Life after death : Naranjo's scrambled stairway

Abstract

Ancient Mesoamericans believed in the animation of their materials and built environments. According to most scholars, animation is created with activation rituals, or is innate to the object at the time of its creation, and is ultimately ended in so-called “termination rituals.” In this view, objects are either alive or dead, and a termination ritual carries a sense of finality, regardless of the afterlife of the terminated object. My thesis uses the Naranjo Hieroglyphic Stairway as a case study to question theoretical ideas about object termination, and ultimately to offer a new understanding of “termination rituals” as transformation rituals instead. The Naranjo Hieroglyphic Stairway is unique, as the monument actually originated in Caracol, a site 100 kilometers to the south of Naranjo. During a military conquest, Naranjo armies fragmented and removed the stairway from Caracol and installed it on the backside of their own E-group, deliberately scrambling the hieroglyphic inscription. I posit that although the scrambling of the blocks appears to be a kind of “termination ritual,” the monument’s continued visibility, and prominent visibility for that matter, indicates a continued animacy, or a new life for this stairway. In this thesis, I will provide a full interpretation of the Naranjo Hieroglyphic Stairway’s first life in Caracol and again in Naranjo to establish that the monument was animated in both sites, despite the “termination ritual” it underwent. Finally, I will introduce the concept of “transformation rituals”, in which objects are either partially de-animated or otherwise completely transformed, with their materials retaining a certain amount of animacy. I suggest that Maya people were primed to view life and death–and thus, animation and termination–as transformative, not final, and that the same view applies to animated objects.Art Histor