The Falling Woman

Notes for City of Stones by Elizabeth Butler

Why do we come here to dig in the dirt, living in huts and going without showers, battling insects and trudging through the afternoon heat? Some people think that archaeologists look for treasure – jade masks, delicate shell jewelry, beaten-gold ornaments. In truth, we search the gray stone past for something much more elusive.

We are looking for patterns. We search for pieces of the past and try to reassemble them. Who lived here? How did they live? Who ruled them and how was that determined? Who were their gods and how did they worship them? Did the people of this place trade salt and carved shell from the gulf for pots from Tikal, obsidian tools from Colha, molded figurines from Isla de Jaina? What news traveled with the merchants who journeyed along the sacbeob, the limestone roads that connected the cities? Did merchants talk of the rise of new rulers, the festivals held to honor gods, the failure of the cacao-bean crop, the overabundance of quetzal feathers this year, the new fashions in Uxmal, the rumors of war in the north?

Each of us looks for patterns in his own way. Anthony Baker, my co-director, is a good man with a trowel and a brush, possessed of awesome patience and the dexterous hands of a grease monkey. In his youth, Tony dismantled and reassembled clocks, electric motors, gas-powered engines, mechanical toys, and, on one hot summer day, the fiendishly intricate planetary-gear-shifting mechanism hidden in the hub of a three-speed bicycle, a device constructed of gears within gears and wheels within wheels.

These days, Tony deals with intricate constructions of a different kind. Tony studies pots. Or, to be more accurate, he studies pieces of pots – potsherds, broken fragments of bowls and pitchers and vases and incense burners and little pipes and ceremonial vessels. Long ago, the vessels broke and the shattered pieces were tossed in the trash heap, thrown into the fill for a new building, kicked aside, cast off, ignored. Tony gathers these fragments and considers them with affection.

When Tony finds a potsherd, chances are he’ll pop it in his mouth to clean it with spit. Archaeologists get used to the taste of dirt and Tony claims he learns about a sherd by its taste and its texture. Each sherd carries its history with it. What kind of clay did the potter use? What was added to the clay to temper it? How was the pot shaped, decorated, burnished, fired? Tony concerns himself with these things, and sometimes I think that he would be quite at home chatting with the artisans of AD 800 about the merits of organic paint over mineral paints, sand-tempered clay over untempered clay. Behind his home in Albuquerque he has a studio where he turns and fires pots.

Fashions in pottery changed steadily over the years, and potsherds are durable records of changing times. The presence of certain types marks the passage of certain eras. Finding a broken bowl in the fill of a palace lets us date the structure.

John, one of Tony’s most trusted graduate students, has a different preoccupation. Though I have never asked, I believe that his father was a bricklayer or a carpenter, a builder of some sort. John admires a well-built wall. He will talk for hours about arches – noting the difference in construction methods used in AD 400 and 800. I think he would be happiest if he were funded to rebuild a temple or two, mortaring temple stones in their rightful places. He draws elegant reconstruction sketches, extrapolating from the tumbled stones of the structure back to the plans from which it could have been built. In his sketches, he realigns the walls, returns the roof combs to their lofty position, carefully sets each stone of the arches back in its place, canting them inward to make a smooth line. His drawings are black and white – fine ink lines on smooth white paper. John knows that the Maya painted their stucco and stone – traces of red and black paint still cling to sheltered stones. But his imagination stops short of color. He likes the stones – solid, massive, and gray – and does not embellish upon them.

And what do I like? I like asking impossible questions about remnants less tangible, but no less durable, than pots and walls. Ancient gods, myths, legends, modes of worship, belief systems – these are my concern. What motivated the potter to shape an incense burner, a mason to build a wall? When a small child woke crying in the dead of the night, what frightened him and to whom did he pray for comfort? When a woman was dying in childbirth, what god did the h’men call on for power?

The questions are impossible; the answers, elusive. I have fewer clues than Tony or John: ancient texts in unreadable glyphs, unreliable records kept by Franciscan friars on the pagan religion they sought to destroy, ceremonial objects cast in cenotes and sealed in tombs, fragments of knowledge retained by the current h’menob. And the embellishments of my own imagination. In my dreams of the ancient past, the buildings are always painted in vivid colors. I people them with ghosts.

Tony makes pots; John builds walls; and I construct castles in the air.