A Maya Universe in Stone examines and explores a series of lintels celebrated in art history scholarship and attributed to Mayuy, a creative Maya sculptor from the Classic period. Carved in Laxtunich, Guatemala, they exhibit scenes of rituals performed by local magnates overseen by their lord, Cheleew Chan K'inich from Yaxchilan. The lintels were taken out of Guatemala in the 1960s. From the outset, Stephen Houston highlights that the objective of this book is to build the case that they were looted and to highlight the impact of that loss, as well as to “contextualize [Mayuy's] masterworks to point the way to the lintels reprovenancing and, as an ultimate aim, repatriatrion to their country of origin” (p. 9).
In 1950, Dana Lamb stumbled onto two of Mayuy's lintels while visiting a remote region of northern Guatemala. The documentation of the explorer being incomplete, Andrew Scherer, Charles Golden, and Houston lay out in Chapter 2 a series of direct and indirect clues to pinpoint the exact location of Laxtunich. They piece together personal letters, hand-drawn maps, notes, and sketches from Lamb himself to conclude that the city is likely to be in the general vicinity of El Túnel and La Pasadita, about 30 km southeast of Piedras Negras. The authors go on to reconstruct how the lintels could have been acquired by collectors and serve as “a moral example of Maya art ripped from their source” (p. 35).
Chapter 3 will surely appeal to art historian readers as Houston, Scherer, and Karl Taube embark on a journey to describe Mayuy's oeuvre. His carving provides a unique opportunity for the reader to track a single artist's trajectory over four commissions. Mayuy's known work, which spans from AD 769 to 783, shows a novel understanding of human sight. The lintels exhibit an extraordinary density of interlocking information and address the challenge of displaying Maya hierarchies within multifigural compositions while producing a comprehensive and cohesive narrative. The authors discuss the artist's innovative visual effects in Maya text and imagery and his three-dimensional virtuosity. They go on to describe the perspective research on the painting techniques in which contrasts mattered.
Chapter 4 is certainly the most challenging for the reader and the one that will most appeal to archaeologists and epigraphers. Mayuy's carvings are a narrative of authority and sacred rulership anchored in rituals and identity. The analysis from Houston, Taube, and David Stuart situates the lintels’ account within the broader context of the Classic Maya mythic universe. Here, the authors establish the relevance of Mayuy's work within a larger geographical and historical frame of reference, requiring the deciphering of glyphs and extensive knowledge of Maya cosmology.
The life of Mayuy was embedded in a set of social relationships that plays out in a complex social geography. Through the description of his artistic production, Houston and the other authors remind us that cultural objects have their own lives: they are born within specific geographies and present a specific historicity. It is the craft of anthropology to mobilize their meaning and to generate a discourse that resonates within our own time and space.
Readers not familiar with Maya glyphs will face the challenge of following the authors’ train of thought reflected in their translations of some of the cited inscriptions. Readers who do not have sufficient expertise will need to rely on the authors’ interpretations of Mayuy's carvings, even though the meaning of the scenes depicted by the carver remains uncertain and hence open to alternative discourse. The authors themselves make use of qualifiers such as “plausible,” “possible,” “metaphorical,” and “uncertain” in their descriptions of the scenes portrayed on the lintels.
A Maya Universe in Stone is not a purely anthropological work. It displays a taste for adventure and a strong inclination toward both archaeology and art history. Stephen Houston edited these diverse chapters together under one cover to create a unique work exploring concepts of space, time, art, and ancient cosmologies. It is therefore an eclectic book in a genre by itself. Beautifully illustrated, it helps the reader fully appreciate this unique Maya artistic production by a single artist. Maya epigraphers will find this work fascinating; anthropologists and art historians will gain a unique opportunity to learn about ancient Maya ideologies and practice in the context of the sober reality of illicit artifact acquisition.
This is altogether an excellent book from the Getty Research Institute that advances visual arts and their histories; it needs to be read with an open mind because it exists at the intersection of various academic domains. It stimulates the reader with just how much information can be drawn from only a few artifacts while building a case for the cultural tragedy of trafficking in ancient artifacts. This book will make the reader reflect on the still-elusive Maya “universe in stone” and on how identifying artifacts in context could go even further to help us better understand the various realities of this ancient civilization.
