66 Maya Portrait Stelae (Mesoamerica)
Kings in Stone
Stela 51, Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico (731 C.E.).
A Maya ruler in ritual dress (Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico D.F.)
In 1839, American lawyer and amateur archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens and English artist Frederick Catherwood were the first outsiders to venture into the rainforests of Central America. They brought back their romanticized accounts and drawings of the remains of ancient Maya civilization to an eager England. In their publications, Stephens and Catherwood conveyed that they had uncovered the ruins of a great civilization that was uniquely American, one that had developed without contact with Egypt, India, or China.
Among the many strange and wonderful sites they encountered, it was the monuments that most aroused their interest and sparked their Victorian sensibility for engaging past civilizations. In regard to these hefty carved stones, Stephens penned the following excerpt:
Standing as they do in the depths of the forest, silent and solemn, strange in design, excellent in sculpture, rich in ornament . . . their uses and purposes and whole history so entirely unknown. . . .
Over the past thirty years, scholars have made substantial advances in understanding the ‘uses and purposes’ of Maya stone sculptures, and of the ancient peoples that produced them. This progress is due in no small part to developments in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, which has escalated in recent decades. Epigraphers and art historians have labored to reconstruct the history and culture of the flourishing Classic period (c. 250-900 C.E.) expressed on the sculptures found throughout México, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize.
We now understand that the sculptors who chiseled these monuments were commissioned by privileged elites who lorded over vast city-states. These regional political and geographic partitions were dominated by singular powerful city-centers that vied for control of land and resources. Such cities were immense, and within them architects built grand pyramids and temples embellished with sculptures. Sculpted stone was an enduring record, and as early explorers witnessed, the remains of hundreds of carved monoliths still grace the ruins of these ancient Maya cities.
Portrait of ’18-Rabbit’ from Stela A, Copán, Honduras,
731 C.E. (photo adapted: Dennis Jarvis)
A Medium for Political and Religious Rhetoric
The stone monuments over which Stephens and Catherwood marveled were crucial to the social and political cohesion of ancient Maya city-states. While small-scale art objects were cloistered behind the walls of privileged homes and courts, larger stone sculptures served as the principal medium for presenting political and religious rhetoric to the public.
The most vital and imposing format was the ‘stela’, an upright flat slab of stone worked in relief on one, two, or four faces. Their placement at the base of immense pyramids or in open plazas facing small stage-lik