On more than one occasion, I have applied successfully for a research grant from the National Geographic Society. They were never enough to fund a full season of excavations, but supplemented other sources to get those extras that are so valued, like supporting graduate students in the field. I thought at the time that it would help my cause if I was on the list of subscribers to their famous magazine, and so the number of issues accumulated over the years, each one including beautifully illustrated articles on matters of interest. However, in the end I ceased subscribing and the issues in my library were parked on the shelves of our holiday retreat on the shore of Lake Hawea in Central Otago – great reading for wet Sundays. Last week, my wife and I decided to take them to the recycling facility, so someone else could enjoy them. As I was moving them out of the car, I noticed one that I was not going to let go. The front cover had an image from the remarkable painted Maya building at Bonampak, the name meaning ‘painted wall’.
It portrays a ferocious Maya chief clad in a jaguar skin, with a jaguar’s head on his own, spearing an unfortunate captive. First seen by an outsider in 1946, the paintings are as close a reflection as you are likely to see of life in an elite Maya centre. The article described the successive themes in the three painted chambers. The first depicts the heir being presented to lordly grandees during a splendid ceremony. We move next into a room completely decorated with a battle in progress, and, in the third, there is a rite of passage to the throne involving blood-letting rituals. Thanks to the relatively recent decipherment of the Maya glyphs, we know that ruler Chaan Muwan was the last known king of Bonampak. There is an extraordinary insight into life at the court. We see trumpeters in front of a person wearing the mask of a caiman, another with arms covered in the claws of a crayfish, both viewed by an aristocrat wearing jade ornaments sitting on a comfortable cushion. Glyphs also tell us that these scenes date to AD 790-791.
Social inequality is the one consistent feature of all early states, and the Bonampak murals leave us in no doubt that this was the bedrock of the Maya social system. In South-east Asia, I have for long encountered wealthy prehistoric elites, their status advertised through exotic marine shell and stone jewellery that they took to their graves. A row of elites at Bonampak likewise wear prestigious Spondylus shells and jade pectorals. We are told that the ceremonies before us were supervised by the holy lord of Yaxchilán, the centre that held political sway over Bonampak. In my experience, too, social inequality is seen in the lavish treatment of dead infants, interred in adult-sized graves in order to contain the weight of mortuary offerings. Here at Bonampak, the crown prince is a small boy, carried to the ceremony by a court functionary.
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