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Maya at the Mouse Meetings Program
The first meeting provided participants a great overview of the ancient Maya but didn't focus that much on any specific themes. Although we avoid firm bumpers for conference content, the theme for this meeting is going to be Flora and Fauna of the Ancient Maya World. Within this very broad topic, we will discuss the plants and animals (natural and supernatural) important to the ancient Maya. Among other things, we hope to present the iconographic representation of plants and animals, the utilization of these resources in the form of diet and material culture, and the supernatural relationships and personifications associated with animals.
We are excited to share a general program schedule for prospective attendees but the detailed daily programming schedules will not be finalized for a few weeks.
The schedule is in Eastern Daylight Time, or (GMT -4).
Thursday, February 19
The conference will officially kick off with a special welcome and evening keynote talk , followed by an evening social event.
Friday, February 20
Friday will be filled with lectures and forums, running roughly between 9:00am to 4:00pm. A 1.5 hour catered lunch will be served a few steps from our conference room and a coordinated evening meetup will be scheduled for those interested.
Creatures of the Night: Bats in Classic Maya Art & Writing
Marc Zender, Tulane University
For the Classic Maya, night was an alien landscape, antithetical and inimical to humans, the domain of predatory, rapacious animals such as jaguars, bats, and mosquitos. As I’ve shown previously (Zender 2010, 2012), such creatures are classified in Maya writing and art as “nocturnal” through the visual infixation of an element reading AHK’AB ‘darkness’. Some of these beings are actually nightmarish, such as the shrieking bats often shown holding plates of dismembered human body parts, their wings marked with disembodied eyes, crossed bones, and mandibles. Undoubtedly this reflects the association of these creatures with disease, ill omen, and death. Yet there seems to be more to the story, for bats (Chiroptera) are well-represented in this part of the world, with seven distinct families and 86 species in Guatemala alone. These vary from the diminutive, frugivorous, and leaf-nosed Honduran white bat (Ectophylla alba) to the large, insectivorous, snub-nosed big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscua) to the medium-sized leaf-nosed vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus). Such striking biodiversity would seem to belie the utility of the singular Mayan term suutz’ “bat”, although closer examination reveals that the Maya modified this core term with various additional adjectives—e.g., chak suutz’ “red/brown bat” or, perhaps, “great bat”, k’an suutz’ ‘yellow bat’, and sak suutz’ “white bat”—thereby capturing at least some of their variations. Similarly, while Thompson recognized only one glyph for “bat” (T756) in his Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs (1962), we now know of at least eight distinct “bat” signs in Maya writing, including the logograms SUUTZ’ “bat (generic)” and TZUTZ “furry” (typically used in rebus for the verb tzutz ‘complete’), the syllabograms xu (derived from xux- ‘whistle’) and tz’i (derived from tz’i- ‘shriek’), as well as at least four others of unknown value and motivation. Close study of these hieroglyphs and their variations, coupled with the numerous contexts of chiropterans in art, reveals much of interest with respect to surprisingly nuanced Maya views about bats and the development of those views over several hundred years of Maya writing and art.
Saturday, February 21
Mirroring Friday, Saturday will be filled with lectures and forums, running roughly between 9:00am to 4:00pm. A 1.5 hour catered lunch will be served a few steps from our conference room and a coordinated evening meetup will be scheduled for those interested.
Fauna at the top of the food chain; flora at the edge of the road
Mary Miller - Getty Research Institute
How did the Maya represent the birds, mammals and reptiles that dominated their world, along with the most dangerous creatures of all, human beings? Powerful lords wore jaguars and ocelots, avian raptors, and snakes, all animals that can move from field and forest to treetop and beyond; at the same time that musicians and artists often don water lilies and imagery of the surface of the earth, as occasionally worn elite women as well.
The broken landscape at the edge of field and forest generated alternative and modest life ways. One of the most neglected of Maya plants is the sunflower, an important foodstuff, but small creatures lived in its shadows.
This presentation will offer a fresh look at the plants and animals of the ancient Maya world.