Ninth-Century Stelae of Machaquilá and Seibal

Seibal

Although there are significant affinities to Machaquilá's sculpture among Seibal sculptural corpus, Seibal's visual discourse is in many respects the antithesis of Machaquilá's. From the beginning of its ninth-century resurgence, Seibal's art was heterogeneous, looking outward for inspiration. Machaquilá's uniform, insular artistic program served the site for some forty years, but Seibal, with its eclectic ninth-century sculpture, dominated the Pasión river drainage in the latter half of the ninth century.

Seibal, located some 35 km to the north and west of Machaquilá, is the only other site in the Pasión region to have produced a substantial quantity of stelae in the ninth century (Figure 1). In contrast to the relatively secluded Machaquilá, Seibal's more accessible location in a region of modern economic interest led to its late nineteenth-century discovery and a century of study, including archaeological excavation. Seibal is at the crossroads of several major trade routes, connecting the highlands of Guatemala to the south to the Gulf coast of Tabasco via the Pasión and Usumacinta rivers, to the Central Maya Lowlands to the north, and to the eastern Southern Lowlands via the San Martín, San Juan, and Mopán Rivers. Interaction with sites in all four cardinal directions is suggested by the art and hieroglyphic texts of Seibal, supporting its status as a primary node on this trade network in the second half of the ninth century. In the ninth century, Seibal was the westernmost major Maya city on the Pasión-Usumacinta trade artery. Its resurgence seems to be directly related to a broader socio-political interest in establishing a fixed boundary to the central Maya area, with Seibal serving as a western border city. The role of Seibal as a 'border town' between the lingering ninth-century Maya cities of the Southern Lowlands and the west strongly affected the site's stelae. Seibal's late sculptural heterogeneity reflects a strategy of accommodating the expectations of a diverse audience, likely of merchants, emissaries and/or other visitors from a variety of locations, while striving to maintain some notion of 'Maya' identity.

Throughout the site's long history of investigation, Seibal's ninth-century stelae have played a central role in discussions of potential foreign invasion of the Southern Maya Lowlands and in descriptions of the decay of the Classic Maya artistic tradition into 'decadence.' However, each of Seibal's stelae also incorporates specifically 'Maya' artistic and/or hieroglyphic conventions. The contemporaneous occurrence of both 'Classic Maya' and 'non-Classic' elements in Seibal's sculpture, often on a single stela, suggests a context of multiple 'systems' of conventions involved in the visual and hieroglyphic discourse of formal power displays.¹³  The diversity of Seibal's late corpus seems to indicate not invasion but a local willingness to adapt to the demands of a diverse and changing audience. Seibal's artistic heterogeneity constitutes a discursive strategy that contributed to the city's political success long after other sites in the region had fallen silent.

Archaeological data indicate that Seibal had a long history marked by two distinct peaks in population, construction activity, and related political power, separated by a virtual abandonment of the site that lasted some 200 years. During the Tepejilote Tepeu Phase (A.D. 600/650-770), a flourishing city emerged once again in the midst of Seibal's ancient remains. Seibal's population grew rapidly and substantially, perhaps reaching 8,000 inhabitants.¹⁴  During this era, the history and politics of Seibal are closely intertwined with those of the Mutal dynasty that ruled the Petexbatún region, from Dos Pilas and Aguateca.¹⁵

Like Machaquilá, Seibal was one of the vying petty kingdoms that sought to proclaim regional authority after the decline of the Mutal polity, as evidenced by Seibal Stela 6/22 and a panel-pair designated as Stelae 5 and 7.  These sculptures reveal strong affinities to other Petexbatún sculpture and include explicit references to regional politics. During this era, Seibal's art was thoroughly involved in the visual trends and conventions of the greater Petexbatún region.

The production of these works is followed by almost fifty years of sculptural silence at Seibal. The same is true of virtually the entire lower Petexbatún region, with only Itzán, on the extreme western edge of the area, producing one sculpture, Stela 6, in A.D. 830.¹⁶  During this same period, Machaquilá enjoyed its late florescence, as all of its late stelae were produced between Seibal's Stelae 5 and 7 and the site's next commissioned sculptures, dating to A.D. 849.

Endnotes

13. The term 'system' herein refers not to some fixed, paradigmatic reality external to particular visual expressions, but the conceptualization of such a coherent structure held by the participants in visual discourses.

14. Sabloff 1975:234-237; Willey et al. 1975:41-42; Tourtellot 1988:411-427; Tourtellot 1990:127-133; Willey 1990:196-197, 247-256, 264.

15. For discussion of the history of the Petexbatún Mutal polity, see Houston and Mathews (1985), Houston (1993), and Martin and Grube (2000).

16. Mathews and Willey 1991:46, 57.

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