Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America

13. Early Maya Dress and Adornment

411 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322825.c013 13 Early Maya Dress and Adornment Matthew G. Looper inTroduCTion Dress and body adornment are widely recognized as a richly meaningful aspect of contemporary Maya culture (Schevill 1997). However, the Precolumbian roots of this tradition are difficult to document. Given the poor conditions of preservation of perishables such as textile fabrics in the Maya area, scholars mainly rely upon pictorial sources to study aspects of ancient Maya attire (Bruhns 1988; Joyce 2001:54–89; Looper 2000, 2009; Taylor 1992; cf. Lothrop 1992; Mahler 1965).The abundant relief sculpture, figurines, and pictorial pottery painting from the Classic and Postclassic periods have assured an emphasis on these epochs. In contrast, Formative dress is the subject of only a few brief essays that focus on the analysis of monumental art (Valdés 1990, 1993; Valdés and Fahsen 2007). By comparing these images, scholars interpret dress as a vehicle of cultural and political identity over a wide geographical area by the Late Formative period (300 BCE–250 CE; Valdés 1993:40). Most salient is the recognition of painted stucco façades as a critical cultural and political symbol during the late Middle Formative (1000–300 BCE) and Late Formative periods at sites such as Cerros, Cival,Tikal, Uaxactun, and El Mirador (Estrada-Belli 2006; Freidel 1977, 1985; Hansen 2001; Valdés 1987, 1992a, 1992b, 1993:40).These façades frequently include colossal masks depicting deities, often wearing immense earflare assemblages identical in structure to those worn by rulers (Figure 13.1). Other façades as well as a few engraved luxury stone objects depict rulers and deities wearing royal headbands studded with jadeite diadem jewels that derive ultimately from the Olmec tradition (see Fields MATTHEW G. LOOPER 412 1991; Freidel and Schele 1988a). These examples underscore the role of dress— and particularly jadeite and Spondylus shell jewelry—in this context as a fundamental power symbol that lent supernatural legitimacy to the authority of the rulers who oversaw construction of these massive politico-religious monuments (Freidel, Reese-Taylor, and MoraMar ín 2002; Freidel and Schele 1988b). The discovery in 2001 of the murals from the San Bartolo Pinturas structure, dated to 100 BCE, represents a new opportunity for evaluating dress in the Late Formative (see Winzenz, Chapter 12, this volume). With their extensive display of at least thirty anthropomorphic figures in dynamic action, the San Bartolo Pinturas murals more than doubled the number of intact human figures available for interpreting the development of dress and personal adornment during the Formative period. However, these images, together with other two-dimensional art, represent only a subset of the material relevant to the study of dress and adornment. Ceramic figurines, an important art form in the Formative Maya lowlands, also depict attire. Although these images focus preferentially on adornment of the head and face, they remain a critically important data set for understanding attire and body art in the Formative period. Aspects of dress and adornment can also be inferred from material remains in durable materials such as stone, bone, and shell. Burials are particularly important historical indicators of adornment, as they contain numerous jewelry artifacts , including beaded necklaces and bracelets and various kinds of pendants, which appear in direct association with particular parts of the body. They also contain human remains (skulls and teeth) that give important evidence of permanent body art. The burials yield datable examples of dress and adornment that can be correlated statistically with a number of variables, including status , age, and sex (Krejci and Culbert 1995; Tiesler Blos 1998, 2001). Variations among sites are more difficult to evaluate, as the sample is skewed toward sites in Belize, and particularly toward Cuello, where hundreds of Formative burials have been excavated and published (Gerhardt 1988; Robin 1989).There are Figure 13.1. Cerros Structure 5C-2nd, detail of lower mask earflare assemblage. Drawing by author after Schele and Freidel (1990:fig. 3.12). EARLY MAYA DRESS AND ADORNMENT 413 additional limitations to the use of burial data in general.The most important of these is the factor of differential preservation, in that only select aspects of personal adornment survive in the archaeological record. For example, many aspects of body art, such as coiffure, are not preserved, nor are textiles to any significant extent. Burials provide only indirect evidence of other forms of body art, such as body painting or stamping. There are thus certain overlaps but...