Material Culture:
A Channel for Ideological Expression How Ancient Mesoamerican Cultures Expressed
Their Views on Life and Death Through Art
Anne Chen CHASE PROGRAM - Perspectives in World Art & Design
Final Paper
December 17, 2012
Archaeologists, historians, and members of other fields of research have long been
interested in how cultural values, beliefs, and attitudinal orientations have expressed themselves
through the material culture of a group of peoples. In the words of Laura G. Turgeon, “an
increase in the number of publications and journals specializing in material culture mirrors the
growing interest in the object as a vehicle for new and innovative ways of understanding
societies past and present.”1 A specific realm of a culture’s ideological positions that has drawn
particular attention is its view on the afterlife – how the culture approaches the impending fate of
all men and women: death. And whether a society of ancient people choose to embrace or fear
the mortality of human beings, what they elect to believe in can more than often be discerned by
academics via the material artifacts they leave behind. The civilizations of Mesoamerica, which
flourished in the region which extended from central Mexico down to the southern portions of
North America before the Spanish conquest of the area in the 16th century, held an especially
interesting perspective of the afterlife which has fascinated scholars. Through the examination
and analyses of these ancient civilizations’ art, monuments, tools, and even human remains,
researchers have been able to develop more knowledge concerning the Mesoamerican peoples’
conception of death, and how their particular view was manifested in their bloody practices such
as ritual blood-letting, self-mutilation, and human sacrifice.
A brief snapshot of the Mesoamerican empire, particularly the complex civilizations
which were birthed from the region prior to the 1300s, would include three key cultures: the
Olmecs, the Mayans, and the Aztecs. Interestingly, despite their lack of interaction, these three
cultures shared four main cultural aspects: a belief in a feathered-serpent deity; an elaborate
calendrical system based upon two-hundred sixty and three-hundred sixty-five day cycles; ritual
ball games; and the practices of human sacrifice and ritual blood-letting. The latter feature
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included acts of human heart extraction, flaying, self-scarification and other bodily-mutilation,
and even emulation. Women, for example, would often pierce their ears and/or tongues with the
tails of sting rays, allowing the blood to drip onto a sheet of paper to be later lighted as a
ritualistic sacrifice to the gods. Yet although these bloody customs are viewed today by many
individuals as strange, irrational, even barbaric, they were not, at least for the ancient
Mesoamericans, without justification, and here the Mesoamerican belief in “animism” may be
introduced. In essence, these ancient peoples followed an ideology in which all things, living and
non-living, housed a spirit – from rocks to trees to maintains to humans and the humblest
animals and plant-life, all that which existed in the physical world are “interpenetrated by
spiritual forces – both personal and impersonal – to the extent that objects carry spiritual
significance and events have spiritual causes.”2 Consequently, Mesoamerican cultures viewed
nature as naturally violent; for instance, the natural world could be best represented through
images such as a jaguar pouncing upon its prey. Nature, if then bloody by evolution, required
inherent adaptations for the sake of survival – a quite rational justification for violence within a
culture. It is of little surprise, then, that such an understanding of their natural surroundings was
expressed in the ancient Mesoamerican’s material culture.
As Terje Oestigaard succinctly put it in his summarizing of a key concept in Valerio
Valeri’s Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, “through the performance
of rituals, people learn to believe in the cultural experience in which they apprehended.”3 It so
follows then that many of the ritualistic practices performed by Mesoamerican peoples were
manifestations of their particular beliefs in the afterlife. Firstly, the question of “How exactly did
these ancient cultures view life and death?” should be answered. According to the Museum of
Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, “many Andean cultures of South America
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had a more optimistic view of the afterlife.”4 Indeed, as the Museum continues, to the Olmec,
Maya, and Aztec peoples, “death was not a final state, but served as the soul’s transition from
one realm of existence to another.”5 One could thus successfully infer that these cultures did not
so much as fear dying as they embraced it – the end of one’s life was not conceived as some
horrific, ultimate end, but as the next chapter in one’s soul’s multidimensional journey. Of
course, this did not mean that everyone would ascend to some seraphic heaven when passing on
from the world of the living – only those who were noble and pure of heart during their time
spent on earth reserved a rightful place in the Mesoamerican people’s celestial paradise. In fact,
as evident from many of the architectural structures which remain from the Maya civilization,
this culture’s conceptualization of heaven involved it being divided into thirteen levels – a
similar ideology was held by the Aztec, as “documentary evidence [from Copán’s Hieroglyphic
Stairway] indicates that the thirteenth and highest level of Heaven was reserved for warriors who
died on the field of battle in the service of the state.”6 As for those who fell on the other side of
the spectrum of goodness and integrity, they would be condemned to one of the nine levels of the
Maya Underworld, which were also represented in the architectural constructions of the Maya.
A closer look at some examples of these Maya architectural creations will allow for a
further understanding of how the ideological beliefs of a civilization can be experienced via its
material culture. Temple I, located at Tikal, features the aforementioned thirteen and nine level
configuration in order to express the hierarchical nature of both Heaven and the Underworld. A
Maya creation of Petén-style, made from stone during the Late Classic Period, the monumental
structure serves as a burial place for Tikal ruler Jasaw Chan K’awiil, who reigned during the
period which stretched from 682 to 734 AD.7 Another Maya architectural masterpiece which
utilizes the symbolic levels is the Temple of Inscriptions, found in Palenque and also made
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during the Late Classic Period. The Temple of Inscriptions was the funerary site of Lord Pakal,
who ruled over Palenque during the 7th century.8 Again, the vaulting arrangement of the temple
was representative of the thirteen levels of Heaven and the nine levels of the Underworld,
emphasizing the Maya belief in how Heaven, the world of the living, and the Underworld were
all enmeshed. Another notable feature of the Temple of Inscriptions include the fact that Pakal’s
tomb itself, constructed from a ten-thousand pound slab of stone, would have been too colossal
to fit through the tomb’s doorway – it has been deduced that the tomb was thus built first, and the
temple then constructed around it. Pakal’s sarcophagus too is worthy of further mentioning – the
image of a world tree etched upon the sarcophagus, emerging from the ruler’s stomach, is
believed to symbolize his soul’s rise to the heavens while the Underworld below him swallows
his physical body.9
Architectural constructions, such as the two Maya temples mentioned above, are not the
only material evidence academics and researchers can analyze in order to understand how
material culture reflects the fundamental ideological beliefs of a culture. Art, including
architectural decorations, effigies, vessels, and tapestries are also valuable artifacts which house
a wealth of information. Lintel 24, discovered at Yaxchilan, is such an example from the Maya
civilization. Made from limestone, the carving shows the Maya queen Lady Xoc threading her
tongue with a cord as she commits the ritualistic act of blood-letting, a devotional performance
of self-mutilation commonly practiced by the Mayans in order to show the high reverence they
held towards their deities. Lady Xoc is depicted besides her husband the Shield Jaguar, to whom
she is committing the blood-letting to. And a closer examination of the lintel provides an
example of another Maya self-mutilating act: scarification. Mary Miller thus describes Lintel 24
as “a stone carving from the city of Yaxchilan [which] portrays the powerful Lady Cock with
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tattoos or scars around her mouth”10. Miller reflectively continues: “Beauty was a way to display
a social, if not moral, value among the Maya. The wealth they invested and pain they endured to
create bodies that reflected their social beliefs make our modern-day obsession with beauty seem
less excessive. Like us, the Maya indulged in self-deception about appearance, preferring to let
artistic depictions conform to their ideals rather than reality.”11
Indeed, whether it was blood-letting or scarification, it seems that the bloody, ceremonial
practices of the Maya were well-justified in their minds because these often gory performances
were fundamental to expressing one’s devotion to the gods. Even the genitals, perhaps part of the
body’s most sensitive region, were susceptible to mutilation: “…other times they [the Maya]
performed an obscene and painful sacrifice … holes were made in the virile member of each
[male worshipper] obliquely from side to side and through the holes which they had thus made,
they passed the greatest quantity of thread that they could, and all of them thus fastened and
strung together, they anointed the idol with the blood which flowed from all these parts; and he
who did this the most was considered the bravest; and their sons from the earliest age began to
practice it, and it is a horrible thing to see how inclined they were to this ceremony.”12 And if the
exploration into the Maya ceremonial customs used for the worship of their deities were to
continue, the subject of human sacrifice must be acknowledged. In the words of Kristin N.
Romey: “By the time the Spanish arrived in the Yucatán and recorded the practices in the
sixteenth century, the Maya had been performing human sacrifice for at least a thousand years. It
was a practice necessary to ensure, among other things, the balance of the universe, a king’s
preservation of authority, and in a land too often prone to drought, the continuation of rain.”13
Evidently, again, the presence of important justifications to the Maya’s belief systems and
bloody traditions – and here, when discussing human sacrifice, perhaps the ultimate example of a
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what can be described as a brutal, violent performance by a cultural people, there were a
multitude of rational justifications.
Of course, it was not just the Mayans who practiced human sacrifice. As mentioned
earlier, the practice of human sacrifice is one of the four shared features of among all
Mesoamerican cultures. It is unsurprising, then, that many of the material artifacts that have been
discovered in the region may have been used in sacrificial performances. The statuesque stone
Lanzón, for instance, which is a creation of Peru’s Chavin de Huantar culture, is believed to have
a role in human sacrificial practice. The object itself is embedded into the earth, and it has been
hypothesized that the opening at its top was used to pour blood down.
A common type of Mesoamerican sculptures is the chac-mool, which are essentially
figurines, representative of seated humans, which have been discovered in many Maya temples.
These figures are another example of how the ancient Mesoamericans created physical objects
which not only expressed their beliefs, but could be used in the performance of practices which
iterated such beliefs. Lawrence G. Desmond describes the chac-mool as “a sculptural figure
seated on the ground with its upper back raised, the head turned to a near right angle, the legs
drawn up to the buttocks, elbows rest on the ground, and hands hold a vessel, disk, or plate on
the stomach where offerings may have been placed or human sacrifices carried out.”14 A human
heart, for instance, could be easily placed on a chac-mool’s repository as a sacrificial offering to
the gods.
It is also interesting to examine how Mesoamerican deities themselves were actually
depicted, as they were the ones who all of these bloody practices were being devoted to. More
than often, these gods were portrayed wearing the skins of flayed humans; Mesoamerican priests,
as well, were well-known to clothe themselves with the skins of others. The Aztec god of death
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and rebirth Xipe Totec, for example, is commonly shown wearing flayed human skin as he
wields an assemblage of weapons. In fact, flayed skin was actually a symbol of rebirth to the
Aztec peoples – a representation of shedding off the old to prepare for the new – and was also
believed to hold curative properties.15 And thus arises the question of how exactly, if the ancient
Mesoamericans so often performed such bloody processes – many of which would require
surgical precision – did these peoples actually accomplish these acts? Evidence of thin, surgical
obsidian blades of the sharpest precision, discovered at numerous Maya archaeological sites,
provide an explanation – many scholars believe that the Mayans held a keen pharmaceutical
knowledge as well as skills of high surgical prowess, which would have been quite useful when
skinning a human being.
Some cultures believe in an afterlife – that an individual’s spirit continues on to some
mysterious, other-worldly realm after its time on this Earth has come to an end – while others
posit that once one dies, there is nothing else, no Heaven or Hell or some strange in-between.
And while the views of life and death, the mortality of the human being, and the universe in
general vary between cultures, whatever ideology is coveted by a particular peoples can more
than often be discerned through the material culture created by those peoples. Whether it be
through architectural constructions, art, or even functional tools, diverse cultures, even if they do
not share the same beliefs and values, undoubtedly do have one thing in common: they enjoy
expressing their chosen ideas in physical objects and customary practices.
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Images
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Temple I
Culture: Maya Site: Tikal
Material: stone Period: Late Classic
Source: Tikal (Guatemala), Temple 1
August 11, 2006 self-photographed by Raymond Ostertag
Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tikal_Temple1_2006_08_11.JPG
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Temple of Inscriptions
Culture: Maya Site: Palenque Material: stone
Period: Late Classic
Source: Palenque (Chiapas), Temple of Inscriptions
2008 self-photographed by Jan Harenburg
Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palenque_temple_1.jpg
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Lintel 24
Culture: Maya Site: Yaxchilán
Material: limestone Period: Late Classic
Source: Lintel 24, Structure 23, Yaxchilan
as published by Désiré Charnay, 1885; scanned and uploaded to en:Wikipedia by Infrogmation on 4 December, 2003
Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yaxchil%C3%A1n_lintel.jpg
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Lanzón
Culture: Chavin de Huantar
Site: Peru Material: stone
Period: Early Horizon
Source: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/chavin/lanzon.htm
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