Archaeology's Visual Culture by Roger Balm

Author:Roger Balm [Balm, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9781317377436
Google: B6o0CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-14T06:00:42+00:00

Traveling glyphs

The accounts of Stephens and Catherwood provide a useful bridge to the second important area of Proskouriakoff’s visual record: epigraphy and the visual sense-making she applied to Maya sculpture and inscriptions. The first volume of Incidents of Travel includes almost two dozen engraved reproductions of stelae and other monuments encountered at Copán and in a rhetorical flourish conspicuous even by the standards of his often florid prose, Stephens writes of the discovered remains. “One thing I believe,” he says, “is that its history is graven on its monuments. No Champollion has yet brought to them the energies of his inquiring mind. Who shall read them?” ([1841] 1949, 125). For Proskouriakoff, Stephens’s stated belief that the history of Copán was “graven on its monuments” would prove particularly resonant for it was she who would become, in a sense, their Champollion.

In Breaking the Maya Code, Coe identifies an “Age of Proskouriakoff” (1992, 167–184) as though her contributions formed part of some epic chronological progression towards full understanding of Maya inscriptions, rather than being the outcome of complex permissions and network enrollments that admitted her, and her imagery, into the circle of Maya scholarship. We have already seen in her associations with Satterthwaite and Morley an early example of this enrollment and permission-granting, but explaining its further development requires positioning her work within a broader visual-cultural and intellectual context.

Between the late 1940s and mid-1950s there was criticism that Maya studies had degenerated into an exercise akin to stamp collecting, and a growing awareness that the sheer bulk of material remains and records that had been garnered in the great cataloging project of the preceding half-century or more far outstripped attempts at analysis and interpretation (Schele and Miller 1986, 25). In an influential polemic, A Study of Archaeology, Walter Taylor laments the lack of synthetic study and singles out for criticism the Carnegie Institution of Washington ([1948] 1967, 48), the very organization with which Proskouriakoff had developed important ties.

The dominant view of Maya glyphs at this time was that they could not be thought to embody historical records, as this extract from Morley makes clear:

The Maya inscriptions treat primarily of chronology, astronomy—perhaps one might better say astrology—and religious matters. They are in no sense records of personal glorification and self-laudation like the inscriptions of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. They tell no story of kingly conquests, recount no deeds of imperial achievement; they neither praise nor assault, glorify nor aggrandize, indeed they are so utterly impersonal, so completely non-individualistic, that it is even probable that the name-glyphs of specific men and women were never recorded upon the Maya monuments.

(1947, 262)

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