black stones, reprised

I wrote of Piedras Negras a little while ago: that remote Mayan site along the Usumacinta River where so many Mayanists did so much important work.

This is a reprise: Piedras Negras by holga.



Memorize this mound of a mountain. It's just opposite the riverbank where you'll put in to climb the steep sandy bank to access the site. It's one of very few landmarks. There are no signs marking Piedras Negras.



Temple steps.


Temple.


Where Tatiana sleeps at the top of the temple steps.

black stones

Had hoped to write something compelling and endlessly fascinating about Piedras Negras, because the Mayan site on the Usamacinta River was, after all, the whole reason I soaked myself in deet and took cloroquin only to be bitten ANYWAY by disease bearing mosquitoes (although bearing something else probably, because the malaria smear turned up negative. west nile’s the head runner, followed by dengue fever. still waiting for results on those.)

But because my brain is taking odd holidays at random moments I’ll stick to the basics and simply upload a handful of shots and prattle on a bit.



Piedras Negras doesn’t see a lot of visitors -- it’s not like the well-groomed sites of Tikal and Palenque or even the mildly groomed jungle site of Yaxchilan (pics from there to follow soon) -- Piedras Negras today is only a few narrow trails cut into a series of steep slopes.



Very few of the ruins are revealed to what little light makes it through the thick rainforest canopy: much has never been excavated and the little that has has been overtaken again by the jungle in the time it lay fallow between excavations and when it was home to guerillas and drug runners.

The real treasures (and they’re astonishing, the estella and thrones and other bas-relief of Piedras) have been spirited away to the National Gallery in Guatemala City (Piedras lies on the Guatemalan side of the river). What’s left on the site has mostly been overtaken by moss.



Piedras Negras matters because Tatiana Proskouriakoff did some of her most important work here -- as an artist developing reconstructive drawings of what the site looked like in its prime she puzzled out the obvious: that the estella -- stone monuments erected in front of the temples and structures of the site -- recorded histories. Not mythologies, as previously believed. Actual chronicles of the kings.

Her insight led to the subsequent rapid tumble decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphics. Well, maybe not that rapid, but something of a tumble, and still underway today.



The approach to Piedras Negras isn’t easy. For us it was an hour and half in the bed of a pick up truck, a slick descent down a muddy bank (well traveled by pollo -- the Usumacinta is a main thoroughfare on the underground highway into the U.S.) into metal skiffs that would ferry us for the next 45 minutes along the river, and then a sandy ascent up another steep bank to the site.



All of which contributed to the wholly giddy feeling that I had on the approach, and the scramble through the bush, through the green soaked sunlight and the thick under story and the muddled mossy edifices. Yeah. Could hardly see a thing. And it was heaven.

Even the indignity of squatting in the woods (there are no port-a-potties at Piedras) couldn’t shake off the feeling that comes from finally touching down at a place where so much history happened.



Tatiana’s ashes are interred on the acropolis -- a steep ascent up yet another mound that’s part hillside part structure part city beneath your feet. She’s surrounded by the whirring sounds of the jungle -- howler monkeys and tiny cicadas that sound like weed whackers and add a surreal edge that makes being in the middle of nowhere sound a little like being in the middle of the suburbs.

rite of spring

Heading to Austin tomorrow to check in with the folks at the Maya Meetings. This has become a fairly regular rite of spring for us, although we missed the last couple of years because I was giving it all to the Man, and waited too long to book a room in town – a fatal error in the days surrounding the SXSW festival, which has morphed from Music into Interactive and Film, too.

Thought about trying to catch some of the Interactive while I was down there; then thought better of it. Days at home lately have become too precious and few. Do hope to catch a little spillover music while we’re in town, if we get lucky.

This will be the second year that they’re “doing things differently” at the meetings – Nikolai Grube left the seat that he inherited from Linda Schele a few years back. He was pretty much a traditionalist, and the meetings ran Linda’s way while he occupied the chair: Two days of papers (Thursday and Friday), followed by two days of collective decipherment (Saturday and Sunday) – which meant the rock stars of Mayan Studies armed with Sharpies hovering around an overhead projector, outlining and highlighting glyphs and their assorted and sundry parts, and making strange guttural utterances to the approval and/or dismay of the peanut gallery.



Worth noting: the peanut gallery is one of the best parts of these meetings, being a mash of notables and nobodys – Justin Kerr, Simon Martin, Michael Coe, Merle Greene, you get the picture… -- surrounded by young Turks and aging groupies (my sweetie and I fall into the aging set) who share little in common outside a prurient interest in the things folks etched in stone down South many, many years ago.

The initial four days used to be followed by a whole week of breakout workshops, in which folks sat down with notebooks full of inscriptions and Mayan grammars and went to town. I never did manage to make the time to stay for the follow up week, and regret now that I never will, because it's been tightened into a considerably more brief few days.

David Stuart is running the show now, having inherited the seat from Grube, and the event as a whole has been compressed. Jury’s still out on whether it’s for the good or the bad – I haven’t experienced it myself, and when I press folks who have for details all I get is a tight-lipped “it’s different”. So we’ll see.

Was pleased to hear that we’ll be taking on Piedras Negras inscriptions, along with a few of its Usumacinta neighbors: Yaxchilan and Pomona. One of my all time fave stellas hails from Piedras Negras, a now inaccessible site along the river because it’s largely occupied by drug lords who have made the monuments their home.



Estella 12 lives in the National Gallery in Guatemala City now, tucked away in a corner of the partially open patio in the heart of the galleries.

It’s stunning.

It portrays mortified captives under the thrall of their conquerors, and I’ve read none of the formal scholarship so I can no longer sort out what I heard from someone who knew something and what I made up on my own, but to the best of my knowledge the estella was carved by the captives it depicts. And it shows.

The captives (from Copan, I think -- the "Paris of the Mayan World" -- one of the captives is branded with the Copan emblem glyph) are wholly human, distinct, unique, and their suffering is palatable. Their captors are stiff and brutish – the weathering probably has something to do with the fact that they lack the humanity that’s conveyed so vividly in the folks whom they’ve enslaved under their feet – but I suspect it has something to do with the artist’s perspective as well.

So with any luck I’ll come away from the weekend understanding, finally, what the stone says. I’ll let you know how it turns out.