Ninth-Century Stelae of Machaquilá and Seibal

Overview of Seibal's sculptural corpus

In contrast to the uniformity of Machaquilá's late stelae, Seibal's stelae are heterogeneous, with little formal or iconographic coherence. In fact, the only pervasive characteristic of Seibal's visual discourse is its diversity. The first sculptures of Seibal's late eighth-century florescence reflect close interaction with, and strong visual inspiration from, the Petexbatún region. Seibal's Hieroglyphic Stairway, likely produced under the direction of the K'uhul Ajaw of Dos Pilas, Bajlaj Chan K'awiil, was a format common in the Petexbatún region and its inscriptions explicitly documented Seibal's subordinate relation to the Mutal polity. After the demise of Dos Pilas, Seibal's new ruler, Ajaw Bot, continued to focus primarily on social interaction with the Petexbatún polities, apparently noting on his Stela 6/22 some form of alliance with the Tamarindito/Arroyo de Piedra polity and implementing the popular Petexbatún panel format and ballplayer theme for the site's first figural reliefs, Stelae 5 and 7.  Ajaw Bot's attempts to claim regional dominance seem to have failed, however, as a fifty-year hiatus in sculptural production at Seibal ensued. Throughout this era, Seibal's ruler-patrons and artists adopted aspects of Petexbatún visual discourse to present their polity as a political entity like in kind to the Mutal polity.

Aj Bolon Haabtal Wat'ul K'atel's ambitious A.D. 849 commission of Structure A-3 and its five associated stelae (Figure 14, Figure 15, Figure 16, Figure 17, and Figure 18) marked Seibal's return to sculptural production. By incorporating hieroglyphic references to visitors from polities representing the four cardinal directions, the Structure A-3 program served to 'center' Seibal within the Southern Lowland Maya political landscape. Aj Bolon Haabtal Wat'ul K'atel's Structure A-3 stelae also incorporated a wide range of conventional, Classic Maya period-ending rituals and imagery. Together, they presented the new king as a thoroughly Classic Maya, legitimate ruler, yet without formal or thematic coherence. Although the Structure A-3 program successfully situated the Seibal polity in the Southern Lowland Maya political landscape, it did not provide Aj Bolon Haabtal Wat'ul K'atel a distinctive identity and did not establish a local visual 'template' for the city's subsequent stelae.

Seibal's later rulers and artists drew visual inspiration even more broadly, integrating in their stelae highly varied iconography, calendrical glyphs, and formal conventions from beyond the Southern Maya Lowlands (Figure 19). These non-Classic features did not derive from a single cultural interlocutor or 'invader.' Instead, Seibal's patrons and artists expanded the scope of their acceptable visual 'paradigm' to accommodate and acknowledge the visual expectations of an increasingly more diverse, 'international' audience. At the same time, the use and function of some Classic Maya conventions changed: (1) the depicted rulers became anonymous, lacking hieroglyphic name captions; (2) the stelae were less consistently associated with k'atuun-based period endings; and (3) both text and imagery indicate a decline in the communicative dominance of Classic Maya visual and hieroglyphic conventions. Classic Maya communicative norms became one of several options for visual expression, gradually losing their central position in the visual discourse.

The variety of non-Classic references and their integration with Classic Maya features on Seibal's late stelae contradict past proposals that a foreign group invaded Seibal. In part, these proposals were rooted in the problematic notion of 'influence.' As Michael Baxandall keenly argued, conceptualizing similarities among works of art as 'influence' wrongly grants agency to the precedent instead of the subsequent, responding work and its producer(s).³⁶  At Seibal, non-Classic elements were actively selected for incorporation, not passively 'received' from invading foreigners. The visual discourse at Seibal never fully integrated its wide-ranging references, however. In fact, the differences among alternate visual 'systems' was at times exaggerated, as exemplified by the use of highly rounded, purely phonetic Classic Maya hieroglyphs to contrast a logographic or pictographic, square, non-Classic glyph on Seibal Stela 13 (Figure 23 and Figure 24). At Seibal, artists and patrons actively made heterogeneity the single most unifying feature of the city's ninth-century visual discourse.

Endnote

36. Baxandall 1985:58-60.

Previous Page  |  Table of Contents  |  Next Page

Return to top of page