In The Comitán Valley, Caitlin Earley provides a thorough and engaging introduction to an understudied region on the periphery of the Maya world. Integrating evidence from archaeology, art history, and related disciplines, Earley focuses her attention on four hilltop sites, each approximately a day’s walk from the others. What distinguishes the region is the prodigious amount of sculpture produced at each of these four relatively small sites, as well as the distinctive local sculptural styles that each site developed, making reference to artistic traditions in different parts of the Mesoamerican world.
In addition to their peripheral location, one of the reasons that these sites have not received scholarly attention is that so much of the surviving sculpture is in a very fragmentary state. The lack of complete texts has undoubtedly also played a role, as have histories of collecting and looting that have removed objects from their original contexts. Earley does a masterful job of bringing together different lines of evidence to wring every possible interpretation out of battered fragments of sculpture. What’s more, in the penultimate chapter of the book, she investigates those processes of fragmentation with the same careful attention that she offers to works in their original contexts.
The text is organized geographically, with one chapter each devoted to the sculpture of the sites of Tenam Puente, Tenam Rosario, Chinkultic, and Quen Santo, moving from west to east across the Comitán Valley, while progressing from sites that thrived during the Late Classic to those that continued into the Postclassic period. The sites under consideration span the modern Mexico-Guatemala border, which all too often also divides modern scholarship and archaeological practice. One great strength of Earley’s account is how ably she synthesizes literature from both sides of the border, from Eduard Seler’s early expeditions onward.
The first case study deals with the sculptural corpus of Tenam Puente. At this site, sculpture in the round recalls that of Tonina, both in frontal images of rulers wearing stacked headdresses carved in highly three-dimensional relief, and in the bodies of bound captives, many of them decapitated, fragmented, and in extremely poor condition. Earley proposes that the captive sculptures may have been part of the decorative program of a ballcourt, much like their counterparts at Tonina. Yet there is no clear evidence of a political relationship between Tonina and Tenam Puente, and indeed, the latter site also has a robust tradition of low relief images of warriors taking captives, very much in the style of Yaxchilan and its subsidiaries in the Usumacinta River region. One of the most interesting observations in this section is that overt images of violence, such as acts of captive-taking, are more common at subsidiary sites, where the responsibilities for territorial violence may have been concentrated.
At Tenam Rosario, Earley traces a group of circular ballcourt markers showing crouching figures wearing goggles and headdresses that reference Central Mexican iconography. Here, Earley argues that these similarities to Teotihuacan and to later Aztec art are refracted through Teotihuacan’s influence in the Maya world, particularly at Pacific slope sites like Escuintla and Los Horcones. Earley relates the form of these crouching figures to the bodies of figures on clay incensarios found throughout the region. These incensarios offer a fascinating suggestion of shared practices across city-states otherwise so different in their artistic affiliations, while demonstrating the transmission of ideas between different scales, media, and contexts of practice.
At Chinkultic, Earley discusses different loci for sculpture, including a ballcourt, a courtly area, and the most elevated parts of the acropolis. She discusses a series of stelae featuring low relief images of rulers conducting rituals in the company of kneeling subsidiary figures. These sculptures once again point to a cosmopolitan range of knowledge: the pillars shown in these rituals resemble sculptures found in the northern Maya area at cities like Oxkintok and Uxmal. How this one feature of such far-flung sites came to be adopted is a fascinating question to which the text offers no easy answer.
Finally, at the site of Quen Santo, more than 100 sculptures have been recovered, many of them stylized human figures with crossed arms, carved fully in the round. Earley uses archival photos to reconstruct the original context of these works in a system of caves below the city’s acropolis, spaces that continue to be sites of devotion to this day. Earley argues that these figures, which resemble wrapped mummy bundles, were images of ancestors venerated in these caves well into the Postclassic period. The similarities she discerns in these works relate to art of highland and coastal Guatemala, including sites like Zaculeu and Cotzumalguapa, as well as to Mixtec art from Oaxaca.
Throughout the text, Earley teases out similarities, whether iconographic or thematic, between sculptures in extremely disparate styles. What she detects are frequently stories about militarism, displayed through the battered three-dimensional bodies of captives at Tenam Puente or through stelae showing rulers conducting rituals with subordinates at Chinkultic. The ballgame is another shared theme, as is the Jaguar God of the Underworld. Many features are shared between two or three sites, but few connect all four, raising fascinating questions about the role of sculpture in defining relationships between these cities, so close to one another and yet so visibly distinct.
Although this region seems peripheral today, Earley demonstrates that it had a far more cosmopolitan history during the first millennium AD. Rather than a backwater or periphery—although it may have that status now—the Comitán Valley was perhaps better described as a crossroads, a place through which goods and ideas moved, where people from many regions encountered one another, and where those who remained adapted and adopted artistic styles to tell their own stories. This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars interested in this “overlooked corner of the Maya world” (p. 4).
