Blog 04 Pu’uc means “hills” 9 December 2012
Mexico is a
pretty mountainous place. A story is told about Charles V and Cortés. The
Emperor asked what manner of land Mexico was, and Cortés replied by crumpling
up a sheet of paper, tossing it on the table, and saying: “It looks like that.”
He wasn’t thinking about the northern Yucatán, which is about as mountainous as
Florida with two types of topography: flat, and slightly less flat. If the
oceans rise very much, the Yucatan’s mean altitude will be meaningless, for
Mexico will have suffered a thumbectomy.
The
slightly less flat part of the Yucatan starts about fifty kilometers southeast
of Mérida, the peninsula’s largest city. A few knobby hills, at best a hundred
feet high, straggle across the plain. The hills are called pu’uc in the Mayan language, and the Mayan lords who thrived here
1500 to 1000 years ago are collectively known as the Pu’uc cultures. They
erected a dozen splendid cities, a couple of them housing 30,000 or more
people, developed their own architectural style, dug cisterns, built roads, and
successfully subjugated the neighboring flatlanders for half a millennium or
so. The dry forest that until recently blanketed this part of the Yucatan and
hid the remains of these cities is so thick that it is hard to see more than
three or four meters into it. To walk anywhere off trail requires a good sense
of direction, a machete, and a sharp eye for aggressive fauna and thorny flora.

When I was
younger —which, come to think of it, encompasses all of my time up until I began
to write this blog… Uh, let me start
again: when I was in my late twenties and early thirties and harbored dreams of
becoming an archaeologist, I approached ancient sites and artifacts with a zeal
for mastering their taxonomies. I was fascinated by the minute differences in
the shapes of the rims of ceramic bowls, differences that indicated use,
status, and very often chronology, since styles inevitably evolve over time.
Take a look on the web, if you want to spend an amusing fifteen minutes,
looking at Coke bottles from the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc. Find 2 similar ones in the
same hole, and you can be pretty sure when the hole was dug. Token type
analysis, the study of the minute differences in flint knives, door lintels,
hemlines, depictions of deities, basket shapes, hair styles, fascinated me. The
way it was possible to pour over a collection of stuff and then, with your
detective-like wit and a few authoritatively dated comparison sets of stuff,
determine when the collection was made … well, it was better than jigsaw
puzzles and crossword puzzles put together. During all those visits to Peru I
learned the phases of Nazca, the evolving shapes of Inca arívalos, the
idiosyncrasies of late intermediate coastal ceramics north to south, from Piura
to Arica. I could look at a shard and make a reasonably solid guess as to where
it was made, and when. It made me feel good. I even began an MA program in
archaeology as a hobby while I was a professor doing something else for a
living, and got halfway through it before my attention was drawn to something
else.[witness picture, 1969,Peru]
[Also these pictures, Peru, 1986. Deborah with finds. Who says it doesn't run in the family ? ]
Today,
though, when I am older and retired from the sequenced phases of my own
salaried career, I find that I am still enthusiastic about the taxonomic
details of the stuff we are seeing, but I’ve moved on past the need to
assimilate them all. The joy is still a combination of aesthetic and
intellectual, but I no longer yearn to put the knowledge to professional use.

For the
past few days Linda and I have been rambling through the heart of the Pu’uc
country, basing ourselves in some very adequate cabins in the village of Santa
Elena. There are at least 8 major Pu’uc cities within 40 kilometers of here,
and we have no intention of visiting them all. One a day is just fine. We’ve
chosen Mayapan, Uxmal, Labna, and Edzna, pretty much because why not? What
these cities have in common is that in them the ruling elite, somewhere between
750 and 950, built immense palaces to house themselves and towering pyramids to
house their gods. Archaeologists and their funding sources have largely favored
excavation of the elite central precincts of these cities. The fomenters of
tourism, too, have thrown most of their support to the reconstruction of the
showiest parts of the sites. The surrounding residential areas where suppers
were cooked and cradles were rocked, and the industrial sectors where flint and
obsidian were knapped, wet clay was shaped and fired, and fibers were spun and
woven, these areas were surmised by the scholars and sometimes even physically discovered,
but never reconstructed and never featured as places that visitors might like
to see.

What the
cities put on show is the spectacular achievements of the Pu’uc architects. The
jungle pretty much takes care of itself. The
bonus for the visitor is the interplay
between the stone and the green: the arches and columns and mosaic masked
façades, with the trees and lianas, ferns and epiphytes, and the minute
fraction of fauna that allows itself to be observed: birds, butterflies, insects, iguanas.
We always
admire the vast reconstructed palaces and plazas as we walk through them on our
way to the edges. But we spend most of our time roaming the tumbledown suburbs,
the mounds of stone that blend with jungle, the remnants of houses and sho
ps,
markets, nurseries and kitchens, that sprawl out into the forest. The further
from the center we walk, the thicker the jungle becomes, until we reach a point
where we can go no further, where even though we can still see chunks of cut
stone jutting out of the thick foliage, we can no
longer make out the shapes of
the structures. We know that the detritus of human intervention in these places
must come to an end, but in the jungle we are never able to see quite that far.
David (and Linda)