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I
Introduction
The paintings and drawings found in Maya caves, the subject of this book, form an intriguing chapter in the history of Mesoamerican art that has yet to be written. Cave art may well be one of the last great frontiers of Maya studies; and, in spite of a recent flurry of books, films, and popular articles on the ancient Maya, their cave art still remains little known to professional archaeologists and the public alike. Yet, owing to the perplexing nature of this art, it is not all that surprising to find it coming to light two hundred years after the dawn of research into Maya civilization. This diverse collection of figures, symbols, and even hieroglyphic writing, found in caverns from the southern highlands of Mexico to the remote Maya Mountains of Belize, was produced by individuals working by firelight with varying levels of skill and different motivations. Moreover, like their Paleolithic counterparts, they did not just decorate rock shelters and shallow caves but also created extraordinary works of art on the walls of deep caves, the kind with vast tunnels and spectacular geological formations.
Cave painting is extremely rare in the world, and the Maya area and western Europe are two of the few places on earth where paintings have ever been found in deep caves. Comparatively speaking, Paleolithic cave painting is far more extensive than the Maya corpus, perhaps on the order of eight times. Obviously it is also much better known. In fact, as it is the only cave art about which most people know anything at all, cave art in its totality tends to be viewed as an exclusive phenomenon of late Paleolithic European culture. This abiding linkage between cave art and some usually fuzzy notion of “cavemen” has not just served to enhance the mystique of cave art, which is already weighty owing to its rarity and exotic location, but also to situate it squarely in the camp of the “primitive.” In the popular imagination, cave art evokes scenes of grunting, fur-clad hunters with little on their minds save the next meal. Such uninformed stereotypes (e.g., see Bahn 1992) have fueled the misconception that the making of cave art could only interest “uncivilized” people, like the “caveman” artists and audiences parodied in cartoons (fig. 1-1). Cave art has also become part of an evolutionary paradigm where it alludes to dredging up deep layers of the psyche: to paint on a cave wall is to tap primitive instincts and relive primordial experiences. Cave art is the art of our evolutionary ancestors.
Fortunately, the ancient Maya offer an alternative view to all of this, for, at the same time that they were exploring caves and decorating their walls, they were also building cities, inaugurating kings, waging war, writing in books, practicing astronomy—essentially getting on with the business of civilization (fig. 1-2). Hardly the enigma of the people we typically associate with what might be called “deep-cave art,” the Maya offer an unusual opportunity to gain concrete insights into the motivation of this rare, little-understood art form. But beyond this, the paintings and drawings left by the Maya in the earth’s deepest recesses, what they viewed as a sacred underworld, reveal in unexpected ways how the natural environment shaped thought and action in aboriginal American culture.
This book discusses twenty-five painted caves found in the Maya area and attempts to assemble under one cover all that is currently known about Maya cave painting. Owing to the relative novelty of this subject in Maya literature, this study has had to contend with a number of unwelcome difficulties. Foremost is a lack of literature, as the cave art presented here has had little previous publication. It also comes from places few readers of this book will ever have a chance to see: caves that are either closed to the public or too remote to visit casually. This, too, is unfortunate, as the experience of viewing cave art in situ is well beyond the scope of any book. But even more disturbing is the fact that some of these paintings have already been destroyed and will never again be seen in their original state.
The only published work prior to my own (e.g., Stone 1987a, 1989b) to deal systematically with Maya cave painting is J. Eric S. Thompson’s introduction to the reprint of Henry Mercer’s Hill Caves of Yucatan. In this classic study of Maya cave utilization, Thompson (1975: xxxvi) summarized what was known in 1975 about Maya cave art, proclaiming: “The best Maya cave art is painted, is quite rare, and on present evidence appears to be confined to Chiapas.” He managed to describe the entire corpus of Maya cave painting in two pages, testimony to how little was known about the subject. But when Thompson penned his remarks, few painted caves had been discovered in the Maya area. Those reported from Chiapas (Joloniel and Yaleltsemen) and Yucatan (Loltun) were sketchily published, at best, and did little to bring Maya cave art out of obscurity. Certainly, cave painting paled in comparison with the splendid sculptures and paintings left by the Maya in dozens of architectural centers. The few anomalous cave paintings known at that time were of little interest in the face of the archaeological treasures at Maya surface sites.
The status of Maya cave art dramatically changed in 1980 with the discovery of Naj Tunich, a cave located in remote hill country of southeastern Peten, Guatemala. Naj Tunich revealed something unknown in the archaeological record: a corpus of fine Late Classic paintings, including dozens of human figures and hieroglyphic texts. This unprecedented find, reported with much fanfare initially in the Guatemalan press (Rodas 1980) and later in a cover story in National Geographic (G. Stuart 1981), showed beyond any doubt that cave art was part of the ancient Maya’s artistic legacy.
“I adore your place. Did you do it yourselves?”
FIG. 1-1. Drawing by Stevenson; © 1970, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
FIG. 1-2. Temple I, Tikal.
Living in Guatemala in 1980, I was able to visit Naj Tunich shortly after it was discovered. I was immediately struck upon arrival by an uncanny juxtaposition of art and environment, one in which delicate paintings, clearly the product of a refined mindset, covered the labyrinthine tunnels of a rugged, three-kilometer-long cave. Not only was this something splendid to see, but it also raised a question: why would the Maya leave paintings of this caliber in a forbidding wilderness? It was a question that drew me to learn more about Naj Tunich and ultimately led to a comprehensive study of Maya cave painting.
The discovery of Naj Tunich seemed to open a floodgate of new cave art finds in the Maya area. In actuality, this was an outgrowth of two earlier trends. One was a revived interest in cave studies by a new generation of Maya archaeologists working on a foundation built by such pioneers as Carlos Navarrete and David Pendergast. Since the late 1970s James Brady, Matthias Strecker, Veronique Breuil, Gary Rex Walters, Juan Luis Bonor, and others have undertaken cave-centered archaeological projects that contributed to a burgeoning corpus of Maya caves and cave art. But an even greater impact on the discovery of painted caves was the expanding human presence in the jungle wilderness that once formed the backdrop of Classic Maya civilization. And as this process accelerates—something which I think is inevitable—the corpus of Maya cave art will grow in the coming decades, and the ideas presented below will be amended and enriched with every new discovery. I hope this book will serve as a stepping-stone for future studies of new painted Maya caves that will eventually come to light.
History of Fieldwork
My introduction to Maya cave archaeology came by way of two individuals extremely knowledgeable about Belizean caves, my fellow graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, Barbara MacLeod and Dorie Reents-Budet. In the late 1970s they both worked at Petroglyph Cave in Belize, and under their aegis in 1977 I visited Petroglyph Cave and Footprint Cave. Both caves are extremely large, geologically complex, and remote, and I relished exploring them, even though I was a complete novice.
To my great fortune, an opportunity to work at Naj Tunich arose in 1981. I first visited Naj Tunich in April of that year with Michael DeVine, owner of Finca Ixobel and one of the original discoverers of the cave, along with several other friends. Shortly after our trip, James Brady extended an invitation to study the cave’s collection of paintings as part of the first official archaeological expedition to Naj Tunich, along with Sandra Villagrán de Brady and archaeologists Miguel Orrego and Vivian Broman de Morales. Our team worked in Naj Tunich for two weeks in June and July of 1981.
Armed with a permit from the Instituto de Antropología e Historia, I returned to Naj Tunich for a week in September of 1981, this time with archaeologist Mark Johnson and our Australian assistant, Elizabeth Williamson. On this expedition we mapped every painting known at that time in plan and elevation. That was my last work at Naj Tunich for about five years, as I finished my dissertation and began a new academic appointment.
In 1986 I returned to Naj Tunich in an unofficial capacity and sadly noted more damage to the paintings. It became obvious that careful photographic documentation was needed before more destruction ensued. With financial assistance from the National Geographic Society and the expertise of cave photographer Chip Clark and his assistant, Jennifer Clark, both on staff at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, we carried out a photographic project in July of 1988. As we now know, this was none too soon, as the paintings were badly vandalized in 1989. A mapping project was also initiated during the 1988 expedition, supervised by George Veni, the staff karst-geomorphologist. To our delight, a new section of Naj Tunich with an important hieroglyphic inscription was discovered. My final work at Naj Tunich came in June of 1989, when I participated in part of a field season directed by James Brady. All told, I made six trips to Naj Tunich and spent over a month in the cave.
Work in Yucatan began with the encouragement of Matthias Strecker, a German archaeologist now residing in Bolivia. Strecker gave me much of his unpublished research on Yucatecan cave art. Between 1984 and 1990 I made several trips to Yucatan, following leads by Strecker and others, and managed to augment my corpus of decorated caves. I visited five painted caves in Yucatan: Actun Ch’on, Loltun, Tixkuytun, Dzibichen, and Caactun. In 1989 I visited Actun Dzib and Roberto’s Cave in the Toledo District of Belize, then under investigation by Gary Rex Walters.
One other field experience important to the formation of my ideas was a three-week expedition in 1984 into the remote Vaca Plateau of central Belize; led by Thomas Miller, it enabled me to participate in the discovery of the largest caves now known in the Maya area. I was deeply impressed with the awesome beauty and size of these caverns, which have passage widths of one hundred meters! I was also able to see Maya cave archaeology in its pristine state, for this part of Belize has been virtually intruder-free since pre-Columbian times. The tremendous size and remoteness of these caverns, most of which had been explored by the ancient Maya, gave me a new appreciation of their spelunking abilities.
These excursions into the field not only brought me to Maya cave art but also expanded my awareness of spatial constructs in ancient Maya thought and ritual life. My previous research on Maya art, a dissertation on the Quirigua zoomorphs, also dealt with space, but space figurated in visual metaphors as part of sculpted compositions (Stone 1983a; 1985a). It was obvious even at that time that these sculpted images alluded to the natural, spatial, specifically topographic environment as a means of constituting sacred space; but the caves—with their spectacular terrain and archaeological contents—added a new dimension to what I had known only as symbols manipulated in a pictorial system: the caves themselves, I realized, were the targeted references in the Maya symbolization of sacred space and entailed a distinct set of human experiences. Caves were an unexplored context for the study of Maya art, but at the same time they resonated with symbolic representations of sacred space in the built environment.
Place and Time
In this study “Maya caves” are understood as those found in the area occupied by Maya-speaking people before the conquest, omitting the territory of the Huastec Maya of Veracruz, who were isolated at an early date from their linguistic cousins. The core Maya area roughly includes all of Belize and Guatemala, that part of Honduras west of the Ulua River, and the area west of the Lempa River in El Salvador (fig. 1-3). Maya territory in Mexico encompasses all of the Yucatan Peninsula, Tabasco as far west as the site of Comalcalco and highland Chiapas, where Maya languages have a border with Mixe-Zoquean.
The largest subregion of the Maya area is the Lowlands, which lie below an elevation of 3,000 feet. The Lowlands constitute the most important sector of the Maya area for this study. Geologically they comprise a vast tract of limestone that provided not only an excell...
