The Dance of the Conquest: Post Cortez Maya Art

Back in 2003, workers restoring a 16th-century house in Chajul, Guatemala uncovered a series of remarkable wall paintings. They have since been conserved, and just recently a detailed study has published. This was a Maya area, and Maya language and traditions are still strong there.

The paintings include European items and therefore date to after contact with the Spanish; the authors of the new study say they were made over an extended time, beginning soon after the conquest and perhaps extending as late as the 1700s. They are unusual in coming from a private house. Most surviving paintings of the period are in churches, and therefore presumably more under the control of the authorities and the church.

Combining scholarly knowledge of other art from the early colonial period with the insights of local Ixil Maya informants, the investigators conclude that these depict dances. The informants named two dances in particular that they thought were depicted, the Baile de la Conquista (Dance of the Conquest), or the Baile de los Moros y Cristianos (Dance of the Moors and Christians). They also suggested that one panel depicts a dance that no longer survives, which people are calling a Lost Dance; apparently the church banned several dances for theological reasons now obscure.

The Dance of the Conquest, as you might imagine, depicts the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. According to what I have found tonight, this may have been developed already in the 16th century by savvy priests as a way to convey the European version of events to those who did not understand Spanish. However, some articles suggest it may have later evolved into forms that were much darker and more critical of the conquistadors.

The Dance of the Moors and the Christians depicts the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, the key event of Spanish history as it was understood until recently. It boggles the mind to think of Maya dancers in those costumes acting out events in Iberian history of which they can have had only the vaguest idea, and yet such a dance definitely existed and survived into the 20th century.

Most of the Maya dances that were developed under Spanish auspices were religious, depicting the life of Jesus and the like. Interesting that the owner of this houses had no interest in those, but preferred secular tales of war and conquest.

What a delightful little window into things one knew nothing about.

The Badianus Manuscript: America's oldest Herbal

The Spanish conquest of Mexico happened so fast that nobody had time to think about what sort of regime or society would emerge afterwards. It would be Catholic, of course, but other than that the Spanish did not agree about anything, and the native aristocracy remained powerful enough for decades to exert their own views.

Church of Santa Cruz, only surviving remnant of the college

The College of Santa Cruz, founded by the Franciscans in Mexico City in 1536, is a good case of how these conflicts played out. The purpose of the college was to train Aztecs from elite families to be Catholic priests. The college had two Spanish Franciscans as teachers, aided by a native assistant, and several dozen sons of elite Aztec families attended. They were taught Spanish, Latin, theology, and "grammar," that is, the basics of Latin literature and composition. But other forces, led by the Dominicans, opposed this whole plan; they kept the school from ever receiving adequate funding and in 1555 banned any native from becoming a priest. By then, our sources say, the school was already a ruin. During its brief life, however, the school did manage to train dozens of Aztec men. One of its instructors was Bernardino de Sahagún, who published several books on the Aztecs and the Nahuatl language and also the famous General History of the Indies, an immense project on which he was helped by students at Santa Cruz.

One of the most notable graduates of Santa Cruz was Martin de la Cruz. De la Cruz wrote, in Nahualt, the manuscript that was then translated into Latin by Juan Badiano as Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, the first work to document Native American knowledge of plants. Badiano's autograph copy ended up in the Vatican Library, where it languished in obscurity for 400 years. The Vatican Library was infamous until recent times for its habit of hiding important, potentially controversial books under boring titles that nobody would ever ask for, and then sometimes of being unable to find them if they were asked for. Anyway hardly anyone had read this book until 1929 when an American named Charles Clark arrived from the Smithsonian searching for early Latin American manuscripts. With backing from Vice President and Smithsonian board member Charles Dawes, Clark was able to get the Vatican to let him photograph and then publish the manuscript, something almost unheard of in those days.

The Spanish were very interested in Native plants and their properties. In the letter Cortes wrote to Emperor Charles V describing his conquest of Mexico, he mentioned that the market district of Tenochitlan included "a street of herb sellers where there are all manner of roots and medicinal plants that are found in the land. There are houses as it were of apothecaries where they sell medicines made from those herbs both for drinking and for use as ointments and salves." Valuable plants were one of the things Europeans were seeking around the world, and of course cacao, tobacco, corn, potatoes, hot peppers, and other American plants ended up being worth many times more than all the gold in the world.

So plant lore was big business in 1552, when someone got de la Cruz to write this manuscript and then paid Badiano to translate it. The Latin version was written on fine parchment and bound in velvet. It is one of the purest sources for Aztec thinking about the natural world, written by a knowledgeable native in his own language.

Cacao

It describes, among many other things, giving patients hypnotic preparations of datura before surgery, which is pretty much what was done to me when they operated on my wrist. Plants are listed for treating bleeding, skin rashes, headaches, colds, wounds, and so on, including those great stables of pre-modern medicine, laxatives and purgatives. Some of these plants are still used by folk healers in Mexico for the same purposes described by de la Cruz, showing strong continuity within the oral culture.

Anyway I can't recall having heard of this manuscript or its authors until this week, and I got excited about it and wanted to share.

Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro

One of the first ethnographic museums in Europe was set up in the Trocadéro palace in Paris, and though it had other, more formal names every called it the Trocadéro or the Troc. These museums grew out of temporary exhibitions of stuff from around the world, which had been a feature of the Grand Expositions the nineteenth century loved so much. Those great fairs often featured whole villages from Africa or the Philippines, or whole blocks lifted from urban streets in the Middle East or India, staffed by natives brought across the sea to act out their exotic ways for visitors.

These exhibits occupy an ambiguous place in the history of relations between the West and the rest of the world. On the one hand, they, along with the lectures that accompanied them, were the main way millions of people learned about Africa or Asia, and they displayed works of art from those places as objects of great interest. They were fundamental to the creation of Anthropology as a discipline. Yet they have also been seen, and were in fact seen by some people at the time, as inherently racist and imperialist enterprises that presented everyone else as primitive and therefore justified European domination.

To call them simply racist is, I think, a mistake, because they featured many exhibits about white people. When it opened in 1878 the Trocadero famously included dioramas depicting the lives of Breton peasants, set up in exactly the same way as scenes from Africa or the Amazon. These were created by a couple of Breton professors, and other Bretons were divided in their response; some thought this was neat, while other found it hideously insulting.

Tunisian market set up in the Trocadero in 1900, with authentic Tunisians

I prefer a different definition of what was going on here, offered by Johannes Fabian. Anthropology, he wrote, is "a science of other men in another tune." Here "another time" does not mean chronology in a simple sense, but to a belief that other societies are frozen in the past, or represent earlier stages of human progress. A professor of mine in college once explained the difference between anthropology and sociology by saying, "sociologists study people with refrigerators, and anthropologists study people without refrigerators." Anthropology, then, always has this sense that we are looking at the past in the present.

There is a strong element of what we would call "othering": the point of these museums was not to point out human universals but to emphasize the exotic and the strange.

It is also true that many of the objects in these museums came via colonialism and conquest: they were taken from natives, or more often purchased from people whose status had just been bludgeoned by war and found themselves in desperate need of cash.

I think, though, that on the whole these museums were a good thing for the world; I believe that in general the whole project of anthropology in the colonial period was a good thing for the world. First, in political terms many of the leading anthropologists of the time were anti-racist and anti-colonialist. That does not mean they were not paternalistic or infused with some vague sense of superiority; they were scientists, after all, studying non-scientific peoples. But they voted against those regimes. Second, I do not believe they were motivated by a desire to prove their own right to rule. Many of them wanted to learn about other cultures because they were dissatisfied with their own; from the time of the ancient Greeks writing about exotic peoples has often been a way of critiquing your own society. Scratch an anthropologist and you often find someone who wants to go to Africa because he or she is disgusted by the capitalist west and desperately seeking an alternative. When people go to India seeking wisdom, some sort of othering or exoticizing is definitely going on, but still; is asking to be taught a colonialist act? I find that in the US today the Euro-Americans who are interested in Native peoples are far more likely to admire them than to scorn them, even though most of their knowledge has come to them via white writers and film-makers or via old-fashioned museums. I find that a desire to know is far more often coupled with good feelings than with hate or scorn.

The Trocadéro library

I have a sense that many people around the world are intensely suspicious of curiosity as a motive. It still happens that scientists who journey to remote regions are suspected by the locals of ulterior motives; these strangers can't really be interested in lemurs or fossils or dying languages, they must be after gold or oil. Critics like Edward Said simply deny that any European was interested in other regions apart from a desire to rule and conquer them. Personally, I find this attitude as weird as villagers seem to find detached scientism. Why on earth would I want to conquer and rule anybody, or dig for gold, when I could just enjoy their art and marvel at their unique ways of doing things?

I also deny in the strongest terms the most common argument deployed against traditional anthropology, that it made people think worse of the people whose cultures were depicted. I think we are simply primed by evolution to distrust strangers, and nothing else is needed to explain why some humans hate people from other places. These museums did emphasize the great technological gap between Europe or the US and villagers of Africa or the Amazon, but, well, that was just true. The speed with which the European powers conquered most of Africa astonishes me to this day. It did not take ethnographic museums to show people the vast differences in the level or wealth and power around the world.

I follow a different approach to the question of how people should get along. I think the way to bring us together is for us to learn about each other. Of course that does not always work, and some people's customs might shock you badly; other times people predisposed to hate will seize on the differences they learn about and build up their hate around them. But I still think this is the best way. To live together in peace, we should strive to understand each other.

I am motivated, I think, mainly by two desires; to love and be loved, and to learn. For me wanting to learn is at the absolute core of my being, and at the root of all my morality. I do honor to other people by learning as much as I can about them. I do honor to the universe by learning about it; I have no form of worship more profound for me than reading the latest astrophysics and pondering how vast and strange is the universe. I do honor to other cultures by learning as much as I can about them. It is true that the old museums were imperfect schools for this learning, and that they were corrupted by various cultural diseases that were endemic in their time. But they helped us get to know each other, and for me that will always be one of the best and most valuable things.

Homo erectus

News comes from South African of what are claimed to be the oldest fossils of Homo erectus, dated to between 1.95 and 2.04 million years ago. They were found in the same stratum as fossils of an older Australopithecus species, so the two species may have shared that landscape, but given that the time span on the dates is 100,000 years, that is far from certain. Anyway this gives us a chance to think for a moment about our first really successful ancestors.

Homo erectus survived for around 1.5 million years, fading from the scene around 500,000 years ago. They are almost certainly the ancestors of us and all our close relatives (Neanderthals, Denisovans). They were first discovered in East Asia (Java Man, Peking Man) and only later in Africa, and while most anthropologists think they evolved in Africa that is not certain. They roamed very widely, from France to Indonesia to South Africa. They were not tied to any particular environment but could, like modern humans (or crows) adapt themselves to whatever place they found themselves in: jungles, plains, mountains, cold, hot, inland, on the shore. This was surely due to the vastly greater size of their brains, compared to hominins before them: the biggest Homo erectus brains measured around 1100 cc, about the same size as the smallest brains of normal modern humans. Their brains seem to have grown slowly over time, the average size increasing from around 850 in early specimens to 1000 in the later ones.

They walked much as we walk, leaving their hands free to carry tools. They shaped crude tools from stone, and presumably from other materials, although nothing but stone survives.

And they endured for 1.5 million years. Compared to the span of our civilizations it is a vast stretch of time, 60,000 generations when beings something like us slowly, slowly developed the ways of life that still survive among hunter gatherers. All that time they were changing physically and surely in other ways as well. The crazy nomenclature that surrounds them (Homo ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo yuanmaoensis) springs from attempts to understand the diversity of their kind, and some splitters still think we should be talking about several different species.

Shell from Java with incised lines, sometimes claimed to be the oldest work of art

We do not know if they had language, but some anthropologists think their skulls show they could make a range of sounds as wide as ours. Recently genetic studies have suggested that the FOXP2 gene, which we know to be essential for language in us, probably evolved by a million years ago. So the early stirrings of our kind's astonishing invention probably took place among them. Since the bones of large animals have been found around their camps, they probably hunted in coordinated groups, and language would come in handy for that. After all they were not bigger or stronger than us, but on the contrary a little smaller and weaker, less able to strong-arm their way through life. Another advantage they may have had: studies of their shoulders suggest they were first species that could throw a spear with deadly effect.

We also do not know if they could control fire, but there is pretty good evidence that they were doing so by 750,000 years ago. That would make them pioneers of another great human advance.

They developed the way of life that defines us, using their big brains and clever hands to negotiate the world. They were smart and adaptable enough to survive through Ice Ages and hot times, across vast areas populated by beasts much larger and stronger than themselves.

Unfortunately their imaginations are closed to us, so we do not know, and probably never will, if they had stories and names. They lived too long ago for us to ever really understand them. We can only look at their bones, and wonder.

Edward Curtis on Prince Edward Island, 1914

Native American masks and costumes photographed on one trip in 1914, now in the Library of Congress. This is the mask of a Qagyuhl culture hero known as the Octopus Hunter, who kills a giant octopus in a famous tale.

This one is captioned, "Woman wearing a fringed Chilkat blanket, a hamatsa neckring and mask representing deceased relative who had been a shaman."

Qagyuhl dancers

Romantic Kissing is far from Universal

A new finding from statistical anthropology:

From pop culture to evolutionary psychology, we have come to take kissing for granted as universally desirable among humans and inseparable from other aspects of affection and intimacy. However, a recent article in American Anthropologist by Jankowiak, Volsche and Garcia questions the notion that romantic kissing is a human universal by conducting a broad cross cultural survey to document the existence or non-existence of the romantic-sexual kiss around the world.

The authors based their research on a set of 168 cultures compiled from eHRAF World Cultures (128 cultures) as well as the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (27 cultures) and by surveying 88 ethnographers (13 cultures). The report’s findings are intriguing: rather than an overwhelming popularity of romantic smooching, the global ethnographic evidence suggests that it is common in only 46% (77) of the cultures sampled. The remaining 54% (91) of cultures had no evidence of romantic kissing. In short, this new research concludes that romantic-sexual kissing is not as universal as we might presume.

Bronze Age Sippy Cups

From  Austria, 1200-800 BCE. Some of them are saturated with fatty acids from milk, so it's pretty clear what they are. These were all recovered from infant burials.

Violence at Çatalhöyük

The neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey has fascinated the world since it was first discovered. It was quite large, 32 acres, and so densely packed with houses that people had to enter their homes through holes in the roof; streets, one supposes, had not been invented yet. There were occasional "courtyards", roofless spaces within the mass of buildings, but they could also only be entered from above and most seem to have filled up fairly quickly with refuse. The population of the town at its peak may have been as much as 8,000, enough that some call it the first city.

Which raises a lot of questions. Why, in such an empty world, would some of the first farmers in that region choose to live in such a dense mass?

If you try to imagine what that was like, you will immediately see the problems. What happened to the trash and waste? A lot of it seems to have been dumped into those courtyards or any other available space, and what was put in baskets for removal may have just been carried across the roofs to the edge of the town and tossed off. The place was full of shit, examination of which has shown that the residents all suffered from worms and other intestinal parasites. And another question: how did people get along? Didn't they drive each other crazy and people living in such close quarters usually do?

A new study of burials from the 7100 B.C. to 5950 B.C. period confirms these problems. According to the analysts, their data show that Çatalhöyük was "a highly stressful environment."

Recently, archaeologists compiled 25 years of data gathered from the remains of 742 individuals at Çatalhöyük. In the preserved evidence of more than 1,000 years of Neolithic life, the scientists discovered "a compelling record of elevated levels of interpersonal violence" triggered by the stress of city living, the researchers wrote in the study.

The scientists found that the number of injuries, evident in skeletons, increased when the community was at its largest, suggesting that as Çatalhöyük's population boomed, violence became more frequent. About 25% of the 95 examined skulls showed healed injuries made by small spherical projectiles, probably a clay ball flung by a slingshot. Many of these clay spheres were also preserved around the site, according to the study.

The majority of the victims were women, and they appeared to have been struck from behind; 12 of the skulls had been fractured more than once, the scientists reported.

Disease was also rampant in Çatalhöyük when the city was at its most crowded, with around 33% of the human skeletons showing signs that hinted at bacterial infection. During that same period, approximately 13% of the women's teeth and 10% of the men's teeth were riddled with cavities — the result of a diet rich in grains.

The investigators also found that the amount of heavy work the inhabitants did started out as greater than that of hunter-gatherers and only increased over time, so that after a millennium the people of Çatalhöyük were worn down by their labors and suffering from arthritis and the like as a result.

There are a lot of problems with these numbers, and the biggest is that we know the burials at Çatalhöyük were not a random sample. There are not nearly enough of them to represent the whole large population; consider that for a period of a thousand years in a community of at least 5,000 people they only have 742 bodies to study. Since we don't know why some people were carefully buried within the settlement and why others have vanished, we can't really say who these people were.

I would also question the assumption that the violence shown by these skeletons represents conflict within the community. What about attacks from outsiders? Because the most obvious answer to the question of why they lived piled on top of each other like that is, "for defense." If they were regularly being attacked by outsiders, who (say) used sling stones to attack women who went out to get water or work in the fields, that could explain a lot. The usual objection to this is to point out that the iconography of these people never shows war, and few weapons have been found. They do not seem to have been very warlike. But maybe that was the point; by living together in such a large community they were able to achieve safety without militarization.

Here's another thought: if those women with head injuries were killed by their neighbors, could these have been stonings, carried out by this close-knit community against those who violated its norms?

The cost  of that density to their way of life was high no matter how you look at it: disease from overcrowding, tooth decay from a grain-heavy diet, many injuries from violence. Why didn't they simply spread out across the landscape into smaller, more manageable settlements, where they might have had more access to wild foods and thus a more diverse diet?

As I said, I think the threat of violence from outsiders is one reason. The other may be the social and spiritual attractions of life within a large community. Çatalhöyük got famous because of the density of religious art in certain buildings that the site's original excavator, James Mellaart, called "shrines." The more convincing interpretation, put forward by Ian Hodder, is that these are houses that had become the central places for family cults within which the elders preserved secret knowledge and shared it as needed with younger non-initiates. I imagine that the people of these settlements were obsessed with secret cults and the level of their initiation within them; I imagine that their social and spiritual lives revolved around initiations and other semi-secret rituals enacted in these small, dark house-shrines. Perhaps they devoted their lives to achieving higher and higher ranks in more and more cults, to learning more and more secrets, as certain aboriginal Australians still do.

Their identities, we can assume, were wrapped up in their home: in its cults, its art, its ritual, its families and clans. They stayed within its disease-ridden, violence-plagued walls because moving away to some smaller, more open community meant giving up everything they cared about.

The Adaptive Power of Culture and our Fondness for Tradition

Anthropologist Joseph Henrich has a new book called The Secret of Our Success, and Scott Alexander has both a long review and a whole post of long quotations. Since Henrich is an anthropologist, you can easily guess what he thinks is the secret to human success: culture. Our brains, unaided, are pretty cool, but what makes us the dominant large species on the planet is our ability to accumulate and share knowledge.

I love this graph, which so nicely brings out what we are best at. At most cognitive tasks human toddlers are on par with apes, but when it comes to learning from others we blow away every other animal. This is what we do well: learn.

Learning of course has two sides, the learning and the teaching. Cultures all make concerted efforts to pass onto the next generation whatever they think is important. But how do they decide what is important? This is a fascinating puzzle. Some traditional knowledge strikes us as extremely useful, but other parts seem silly. One of Henrich's main arguments is that we preserve a lot of strange cultural rules and the like because it is very hard, in fact often impossible, for any single person to figure out which parts of the culture are important and which are not. Henrich has many illustrative examples, one of which concerns raising pigs. In the New Guinea highlands raising pigs is a supremely important activity, since the prestige of a community is tied up in how many pigs they can serve to guests at important feasts. In 1971 anthropologist David Boyd visited the village of Irakia and found the community immersed in a debate about how to fix their own lagging pig production. It is proposed, and eventually adopted that they should "follow the Fore," that is, adopt the pig-raising techniques of the Fore people, who have lately been very successful in this department. Here is the actual list of measures adopted by the village:

1) All villagers must sing, dance and play flutes for their pigs. This ritual causes the pigs to grow faster and bigger. At feasts, the pigs should be fed first from the oven. People are fed second.

2) Pigs should not be killed for breaking into another’s garden. The pig’s owner must assist the owner of the garden in repairing the fence. Disputes will be resolved following the dispute resolution procedure used among the Fore’.

3) Sending pigs to other villages is tabooed, except for the official festival feast.

4) Women should take better care of the pigs, and feed them more food. To find extra time for this, women should spend less time gossiping.

5) Men must plant more sweet potatoes for the women to feed to the pigs, and should not depart for wage labor in distant towns until the pigs have grown to a certain size.

We look at this list and think that some of it is highly relevant and some is not. But how do we know? The people of Irakia presumably know a lot more about raising pigs in New Guinea than any of us, so why do we think we know that, say, playing music to pigs does not help them grow? But anyway the point is that the Fore way of raising pigs was adapted en bloc because that is just how people work most of the time. The thousands of particular actions that make up something like hunting deer or growing potatoes or holding feasts are rarely scrutinized in themselves; they are part of the way, and if the way is good, if the way is working, then we keep doing all of them.

So when you ask, why do people cling to ideas that strike you as outmoded, from an anthropological standpoint the question answers itself: because cultures that passed on their ways of doing things survived, and those that did not have disappeared. You may think that you can reason your way to improvements, but this is a particularly modern outlook that would have seemed bizarre of most humans of the past, and anyway you are probably wrong. (See: communism, libertarianism, etc.)

Life, even in a neolithic village, is simply too complex for any person working alone to reason out a better way of living. So we evolved a very strong attachment to old ways.

I think the best way to see all the weirdness of the modern world is through this lens. We have created so much change, so fast, that clinging to old cultural ways no longer makes sense in many, many areas. This has unmoored us and left us floundering about, prey to ideologies that offer something solid to take the place of tradition. But this is illusion; the world is too complex for ideology, just as it is too complex for reliance on tradition. So we suffer from anxiety and rage and all the other modern diseases.

I should say that I think this picture is highly simplified; along with our general attachment to tradition we humans also have a thirst for novelty that is in some of us extremely strong. After all cultures do change, even the most traditional. But for most of our history they changed very slowly because that was the best guarantee of survival, and our poor brains, which evolved for the slow pace of peasant life, are at sea in this crazy modern world we have devised.

Frog and Maize

Reconstruction of an Aztec mural from Cacaxtla, Mexico, now in Mexico City.

Cherokee Inscriptions in Manitou Cave

A team of researchers that includes Euro-American professors and Cherokee elders has announced the results of their study of the long-known but never read inscriptions in Manitou Cave, Alabama. The inscriptions are in the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, and two of them were signed by Richard Guess, one of Sequoyah's sons.

One reason the inscriptions had never been translated is that Sequoyah's script was designed to look much like English writing, so many people thought the Manitou Cave inscriptions were in Latin letters but some kind of code.

The inscriptions relate to ritual events of 1828, including a ball game; one is signed "we are the ones with blood flowing from our noses." (The Cherokee ball game, something like lacrosse, was a rough sport.)

This is my favorite detail:

"The ceiling inscriptions are written backwards, as if addressing readers inside the rock itself," Simek said. "This corresponds with part of one inscription which reads 'I am your grandson.' This is how the Cherokee might formally address the Old Ones, which can include deceased Cherokee ancestors as well as comprise other supernatural beings who inhabited the world before the Cherokee came into existence."

How wonderful that these survive, so that Cherokee and everyone else can see and learn about  this piece of history.