An international team of archeologists has unearthed the earliest known portrait of a goddess or royal Maya woman, a 6-foot, 6-inch carved stone stela, or pillar, that is at least 200 years older than the earliest previously known portrait of a Maya queen.
The stela was damaged about the fifth century during an attack on the Maya city now known as Naachtun, then buried ceremonially amid the rubble as the city was rebuilt on top of it, said team leader Kathryn Reese-Taylor of the University of Calgary.
“That kind of (reburial) is done very infrequently,” she said, “usually because the king and the historic events on the monument were incredibly important to the history of the site. That makes us think this woman would have been really important to the people of Naachtun.”
That’s unusual, she added, “because there are prominent queens later, but not in this period. Usually, women are pictured in the background, as mothers and wives.”
The stela is also unusual in that it portrays only the woman’s head, in profile, in the middle of the stone. “When a historical figure is depicted, it is generally with a full body,” she said. “This is a portrait. There is not another like it in the Maya area.”
Glyphs in the figure’s headdress have been translated as the woman’s name: “Lady Completion Flower.”
After Reese-Taylor’s discovery was announced Monday, some people proposed an alternative translation that suggested the figure was not feminine.
But a check of the literature showed that archaeologist Simon Martin of the University of Pennsylvania had documented the same name on a stela from Tikal, dated nearly 200 years later, with the woman identified as the mother of a king. The name also has been found on a pair of looted earrings and on a stela fragment from Yaxha.
The names of royalty frequently are handed down from generation to generation among the Maya, so the woman on the stela might have been the namesake of the subsequent women of power or she might have been a deity that they were named after.
“I’m pretty confident it will be a historical figure, an early queen,” Reese-Taylor said.
Archaeologist Julia Guernsey of the University of Texas, Austin said the gender is significant. “It means that we may need to re-evaluate the role and status of women within Early Classic Maya political dynamics.”
Naachtun probably was founded around 400 B.C., but thrived during the Early Classic Maya Period, from A.D. 150 to A.D. 600 Some of its influence probably arose from its critical position halfway between Tikal and Calakmul, the two greatest cities of the Classic Maya world.
Those cities formed powerful confederacies and fought wars with each other, both directly and through proxies. Naachtun probably was one of those proxies, and the partial destruction of the stela around the fifth century probably occurred during one of those wars, Reese-Taylor said.
University of Calgary
A portion of a Maya stone pillar unearthed by researchers could contain the name of an early queen.
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