Survey of Talking Cross Shrines in Yucatán and Quintana Roo

Preliminary Conclusions

The quadripartite/cross form concept was present, at least, from the formative period of Maya Mesoamerica (McAnany 1995). My survey clearly indicates that this icon continues to be a central focus of a portion of traditional Maya culture. The so-called "Talking Cross" is a communicating device which, I believe, existed prior to the Caste War of Yucatán of 1847 and prior to Spanish contact. Caste War history demonstrates that the confiscation and destruction of crosses has not brought about their silence. My preliminary research indicates that not only are communicating crosses still active but that such objects and shrines that shelter them are more widespread than previously thought. The Maya Cross has not ceased to exist because, as I have tried to demonstrate, its symbolic identity is that of supernatural entities, such as Itzamná and Chaak; as well as ancestral entities, trees, corn stalks, and other plants which abound in the Mayaab, the land of the Maya.

The interdisciplinary methodology of this preliminary report provides interpretations concerning not only the ideology behind the communicating crosses; but also the agricultural rationale for their retention within some contemporary Maya communities. I believe that the resulting historically bound symbolic interpretations could not have been possible through a single methodology, be it archaeology or ethnography, focusing on synchronic data. Only time constraints, due to the preliminary stage of my research, inhibits a broader use of this experimental approach which I term Icono-Symbolic Reconstruction: an approach which draws on the assumption that pivotal religious imagery, though transformed, can temporally and spatially retain certain core aspects of their symbolic meaning. My survey has made clear to me that the retention of vestigial ideology is accomplished through the agency of cultural agents as they give meaning to their world--in this case the communicating crosses of the Yucatec-Maya.

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