Maya History

Tatiana Proskouriakoff

MAYA HISTORY

Edited by Rosemary A. Joyce

Foreword by Gordon R. Willey

Biographical Sketch by Ian Graham

Illustrations by Barbara C. Page

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN

Copyright © 1993 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 1993

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Library ebook ISBN: 978-0-292-75103-3

Individual ebook ISBN: 978-0-292-78606-6

DOI: 10.7560/750852

Proskouriakoff, Tatiana, 1909-

Maya history / by Tatiana Proskouriakoff; edited by Rosemary A. Joyce; foreword by Gordon R. Willey; biographical sketch by Ian Graham; illustrations by Barbara C. Page. — 1st ed.

       p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-292-76600-9

I. Mayas—History. I. Joyce, Rosemary A., date. II. Title.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD by Gordon R. Willey

TATIANA PROSKOURIAKOFF, 1909–1985 by Ian Graham

INTRODUCTION by Rosemary A. Joyce

ABBREVIATIONS USED

1. THE EARLIEST RECORDS: 8.12.10.0.0–8.15.0.0.0 (A.D. 288–337)

2. THE ARRIVAL OF STRANGERS: 8.15.0.0.0–8.17.10.0.0 (A.D. 337–386)

3. THE MAYA REGAIN TIKAL: 8.17.10.0.0–9.0.0.0.0 (A.D. 386–435)

4. SOME RAGGED PAGES: 9.0.0.0.0–9.2.10.0.0 (A.D. 435–485)

5. EXPANSION OF THE MAYA TRADITION: 9.2.10.0.0–9.50.0.0 (A.D. 485–534)

6. A TIME OF TROUBLES: 9.5.0.0.0–9.7.10.0.0 (A.D. 534–583)

7. RECOVERY ON THE FRONTIERS: 9.7.10.0.0–9.10.0.0.0 (A.D. 583–633)

8. GROWTH AND EXPANSION: 9.10.0.0.0–9.12.10.0.0 (A.D. 633–682)

9. TOWARD A PEAK OF PROSPERITY: 9.12.10.0.0–9.15.0.0.0 (A.D. 682–736)

10. ON THE CREST OF THE WAVE: 9.15.0.0.0–9.17.10.0.0 (A.D. 731–780)

11. PRELUDE TO DISASTER: 9.17.10.0.0–10.0.0.0.0 (A.D. 780–830)

12. THE FINAL YEARS: 10.0.0.0.0–10.2.10.0.0 (A.D. 831–909)

13. THE LAST SURVIVALS: 10.2.10.0.0–10.4.0.0.0 (A.D. 909–938)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Ackno

wledgments

THE PRODUCTION OF THIS BOOK, THE LAST WORK OF a great Maya scholar, owes much to the efforts of a number of interested people. During the final composition of the manuscript, Tatiana Proskouriakoff consulted with the staff of the Peabody Museum Press, particularly Robyn Sweesy and Donna Dickerson, who supervised the initial copy-editing of the manuscript. As Proskouriakoff’s health faded, Peter Mathews agreed to help advance the project. He selected the individual glyphs to be illustrated within the text to complement the larger figures which Proskouriakoff had chosen. He supervised the drawings done by Barbara C. Page and indicated the location for in-text placement of glyphs. Peter Mathews also consulted with Peabody Museum staff in the initial stages of preparation of the manuscript.

In the production of the final version of the manuscript, we have worked from the revised version produced by Peabody Press staff in consultation with Proskouriakoff. This version of the manuscript lacked citations of published literature and a bibliography. John G. Fox compiled the initial bibliography for the manuscript, which has been corrected and augmented by Rosemary Joyce. The current bibliography incorporates all sources referred to by all contributors to this volume.

Emeritus Professor Gordon R. Willey kindly agreed to provide his impressions of Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and Ian Graham contributed a biographical sketch previously published in American Antiquity. Both scholars have also provided valuable assistance with the final production of illustrations for the book, and have been a source of guidance to Rosemary Joyce as she edited the manuscript.

GORDON R. WILLEY

Foreword

TATIANA PROSKOURIAKOFF WILL SURELY BE remembered as one of the outstanding Mayanists of all time. She brought to her work great love and dedication, and this shows in all of her writings-as well as in her superb drawings of Maya architectural reconstructions. While not trained as an ethnologist, she was highly sensitive to and empathetic with peoples from cultures other than her own. I can explain it in no other way except to say that she had an intuitive perception in such matters.

Tatiana, or Tania, was born in Czarist Russia, and she was with her family in the United States—her father was a purchasing agent for the Czar’s government during World War I—at the time of the Russian Revolution. They remained in the States, and Tania never went back to Russia until much later in life, and then only for short visit. She attended Pennsylvania State College and the University of Pennsylvania as an architectural student, and she was drawn into Maya archaeology as an architectural draftsperson with the Carnegie Institution’s Maya staff in the Depression years. Although I never spoke with her about it, I can imagine that she became intrigued early on with the imagination of the ancient Maya architects. Here on this American hemisphere were Precolumbian architectural masterpieces that rivaled those of the Old World. She went on to become a leading authority in the subject.

When I first met Tania, in 1950, she was also recognized as an authority in Maya art, the author of A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture, which had just been published in that year, the first major work on that subject since Herbert J. Spinden’s magnum opus of almost forty years before (1913). In my early conversations with her, I don’t think I was aware of the range and depth of her interests. I suppose they were there all along, but I remember Tania as a person who, much more than most, continued to develop intellectually throughout her entire life. In the early and middle 1960s she published three important short papers on Maya hieroglyphic texts (1960; 1963; 1964). As Rosemary Joyce has stated in her Introduction, these papers changed the basic premise of Maya scholarship. Maya hieroglyphic texts, as carved on monuments and buildings, were read, for the first time, as applying to actual historic human events rather than being considered as only ritual and priestly lore. Proskouriakoff had done this very much in the contexts of the Maya portrait art and the Maya calendrical dates which were associated with the texts. Archaeology, in its most meaningful sense, is a study of contexts, and Tania’s archaeology was always very contextual.

At the same time that she was writing these pathbreaking papers on Maya glyphs, Tania was analyzing the many humble artifacts from Mayapan, which she was to publish upon in 1962, and she went from all of this to her very detailed and scholarly examination of the big jade collection from the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza. The jades, which had been brought from the murky waters of that well by E. H. Thompson more than a half-century before, were mostly the fragmentary pieces of hundreds of beautifully carved heirloom ornaments dating back to earlier Classic Period Maya times. These had been thrown into the Cenote, along with other sacrifices, by the Post-classic inheritors of these treasured pieces. Tania and her assistants spent years painstakingly fitting all of these back together so they could be properly described in her monograph, Jades from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichen Itza, ϒucatan, which was published in 1974.

That academic year of 1974–1975 Tania was kind enough to collaborate with me in a seminar on Maya art and the interpretations of Maya iconography. I look back on it as an outstanding learning experience for our students and, especially, for me. In the seminar she constantly surprised me with the anthropological approach she brought to the subject. I was always hesitant to tell her this; somehow I didn’t think that she would appreciate it. I had the impression that she always thought of herself as an art historian—and she was, I am sure, by the most professional definitions of that term. Above all, though, she was a great humanistic scholar, but one who disciplined humanistic appreciation with a strong critical intelligence.

During that year, and later, Tania spoke of her desire to bring together her vision of the Maya past into a history that would transcend the somewhat bleak, skeletonized, and fragmented chronicles which normally characterize archaeology. She saw this as her last work. It would draw upon all of the Maya past, as this could be recreated in the context of art, monuments, land, and peoples, and it would be given its narrative force by an understanding of events as these could be interpreted from the ancient texts in this setting. It was to be Maya History.

G.R.W.                

November 1990

            IAN GRAHAM

Tatiana Proskouriakoff

1909 – 1985

TATIANA PROSKOURIAKOFF WAS ACTIVE FOR FIFTY years in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology, and will always be remembered for the important contributions that she made, most notably in her studies of Maya art, architecture, and hieroglyphic writing.

She was born in Tomsk, Siberia, where her grandfather taught natural science (and wrote articles on Siberian archaeology) and where her father, Avenir Proskouriakoff, a chemist and engineer, also worked. Tatiana’s mother, Alla Nekrassova, the daughter of a general, had met him in Moscow and eloped with him to Tomsk. She was a physician, who had graduated from the first class in any Russian medical school to accept women.

At the entry of Russia into World War I, her father found himself unable to enlist because of a weak heart; instead he was appointed inspector of ordnance, and late in 1915 was sent on a mission to the United States to supervise the manufacture of arms for his country. The Proskouriakoffs and their two daughters took ship from Archangel but had gone only a short way when ice closed in. While in this ship, stuck fast in the ice, the two girls contracted scarlet fever and diphtheria—Tatiana’s sister also came down with measles—and they had to be carried back across the ice. Eventually the family was reunited in Pennsylvania the following spring, and there, after the Russian Revolution had occurred, they elected to stay. Her mother resumed her career as a physician in her adopted country, and her father taught chemistry.

Reproduced by permission of the Society for American Archaeology from American Antiquity 55(1), 1990.

At Lansdowne High School Tatiana—or Tania, as later she was universally known among her colleagues—acquired the nickname Duchess, by no means bestowed for hauteur or pretensions, but for the Rolls-Royce quality of her mind, and by this name her sister and friends from those days continued to call her. After graduation, Proskouriakoff enrolled in the School of Architecture of Pennsylvania State College, though one academic year was spent at the University of Pennsylvania. Upon graduation in 1930 she found that because of the Depression, building was practically at a standstill, and some dismal years were spent job hunting. For a time she worked at Wanamaker’s store. Then she took on a small job which involved copying drawings at a scale suitable for needlepoint, and for this purpose was given access to the University Museum. Having met one of the curators, she volunteered to make drawings for him—mostly to stave off boredom, she later said—and was accepted. The pay was poor, but at least she could use the library.

Soon after, Linton Satterthwaite, impressed by the quality of her work, invited her to join the 1936 expedition to Piedras Negras, with travel and expenses paid but no salary. On the way to the site they visited Palenque, and there, on seeing the elegant Temple of the Sun, Proskouriakoff knew she had found her vocation.

Unfortunately, the Depression showed no signs of letting up, and after another season at Piedras Negras, Satterthwaite was threatening to fire her (as he put it) because he could not agree to go on employing her without salary. Just then Sylvanus Morley, on a visit to the museum, was shown a drawing she had done as a pastime, one showing the Piedras Negras acropolis as it might have looked in its heyday. Morley immediately encouraged her to do a series of such drawings; in addition he secured funds to send her in 1939 to work with the Carnegie Institution team at Copan, and later at Chichen Itza.

Proskouriakoff traveled alone to Copan, and once there, found life at the staff camp distinctly wild. Having been brought up in a very proper European household, she was surprised considerably by the battery of bottles displayed on a table in the camp sala, and more so on finding how much the consumption of their contents enlivened the nightly games of poker, especially on Saturdays. One Sunday morning, annoyed with the men for sleeping so late, she opened the door of Gustav Stromsvik’s room and let his parrot in. Soon there was a duet of squawking, the parrot having gotten Stromsvik by the mustache.

Proskouriakoff continued working on the series of reconstruction drawings in her spare time, and it was published by the Carnegie Institution as An Album of Maya Architecture (1946). It was Morley again who provided the stimulus for her next major work, even though this time it arose out of a friendly disagreement they had over the dating of a certain monument. Stimulated as ever by disagreement, she started on a bold attempt to establish a method of dating monuments on the basis, not of aesthetic values (on which Morley tended to rely) but of morphology and sculptural style. Through her systematic and laborious analysis of the known body of Maya monuments datable by their own inscriptions, she was able to provide a method of dating any monument lacking an inscribed date to within twenty or thirty years. Since this important work, A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture (1950), was compiled, a large number of new monuments has been found, and a new edition incorporating them is needed.

In 1943 Proskouriakoff had been promoted by A. V. Kidder, then head of the Carnegie’s Division of Historical Research, from draftsman and illustrator to staff member, and it was as a surveyor and excavator that she took part in the Institution’s last archaeological work, at Mayapan (1950–1955). At its end, all staff members were to be retired. Kidder, however, managed to persuade the Institution to retain on a permanent basis the three youngest members of the staff, of whom Proskouriakoff was one, at a reduced salary.

Now free of all assigned duties and established as a research associate in the Peabody Museum of Harvard University (where ultimately she was named honorary curator of Maya art), Proskouriakoff could turn to the study of Maya hieroglyphic writing. From the beginning this had fascinated her and it had been the subject of her first published contribution (1944). Within a very short time she was to produce a paper, modest in presentation but of surpassing importance, entitled Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (1960). At one blow, this short paper freed the study of Maya writing from lengthy stagnation, which largely was due to the generally accepted idea that monumental inscriptions contained exclusively calendrical and astronomical matter. Proskouriakoff’s demonstration that they contained instead records of the principal events in the lives of historical personages was truly liberating. In 1962 it won for her the fifth A. V. Kidder Medal (she herself had been designer of the medal), and it continues to underlie much of today’s greatly increased epigraphic activity.

Proskouriakoff’s next major undertaking, if less remarkable for originality, was notable for the great perseverance it called forth. This was preparation of Jades from the Cenote of Sacrifice (1974), an illustrated and descriptive catalog of nearly one thousand complete or restorable jade pieces (besides innumerable other fragments) that had lain nearly seventy years in the Peabody Museum. Identifying and sorting the shattered components of incomplete plaques, and then to the best of her ability supplying the missing portions of the designs in modeled plaster presented a tremendous challenge—one that exploited to the full her visual memory and unrivaled knowledge of iconography.

That task occupied a good part of her time for fifteen years. During some of that time she also was engaged in an analysis of design motifs found on pottery. This project must be counted as her one failure. Having amassed a large amount of data, she came to realize that little of value could be extracted from it. In her brief description of this work (1968) she still expressed hopes of completing a monograph; in fact she abandoned work on it at about that time.

Early in 1973, with work on the jades completed, Proskouriakoff began her last major work, a review of historical material in Classic Maya inscriptions tentatively titled Maya History. Characteristically she had chosen an extremely difficult and time-consuming study. The dynastic histories and intersite relations for most of the larger sites had to be pored over, and hieroglyphic passages copied onto working sheets. Though her eyesight and energy began to fail, she battled on and was able to complete the work in its essentials before the onset of her final illness.

According to family anecdotes Tania’s independent spirit and high intelligence were evident in early childhood. As she grew up, a facet of that independence grew into a dislike of arbitrary rules, one of which she became aware of soon after arriving in New York. When her mother lit a cigarette in a restaurant she was immediately informed that smoking by women in public places was prohibited. But, the eight-year-old asked her mother, isn’t the United States a free country?—and on turning sixteen she did not forget to take up smoking!

As an adult, this tendency to swim against the current settled into the healthy skepticism that underlay her scholarly judgment. Sometimes it came to the surface as a propensity for lightly but almost automatically contradicting her colleagues, a habit that most of them regarded more with amused indulgence than irritation. A lively example of this slight contrariness and disdain for the expected response is found in her reply to a questionnaire concerning the suitability of the term primitive in the expression Primitive Art. In her short comment (1965) Proskouriakoff had nothing to say about primitive, but attacked art as a really ambiguous and poorly defined term, listing five of its connotations.

As friends and old Carnegie hands have described her, and on the evidence of photographs, Tania as a young woman was distinctly attractive, and quite feminine—there was nothing of the tweedy bluestocking about her. Decided in her opinions she may have been, even at times a little formidable in conversation, yet socially she was shy and retiring; but here again there was a contradiction in that she enjoyed giving parties and had a way of making them go. In the field, she has been described as good company and quite unperturbed by the horrible accommodations she sometimes had to endure. Friends she had, and a few of her close friendships meant enough to have stirred occasional yearnings for a more social or companionable existence, as against the cloistered life of the scholar.

Later in middle age, she began to feel a certain alienation not only from a world imbued with violence and greed (her heroes had been Gandhi and Franklin Delano Roosevelt), but also from the newer trends in archaeology. As a scholar who was self-taught and preferred to work alone, she had a romantic streak appropriate to the lone adventurer. It seldom showed, but it was this side that felt the appeal of boats and steamships, and the novels of Joseph Conrad, which she read and reread, partly for the sake of improving her style (and she did write very well). There also is a hint of that side in a note to the editors that accompanied her contribution to the Codex Wauchope (1978): If you read between the lines [of my contribution], you will probably see it as a nostalgic retreat from contemporary methodologies, and a plea for old-fashioned hit or miss logic, which is more fun, and once in a good while pays off.

Hits that paid off she undoubtedly scored in her life’s work, and she had some fun. Her achievements gained her, in addition to the Kidder Medal, Pennsylvania State University’s nomination as their Woman of the Year for 1971; an honorary Doctorate of Laws from Tulane University in 1977; and in 1984 the Guatemalan Order of the Quetzal. For her successes she always was ready to pay tribute to her early mentors, especially Satterthwaite, Morley, Kidder, and Tozzer; it was her hope that she might pass on to the next generation something of their tradition. Through her work, at once adventurous and meticulous, that ambition has abundantly been fulfilled, and through her friendship, example, and scholarly counsel, she left a small band of students and many others forever indebted to her.

I.G.

ROSEMARY A. JOYCE

Introduction

DAVID KELLEY, VOICING A WIDELY SHARED OPINION, credits Tatiana Proskouriakoff with one of the four most important breakthroughs in the modern study of Maya inscriptions (1976:5). Yet this achievement was embodied in a mere handful of articles limited almost entirely to comments on two little-known peripheral sites (Proskouriakoff 1960; 1961a; 1963; 1964). These few pages literally changed the basic premise of Maya scholarship. Maya monuments, Proskouriakoff demonstrated, far from presenting only gods and priests, record the deeds of human beings and form the basis for a Maya history.

The history that Proskouriakoff envisioned was her final life work. In scope, it incorporates the entire Classic Maya area. The basic sources of information are the iconography and themes of monuments which can be placed in chronological succession. Proskouriakoff puts less reliance on interpretations of texts, since she remained skeptical of the ability of scholars to read what the Maya recorded. As she reconstructs it, Maya history is the sketchy story of the spread from the central Peten, and above all from Tikal, of institutions of government. Warfare and intermarriage are the common ground she detects for the city-states of the Classic Maya Lowlands. The Classic Maya collapse is mirrored in the decadence of Maya art, a gradual infiltration of foreign elements which signaled the entry of outsiders into the Maya lowlands and the rise of secular authority and a mercantile class.

Since Proskouriakoff wrote, the volume of scholarship on Maya inscriptions has increased dramatically. Much of this work has been accomplished by researchers who accept the methodology of phonetic decipherment, about which Proskouriakoff expressed great reservations. New excavations have resulted in the addition of new documents unavailable for her analysis. Many suggestions made in this book have been independently elaborated by other scholars. Proskouriakoff’s unpublished ideas about Tikal’s Early Classic history informed the discussions of other scholars with whom she shared her insights. Still other points raised in her analysis have not as yet been adequately addressed, and provide a challenge for future scholarship.

THE SCOPE OF MAYA HISTORY

Underlying this work is the belief that a global review of the Maya world is necessary to understand the developments reflected in the erection of monuments, changes in themes depicted in art, and the events recorded in texts. Proskouriakoff limits herself to an examination of carved stone monuments, primarily those visible to the public, such as stelae, altars, and hieroglyphic stairs. Her goal can be seen as a study of the processes which spread the use of carved stone monuments from a relatively small area in the Central Peten in the fourth century to a broad arc extending from Mexico to Honduras in the eighth century. Her discussion of the gradual contraction of this sphere through the tenth century, and in particular her exclusion of Palenque from the historical record (a separate chapter on the site was left unfinished at her death), illustrate how central the spread of public stone monuments is in this work. It is clear that Proskouriakoff sees this spread simultaneously as evidence of political events, such as conquest, intermarriage, and alliance, and as evidence for the existence of a pan-Maya ethnic identity expressed in the form of a shared art style.

Tikal is central to her analysis, and the rise and fall in the fortunes of this site provide the structure for the presentation (see Jones, Coe, and Haviland 1981 for a discussion of Tikal archaeology). Early Classic Tikal established the themes which are found throughout the Classic Maya world. Military conflict with Uaxactun is reflected in the monuments at both sites. Tikal’s hegemony in the central Peten begins a long history of military raids as a primary means to establish polities. Equally important in Early Classic Tikal were alliances cemented through marriage, reflected in paired depictions of male and female figures like those of Stelae 23 and 25. Proskouriakoff detects possible reflections of a complex system of elite succession integrating three matrilineages with the ruling patriline on Tikal Stela 26. From the very beginning, political power was based on a balance between conflict and alliance.

Carved monuments and the political system they represented spread from Tikal. Sites along the Río San Pedro prior to 9.10.0.0.0 are interpreted as stages on a trade route important to the central Peten power. Little is made of the preexisting centers in which large-scale architecture, ornamented by stucco sculpture, predominated and freestanding stone sculpture was not used (such as Cerros, Belize; see Friedel 1985). Tikal and Uaxactun, themselves examples of this Late Preclassic tradition, were not alone in the early Maya world, but the roots of the distinctive Peten developments are unexplored.

As the Tikal polity extended its ties out from the central Peten, images of male-female pairs became widespread. Proskouriakoff interprets this pattern as an indication that elite intermarriage was a key to the expansion of Maya polities (compare Marcus 1976; 1987; Molloy and Rathje 1974). Equally widespread are indications of warfare, marked by male figures dressed for battle and taking prisoners. The Maya world, with Tikal at its center, quickly reaches its maximum southern, northern, and western peripheries. In this expanding world, however, internal strains between the elite and a middle class are detected. The succession at Tikal is disrupted, and a hiatus in monument building occurs. The hiatus at Tikal marks the removal of the ruling lineage to the Petexbatun region, where a court is established at Dos Pilas.

The fragmentation of the Maya world is not complete, and through military power and marital alliance, Tikal’s lineage is reestablished in the Late Classic. The conservative style of monuments and grand scale of the site suggest to Proskouriakoff a status as a pilgrimage center for the entire Maya world. As that world shrinks, the Maya of Tikal continue to perpetuate traditional ways. The end of the Classic Maya tradition comes as foreigners conquer Chichen Itza, foreign elements enter the monumental art of the western fringe, and the secular concerns of the trading class predominate.

Revolving around this central story of the waxing and waning of Tikal are subordinate plots in which sites initially touched by Tikal themselves practice Maya statecraft of warfare and marriage alliance. Caracol in Belize, initially founded by Tikal, becomes deeply involved in affairs of Naranjo. Pusilha in Belize plays a part in the founding of Quirigua, which in turn is related to Copan. War captains at Yaxchilan, legitimated by their marriage with the royal line, play roles in the political stabilization of Piedras Negras. The effects of developments in each site on its neighbors and allies are constantly reviewed. The world of Maya History is a world of intimate interconnections reflected in the public monumental record.

TRAILS BLAZED AND PATHS FOLLOWED

Proskouriakoff constantly restrains her speculation and calls for more research. Despite this restraint, she makes several intriguing points which have not been pursued by other researchers. Other conclusions have been independently discovered or elaborated by later scholars. Some studies based on methodological assumptions which Proskouriakoff does not share are not incorporated in her discussion. Others postdate the completion of her manuscript.

Speculations in Maya History

Proskouriakoff recognizes the importance of Teotihuacan as the source for iconography which was particularly prevalent in the Usumacinta river drainage. She notes the use of goggle-eyed Tlaloc faces on shields and in headdresses, and the trapezoidal year sign motif in headdresses. The significance of Teotihuacan iconography in the Maya lowlands has been the topic of much debate, with scenarios ranging from invasion and conquest (Coggins 1975; 1979; 1983) to the independent adoption of the foreign style to symbolize warfare and sacrifice (Scheie 1984a). Exploration of such highland-lowland interaction has clarified considerably the conditions of culture contact and their potential reflection in the archaeological record (A. Miller, ed., 1983, especially Ball 1983). Nonetheless, no consensus has been reached about the precise nature of the iconographie relations which Proskouriakoff describes.

An equally lively debate continues about the nature of relationships between Copan and Quirigua, the southernmost Classic Maya centers. Proskouriakoff discusses stylistic relations in monumental sculpture between the sites and tentatively supports glyphic evidence of connections between the sites. Recent studies have capitalized on decipherments of texts at Quirigua and Copan to describe relations surrounding the apparent defeat in battle of Eighteen Rabbit of Copan by the ruler of Quirigua (Jones and Sharer 1986; Riese 1986; 1988). Analysis of the site plans of the two centers confirms their close relationship (Ashmore 1986). Divergent traditions at Quirigua and Copan are evident in other studies, such as ceramic analyses (e.g., Bishop et al. 1986). These ceramic analyses also support Proskouriakoff’s association of Pusilha with the southeastern Maya sites, although specific relations seem stronger with Copan than with Quirigua.

Issues such as these, phrased as they are in the idiom of great events and wide-ranging processes, are naturally part of Maya History. But contained within the narrative of history are an extraordinary number of rich suggestions about the relationship between particular sculptural formats and programs and social, geographic, and religious forces. These suggestions recall the contributions made by Proskouriakoff’s short topical articles (1961b; 1968; 1973). Many of these ideas have been independently investigated by later researchers.

Among observations of this kind, Proskouriakoff notes the association of depictions of ballgame players with hieroglyphic stairs (see M. E. Miller and Houston 1987). While summarizing the waning years of the Classic Maya world, she identifies and traces out what she calls the cloud-rider motif in sites near Tikal (compare D. Stuart 1984). At Yaxchilan and Bonampak, Proskouriakoff notes a glyphic compound she calls the moon-comb title of subordinates (compare Houston 1989:55–56, based on D. Stuart 1986). She briefly discusses names and titles of royal women on shells from a burial at Piedras Negras (see D. Stuart 1985). She notes the apparent association at Yaxchilan between a particular form of staff with cut-out flaps and solstice dates (compare Tate 1992).

Results from New Excavations

The breadth of Proskouriakoff’s work allowed her to identify a wide range of patterns which have become obvious to later researchers through more detailed analyses of single sites and single themes. Researchers studying Caracol (Beetz and Satterthwaite 1981; Chase and Chase 1987; Stone, Reents, and Coffman 1985) and the Petexbatun region (Houston and Mathews 1985; Johnston 1985) have begun to trace the effects of warfare recorded in the texts of the two areas. Tonina, a site barely touched on by Proskouriakoff, has been thoroughly investigated (Becquelin and Baudez 1979–1982) and its monuments discussed from both epigraphic (Mathews 1983) and thematic (Baudez and Mathews 1979) points of view.

Continuing excavations at Tikal have produced new Early Classic monuments, especially in the Mundo Perdido zone (Fahsen 1987; 1988; Fialko 1987; 1988; Laporte and Vega de Zea 1987). These give further weight to Proskouriakoff’s speculations about an intimate relationship with Uaxactun, suggestions which underlie other published discussions of Early Classic Tikal (e.g., Coggins 1975; Jones and Satterthwaite 1982; Marcus 1976; Mathews 1985). Newly discovered texts from Caracol suggest the rulers of this site defeated Tikal in battle, and the timing of this defeat may be related to the Tikal hiatus. Continuing debate revolves around the relationship of Tikal and Dos Pilas, in particular about the meaning of the shared Emblem Glyph of the two sites (Houston and Mathews 1985).

The continuation of archaeological investigations at Copan has produced carved monuments from both early and late in the occupation of the site. Proskouriakoff rejected the designation of the Copan village area as the center of Early Classic development, drawing attention to the fact that early monuments there were fragmentary and could have been moved from the Main Group. The many fragments of Early Classic monuments recently recovered in the area of the Great Plaza (Riese 1983) amply support her view, as does detailed stratigraphie evidence for the construction of the Great Plaza beginning in the Early Classic (Cheek 1986). Recent dramatic discoveries of intact Early Classic monuments under the Hieroglyphic Stairway of Temple 26 provide final confirmation that the Main Group was the earliest, and longest occupied, zone of elite activity at Copan (G. Stuart 1989). Late Classic carved benches and other texts excavated in the elite residential zones (e.g., Webster, ed., 1989) reinforce Proskouriakoff’s suggestion that stelae scattered throughout the valley may document political grants to subordinates by the ruler of Copan. Contemporary events at Quirigua have been clarified by a project of excavations and investigation of inscriptions (Sharer 1978).

Results of recent excavations at Copan and Quirigua dramatically illustrate that new excavations have disproportionately affected knowledge of the Early Classic period. A fragmentary stela depicting a human figure holding a serpent-bar discovered at Copan (Baudez 1986) challenges Proskouriakoff’s characterization of the early monuments at the site as