Dr. Barbara MacLeod, an independent scholar: “Nurturing the New Maize, Anchoring the New Year: The Painted Texts of Naj Tunich Cave, Peten, Guatemala.”
The spectacular corpus of hieroglyphic texts in Naj Tunich Cave first came to light in 1980. This discovery was followed by intensive archaeological investigations by. Dr. James Brady and later, detailed epigraphic and stylistic analysis by Dr. Andrea Stone. As the field of Maya epigraphy has evolved, so has our ability to date, correlate, and interpret these texts. A pattern of recorded visits termed Mon Pan ‘nurture-(maize) sprouts’ during the mid-eighth century strongly supports the work of Dr. Holley Moyes on caves as the loci of a “drought cult” during decades of less-reliable rainfall and burgeoning population. These pressures motivated long-distance pilgrimages to this cave in service not only to the propitiation of rain deities but also to the foundation and strengthening of alliances in a volatile geopolitical climate. While such rituals in caves surely took place throughout the Classic, as demonstrated by the ceramic record, there was a particular urgency at this time and place which brought high-status lords and their scribes to this cave. The dates of these texts fall into two groups with modern parallels: (1) the zenith-based agricultural year of the Ch’orti’ Maya, and (2) the celebrations leading up to the New Year and the change of the Year Bearer in Yucatan as recorded by Diego de Landa. She discussed these texts in as much detail as time permitted.
Dr. Barbara MacLeod grew up in Missouri and took up cave exploration and mapping in her early teens. From 1971-1975 she was attached to the Belize Department of Archaeology as a speleologist, documenting extensive Classic-period underground ritual sites and salvaging endangered artifacts. She has for four decades been an active contributor to the fields of Maya epigraphy and Maya cave archaeology. She first visited Naj Tunich Cave in 1987 as an archaeology field course instructor, and has maintained a keen interest in its texts. She is currently completing a book on Naj Tunich titled Celebrations in the Heart of the Mountain.
She also gave an epigraphy seminar in the afternoon