Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World - John Baines
9. Telling Time: Historical Thinking and the Ancient Maya
Historical Consciousness and the Use of the Past in the Ancient World - John Baines
Simon Martin [+]
University of Pennsylvania Museum
Description
The ancient Maya were the only civilization of the Americas to develop a script that comprehensively recorded language, and they made prodigious use of it to create durable records. That legible inscriptions reach back to at least 300 AD means that we have a rich resource both for historical analysis and for engaging with an indigenous historiography and historical consciousness. This chapter examines some related issues. Maya texts offer data on the continuities and the contrasts between myth and history, in ways that touch on ‘mythistory’ as a non-judgmental term for approaching concepts of time and agency. They also provide evidence for the organizing principles they applied to past events, in which monumental discourse lacks an emphasis on narrativization and focuses instead on a highly formulaic ordering through chronology. This is part-and-parcel of a semantic ‘thinness’ that confines recorded events to a select number of tropes that are often presented without causation or consequence. Discussion of possible reasons for this focus revolves around the social and political purposes of the texts, which are expressed in a material form that ensured that they could broadcast a patrimonial rhetoric through time. These displays of identity and achievement did not simply reflect the historical events and current social realities they record; they also constituted them. Maya writing cannot easily be separated from the context of the numerous competing kingdoms in which it was practised—indeed that context seems to be the very reason why monumental writing took the form that it did.