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REVIEW BY BRYAN R JUST
Megan O’Neil’s Memory in Fragments provides a comprehensive and nuanced presentation of a topic the author has been exploring for years, namely the myriad ways the ancient Maya interacted with monumental sculptures over their long social lives. It is a rich and expansive consideration of a complex array of distinctive practices, all of which, O’Neil effectively argues, related directly to ancient Maya concepts of ancestor veneration, the animacy of things, and the import of ancestors to the living.
The book is organised into three overarching sections. The first is introductory, presenting the methodological grounding and defining Maya monuments as material manifestations of time, its cycles, and dynastic history. Maya stelae were perceived as animate extensions of their royal subjects, often framed by additional reliefs and texts that highlight resonances between current acts and those conducted by ancestors. Memory in Fragments lucidly demonstrates that Maya engagement with monuments after their initial creation was comparably complex, varied, and deeply meaningful.
The second section concentrates on two kinds of modification: intentional breaking and repurposing. For the Maya, breath was a form of soul; chipped mouths and noses removed the breath and thus the vitality from depictions of royalty. Stelae were also felled by cleaving, usually to be reset or interred elsewhere. The chopping of sculpture parallels the Maya storm god’s strikes to the earth, cracking it open to allow for agricultural renewal and for the apotheosis of supernatural beings and ancestors. Spalling from the burning of offerings near a monument’s base is similarly linked to regenerative concepts. As O’Neil acknowledges, breakage can also result from aggression, whether by bellicose outsiders or local dynasties seeking to manipulate a site’s history in their favour.
The movement of objects was similarly common and variably meaningful. In some cases, old carvings were incorporated into new programmes, proclaiming dynastic continuity. Others were taken as loot during conflicts and presented anew in the cities of the victors. Yet other monuments were hidden or enshrined, either to avoid such destruction or to acknowledge the sacrality of old carved stones. Some became new classes of monument, such as drum-shaped altars made of old stelae. As O’Neil reveals, movement and resetting privileged the old material thing over the original message carved on it.
The third and final section considers why the ancient Maya buried monuments under other monuments or buildings, thus removing them from view. O’Neil posits that such acts mark ongoing engagement with monuments as opposed to deactivation or obsolescence. Their potency is assumed by the sculpture or building above, just as caches of other materials served to consecrate and animate the things above. O’Neil observes a parallel between the cycles and recurrences highlighted in the historical dynastic subject matter of monuments, where a living king’s activities are likened to those of their predecessors, and the honorific burial of monuments, whose potency and material antiquity contributes to the power of the new monument or building. Old and new objects form a sort of dynastic succession of material manifestations of legitimacy and sacrality.
Memory in Fragments: the lives of ancient Maya sculptures
Megan E O’Neil
University of Texas Press, £54
ISBN 978-1477329399
