|
|
|
|
|
|
Naj Tunich: Entrance to the Maya Underworld by JAMES E. BRADY and ANDREA STONE |
Spectrographic analysis of Naj
Tunich pictographs |
|
|
||
|
The recently
discovered Naj Tunich Cave promises to provide valuable information on Maya
art and writing. More than 500 hieroglyphs were found here, along with
paintings, artifacts and petroglyphs. (Detail, far left) A typical view of a
passage and (next detail) the lighted chamber at the floor level, one of six
interconnected rooms before the balcony, give some idea of what the cave
looked like. The ceiling in the entrance (next detail) is covered with
stalactites and petroglyphs of human faces were found on the walls (detail,
far right). Perhaps the most beautiful hieroglyphic text in the cave
(background, detail of text), this inscription contains two dates
corresponding to August 25, A.D. 744 and August 20, A.D. 772 but it is not
certain what these dates refer to. Caves, the
world over, are physically and psychologically powerful places. They move us
to deep and primordial responses, and constitute the archetypal place of
transition between the upper world and the underworld. From time immemorial
they have been important in humanity's religious evolution as we well know
from the Paleolithic cave art at such famous sites as Lascaux in France and
Altamira in Spain. For the
ancient Maya, too, caves were considered sacred sites, ones that functioned
as the all-important juncture between the ordinary world and the underworld.
They were the abode of the underworld gods, especially the vital deities
controlling rain and fertility. Even today among contemporary Maya, the rich
traditions that surrounded caves in ancient times are intact in such
countries as Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, where traditional Maya folkways
still flourish. The modern Tzotzil Maya, for instance, who live in Highland
Chiapas, Mexico, still believe that rain gods live in caves and cause it to
rain by driving the clouds and lightning out of the caves and into the sky.
They also believe that caves constitute the abode of their village ancestors
and provide the pathways used by the souls of the dead when they make their
journey into the underworld. Now, in the
Maya lowlands of Guatemala near Belize, a major new Maya cave is being
studied. This cave is so rich in artwork, artifacts, tombs, and monumental
architecture that it effectively revolutionizes our picture of caves as an
element of Maya social and religious life, particularly among the elite. The
site possesses unique features, and gives evidence of child sacrifice, ritual
bloodletting, and intercourse - sacred activates which may have been
accompanied by alerted states of consciousness induced by alcoholic or
hallucinogenic substances. Members of Maya royalty may be included among
those who were buried there. A sacred site from as early as the late
Preclassic period, around 100 B.C., this cave continued in use until the Late
Classic era (A.D. 550-900), although its greatest use occurred during the
Early Classic phase from A.D. 250-550. Known as
Naj Tunich - pronounced Nah Too-Neech - this cave has caused especially great
excitement because of the large number of Late Classic inscriptions and
figures of the highest aesthetic quality painted on the walls of the cave -
500 paintings all told, a surprisingly large number given the extreme rarity
of paintings in Maya caves. Until the discovery of Naj Tunich no single Maya
cave was known to contain more than 85 glyphs and a few figurative images,
and caves with any Classic-style paintings could be counted on the fingers of
one hand. Indeed, the magnitude of this find might be likened to the
discovery of a new Maya codex, of which only four are now known. Even more
important, the many inscriptions and scenes evident at Naj Tunich provide a
new context for the interpretation of Maya art and writing. Naj Tunich
lies in the foothills of the Maya Mountains, which rise in the southeastern
corner of the department of El Peten, Guatemala, five kilometers from the
Belizean border. The cave was discovered early in 1980 by a Kekchi Maya
Indian, Bernabe Pop, while he was hunting: Bernabe's dogs chased a peccary
down a dark train, and his pursuit led him into the enormous entrance chamber
of one of the greatest discoveries of Maya archaeology. Pop and his
father, Emilio, explored the cave on a number of subsequent visits and
discovered the inscriptions. The Pops revealed the existence of the cave to
Mike De Vine, an American living in Poptun, who acted as a guide to tourists
interested in visiting the site. The first visitor to the cave with an
anthropological background was Yale linguist Pierre Ventur, Photographer
Jacque VanKirk, whom De Vine took to Naj Tunich to photograph the drawings,
reported the cave to the Instituto de Antropologia e Historia de Guatemala
and provided the photo- graphs for a story that appeared in Prensa Libre
at the end of August 1980. In January of 1981 a National Geographic
film crew spent several days at the cave to gather material for an article
that appeared in their August issue. Two spelunkers, Ernie Garza and Karen
Witte, mapped the cave in February 1981 and published a short description of
the cave in the July 1981 National Speleological Society
News. Later they produced versions of their map for both National
Geographic and author James Brady, then director of the Asociacion de
Cultura Maya, a non-profit archaeological research foundation. During a visit
in February 1981 by Brady and photographer VanKirk, all of the inscriptions
were photographically recorded and plans were made for a more extensive
survey, permission for which was granted by Francis Polo Sifontes, Director
of the Instituto de Antropologia. The work was undertaken in late June and
early July 1981 with a five- member crew that included co- author Andrea
Stone. With the map supplied by spelunker Garza, the cave was surveyed,
artifacts were located, counted and mapped, and detailed maps were made of
several areas, including a very complicated one of the balcony. Stone, at the
time a University of Texas graduate student doing doctoral research in
Guatemala, volunteered to draw, measure and record all of the cave's artwork.
She plans to finish the catalog of drawings during the 1986-87 academic year
while holding a Dumbarton Oaks fellowship. A second
season of work approved by the director of the Instituto de Antropologia was
carried out in March and April 1982. During this time all surface artifacts
were removed from the cave, several additional maps were made, excavations on
the upper level of the balcony were undertaken, and one of the looted tombs
was cleared. In addition, an iron grate was installed across the entrance of
the tunnel to protect the drawings. In April
1984, the Instituto de Antropologia approved the loan of the Naj Tunich
artifacts for study at UCLA and later approved a short field season in April
1986, during which several test pits were excavated in front of the mouth of
the cave. The 1981 and 1982 fieldwork was supported by the Asociacion Tikal
and the Asociacion de Cultura Maya. More recently the UCLA Graduate Division
and the UCLA Friends of Archaeology have supported the fieldwork and also
provided generous grants to support technical analyses. What follows here is
a preliminary report on the significant features and artwork of Naj Tunich. The
entrance hall into which Bernabe first made his way proved to be an enormous
chamber, 30 meters deep and running 150 meters east to west. Running off this
entrance chamber was a tunnel system, generally 15 meters in diameter, that
extended for nearly 300 meters before branching off into two forks, one
leading east, the other leading northwest. A standing pool, and another that
no longer holds water, were discovered in the cave as well- both having
functioned as ceremonial centers for the early Maya. .It turns
out that even before one enters the cave, the site has unique features. The
entrance to the cave lies at the end of a ravine, 50 meters in front of which
stand a pair of low mounds which effectively span the ravine; these mounds
appear to constitute a kind of gateway to the sacred precinct, and are
possibly the remnants of platforms that restricted access to the cave. These
mounds have yet to be excavated, but if they do prove to be the remnants of a
gateway type of construction, they will be the first such among the known
corpus of Maya caves. (Of perhaps 100 caves discovered, about two dozen have
been reported in some detail. ) Before we
look at the specific features of the cave, it is important to establish why
the fact of its use by members of the Maya elite is so important
archaeologically. The reason for the paucity of caves with elite associations
lies in the highly stratified nature of ancient Maya society, in which
rituals, religious beliefs and even places of worship might differ between
the priestly elite and the common peasant. With few exceptions-Naj Tunich is
now the chief one-lowland Maya caves were devoted to use by more common folk.
That Naj Tunich was a place of worship among the elite is reasonably
established by the massive architectural construction, the presence of elite
burials, the abundant artifact assemblage, which includes jade and polychrome
pottery, and finally, and most decisively, by the impressive paintings it
contains.
The massive
entrance hall is filled with semi-daylight making its way in from outside,
and it is a truly impressive space. Its stalactite-covered ceiling rises 30
meters above the level mud floor. A natural rise occurs in the eastern third
of this hall which the Maya modified with an elaborate system of retaining
walls; the areas behind these walls were filled and leveled to create a
balcony which rises 14 meters, in two broad tiers, from the entrance floor.
The sheer scale of construction here exceeds anything yet reported for a Maya
cave anywhere. Of the
three locations especially sacred to the Maya inside the cave, the first is
the two-tiered balcony. The lower level of the balcony contains fewer
artifacts than the upper, so the lower level was probably less intensively
used. On the other hand, a shaft leading down from the lower level contained
six small chambers, where the remains of at least two children were found,
possibly sacrificial victims. These same chambers also contained numerous
ceremonial objects including miniature vessels, incense burners and bone
needles, whose ceremonial role we shall return to later. Several other
passages led off of the lower level of the balcony, but none were as large or
as elaborate as the shaft. These other passages, too, contained evidence of
human activity, but it is clear that none of them could have held more than
one or two persons at a time. Even diminutive Maya workers taking part in the
excavating had a hard time squeezing down them. The
question of child sacrifice is a problematic one, but we believe that the
evidence at Naj Tunich points in that direction. Of the 20 individuals so far
recovered from the cave, four were small children and four others were
juveniles. The best preserved skeleton is that of a small child, five to six
years old, whose skull bears three holes that show no signs of healing. This
child is buried in a shallow grave in the rear of the central tunnel, and may
have been put to death for ritual purposes as a sacrifice to one of the Maya
gods, particularly the rain god. David Pendergast of the Royal Ontario Museum
has discovered an analogous child's skull at Eduardo Quiroz Cave in Belize
which also bears several unhealed holes. Pendergast speculates that this
child, three to five years old, had been a sacrificial victim; and the child
killed at Naj Tunich may have been one as well, given the lack of grave goods
and the haphazard nature of the grave. The skeletons of the other children in
the cave were too fragmentary or too disturbed to allow us to say a great
deal about their function in the cave or the cause of death; but it is known
that the Maya practiced ritual sacrifice of children to the rain god, who was
widely seen as residing in a cave. The upper
level of the balcony in the entrance hall was the site of six structures
which we believe to have been tombs. All six had been looted, and may have
been looted in ancient times, to judge from a large stalagmite that has
formed on top of one partially destroyed wall. So far, only one–Structure
2–has been thoroughly excavated; three are particularly important because
they were masonry structures. The other three were simpler and consisted of
adaptations of natural features in the cave. Two were alcoves which had been
sealed with a stone wall, whereas the other contained a doorway – a feature
indicating that it may have had another function before it served as a tomb.
Probably, at the time the body was laid on the floor, the doorway was blocked
with stones and a second wall was constructed in front of the first to hide
all traces of the sealed door. The three
tombs that were actually built as tombs are the first of this kind ever
reported from a Maya cave, and they clearly point to the elite status of
their occupants. The floor of Structure 2, the only one scientifically
explored so far, lies entirely above the ground and was leveled by cutting
the protruding stalagmites and then paving the area with flat stones. The
walls of this tomb are nearly a meter thick. They were constructed of
limestone blocks facing the inner and outer surfaces of a rubble core. Since
this tomb was filled with several inches of ash and partially burned beams,
we can surmise that it originally had a wooden ceiling or roof; but the early
looting and subsequent toppling of the walls have left few of the original
contents intact. Fragments
of human skeletal material were found on the floor, and several jade beads
and a small plain jade plaque were found in the rubble in front of the tomb.
An incomplete rim of a vessel found here bears a text with two glyphs
associated from Maya kingship, which loosely translated might read "lord
of the office, lord of succession;" so it is virtually certain that this
was the burial place of a member of the elite, and possibly of Maya royalty.
It is a shame that this tomb's state of poor preservation deprives us of more
knowledge about an important individual. The upper
portion of the balcony has yet another interesting feature, a room that contained
a shallow pool artificially dammed by the ancient Maya. This room is somewhat
lower than the rest of the upper level, and in former times water drained
through it to the floor of the entrance hall, until at some time the water
created a new exit or drainage for itself. The pool no longer holds water.
Bodies of standing water were considered sacred in Maya religion and are
often filled with offerings. But to have a body of standing water inside a
cave would intensify its sacred nature, so one can easily appreciate the
importance of this pool on the balcony with its spectacular location.
Offerings were thrown into the pool from a ledge above; some of the ceramics
can still be seen cemented to the floor by calcite.
The
artifacts found in this complex part of the cave were both abundant and
important. On the ledge overlooking the pool, to begin with, large quantities
of Preclassic pottery (100 B.C.-A.D. 250) were found. The quantity of
artifacts here indicates that this area of the cave was one of the most
significant from the earliest times. The heavy concentration of artifacts on
top of the platform included not only ceramics, but an obsidian blade,
several shell pendants, and a pottery pendant. While most of the ceramics
were Early Classic in date, as we said, we also recovered and restored a
highly polished Late Classic bowl with faces modeled on two sides. The three
small alcoves against the cave wall opposite the platform also contained
evidence of a great deal of use. Mixed in with charcoal and broken pottery
were several obsidian blades, a shell pendant and a small corn cob. The final
area of intense ceremonial activity in Naj Tunich was discovered at the end
of the east branch of the tunnel system at the farthest point from the cave
entrance-a deep shaft five meters wide at its mouth, dubbed the "Silent
Well" by an earlier team of explorers, Ernie Garza and Karen Witte of
the National Speleological Society. The approach to this well slopes
dramatically downward and the floor of the tunnel turns into a deep layer of
mud. Bare footprints in clay along the cave walls skirting this mud remind us
of ancient Maya pilgrims making their way to this site. The well has yet to
be explored, but we surmise that it, too, was very likely the receptacle of
ceremonial offerings. The
evidence for intense activity occurs near this well, under a projecting
portion of the cave wall. Here we encountered a deep midden of broken
pottery, charcoal and burnt stone. Once again we found Preclassic pottery,
but the use of the well was not limited to the Preclassic period. Found in the
debris. was a Late Classic jade head indicating that the Silent Well remained
ritually important throughout the cave's long period of continuous use.
Preclassic ceramics in the cave as a whole, however, are restricted to the
three major areas of ceremonial use. Again, the
period of greatest activity within the cave seems to have occurred during the
Early Classic period (A.D. 250-550), which is when the balcony platform was
built. What caused this florescence is uncertain, but it seems to have been
heralded by the appearance of large amounts of Protoclassic (A.D. 50-250)
pottery. While Late Classic artifacts are rarer, it is from the Late Classic
that the inscriptions and paintings date, and several of the tombs may date
from this period as well. Quite clearly, Naj Tunich was an important
religious shrine for centuries before the paintings were executed: and
indeed, it is quite probable that the cave was chosen to house this
impressive corpus of paintings precisely because of its established position
of ceremonial importance.
Such
considerations, however, leave us with this interesting question: If caves
were supposed to represent sacred spaces in Maya cosmology, why are the elite
associations with caves so visibly few in number? The answer remains
uncertain, but we can propose the following. Throughout Mesoamerica from the
time of the Olmec (ca. 1200 B.C.) to the time of the Conquest, we find caves
symbolically portrayed as the open mouth of the jaguar, serpent or earth
monster. This motif, adorning temple door- ways, drew on the sacredness of
.caves by symbolically creating a cave in the urban center. The
sanctification of such centers, moreover, was one of the powerful ways in
which Mesoamerican rulers helped to legitimize their divine authority, and
hence their political control. The elite class, then, would have little
interest in patronizing any cave – real or otherwise – other than the
symbolic temple/caves which buttressed their own authority. The peasants,
meanwhile, continued to make offerings in their caves as they had done before
the elite controlled the Maya lowlands, and as they have continued to do long
after the elites disappeared. Whether
this explanation is entirely correct or not, we have the unique advantage in
Naj Tunich of being able to look at the paintings themselves for assistance
in interpreting the cave's importance. To begin with, we should note the
variety of motifs which appear in these paintings, which range in size from
four centimeters to 1.7 meters. One group depicts men either next to or
drinking from a bowl; another group depicts the act of autosacrifice by
males, which most often involved piercing the penis with a sharp instrument
and dripping the blood on paper to be burned. Yet another group relates to
the cave as the abode of the underworld gods. The cave also contains a
surprisingly large number of human profiles, 18 in all, and, quite
significantly, the most explicit portrayal of sexual intercourse in Maya art.
The many inscriptions in the cave provide a new context for the
interpretation of Maya writing as well. The
painting of a man associated with a bowl may well reflect a ritual, as we said
at the outset, in which men sought to achieve altered states of consciousness
by ingesting mind-altering substances. The scene in question may depict men
consuming balche, an alcoholic drink made of fermented honey, water and the
bark of the balche tree, or perhaps some other mind-altering substance – a
possibility we derive from an important paper by Barbara MacLeod of the
University of Texas and the late Dennis Puleston of the University of
Minnesota, according to which a major focus of ritual activity in Maya caves
was to achieve altered states of consciousness. In the painting, the bowl is
held by a figure wearing a deer headdress and facing a dwarf, identified by
his stocky build and pinched facial features. In the murals at Bonampak, it
is clear that music was an integral part of elite ceremonial life. At Naj
Tunich there are two .scenes depicting groups of musicians playing drums and
wind instruments. A portion of what appears to be a bone flute as well as a
number of broken whistles have been recovered in excavation. The artwork
depicting the act of bloodletting is of particular importance, since although
blood- letting is often shown in Maya art it is rarely so graphic as in the
paintings at Naj Tunich. In conservative depictions, a male figure, often
richly garbed, holds an object, symbolically representing the bloodletting
instrument, near or below his waist. In contrast, at Naj Tunich we see a nude
squatting figure with his penis prominently represented, and a standing
figure who appears to be looking away as he holds a bloodletter near his
groin. A third such figure stands with his eyes turned heavenward while he
holds his hands near his groin, a clear signal of his intentions. It is in
the context of these paintings that the obsidian blades and bone needles
found in the cave become important, for these are the instruments that
probably served as bloodletters. Further support for bloodletting comes from
a fragment of a cylindrical polychrome vase found in the chambers below the
first level of the balcony, which shows a seated figure with liquid falling
from his hand. This posture is generally thought to depict the ceremonial
scattering of blood following autosacrifice. What
accounts for the graphic nature of the bloodletting scenes in the art and
ritual of Naj Tunich. We must remember how the interior of a cave can affect
us: the fantastic terrain, the unsettling effect of darkness, and unexplained
noises make caves superb settings for extraordinary experiences, at once more
profound and more private than experiences in the daylight world. The
presumably restricted access to Naj Tunich, in combination with these
factors, may well have loosened the restraints of formality seen in Maya
public art. Such changes in the normal patterns of things might also help to
account for the depiction of intercourse. The scene in question shows a man
and woman locked in embrace, accompanied by a fragmentary hieroglyphic text.
The male figure is nude and sexually aroused, while the elegant female figure
– identifiable from the long queue of hair trailing down her back – is
clothed in a triangular garment hugging her hips. This vivid but nonetheless
enigmatic scene may be related in its meaning to the bloodletting scenes
already considered. The work of Linda Schele, of the University of Texas, on
the inscriptions and scenes of the Palenque Cross Group has revealed that the
male bloodletting rite emulated the female procreative and nurturing role.
Schele's work has also established that the male ruler of the Maya also used
the bloodletting act to nourish the gods. In a more general sense, then,
bloodletting was possibly connected to the broader idea of fecundity; and
significantly, the scene of blatant sexual intercourse at Naj Tunich is
flanked by bloodletting scenes on either side. The amorous couple then may be
a restatement, couched in more literal terms, of the desire for fecundity and
fertility.
Several
paintings suggest that the cave is the abode of the underworld gods. One
painting near the Silent Well depicts a pair of figures whom Michael Coe of
Yale University has likened to Hunahpu and Xblanque, heroes of the Papal Vuh,
the sacred book of the Quiche Maya, whose drama is acted out in an underworld
setting called Xibalba. This connecting of the cave to underworld mytho-drama
may also be reflected in four paintings that depict ball- players. The Papal
Vuh reveals that a ritual ballgame took place in the underworld. Moreover,
Maya ball- court markers are often framed with a quatrefoil, a symbol of the
entrance into caves or the earth's interior. At Naj Tunich, three of the
depicted ball- players face a large rubber ball and the profile of a stepped
ballcourt structure, similar to ballcourt architecture portrayed on
polychrome pottery. The fourth painting shows a scene in which several human
figures appear to be paying obeisance to a ballplayer. The final
category of paintings comprises the human profiles – again, 18 in all. The
majority of them measure between four and seven centimeters in height; but
the largest is an elegant petroglyph 18 centimeters high, located near the
ground in a narrow flowstone passage. A similar profile has been found in the
Olmec cave of Oxtotitlan. We do not know what these sketchy profiles signify,
but their striking continuity over a 1,500- year period argues, at the very
least, for their importance in cave symbolism. Finally, we
come to the hieroglyphic texts, whose repetitive structure holds out the
promise that they might eventually be deciphered. Some are clear enough: 17
are "Calendar Round" dates – cyclical dates resulting from the
permutation of the ancient Maya 260-day and 365-day calendars – spanning a
thirty-three-and-a-half-year period from A.D. 737 to 771. Dates tend to
cluster near the summer and winter solstices, a potentially significant
pattern inasmuch as the summer dates fall close to the onset of the rainy
season, a time when rain-god propitiation might have been practiced at Naj
Tunich. Moreover, most of these same summer dates are also found among the
hieroglyphs accompanying the blood- letting scenes and the scene of
copulation. A picture
emerges of agricultural-fertility rites that are associated both with this
area of the cave and with the rainy season. Indeed, during our 1982 field
season, a group of Kekchi Maya inquired about our cave because they believed
it to be the abode of the corn god, and they wanted to make offerings in the
cave for a bountiful harvest. Three small corn cobs recovered from Naj Tunich
reinforce these connections. Both at Naj Tunich and at other caves, moreover,
manos and metates – stones for grinding maize – have been found as offerings,
possibly in keeping with the important function of Maya caves as sites of
rain and agricultural fertility rites. What of the
dead? It is not surprising that we find references in ethnographic,
enthnohistoric and archaeological sources to Maya burials in caves. Analysis
of the skeletal material at Naj Tunich, however, as we have already seen,
indicates that the cave was more than a cemetery. The skeletons of the
children who may have been sacrificial victims give poignant testimony to the
profound and some- times grisly need the ancient Maya had to propitiate their
deities. Since their
discovery, the Naj Tunich paintings. have been in constant peril. The
paintings were done with a pigment which, unlike paint, never "set"
and therefore smears when touched. Great damage has already been done by
visitors who couldn't resist touching the artwork. About two weeks after our
first visit a looter attempted to steal one of the paintings by sawing
through the column on which it was painted. Fortunately, the crystalline
structure of the column was too tough for his saw, but the at. tempt left the
painting covered with a fine white dust. Immediately after the incident, the
Guatemalan Institute of Anthropology and History posted guards, and through
the cooperation of a number of parties further precautions were taken. The
Tikal Association, a group of concerned Guatemalans, paid for the construction
of an iron gate at the entrance to the tunnel. The Institute supplied the
workers; our project supported the workers and paid for the mules to haul
their supplies to the site so that the gate could be installed. Despite these
measures, one night early in 1986 looters cut the lock on the gate and dug a
number of pits in the hopes of finding artifacts. The Institute has doubled
the number of guards as a result. We hope to
return to Naj Tunich in the Spring of 1987 to complete the scientific
exploration of the cave and to see if something can be done to protect the
paintings. It would be a tragedy if this fragile treasure which passed more
than a millennium in obscurity does not survive a decade of celebrity. |
||
|
Web design by J McLarren |
||
