Lintel 24 Culture: Maya Site: Yaxchilán Material: limestone Period: Late Classic

Source: Lintel 24, Structure 23, Yaxchilan as published by Désiré Charnay, 1885; scanned and uploaded to en:Wikipedia by Infrogmation on 4 December, 2003 Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yaxchil%C3%A1n_lintel.jpg

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Lanz贸n Culture: Chavin de Huantar Site: Peru Material: stone Period: Early Horizon

Source: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/chavin/lanzon.htm

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Works Cited

1. Turgeon, Laura G. “Material Culture and Cross-Cultural Consumption: French Beads in North America, 1500-1700.” Studies in the Decorative Arts. Vol. 9, No. 1. Fall-Winter 20012002: pp. 85-107. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago. Print. pp. 85.

2. Halverson, Dean C. “Animism: The Religion of the Tribal World.” International Journal of Frontier Missions. Vol. 15, No. 2. April-June 1998. Pasadena, California. Print. pp. 59.

3. Oestigaard, Terje. “Death and Ambivalent Materiality – Human Flesh as Culture and Cosmology”. In Oestigaard, T., Anfinset, N. & Saetersdal, T. (eds.). Combining the Past and the Present: Archaeological perspectives in society: 23-20. BAR International Series 1210. Oxford. Print. pp. 23.

4. “Immortal Spirits: The Pre-Colombian Afterlife.” Final Farewell: The Culture of Death and the Afterlife. Museum of Art and Archaeology. The University of Missouri. 2011. Web. 14, December. 2012. para. 2. <http://maa.missouri.edu/exhibitions/finalfarewell/pre columbianintro.html>.

5. “Immortal Spirits: The Pre-Colombian Afterlife.” Final Farewell: The Culture of Death and the Afterlife. Museum of Art and Archaeology. The University of Missouri. 2011. Web. 14, December. 2012. para. 1. <http://maa.missouri.edu/exhibitions/finalfarewell/precolum bian intro.html>.

6. Fash, William. “Religion and Human Agency in Ancient Maya History: Tales from the Hieroglyphic Stairway.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Vol. 12, No. 1. 2002: pp. 519. The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. United Kingdom. Print. pp. 16.

7. .Sharer, Robert J. with Loa P. Traxler. The Ancient Maya. 6th ed. Stanford University Press.

Stanford, CA. 2006. Print. pp. 313, 397.

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8. Guenter, Stanley. “The Tomb of K’inich Janaab Pakal: The Temple of Inscriptions of Palenque.” Mesoweb Articles. Mesoweb. 2007. Web. 14, Dec. 2012. pp. 1.

9. Stierlin, Henri. The Maya: Palaces and Pyramids of the Rainforest. London; New York: Taschen. 2001. Print. pp. 80.

10. Miller, Mary. “Extreme Makeover.” Abstracts: The Archaeological Institute. Vol. 26, No. 1.

January-February 2009. Web. < http://www.archaeology.org/0901/abstracts/maya.html>.

11. Miller, Mary. “Extreme Makeover.” Abstracts: The Archaeological Institute. Vol. 26, No. 1.

January-February 2009: para. 6. Web. 13, Dec. 2012. <http://www.archaeology.org/0901 /abstracts/maya.html>.

12. Landa, Diego de. “Landa’s Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan.” translated by Alfred Tozzer.

Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Vol. 9. Harvard University. Cambridge: 1941. Print. pp. 114.

13. Romey, Kristin N. “Cenotes of Sacrifice.” Archaeology. May-June 2004: pp. 16-23. Print. pp. 16.

14. Desmond, Lawrence G. “Chacmool.” Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. New York, 2001: pp. 168-169. Print.

15. Fernández, Adela. Dioses Prehispánicos de México. Mexico City: Panorama Editorial. 1992, 1996. pp. 62. Print.

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