Biographical Information and Abstracts

Anthony F. Aveni

Ends of Time:  The Maya Mystery of Creation 2012

Advance notices indicate that the Maya world will be subjected to intense focus four years from now.  That’s when the Long Count overturns for the first time in 5125 years.  What will happen?  Will the heavens realign?  Did the Maya key cosmic events to their grandest of all cycles that we haven’t yet perceived?  Predictions range from Armageddon to the dawn of a New Age of global consciousness.  What lies behind our long (largely American) history of cataclysmic utopians fin-de-siécle forecasting?  And what makes us think Maya messages may be intended for us?  These are some of the fascinating questions on the minds of students of the Maya and the wider public that will comprise the content of this lecture.

Victoria R. Bricker and Harvey M. Bricker

The Sacred Cycle of Time in the Paris Codex

The Paris Codex is a Precolumbian Maya bark-fiber, fan-fold book containing pictures and hieroglyphic texts.  It was made and used somewhere in the Yucatan peninsula during the Late Postclassic period, not long before the Spanish Conquest of the region in the sixteenth century.  However, dating evidence within the codex itself shows that about half of its content, the so-called katun pages, refers to a cycle of 20-year periods--katuns--extending from AD 475 to AD 731, that is, within the much earlier Classic period.  These pages depict aspects of the ritual associated with this sacred cycle, specifically ceremonies marking the end of one katun and the beginning of the next.  We compare the content of these pages with katun-ending ritual shown on carved stone monuments from Maya archaeological sites of both the Classic (Piedras Negras) and Postclassic (Mayapan) periods.  Another part of the content of the Paris Codex katun pages is historical, recording not human biographical events, but astronomical and meteorological events.  We document this kind of content, which has not been emphasized in earlier scholarship.  We consider also the extent to which the Paris katun pages may be prophetic, like the katun-cycle sections of the Books of Chilam Balam of colonial Yucatan.

Allen J. Christenson
Allen Christenson has worked as an ethnographer and linguist in highland Guatemala since 1978, working principally with the K’iche’ Maya and Tz’utujil Maya. His M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are in Precolumbian Art History and Literature from the University of Texas, Austin. He has written numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books on the Maya, including Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community and a new translation and critical edition of the Popol Vuh, an important ancient Maya text containing detailed descriptions of ancient theology, creation, and history. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University, where his research and teaching focus on the art and culture of the Maya.

“Straightaway their Vision Came to Them:” Ancestral Vision and Calendric Divination Ceremonies
According to the Popol Vuh, a Maya text compiled soon after the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century, the first men created by the gods had the gift of extraordinary vision whereby they could see all things: “Perfect was their sight, and perfect was their knowledge of everything beneath the sky.  If they gazed about them, turning their faces around, they beheld that which was in the sky and that which was upon the earth.  Instantly, they were able to behold everything.  They didn’t have to walk to see all that existed beneath the sky.  They merely saw it from wherever they were.  Thus their knowledge became full.  Their vision passed beyond the trees and rocks, beyond the lakes and the seas, beyond the mountains and the valleys” (Popol Vuh 2007, 197).  Although the creator gods eventually clouded this vision so that men could only see those things which were “nearby,” the progenitors of the Maya and their descendents nevertheless bore within their blood the potential for divine sight, bestowed upon them by their creators.  Present-day Maya traditionalist priests in the highlands of Guatemala believe that their divine ancestors, who set the pattern for contemporary rituals, continue to operate through them as conduits at appropriate times and under appropriate circumstances.  It is their sacred ancestral vision that allows indigenous priests to “see” beyond the limits of time and distance as the first men once did as they conduct divination ceremonies connected with the ancient Maya calendar.

William Fash, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Barbara Fash, Peabody Museum, Harvard University

The Role of New Fire Ceremonies at Teotihuacan in Foundation Narratives at Copan and Other Classic Maya Kingdoms

The pivotal place of the 9.0.0.0.0 Period Ending ceremonies in Copan historiography has been demonstrated in both the archaeological and epigraphic registers. Close scrutiny of the archaeological record and iconographic messages at a key monument in Teotihuacan suggests that it played a key role in the investiture of the Founder of the Copan dynasty. Comparative epigraphic research, in turn, highlights the possibility that K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' was not the only Classic Maya ruler to participate in such a ceremony at the City of the Gods. A review of Late Classic retrospective references in both iconography and text to such "master narratives," vs. the contemporary Early Classic mentions, reveals much about changes in Maya representation of Teotihuacan before and after the fall of the city.

Christine Hernández and Gabrielle Vail
Christine Hernández received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Tulane University in 2000.  Her dissertation research included a typological and chronological analysis of prehispanic ceramics recovered by Tulane’s Ucareo-Zinapécuaro Project (1989-1995) directed by Dan M. Healan in the eastern Lake Cuitzeo basin in Michoacán, Mexico.  She currently holds a research position with the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana and is an Anthropology lecturer at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana.  Her research interests are divided between on-going archaeological study of the prehistory of the eastern Lake Cuitzeo basin and comparative calendrical and iconographic studies of the Maya and Borgia Group codices.  She has published articles on both enterprises in several edited volumes and journals including Ancient Mesoamerica, Ancient America, and has most recently completed a co-edited volume with Gabrielle Vail entitled, Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests: Intellectual Interchange Between the Northern Lowland Maya and Highland Mexico in the Late Postclassic Period (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C., in press).  She is currently working with Gabrielle Vail on completing the on-line Mesoamerican Codices Database Project and a new commentary of the Madrid Codex.

Creation Mythology in Late Postclassic Maya Iconography and Texts

Considerable emphasis has been placed on reconstructing creation stories recorded in hieroglyphic texts and depicted in Classic and Preclassic Maya art.  Much less is known about Late Postclassic Maya mythology, although recent studies reveal that there is a rich body of data available for study. Our presentation focuses on an analysis of codices and murals from the Late Postclassic northern Maya lowlands.  In addition to those with widely recognized cosmological themes, a number of scenes from these sources have only recently been identified as pertaining to origin stories and the mythology of world creation and destruction.  One such example is the tun mural from Santa Rita Mound 1, which includes a sequence of images that can be demonstrated to concern mythic events related to the foundation of the present world and its deity and human occupants.  Comparisons with colonial era texts indicate that the Santa Rita murals include episodes that are well known from later Yucatec and highland Maya sources, as well as texts from highland Mexico.  A consideration of calendrical instruments from the Maya codices reveals that many of them have a similar thematic content, often framed within the context of period-ending ceremonies or astronomical events of significance to the prehispanic Maya.

Matthew Looper
Matthew Looper received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995.  His advisor was Dr. Linda Schele.  His dissertation research was conducted between 1993 and 1995 in Quiriguá, Izabal, Guatemala, on the sculpture programs of K'ahk Tiliw, an eighth-century Maya ruler of Quiriguá.  Following postdoctoral work on the Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project, Department of Native American Studies, University of California at Davis (1996-1998), he joined the faculty at California State University, Chico, where he has taught from 1998 to the present.  Looper's research interests include Classic Maya art and writing, Maya textiles, and Maya dance traditions, in all periods. His books include To Be Like Gods: Dance in Ancient Maya Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Quiriguá: A Guide to an Ancient Maya City (Guatemala City: Editorial Antigua, 2007); Birds and Thorns: Textile Design in San Martín Sacatepéquez (Guatemala City: Editorial Antigua, 2004); Lightning Warrior: Maya Art and Kingship at Quirigua (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs, Volume One: The Classic Period Inscriptions (with Martha J. Macri) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); and Gifts of the Moon: Huipil Designs of the Ancient Maya, San Diego Museum Papers 38 (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Man, 2000).

Cosmology and Creation in Ch'orti' and Ancient Maya Ritual
The Ch'orti' Maya, who live mainly in the department of Chiquimula of eastern Guatemala, are relatively isolated from other Maya groups and in close contact with peoples of European origin. While this situation has resulted in significant cultural erosion, many aspects of traditional culture survive, including complex agricultural ceremonies. These rites, which have been studied intensively beginning with the work of the ethnologist Rafael Girard in the early twentieth century, are of particular interest to scholars of the ancient Maya because recent research points to the Ch'orti' language as a close living descendant of the language employed in the Classic-period hieroglyphic inscriptions.  Moreover, Girard drew attention to the cosmological and astronomical symbolism of these rituals, which suggest many parallels to ancient Maya lore. In this presentation, I will outline the structure and symbolism of Ch'orti' agricultural ceremonies, and suggest a number of analogies with Classic-period rituals in both popular and elite contexts.  These correspondences suggest not only the remarkable perseverance of cosmological concepts among Maya peoples, but also highlight the way in which creation narratives can be embedded in ceremonies in a variety of contexts.