Identifying Individual Hands in the Monuments of K’inich Ahkal Mo’ Naab of Palenque

A Parting Question

The question remains: Why did the monuments of Palenque (and Piedras Negras and San José de Motul) employ such a jostling crowd of artists? Were they just interested in cranking these stones out fast? With seven artists at work, the Temple XIX Platform could have been conceived and completed in a week or two. Perhaps there were so many celebrations to commemorate, they had to produce monuments on a tight schedule.

Allen Christenson and David Stuart suggested to me another reason. Large monuments were costly, and certain types were erected only once every five or ten years. It seems likely to have been the custom for each lineage head to endow a portion of such a monument, not only to enable large communal works to be erected, but to allow each of several lineages to share the honor of having produced them.

In the Primary Standard Sequence on ceramic vessels, one notes that a critical part of the text states that the process of painting or of carving the vessel sanctifies it. Often the painter or carver is honored by the mention of his or her name. Now the action of patronage, of causing someone to do something, is often recorded on monuments: "Sajal So and So conquers the city of Whatzit, u-kab-hi / "By order of" his lord Such and Such." Nowhere do we find on a pot or monument that it was painted or carved u-kab-hi Such and Such. What is recorded is the actual act of painting or carving, u-ts’ib So and So. It apparently would not do merely to provide the money to erect a monument, you had to provide the carving itself.

My guess is that each carver-calligrapher working on the Palace Tablet and on the Temple XIX Platform could have been the actual scion of a participating lineage. Michael Coe (1995) has shown that Maya calligraphers and at least some associated craftspeople were highly esteemed members of court, on par with Japanese and Chinese calligraphers. Some were apparently members of the royal family itself, and clearly the arts of calligraphy and carving were considered honourable callings for nobles. I have no doubt that any lineage of high rank was well-supplied with skilled scribes and artisans in its own members, which their ajaw could assign to contribute to a given monument. This situation prevails today, according to Christenson, among the lineages of a cofradía which each contribute to decorating a specific portion of the building on feast days.

Although this practice of distributing work among several artists seems less widespread in the Early Classic, there is some evidence that it goes back to the Middle Preclassic. Susan Gillespie analyzed unfinished Olmec monuments at Ana del Jacaro. Her analysis suggests that one group of artisans did the initial roughing out of the sculptures, another brought the figures nearly to their final state, then fine details were added by a third group. This could be an entirely practical kind of craft specialization, or it might have had a basis in religious or political considerations like those I am positing.

The large number of signatures on monuments from El Perú and Piedras Negras suggests similar divisions of sponsorship there. I am anxious to apply this connoisseurship analysis to Early Tikal and other sites and eras, to determine whether this multiple-artist procedure was the rule. Whether it turns out to have been more or less universal, or whether one finds spatial or temporal distinctions in Maya monument-creation practice, I believe it can shed a little more light on the political microeconomy of Ancient Maya cities.

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