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Some forty years ago, three major epigraphic revolutions drastically altered the prevailing understanding of the ancient Maya landscape. Proskouriakoff’s (1960) demonstration that the content of the Maya script was largely historical (rather than solely religious or chronological) in nature, Knorosov’s (1953, 1958, 1965) “phonetic” approach, and Berlin’s (1958) discovery of “emblem glyphs” would eventually allow the reconstruction of ancient political organization (Houston 1987, 1992, 1993a; Mathews 1988), the association of city-states with ancient dynasties (Mathews 1991; Schele and Grube 1994b, 1995), and the interaction of these dynasties with respect to larger, more powerful city-states exercising hegemonic in®uence (Martin and Grube 1995). It is Berlin’s (1958) discovery— emblem glyphs incorporating toponyms used in lordly titles of origin and political af¤liation—that led to Stuart and Houston’s (1994) seminal decipherment of “place names,” a category of glyphic collocations that ¤rst made available for scrutiny ancient Maya concepts of place, identity, and ethnicity. They recognized that toponyms were regularly employed in titles of the form aj-TOPONYM “he of such-a-place” and TOPONYM-ajaw “lord of such-a-place” to signal origin, rank, or both (Stuart and Houston 1994). They also pointed out that many texts employ these place names to record explicitly the location of ancient actions, whether ¤elds of battle, places of burial, or the locales of kingly ceremony (Stuart and Houston 1994). With this breakthrough, epigraphers could ¤nally read where (rather than merely when and at the behest of whom) events referred to in the texts had taken place and begin to build approximations of the spatial arena of ancient sociopolitical interaction.1 10 The Toponyms of El Cayo, Piedras Negras, and La Mar Marc Zender Previously Identi¤ed Upper Usumacinta Toponyms With the recognition of toponyms in the inscriptions, a number of recent studies have located and discussed locales of importance to the region here under consideration. Stuart and Houston (1994:31–33) have shown that the main component of Piedras Negras’s emblem glyph, Yokib’, also appears, albeit very rarely, as a toponym, as on Altar 1 of that site (Stuart and Houston 1994:Figure 36a, b). Their work has also made possible the identi¤cation of a Siyan Chan toponym for Yaxchilan—again, an element well known from this site’s emblem glyph but rarely employed as a toponym proper. There is also some suggestive evidence from both inscriptions (Anaya et al. 2002; David Stuart, personal communication 2001) and geographical modeling that another site, Hix Witz, or “Jaguar Hill”—known to us from inscriptions at Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan and on unprovenanced Peten ceramics—is perhaps to be equated with El Pajaral and/or Zapote Bobal, in the Peten (Figure 10.1). A little further a¤eld, Stanley Guenter (1998) and Alexandre Safronov (personal communication 2000) have recently proposed that Maan—a site mentioned prominently in the inscriptions of Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, Motul de San Jose, and Tikal—is to be identi¤ed with La Florida (Figure 10.1).2 These recent identi¤cations are very exciting and open up entirely new avenues for the exploration of dynastic politics, warfare, and alliances. As further toponymical expressions are tied to speci¤c archaeological sites, the task of discovering the identities of those remaining is greatly simpli ¤ed. This said, it was until recently quite troubling that our toponym record in the Upper Usumacinta did not address in any signi¤cant manner its largest site, Piedras Negras, nor any of the smaller sites known to have been most directly under its hegemonic in®uence. Mathews’s (personal communication 1997) recent work at El Cayo has greatly assisted in ¤lling in this gap, with clear references to an El Cayo toponym. With the ¤rst of Piedras Negras’s dependencies identi¤ed, the rest of them, and that of Piedras Negras itself, are more easily identi¤ed. Yaxniil, the El Cayo Toponym At least as early as 1989, Stuart and Houston (1994:43) had noted peculiar “general and speci¤c place references” in the context of a burial event on El Cayo Panel 1. In the absence of any further, unequivocal El Cayo inscriptions, however , they were unable to con¤rm the identity of this toponym with El Cayo. Moreover, available photographs and drawings of the monuments were not clear enough for them to propose a reading for the collocation (cf. Stuart and Houston 1994:Figure 46). With the discovery in 1994 of El Cayo Altar 4, however, we are Toponyms...

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