Dr. Mark Van Stone

Did Spacemen Visit the Ancient Maya?

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:47:34 +0000

A university student in Memphis poses the question:
Did the Ancient Maya have extraterrestrial help to achieve their civilization?

Ever since I was a child wondering at the night sky, I have hoped and wished to see a UFO. I collected stories from magazines and newspapers about them; read all I could get my hands on, of the literature by Donald Kehoe, Project Blue Book, etc. But it never happened; I have never laid eyes on a flying saucer, or even a suspicious moving point of light.
I still would welcome a proof of their existence, but to date I have never seen any evidence that anyone is out there. As a scientist, I must conclude that, without more substantial evidence, we have never been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence. As a scientist, I am also impressed by the arithmetic that suggests overwhelmingly that we are not alone in the galaxy. Everywhere we look we seem to find planetary systems, and a calculable portion of these fall in the same range of life-sustaining features that we enjoy here on the thin habitable skin of the Earth. If only one out of a million solar systems is inhabited, then there are 200,000 such star systems in our galaxy. If we are just an average planet, then perhaps half of these will have a civilization more advanced than ours. That’s still 100,000 potential star-sailing civilizations. As far as I am concerned, it’s certain that they are out there.
So why aren’t they here too? Why haven’t some of them come here and conquered us just as Europeans conquered the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and most of Africa? I think it is simple economics. The Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across; that is, it has a radius of 50,000 light-years.
Let’s assume that star-sailing civilizations within 50 light-years might consider it worth the expense to send a probe to Earth. That radius of 50 light-years constitutes about one-millionth the area of the Galaxy. Of the 100,000 candidates, the chance of any one of them falling within 50 light-years is thus about 10%. You have to expand the radius to 150 light-years to get a reasonable chance of finding one of those 100,000 civilizations.
All this is predicated on my vaporous guess of one in a million stars harboring starfaring civilizations… If the proportion be higher, the radius shrinks, and if there are fewer, then they are likely even farther away. But in any case, suppose they determined which planets were worth visiting by picking up our radio signals. We’ve only had radio for a century. They’d have to be within 100 light-years to even know where to look for us.
Then there is the cost. In Star Trek and Star Wars, we assume the existence of Warp Drive, some way of violating the speed of light, called c. As far as our primitive physics is concerned, c is a speed limit for any travel. Suppose you live near Sirius (8.6 light-years away), and want to visit Earth. Unless you have Warp Drive, you might, with tremendous expense of energy, be able to attain a speed of, say, 1/10 of c. It would take you 86 years to get here. And 86 more to get back. Who would volunteer for such a mission? They’d spend their lives in space, and only their kids and grandkids would be able to visit Earth. And only their grandkids might be able to return with a report. Consider what it cost to send men to the Moon –so much we haven’t done so since 1972. The Apollo Program cost about 25 billion 1972 dollars, which would be about 100 billion today. We, the wealthiest nation on Earth, have chosen not to spend that kind of money again, not for Mars, not even for the Moon again… . The Moon is like a quarter-million miles away. How much more would it cost to mount a spaceship to the stars? Who has that kind of money? Add to that, a starship to Sirius and back (or vice versa) would not produce any benefit for at least 170 years… . Who would undertake such an expense, for a possible result no-one sees for five generations? I remain skeptical that any race, human or not, is so far-sighted.
Okay, you say, when Warp Drive is invented, the time issue will no longer be a problem. Maybe not. But who is to say that Warp will be less expensive than going the long way? I would bet, if it can exist (and no-one has come close to explaining how it could), it will cost more, much more. Remember the Concorde? From 1976 to 2003, one could fly New York to Paris in three hours. For a ticket price that rose to over $8000 by 2001. Yeah, supersonic flight is possible, but it cost so much that they closed it down.
Maybe we will someday discover how to Warp our way across the universe in less than twenty lifetimes. But it’ll probably use energy the equivalent of the sun’s entire output for a year, and cost the GDP of ten major nations… .
This is why I think we –and the ancient Maya– have never hosted any Visitors from Space. As likely as it is that intelligent life is up there, it is even more likely that they cannot afford to get here.

The question also brings up the issue of Diffusionism. To say that the Maya needed the help of Spacemen (or Vikings, or Egyptians, or whomever) to create their civilization is simply racist. It is to say they were incapable of building pyramids, or inventing writing, or taming the jungle, by themselves. It is to say that they are inferior to White Folks, who did build pyramids, did invent writing, and did tame their environment (for a while, but that’s another question!)… . I maintain that Amerindians, and Africans, and Polynesians, and any people on Earth, are capable of all these things (under the right circumstances), and to ascribe their stupendous achievements to “superior” visitors, simply because we cannot conceive of having the means or the will to do it ourselves, is nothing more than lack of imagination. Racist lack of imagination. And to say that they had to have help from Extraterrestrials is racism against the whole human race. Now that is low self-esteem!
The Maya were indeed marvelous and awe-inspiring, and they were so by themselves, without any help from outside.
We humans are shortsighted, violent, and self-destructive. But we are also generous, loving, and full of glorious creativity. The seesaw of history is simply the swing back and forth between these qualities.

Yaxchilan, Jewel of the Usumacinta

admin — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 02:30:39 +0000

A four- to five-hour trek by road and a one-hour speedboat ride down the broad Usumacinta (which forms here the border between Mexico and Guatemala) brings the intrepid traveler to the riverbank-city-ruin of Yaxchilan, strategically located on a forested oxbow-peninsula, its main plaza winding along a plateau a hundred feet above the river. Along this meandering sacred space its kings erected several dozen small palace-temples. Kind of like the Washington Mall, I reckon. Maya ceremonial structures like this always had lintels over the doorways, usually made of hard sapodilla wood, which resists rot and decay for centuries. Eventually nature has her way, and nearly all these lintels rot away, letting a bit of the wall above them collapse. Only a few such lintels survive, usually on high temples, above the tree line at Tikal and a couple other places where the wood was allowed to dry out.
But at Yaxchilan and nearby Bonampak, the architects utilized a fine, tough limestone for their lintels, and Yaxchilan has yielded to archeologists (and ruin-raiders) about sixty of them, beautifully carved in relief. Unlike the more-public stelae, which stand out in the plaza for all to see, lintels are much more private. Only two or three people at a time can standin their doorways and admire them. The carvings announce political-religious propaganda just like their more public brethren, but the messages are more personal, meant for an elite audience.
Only a few of her lintels remain in place; most have been taken indoors for safekeeping. Those at Bonampak still retain their original color.
But the city, sprawling along the riverbank-ridge and climbing up the hill, broods silently among the riotous jungle, its stones kept free of invading roots and insect-hives only by an assiduous army of cleaners. As in most Maya ruins, 95% of the buildings still sleep under the soil, indistinguishable from other hills or mountains except for their sharp slopes and regular arrangement. The exposed five percent are awesome, hulking and evocative, made all the more so when one notices their numerous sleeping siblings.
Entering the site, the first building one encounters is the “Labyrinth”, a rambling palace that one enters from the rear. Although living in a stone palace must have offered some advantages over the typical thatch-and-stick houses that have offered shelter here for millennia… But I don’t know what these are. In an environment that reminds me of summers in Texas and Alabama, perhaps the thick stone walls retained the cool of winter, like caves worldwide. Also a stone palace, when attacked, resists both battering rams and fire. But the dark, narrow, corbeled passages of the Labyrinth, weeping with percolating moisture, are hardly an inviting home. The air is thick, hot, still, stifling. There seems to be no outlet for smoky lamps; the rooms could only rarely have been cheerily lit; after a few minutes the smoke from a Maya chandelier would have filled the passages. There must have been some religious perquisite, some aspect of Underworld-imitation, whose mystery, dark forces lurking, offset all the inconvenience. I have little doubt that the rulers spent most of their nights on gazebo-like sleeping-porches up top, where they would catch the breezes. I have no doubt that ancient Maya weavers were as skillful as their Egyptian counterparts; surely the ruling class had mosquito netting. Maybe that was one use for the ubiquitous “curtain holes” we see all over Palenque.
Today, the Labyrinth supports a variety of creepy wildlife, mainly bats and spiders. The arachnid pictured here had a legspan about the size of my open hand; I speculated at the function of its specialized legs: claws like a scorpion, okay, but that third pair of legs, why twice as long as the others? The charming little bats hanging from the vaults objected to our flashlights, glaring balefully at us while we tried to get a good picture before they grumpily retreated back into the darkness. Surprisingly agile fliers. Some seemed to revel in the knee-jerk terror they inspired as they dive-bombed us, swooping back and forth down the hallways. The Labyrinth is well-named; its hallways unpredictably tunnel to and fro through the structure, here and there opening into a room with a stone sleeping-bench, climbing up a few steps and then turning abruptly again…
We emerged into the Northwestern Plaza, the moss-clad stone walls of several rambling buildings surrounding a ceremonial (or perhaps merely amiable) open space. The archaeologists left a few towering trees standing among them, shading the area with high canopy. Some of these are sequoia-like giants, vine-festooned trunks disappearing into the canopy, impossible to do justice to in a photograph.
The best sculptural monuments of Yaxchilan are now mostly protected, either under roofs, or safely stored in museums –I saw about a dozen in Mexico City–, while many eroded altars and other sculptures are moldering peacefully away, covered with leaves and moss.
One of the best features of the ruin is due to its comparative inacessibility: besides our group we saw only about ten other tourists the whole day. Not nearly enough customers to support the trinket-sellers who infest places like Chichen and Palenque. Thanks be to Chaak and K’awiil. Only the sounds of our hushed “Oh, wow”s, the keening cicadas, hooting monkeys, and a host of jungle birdcalls accompanied our tour.
Since I last visited Yaxchilan a k’atun ago, archaeologists have erected a dozen or so stelae, protected from weather under palapas… which also block the raking sunlight which makes for great photographs. As a glypher, I beeline for these monuments and shoot them from afar and close up, in detail and in stereo, in order to capture as much of their essence as possible. In particular, two hieroglyphic texts caught my attention. One is a taller-than-man-sized speleothem (a stalactite I believe) carved like a stela, from which a good portion has unfortunately spalled off. This stands before Structure 33, standing on a hill far above the plaza, accessible by an arduous climb up a long staircase. The view from up here must have been great when the city was in its prime and the trees had all be cut.
The other inscription also adorns Str. 33: a series of low, wide carvings, called a Hieroglyphic Stairway, depicting ballgames. In each, a huge ball bounces down steps toward a ruler in ballgame gear, ready to return the volley. Some of the balls in Ballgame iconography are marked as if to tell us what they contain; here, it is a trussed captive. One of these scenes I feature in my book “2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya”, because the text has a very unusual date. This date (actually a special kind of time-interval, called a “Distance Number”) comprises 13 digits. This indicates the event needed placement very specifically in a very large time-span; I liken it to a date like “21st June, 2011 AD, Holocene epoch, …” A normal (and standard) Maya Long Count date needs only five digits, and spans a 5000-year interval. The extra digits expand the scope of this time-location by a factor of 20-to the-eighth-power, or 25,600,000,000, so we are talking on the order of 128,000,000,000,000 years, considerably longer than since the Big Bang…
Enough for now. Every trip to the jungle should include a lost city or two, without commercial interruption!

Palenque

admin — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 02:19:04 +0000

Visitors to Palenque can spend days bedazzled by the many ancient buildings in various states of picturesque decay and reconstruction. Set on a jungled hillside overlooking the plains of Chiapas and Tabasco to the north, the ruined city is sometimes dubbed “Athens of Mesoamerica” due to its wealth of sensuous relief sculpture. Like the Acropolis of Athens, the buildings of Palenque display mere fragments of what was once a vast gallery of polychrome sculptural art, shining from every wall, courtyard, mansard-roof, hallway, and roof-comb.
Unlike Athens, shining white in the rocky semiarid landscape, Palenque is crowded, surrounded, festooned, (one might even say oppressed) by the fecund jungle. Toucans, monkeys, and innumerable loud insects gambol in the branches of the forest canopy; every tree is burdened with bromeliads, air ferns, staghorn ferns, Spanish moss, strangler figs, huge termite metropoli, and aerial roots dangling down looking for more purchase, trying to wedge another slight advantage in the constant competition for the abundant resources. Even in the “civilized” parts of town, near our hotel, the trees are stages, platforms for desperate competition, a tangle of roots and vines continually climbing on each others’ backs.
Only a tiny part of Palenque has been dug out from the grasping jungle. Ed Barnhardt and his team mapped the remains of about 1500 stone structures –temples, shrines, palaces, apartment blocks, performance platforms… even, in Residential Group B, a waterfall-view platform that could have –must have– been the site of moonrise-watching, spontaneous-poetry-composing parties. Of these 1500, about 50 or 60 have been excavated. The very first building one encounters upon entering the site is Temple 11 –still a towering, jungle-clad heap, flanking the main Plaza… Its next-door neighbors include the Palace, largest and most complex edifice of all, and the Temple of Inscriptions, containing the tomb of Pakal the Great. This prominent pyramid was never unimportant, yet it remains unexcavated. This is a reminder of just how much work archaeologists have yet to do… In Mike Coe’s phrase, “We have 1% penetration”. (Also on this plaza stands the tomb of Pakal’s excavator, Alberto Ruz-Lhuiller, and a ceiba planted in memory of Linda Schele, in 1998. It is growing fast, I hardly recognized it. “See the tree, how big it’s grown…”)
The time-framework of any archaeological survey lie in its ceramics. Sherds of broken vases, plates and figurines litter every site, and any careful excavation includes a careful assessment of every scrap of pottery found at each stratum. The changes in style, composition, and quality of the pottery are the most secure way to date the items associated with them. (Archaeologists at each site name their strata differently, according to whim, so, for example, the Early Classic “Tzakol” style at Waxaktun correlates with the “Manik” style dug at nearby Tikal… It takes some time for the freshman archeologist to learn one’s way around the various chronologies.)
Within the grand stylistic chronologies, of course, there are local styles. And of course, some cities had better ceramics than others. (For a mesmerizing look into the rich and dazzling variety of Classic Maya painted pottery styles, see Justin Kerr’s invaluable Maya Vase photographic database at Mayavase.com. You’ll eventually recognize the distinct painting “schools” of Nakbe ["Codex-Style"], “red-background”, “Ik’ site”, and Naranjo pottery, for example.)
What I find surprising is that Palenque ceramics are, for the most part, crap — plain, unadorned, low-quality pottery, surface fragments often crumbling into sand in one’s hand if one picks it up. It is as if Palencano artistic energy all went into their wall-paintings and relief sculpture… with one curious and glorious exception: their incensario stands.
These ceramic objects, standing two to three feet high, are intricate, unique, and prodigious; over a hundred have been dug up so far, almost all on the Cross Group. Many, for example, were systematically buried, every meter or so along every side of the nine-level Pyramid of the Cross.
They are made of the finest red clay, ornately sculpted and painted with Maya Blue (a unique and surprisingly-permanent pigment made from a special clay dyed with indigo); they each resemble a Northwest Coast totem pole: A cylinder comprising a stack of three faces adorned with lively figurines cavorting in the upper headdress, with low relief flanges on each side. Atop the stack sits the incense-burner itself, usually unadorned and truncated-biconical.
The way these are displayed in the museums of Mexico City and the Site Museum at Palenque, in less-than-perfectly-clean glass cases that reflect *everything*, prevents decent photography of a whole stand… Hmph. But I did get a few decent details…
I’ve included a couple stereo photographs of some of these little gems of sculptural detail. If you have experienced the “Magic Eye” fad of recent date, you can look at these photos…. Cross your eyes to merge the two views, and if you can hold them and focus, the 3-Dimensional effect will provide you a nice Oh-Wow moment. It takes a little practice, but well worth the effort!
Another sculptural masterpiece is the Jade Mask of Pakal. It has been reconstructed twice, the newer version based on careful archaeological evidence, and apparently more true to the original. (The wooden substrate had decayed in antiquity, and all the archaeologists found were the jade mosaic pieces, slid off the skull to one side.) Unfortunately, all Pakal’s burial jewelry is on display in the Museo Nacional in Mexico City, and only copies appear in the Palenque Museum, but I was fortunate while in the MNAH to get some good pictures.
We were ably led around the site for three days by my old friends Alfonso Morales and Julia Miller (now operating a Merida tour agency called Catherwood Travels). I worked on their “Proyecto Grupo de las Cruces” excavation in 1999, drawing artifacts like incensario stands and the reliefs from Temple XIX. Working at a dig is one of the most memorable and affecting experiences of many of my colleagues’ lives. As with platoon-bonding and other intense group experiences, the rewards far outweigh all the inconveniences (malaria, heat, humidity, mold, bugs, dengue fever, sweat, dirt, bad water, bad food, bad roads, political instability [and even worse, political bureaucracy!], vampire bats, … did I mention bugs? The most aggressive and vicious ants, scorpions, mosquitoes, flies, centipedes, spiders, tarantulas, and earwigs you’ll ever have the displeasure to meet) … Those intrepid archaeologists just keep coming back. As one might imagine, Alfonso and Julia had as many stories about the political underbelly of Mexican archeology as about the ancient history…
Alfonso and his siblings and cousins are also responsible for the superlative quality of the sculptural replicas one can purchase around Palenque. They started the business around age 12 or 13, and developed techniques for transferring images from xeroxes onto stone, to guide their careful relief carving. Alfonso related how the government tried to forbid the boys from making such accurate copies, because they were fooling the experts… One collector claimed to have the original Tablet of the Slaves, for example, causing a scandal that such a treasure had been stolen from the Palenque Museum without anyone knowing, until it was discovered that the original was still safe in Palenque…. Alfonso kindly pulled out a carving tool he’d made from a hacksaw and demonstrated his technique. As with any expert craftsman, it astonishes to see how rapidly a form takes shape under skilled hands.
We stayed in the leafy district called La Canada, a block from the former home of Merle Greene Robertson (our hotel was on the corner of Calle Merle Greene). I cannot close this note without note of her passing. She died peacefully at home in San Francisco a couple months ago at 97 (or was it 98?), after a lifetime of accomplishment, touching the lives of almost every Maya archaeologist, and carefully recording-and-publishing every work of sculpture at Palenque discovered up to 1975. One of her former students, Arlen Chase, has himself been head archaeologist at Caracol, Belize since 1985, and another funded the archaeological dig at Palenque at which I worked, and which found at Temple XIX the most important sculptures at Palenque in the second half of the 20th century. He also found an early painted tomb in Temple XX, and claims to know where to find the tomb of the elusive Kan Bahlam, son of Pakal the Great. (This quest needs another benefactor like Merle’s student!) You can find an archive of her work, especially her thousands of rubbings of Maya reliefs, at the vast and excellent Mesoweb.com, the creation of the tireless and brilliant Joel Skidmore. His generosity and industry are in keeping with Merle’s.
In any case, every archaeologist who passed through Palenque, and every student and every serious enthusiast (Merle did not discriminate, nor stand on ceremony), found welcome, good food, and an excellent library in Merle’s home. She also convened the Mesas Redondas de Palenque, the biannual meetings of scholars and archaeologists that first broke the dam of Maya Glyph decipherment (starting 1973). Read all about it in “Breaking the Maya Code”, or watch the Nightfire Film of the same name….
When Linda Schele died in 1998, I believe it was David Humiston Kelley who said, “She has left a big hole in the firmament.” The same could be said for him, when he passed this spring, and it certainly applies to Merle.

Teotihuacan, “The Place Where Men Became Gods”!

admin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:34:00 +0000

Teotihuacan is pretty convenient to Mexico City. A short bus-ride from the Bus terminal Norte, for 36 Pesos, and the ticket seller gave me my first lesson (on this trip) in caveat emptor: “The bus leaves in three minutes,” he informed us, “Do you have 8 pesos?” I had given him a 200-peso note, and fished out the requisite change. He gave us our three tickets and we hurried away…. You guessed it. He did not readily proffer our 100-peso-note change. The bus was pulling out of its parking space by the time we did the arithmetic, and realized we had been *allowed* to overpay. (Later that day, we reported him, but we were unable to return the following day and confront him. His colleague was very apologetic …. and unable to pay us back.)

No shade, bring plenty of water. Teotihuacan, like every major archeological attraction in the country, cost us each 51 pesos. Couldn’t find a decent map of the site to guide us around, though there were maps posted here and there. I shot a photo and consulted it from time to time. Most of the visitor-friendly portion stretches along the Avenida de los Muertos, the broad, (nearly) north-south boulevard that forms the axis of the ancient mertropolis. It’s not exactly a highway, interrupted by stairways and sunken courts… There are no ballcourts in Teo, but the Avenida, lined with steps like bleachers, would have served well. Imagine huge, sacred Stickball tournaments held in Times Square…. Or down Colorado Blvd in Pasadena, instead of the Rose Parade….

Evidence of the ancient city’s enormous population, (variously estimated from 150,000 – 400,000, during its apogee in the 500′s AD): Even today, with millions of visitors annually, the ground is littered with ancient trash. Potsherds abound, red, buff, or black, even right on the Avenida. Here and there, especially after a rain, the occasional chip of obsidian glitters in the harsh sunlight. One does not pick up souvenirs at archeological sites –it’s unethical and illegal– but I did shoot a few pictures of some of the richer surface scatters of s herds.

We met some schoolboys who showed us, not just sherds, but a piece of pottery painted with post-fire stucco they had found. Teo is a rich site still… Will reward anyone allowed to stick a shovel in the ground. 95% of the city still sleeps beneath the sod. A few of the mounds have been penetrated, and several painted apartment-complexes even lie outside the fence surrounding the site. Why is there not an army of archaeologists burrowing and exposing its treasures? Partly lack of funding, mainly infighting and highly restrictive obstacles to anyone’s receiving permission to dig. Anyone lucky enough to dig here will find career-changing treasures, and the powers-that-be are not generous in granting such opportunities. Stay tuned, and visit often.

Teo died violently –a layer of ash overlays the final layers of occupational debris– around 650 AD. Some experts date its Fall as early as 600 or as late as 750, but I note that the Late Classic Florescence all over Mesoamerica seems to have really revved up in the mid-7th century: Cities like Tikal, Monte Alban, and Cholula enjoyed a huge building boom in the Late Classic (650-850); I attribute this to sudden freedom from onerous Teo-taxation. Most of the Classic ruins one visits show very little Early Classic or Preclassic architecture at all. Late Classic structures cover them all, just as Rome’s Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance churches all hide behind Baroque facades.

As we climbed the Pyramids of the Feathered Serpent (actually they don’t let you near it; we climbed the *adosada*, or porch), of the Sun (about 260 steps to the top), and of the Moon (they let you up half way), we scanned the site to see which mounds had been excavated, as we knew that that was where to see painted walls. By the time we finally learned that the mural sites were outside the gates, it was pushing four pm, and they closed at five. After much searching and asking –a pleasant walk through semi-rural avenues and alleyways– we found Tetitla, a large complex (about 40 rooms?) with the remains of beautiful frescoes on many walls. Preservation exacted a price however: Only the portion of the walls which had lain buried for the last millennium, that is, the lower two to four feet, are still adorned… Often all we see are the feet of the sacred participants, or the lower framing band.

At Tetitla, also, lived some ancient Maya ex-pats; iconographer Karl Taube’s latest project is analyzing hundreds of fragments of their murals. He tells me they even contain a few glyphs. Sadly (for me), these are all packed away in the storeroom. But what is on display enthralls.

Now, the return journey provided some REAL adventure. About ten minutes out of Teo, the bus pulls over, some armed, brown-shirted special police clamber aboard, look over the passengers… point at me, and beckon. I rise slowly. I am NOT liking being singled out in this manner. My companions sit quietly, trying to be as unobtrusive, as *invisible*, as the rest of the passengers. They take me outside the bus, pat me down perfunctorily, and motion that I remain outside. Inside the bus they’re prodding and searching people’s handbags.… Eventually one of the guards and I establish enough of a connection to overcome the language *tope*. They’re looking for guns. My new friend tells me that the newest method to smuggle them is in ladies’ handbags, but all Americans are suspect. After ten endless minutes –or was it an hour?–, they let me back on, and we continue home.

A week among the wonders of (mostly) ancient Mexico and the jungle!

admin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:26:30 +0000

Dazzling churches! Frida & Diego! Great cuisine! Pyramids! Sublime sculpture! Hieroglyphs! Mysteries! Howler Monkeys! Dawn chorus of a million birds! Dark, vaulted chambers, stone walls sweating, ceilings hung with bats! Leafcutter ants! Army ants! Biting ants! Stinging ants! Malarial mosquitoes! Montezuma’s Revenge! Corrupt cops! I love this place!

So, arriving into Mexico City with friends, one is obliged to put away the pith helmet and don the tourist’s baseball cap a bit. It turns out that we chose a bad time to visit the joined houses/studios of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in San Angel, as her half was closed completely and in his half only the top floor was open. (A landmark of modernist architecture by their friend Juan O’Gorman, built just after their return from the USA. Fenced with organ-pipe cacti.)

This contained his airy studio, reconstructed to look like he just left it: A sexy portrait of Dolores del Rio on the easel, her eyes enormous, Keen-like; his palette and brushes ready, his jacket and other clothes hung on the chair. Around three walls hang colossal papier-mache skeletons and other parade figures; shelves along the walls hold the tools of the traditional artist:brushes galore, palettes, scales with brass weights, muller and grinding-glass, jars of brightly-colored minerals, some finely powdered, others in crumbly crystals of sienna,

malachite, and orpiment…. And then four huge vitrines of artifacts: some folk-art, but mostly Pre-Columbian . Mainly pottery and figurines, broken heads of prettyladies, and the like. Someone once pointed out to Diego that he had a large number of :”fakes” in his collection. His reply: “It’s all made by the same hands.”

A taxi ride across town to Frida’s Blue House in Coyoacan was much more rewarding. No photos allowed in the galleries, full of her and others’ paintings, photos, drawings, letters, furniture, books, and other relics… Hmph. Apparently this is the spacious home-around-a-courtyard she had grown up in, and in the courtyard she displayed dozens of precolumbian sculptures, mostly Teotihuacan and Aztec. Tenoned skulls protrude from a little pyramid decked with Chicomecoatls (Aztec Maize goddesses), serpents, etc…. and so on. Lovely, tranquil place.

Lunched at the famed and gracious San Angel Inn (built in a grand 17th-century estate). Great environment. Good –not great– food.

Revisioning the Maya Tour Log

admin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:09:29 +0000

1 June 2011

Tomorrow I set off with two friends for Mexico City. For twelve days, we journey slowly across southern Mexico, eastward, toward what the Aztecs called “The Land of the Red and the Black”… For the Aztecs, these colors usually refer to the rising Sun and the watery Underworld**, but they have a double meaning: Red and black are the colors of ink. The Maya were the learned ones, their home the land of innumerable books.
My kind of people!
After twelve days —the wish-list is long, from Cholula to San Lorenzo to La Venta to Agua Azul to Palenque— I join a tour of 27 academics paid for by the NEH (thank you, taxpayers, thank you!) for five weeks, to as many Maya sites as we can get to.
Last trip I took, to Peru for ten days, I came home with 7000 digital photos (many in stereo, so it’s not as many as it sounds). My view of the world is often framed by a camera viewfinder.
Packing to do, so will close here. More soon!

**Yucatan is riddled with caves… So many that the land has no surface water to speak of… It’s all underground. Every town and village is built around a cave, a cenote (Mayan dzonot), a sinkhole, access to an underground pool of the clearest, cleanest, sweetest water anywhere. This peculiar topography is thanks to the limestone karst, shivered with a million cracks sixty million years ago by the Chikxulub meteorite impact…. Sorry, dinosaurs!=

Glyphs – The Ancient Maya and the Film Industry, Part I

Mark Van Stone — Sat, 28 May 2011 14:21:30 +0000

Precious Few Films Attempt to Portray the Ancient Maya in a Sympathetic and Realistic Way.

The documentary-film industry has found the “Mysterious Maya”, “Mayan Calendar Prophecy” and the “2012 End of the World” to be fertile soil. There are so many of these films that I can’t keep track of them all… And most of them are sensational, opportunistic, garbage, merely jumping on the “Mayan Apocalypse” bandwagon.

However, Independent filmmaker David Lebrun is a delicious exception. He and his wife Amy Halpern spent eleven years making Breaking the Maya Code .

This is a feature-length, 2-hour visualization of Michael Coe’s book of the same name,

and Lebrun and Coe tell the incredibly complex, 150-year story of the decipherment of this mysterious script. (*see note below)

David selected me to do the graphics and the “hand-inserts”. This means my hands got to be in the film —carving stone, writing Japanese, painting Mayan glyphs in codices and on ceramic vessels, and writing Mayan in Colonial Spanish letters— but not my face. (The makeup people were able to make my hands look Maya, painting them brown and even shaving off my arm-hair! But, sadly, my mug was too Anglo.) I also drew all the Maya glyphs used in the film’s numerous graphics, and with my friend Paul Johnson, made all the codex-props used in the film. The largest number of these eventually were burned in the “Bonfire of Maní” scene, (in 1561 the Archbishop of Yucatan burned every Maya book he could lay his hands on… An act which his Maya flock, who had trustingly turned them over to him, “regretted to an amazing degree”.) To make these books as authentic as possible, we copied the texts and images from ancient Maya vases (thanks to the fabulous visual database of Justin Kerr actually printed them on bark-paper, so they would burn authentically. I have made props for a number of historic movies, from wax-seals for The Man in the Iron Mask,

to the “Pirate’s Code Book” in Pirates of the Caribbean 3,

but I have never had as much fun working for any other film as I did in Breaking the Maya Code.

PBS-NOVA edited Lebrun’s splendid film down to 53 minutes and called it “Cracking the Maya Code“.

Though not as in-depth as “BtMC”, it is a fine introduction to an understanding of the Mysterious Maya Glyphs. WGBH-Boston, who produce NOVA, also put up a great website where one can see and hear an ancient Maya stela read through from start to finish. They engaged me to render the text into stately English, and I in turn hired my friend, linguist Barbara MacLeod (a far better decipherer than I), to read it aloud in sonorous Mayan.
——- ——–
(*below Note):
Now, I am happy to report, the majority of Maya texts can be read, and it turns out that they contain the same kind of wisdom we find written on monuments the world over. Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean to belittle this information; what the ancient Greeks and Romans and Egyptians and Chinese carved for the Ages on stone is an extremely important source of historical and cultural information —notwithstanding their stunning calligraphy— but have you ever sat down to read through it? “Lord So-and-so nobly led his people/soldiers to prosperity/victory, in the year …”, or “Here lies Dame Such-and-such, a good wife and mother … “, or “This building’s cornerstone laid by So-and-so in the year …” Every culture has unique ways to invoke blessings from above, and the Maya erected statues or stelae (monumental carved slabs), bearing beautiful glyphs and images of their sacred kings performing ceremonies. And what they say, carefully documented with dated events and calculations of the intervals between events, is “Lord So-and-so dedicated this temple with a ‘scattering’ of his blood/ burning of incense/ donning the costume of the god Such-and-such. Six years and 136 days later he was married to Lady So-and-so, noble daughter of Lord Whatsisname of [neighboring kingdom]. Twelve years and 73 days later, So-and-so made sacred war on the people of ….” And so on in that rather tedious vein. Ho-hum. We have thousands of inscriptions in Maya glyphs, but none of them mention an “apocalypse” nor a “2012 End of the World” nor even an “End of the Mayan Calendar”. (Frankly, I find the beautiful artistry of Maya calligraphy much more interesting than the events it so beautifully records.)

To repeat a technicality: The word “Maya” is properly used as a noun or an adjective: “Maya culture”, or “the ancient Maya” “Maya glyphs”. One ought *only* use “Mayan” when referring to language: “Landa was fluent in Mayan”, or “the Mayan word for ‘snake’ is the same as the word for ‘sky’: *Chan*.”

Glyphs – The Ancient Maya and the Film Industry, Part II

Mark Van Stone — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:28:42 +0000

Another Good Documentary and a Couple Feature Films

National Geographic, once reknowned for the quality of its features about the Maya (and the ancient Americas in general), has lost a little of its Mesoamerican creds since George Stuart retired. One of the documentaries that I DO recommend, they made during his tenure: Dawn of the Maya (2004).

It was this film that introduced me to producer/director Graham Townsley.

He has been responsible for about 20 films (mostly on PBS’s “NOVA”), as producer, director, and/or writer. His work is intelligent and deeply respectful of the people he exhibits for us.
So I was deeply honored when he sought me out to contribute to his new series on the Maya predictions of 2012, and the 2012 phenomenon in general. It will consist of three parts, one about the ancient Maya calendar and their culture of prophecy, a second on the Maya Collapse of the tenth century, and a third on the modern New Age response to the so-called “Mayan 2012 Prophecies”. I believe in this one, you’ll get to see my face…

Among films-as-entertainment, a few spring to mind. In some James Bond film from my distant youth, the Bad Guy and his bevy of buxom, blank-faced women occupy a fanciful Maya ruin, where James battles crocodiles or water snakes… (Why didn’t the Baddie just throw him into a piranha pool?) More recently, the latest “National Treasure”

and “Indiana Jones” films construct quasi-Maya temples (replete with Chichen-Itza serpents, talud-tablero step-pyramids, and numerous teetering replicas of the Aztec Sun Stone.

The “Jones” film also features the gratuitous massacre of an entire population of Maya Temple guardians and destruction of a whole alien museum, just because George Lucas couldn’t figure out what to do with them by film’s end. (At least Nicholas Cage is able to save the Museum of Alexandria!) Finally, they put Maya inscriptions side-by-side with Ancient Chinese Shang-Dynasty characters, and locate Maya civilization in South Dakota and Peru respectively. I roll my eyes, heave a big sigh. … Ah, Hollywood!

Glyphs – The Ancient Maya and the Film Industry, Part III

Mark Van Stone — Thu, 26 May 2011 14:29:24 +0000

Blood, Gore and Gibson

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto has the unique distinction of being the only feature film whose dialogue is entirely in the lovely Mayan language.

This remarkable feature is offset, of course: Gibson portrays the Maya as either Noble Savages living “innocently” in the forest, violently impaling pigs and playing nasty practical jokes on their friends (in the first five minutes), or as Jaded Bloodthirsty City-Dwellers, drugged or diseased, performing mass sacrifices, and cowering at a solar eclipse (a scene Gibson borrowed from Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). The ancient Maya may have had a stone-age technology, but they were excellent astronomers: they knew how to predict eclipses. He seems reluctant to credit them with anything good, even of having built a glorious city of towering pyramids. which he shows for about three seconds total…. In this, he is not unlike the first explorers, who gave credit for the Mayas’ Lost Cities to the Phoenicians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, the Egyptians, … anybody but those pesky Indians. The little bit of Maya costume and construction we are granted to see (most of the film is one long, tedious Run Through the Jungle) is mostly authentic, thanks to the guidance of Gibson’s adviser Archaeologist Richard Hansen, who has been excavating in the vast Mirador Basin in Northern Guatemala for several years now.

Glyphs – The Ancient Maya and the Film Industry, Part IV

Mark Van Stone — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:30:09 +0000

Animation is Getting Better than Live Action

The best recent films about the Maya are both cartoons: The Road to El Dorado is an unlikely animated musical, featuring the vocal skills of Elton John, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Rosie Perez, and Edward James Olmos.

The film is very loosely inspired by the true story of two Spanish castaways, captured by the Maya of Yucatan in 1511, some years before the arrival of Cortez, who in 1519 tried to enlist them in his Conquest. One, Gerónimo de Aguilar, a former priest, joined up. The other, Gonzalo Guerrero, remained with his adopted people, and eventually died fighting the Conquistadors. (Even more unlikely, the film has a happy ending: The jovial citizens of El Dorado are spared their own World End, and the castaways leave the city with their sexy sidekick Chel, played by Rosie Perez. The three lose the gold, but save their self-respect.)

King Tarabak of El Dorado is modeled after the so-called “Fat Cacique”, a Classic ruler of “The Ik’ Site” in northern Guatemala, whose workshops produced dozens of vases painted with distinctive pink glyphs …and featuring a distinctively portly ruler.

These vases were all brought to light by “tomb raiders” like Lara Croft.) Temples, costume, haircuts, glyphs, the Maya ballgame, even the spears, sandals and other details are pretty correct. This accuracy is thanks to archaeologist John Pohl, adviser to the film, who did his best to keep the film honest. Alas, the big fish and the golden-walled pyramids are fantasy, but at least the architecture is right.

It occurs to me that the trope of the Hidden City is also based loosely on history: Conquistadors didn’t bother to invade the Maya in the central Peten jungle of Guatemala for 250 years; it was not until 1697 that they captured the kingdom of Tayasal. Tayasal is the modern Flores, the Maya jungle city into which tourists fly on their way to Tikal. Even today the area is heavily forested, one of the largest patches of rainforest on the continent. Like the Maya of El Dorado, Tayasal’s isolation delayed the End of their World for centuries.

The second cartoon is a short called Kichwa, made apparently by film students at the French École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques.

Kichwa by Esma-Movie
This French school is pretty prolific, producing dozens of shorts that are charming and technically excellent. Kichwa features time travelers and a Maya civilization, placed, like the City of the Crystal Skulls, in Peru. If one can ignore that jarring error, the kids got the visuals pretty well, and the story is rather fun.

Having written these four at one sitting, I expect I have neglected a Maya-themed film or two. There are rumors of other 2012 end-of-the-world films coming soon to a multiplex near you.