Copán

The sky was part of their architecture, but how much of the architecture was part of the sky remains an open question.

At the site of Copán, in the far southeastern corner of the Maya world, in what is now western Honduras, surrounded by a valley of tobacco fields and low green mountains, there is a stairway that contains the longest known Maya text, and it cannot yet be fully read.

The hieroglyphic stairway is a monumental flight of 63 steps Each riser carved with hieroglyphs, over 2,000 individual glyph blocks recording the dynastic history of Copan's ruling lineage across roughly 350 years.

It is an astonishing document, a political history written in stone, meant to be read by anyone climbing the steps toward the temple at the top.

They had heard rumors of ancient cities hidden in the jungle, and they went looking.

What they found exceeded anything they had imagined.

At Copán, at Palenque, at Uxmal, at dozens of sites across the Yucatán and Guatemala, they encountered the remains of a monumental civilization.

Pyramids, palaces, carved monuments, ball courts, roads.

documents.

The True Year The baseline at Copán yielded accurate data on the exact length of the tropical year, a period varying by a difficult fraction from 365 full days.

The tropical year is the time measured by the

revolution of the Earth around the Sun and by the recurring seasons.

The Toltecs seemed originally to have been desert dwellers, but they extended their conquests over tribes living in the humid tropics and made much of cacao, rubber, copal, etc., obtained by trade and tribute from such subject peoples.

along the pacific coast below the isthmus of tehuantepec lies a rain belt containing ruined cities which flourished between one thousand and thirteen hundred a d or on the historical level of the toltec expansion the sculptural art at these sites resembles the works attributed to the olmecs in tabasco and vera cruz on the one hand and to the works of the chorotega of lower central america on the other one such ruin is cuyengola near the modern city of tehuantepec another occupies a ridge above tonalá and there is a cluster of sites in the environs of santa lucia cosumalhualpa in southern guatemala extending into western salvador

whether or not the sculptures of santa lucia cosumalhualpa are to be credited to the pipil a mexican tribe is far from certain but human sacrifice and other toltec religious ideas are plainly presented we find here elaborate speech scrolls comparable to those of xochicalco and the toltec work at also there is evidence of the ceremonial importance of cacao in this region the god of this economic plant being pictured in the form of a jaguar a peculiar type of pottery centered in southern guatemala and western salvador from which region it was distributed far and wide by trade Although a few examples of this ware are found at Copán, it is clear from the designs that most of the pieces belong to a time subsequent to the abandonment of this Mayan city.

The ware has a semi-glaze, which is the result of lead in the clay.

But there was one for the Maya, and so I started studying the Maya.

And in my, I guess, sophomore year, I signed up to do a field school in Honduras that was in a beautiful city called Copan.

And I called my dad and said, "Hey, I made it in this field school." And he said, "You're an idiot.

[laughs] You've never even been out of the country.

[laughs]

Right on.

Anyway, I, uh, I really fell in love with Copan, and that's where I met my mentor, Linda Schele, who's the woman who broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics.

And I followed her to the University of Texas, and there I got into the archeology side of it and signed up to do the deepest of the jungle surveys they allowed their students to do.

Oh, yeah.

That, uh, happened at, uh, Copán.

Um, you know, Copán is, uh, is an interesting place.

It's deep in the jungle.

It's, uh, it's accessible by a highway, uh, but, uh, it has the distinction of having the highest pyramid in all of the Yucatan.

Not at all.

If you read the Popol Vuh, which is their foundational cultural narrative, or if you look at the inscriptions on the stelae at Copán, they explicitly state that this hyper-advanced astronomical and mathematical knowledge was not something they organically developed over time.

So no trial and error.

Right.

were counting time carefully enough to hold together the day of a ritual the turning of the year the memory of ancestors the authority of kings and the deep ages of creation and when one great cycle ended they did not necessarily see darkness ahead they saw another number waiting to be counted and this is where the modern story begins Not in a Maya city.

Not in the carved inscriptions of Palenque or Copan.

Not in some secret tablet buried beneath a temple floor.

It began much later in books, television documentaries, New Age workshops, disaster forums, and eventually the fast-moving rumour machine of the early internet.

Uh, some of them we find their piles of rubble and, uh, and their sculptures are now, you know, dust.

Copan's a great example.

Copan has all along its courts lane are these macaw heads, full, big carved macaw heads that are looking down on the court.

Do we have any idea what that's supposed to symbolize, or it's just, just an artistic choice?

Well, there is a lot of bird iconography at Copan.

In fact, we thought for a while, its name is Xupe, and we thought that was bird gift for a while 'cause xu is a, a word for, uh, birds in general.

But we've changed that name a little bit.

In many temples at Yaxchilan, Tikal, etc., are found splendidly sculptured lintels of stone or wood.

At Copan we see wall sculptures that adorn the entrance to the sanctuary and at Palenque finely sculptured tablets let into the rear wall of the sanctuary.

elsewhere are occasional examples of mural paintings sculptured door-jams decorated interior steps etc the faade decorations of the earlier mayan structures are freer and more realistic than those of the later buildings in many cases they consist of figures of men serpents etc modelled in stucco or built up out of several nicely fitted blocks of stone grotesque faces also occur in the later styles decoration consists largely of masked panels which are grotesque front-view faces arranged to fill rectangular panels but there is an increasing amount of purely geometric ornament the masked panels represent in most instances a highly elaborated serpent's face which sometimes carries the special markings of one of the greater gods These panels, considered historically, pass through some interesting developments.

Angular representations of serpent heads in profile are sometimes used at the sides of doorways the supplementary monuments are stelae and altars these are monolithic sculptures that are often set up in definite relation to a building either on the terraces or at the foot of the stairway the stelae are great plinths or slabs of stone carved on one or more sides with the figures of priests and warriors loaded down with religious symbols the altars are small stones usually placed in front of the stelae many stelae and altars are set up in plazas and have no definite architectural quality minor arts while the richly ornamented temples and the great monoliths attract first attention as works of art the humbler products of the potter the weaver and the lapidary also attain to grace and dignity the mayas were expert potters and employed a variety of technical processes in the decoration of their wares such as painting modelling engraving and stamping we can only take time to examine a few examples of the best works leaving the commoner products practically undescribed suffice it to say that tripod dishes were much used as well as bowls bottle-necked vessels and cylindrical vases and that the common decorative use of hieroglyphics serves to mark off mayan pottery from that of other central american peoples the realistic designs are drawn in accordance with the highest principles of decorative art serpents monkeys jaguars various birds as well as priests and supernatural beings are used as subjects for the pottery embellishment geometric decoration is also much used the polychrome pottery is rare and exceptionally beautiful with designs related to religious subjects the background color of these cylindrical bases is usually orange or yellow the designs are outlined in black and the details filled in with delicate washes of red brown white etc the surface bears a high polish made by rubbing plate eighteen reproduces the design units on two bases from chamah guatemala the first example pictures a seated man with a wide-spreading headdress made of two conventional serpent heads from the ends of which issue the plumes of the quetzal the hieroglyphs are mayan day signs ben and imix on the left and khan and kaban on the right the second example presents a god before an altar this god has the face of an old man and his body is attached to a spiral shell this divinity was probably associated with the end of the year in the next illustration an engraved design on a bowl from northern yucatan is given A jaguar attired in the dress of man is seated in a wreath of water lilies.

Astronomical checks on these inscribed dates.

the artistic position of a monument may be used to validate the contemporaneous character of an inscribed date otherwise interpretable as referring to the past or future or it may serve to fix a repeating date in a single historical setting the events in the traditional history of the books of chilambalam meagre enough when taken alone have the valuable quality of reaching back into the time of the first empire when the use of dates on temples and monuments was much in vogue they permit a richly documented past to be tied in as it were to a poorly documented terminal period before the matter of the ancient inscribed dates can be understood however the somewhat complicated mechanism of the mayan calendar must be explained as well as the system of hieroglyphs and the notation of numbers then there is the problem of correlation which necessitates delicate adjudications of evidence finally we must take up the proofs which demonstrate the astronomical achievements of the mayas which in reverse provide checks upon the correctness of the day for day correlation itself we must proceed slowly and carefully without much following of byways however attractive they may appear we will begin with stratigraphy and stylistic sequence sequences in art The study of Mayan ceramics reveals developments as regard shapes, fabrics, and designs.

Specimens recovered from sealed cysts under Stele at Copan establish true associations with the higher forms of art and can be used far and wide in comparison with pottery finds in Salvador, Guatemala, etc.

by land has found stratigraphic sequences in a collection of funerary vessels obtained at holmul where graves occurred under the floors and within the filled-in chambers of a buried temple As regards sculpture, we find at Copan a remarkably homogeneous series of stelae, on which a royal or priestly personage stands erect and in front view.