Introduction

Sacred Spaces as Subject and Study in the Mesoamerican Landscape

KEITH M. PRUFER

It can't be that we just clear the land, that we just cultivate the earth, that we just dig and scrape. That can't be how it is. Rather, it must be as in the story in my opinion, as far back as I can tell. Because the earth is alive. The earth also has virtue. The earth is also just earth, but it has awareness. Therefore, it has remained like this. Back when the first man asked for work it was given to him. But the earth requested our bodies in return. That's how I have heard it. I haven't invented or dreamed it up.

Jilotepequeño Poqomam text (Smith-Stark 1976: 86)

Populating Sacred Places

Sacred spaces are human constructions. They do not merely exist to be discovered. They are places in nature or in the built environment that are made sacred by the actions of people. For archaeologists and art historians sacred spaces are found or reflected in architectural configurations, iconographic representations, and as modifications to and activity residues from significant landmarks such as caves, grottos, rockshelters, and mountaintops.

In the simplest of terms, sacred places emerge as one of many ways people know their world. As humans map their lives onto the terrain of their landscapes they are constantly creating and re-creating senses of place: domestic place, human place, wild place, death place, sacred place. This is a crude model, in that such categories are never static or bounded; within the life cycles of individuals and the generational cycles of societies, senses of place can and do shift or change. It still stands as valid, though, in that "cultural landscape[s are] fashioned from the natural landscape by a cultural group" with culture as the "agent," the natural area or space as the "medium," and the "cultural landscape" as the product (Sauer 1963: 343).

As prominent locations within cultural landscapes, sacred spaces are imbued by people with notions of both power and history. Sacred spaces are conservative, in that they generally change slowly and are considered places for conserving cosmological information that is socially encoded. The perception that they are symbolically charged with supernatural forces gives them the potential to guide socially transformative processes, including those linked to a range of life-cycle events (birth, death, social personhood) and a broad range of political and prestige interactions and other behaviors.

Sacred spaces are also one of the best windows into pre- Hispanic cosmologies. Cosmologies are literally "sciences of nature," from the physics of Aristotle and Newton to the mythical cosmograms of Tibet. A cosmology is any composition or cultural construct relating to the structure and process of systems of creation. Included are the origins of physical elements of earthly or astronomical spheres, the genesis of the material world, and the order and function of the observable universe, including the planets, the solar system, and celestial bodies. Quite simply, a cosmology is any cultural belief related to the creative forces responsible for the composition of the universe.

Cosmologies are reflected in the patterning of material constructions and in iconographic representations of sacred space, but for people who consider those spaces sacred, the links between cosmology and place are usually actualized through ritual. The archaeologically detectable uses of the sacred places by pre-Columbian people, as well as our interpretations of material evidence of Mesoamerican religions, center on the remains of ritual activities. In contexts considered sacred, rituals are forums for the expression of religious ideas and events where shared cultural ideas are given meaning by participants (Lawson 1993: 185). Simply, ritual "imposes an order, accounts for the origin and nature of that order, and shapes people's disposition to experience that order in the world around them" (Bell 1997: 21). Societies have rich and varied types of rituals reflecting the milieux of religious and secular traditions. Anthropologists worldwide have studied the multivocal ways rituals enter into peoples' construction of identity on a number of different levels — personal, domestic, political, and religious (Bastian 1978; Hill 1988; Williams and Boyd 1993). For archaeologists the task of identifying and categorizing ritual behaviors is difficult, since they deal largely with the material remains of activities that occurred in the distant past, sometimes with the benefit of analogous behaviors that must be carefully evaluated through the filters of historical change.

The discussion of pre-Columbian religion almost always refers to some type of specialized activity, and therefore, in all likelihood, to the actions of ritual specialists. While specialists need not mediate or conduct rituals, they often do, and as discussed below, most rituals associated with the sacred places involve religious practitioners who specialize in mediating with cosmological forces. Anthropologists have frequently gauged the importance of rituals based on the presence of specialists (Bell 1992: 130). Mary Douglas (1966), in a survey of ritual events, found a higher propensity for religious specialists in societies that are more highly stratified. Max Weber's entire premise of the evolutionary development of religion through rationalization had at its core three types of authority — the magician, the priest, and the charismatic prophet — with only the priest and the prophet falling into the realm of his definition of religious specialist. In a view that has found favor in sociology and religious studies, priests are seen as influencing gods "as part of the functioning of a regularly organized and permanent enterprise" that is distinct from the activities of individuals or magicians (Weber 1963, 28). Prophets, on the other hand, have a personal calling from which they derive their power, and this power is manifested in terms of a "charisma" that is distinctly individual.

In the anthropological literature, the distinction between the priest and the prophet has been less instrumental than the distinction between priests and another form of inspirational practitioner: the shaman. In part this may be due to anthropology's emphasis on comparative studies of competing statuses in religious systems in nonindustrial societies (Turner 1968: 438). Priests and shamans may be found in the same religions, or they may not. The main distinction between the two appears to be that shamans claim a direct communicative relationship with the supernatural forces they mediate, while this is not a necessary criterion for the priest (Lessa and Vogt 1958: 410). However, the roles are not static, and there may be many exceptions. Turner, a proponent of the distinction, clearly notes that "we sometimes find the two functions of the priest and the shaman combined in the same individual" and that priest can sometimes take the role of innovators or dramatists (Turner 1968: 439). These points are important in that most ethnohistoric and ethnographic discussions of sacred space and sacred places involve the actions of individuals who, anthropologically, would be considered shamans.

Studying Sacred Places

The concept of sacred space is as old as human belief systems. In the earliest Sumarian epic, which dates to at least 3000 BCE, the heroic figure Gilgamesh refers to a sacred grove of cedar trees (Swan 1990: 33). Geographers have generalized several ways in which sacred places can be categorized. James Swan (1990: 35–36) proposes three groupings:

1. As human constructed structures that are situated at or near a natural feature that possesses a strong religious significance. This can include churches, shrines, and temples.

2. "Archetypal-symbolic" places, where a larger model or "whole has become condensed into a limited space, maintaining a sense of order and displaying a harmonious relationship between human life and the Cosmos." This includes mandalic cities in India, as well as the sacred layout of many Maya communities.

3. Places in nature that possess no special construction. This category includes sacred mountains, caves, grottos, and other natural features, such as the Ganges River.

Natural places by themselves do not constitute monuments, since they are not constructed (Bradley 2000: 34), but this does not mean that they cannot contain monuments, have monuments around them, or be modified as monuments. It is obvious that these categories are not immutable: some loci may combine two or more of the abovementioned, such as the Temple at Parvati, India (465 CE), where the outside walls are decorated with images of piles of rocks and wild animals in a grotto, the interior of the building being a metaphoric cave (Humphrey and Vitebsky 1997: 23). The Indian geographer Rana Singh (1993: 161, citing Lane 1988: 15) identified four maxims that can be used to define how humans relate to sacred spaces:

1. A sacred space is not chosen, it chooses.

2. A sacred space is an ordinary space, ritually made extraordinary.

3. A sacred space can be tread upon without being entered.

4. The impulse of a sacred space is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal.

Although these maxims are useful for their understanding of emic perspectives on sacred space, some are not very helpful for analyzing those spaces. This is not to say that emic (analogical or ethnoarchaeological) perspectives and data are unhelpful for prehistorians. To the contrary they have been integral to most understandings of sacred spaces, and are discussed below. For archaeologists, the study of sacred spaces needs to be framed somewhat differently than in geography. An emic perspective might insist, for example, that sacred places exist in nature outside of the actions of humans, and that humans merely recognize or are drawn to that sacredness. For anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, the understanding of sacred places needs to begin with the notion that humans create those locations from their own conceptions of lived, built, and natural spaces, assigning particular qualities of the sacred to particular locations, replicating those concepts in the built environment, communicating the models of sacredness through image and text, and incorporating those symbols into structures that are reproduced across generations.

Archaeologists and other prehistorians have found three fruitful avenues of inquiry for their studies of sacred places: studies of sacred spaces in the built environment (architecture and architectural arrangements); studies of sacred landscapes (sacred places in the natural world); and studies of iconographic representations of the sacred (on various media, including, in Mesoamerica, ceramics, codices, murals, monumental sculptures, portable objects, and cave paintings and petroglyphs). In many cases these categories overlap; in general, concepts of sacrality and the natural world are inseparable in Mesoamerica. For example, paintings are commonly found both on architecture, such as the famous murals of Teotihuacan, Bonampak, and San Bartolo, or inside caves, such as Naj Tunich (Stone 1995), and sacred architectural architectural arrangements are found both in cities and as landscape modifications as in hilltop shrines and in caves and rockshelters (Moyes and Prufer 2013; Brady and Prufer 2005). Given these overlaps between categories, many prehistorians prefer to think of sacred spaces as parts of a broader category of sacred landscapes, minimizing or even erasing the distinctions between the urban environment and natural environments.

The larger reason for this categorical blending has to do with Mesoamerican groups and even other Amerindian peoples' orientation toward the earth as a sacred and animate entity that is fundamentally different from most European cultures (Brady and Prufer 1999). For many Mesoamerican people, religious symbolism has an important terrestrial component, with mountains and caves being the natural features they consider the most sacred (Stuart 1997; Vogt 1969, 1997). This is not to imply that celestial phenomena are unimportant in Mesoamerican thought, for they clearly are significant (Aveni 2001; Bricker et al. 2001). More to the point, though, the distinction between celestial and terrestrial may be less important than in Western thought. It has been proposed that Mesoamerican cities were built as a reflection of the natural world that surrounds them: temples represent sacred mountains, and tombs are man-made caves that are links to the underworld homes of deities and ancestors (Benson 1983: 184). Ethnohistorians have documented the links between terrain and cosmology, to the extent that settlement choices by communities may have been as much guided by cosmological considerations as they were by ecological ones, according to García Zambrano (1994: 217–218), who says:

Mesoamerican migrants searched for an environment with specific characteristics that comprised several symbolic levels. ... Such a place had to recall the mythical moment when the earth was created: an aquatic universe framed by four mountains with a fifth elevation protruding in the middle of the water. ... A setting like this duplicated, and forever would freeze, the primordial scene when the waters and the sky separated and the earth sprang upwards.

Similarly, Rincón Mautner's (1997: 135) analysis of the Coixtlahuacan codices indicates that place-making is guided by references to the earth's creation, and that prominent landforms symbolic of those events are repeated over and over in the mapping the foundations of Chocho villages in the Coixtlahuaca Basin.

Landscapes as Sacred Spaces

Landscapes are a means to attribute the ways that local people view their cultural and physical surroundings (Hirsch 1995: 1). As a spatial category, landscapes are intertwined with time, in that they are not static or abstract entities but a part of social practices (Gosden and Head 1994: 113; Gregory 1985: 315). Space and time are related in that they represent a relationship between objects and actions. The production of social space results in the creating of history (Soja 1985: 91).

Landscapes are integral to any cosmology, though not all cosmologies emphasize that landscapes are sacred. Landscape is a powerful term with considerable utility for describing and giving context to cultural beliefs and worldview regarding the natural world in which people live. Hence, it is important in the context of cosmology. People live in landscapes but landscapes are more than social space. Long the domain of geographers who fashioned "landscapes" from "spatial-scientific" or "structural" geographical theory, broader understandings of non-Western cosmologies have brought deeper comprehension of landscape and its relationship to cultures (Thomas 1993: 20).

Anthropologists have long recognized that many indigenous people view and map landscapes differently than is done in the West (Bender 1999) and that often conceptions of land and landscape are permeated with notions of the sacred. Among the Andonque of the Colombian Amazon, the land is conceptualized as specific features both within and outside their territory. These features include mountains, hills, flat savannahs, and rocks. Each feature has been purposely named by a religious specialist, is "owned" by a specific supernatural force, and is identified socially by specific mythic events that occurred there. This landscape extends well beyond the actual territory of the community. This conception of the world is not fixed or permanent. Shamanic intervention in the form of specialist communication with specific landscape features results in symbolic remodeling of both the landscape and the ceremonial ways people interact with and are influenced by it (Espinosa Arango and Andoque 1999: 240–241).

Specifics about the sacred landscapes are learned: as people grow up and physically moved through the land, they become aware of the relationships between the land and their ancestors, as well as of their social responsibilities (Bastian 1978). There are dramatic indications of links between memory, ancestral power, and the land. Recently residents of northern Australia, visiting southeastern parts of the continent, identified features in the natural environment as part of their ancestral landscape. This is particularly relevant in that the individuals in question had never been to southeastern Australia before, and little was known about the mythology of the area or the original inhabitants, who had been forcibly removed in the nineteenth century (Morphy 1995: 204). This knowledge is part of an ancestral grid learned through interaction with and observation of highly ritualized activities, and then experienced by traveling to different places. Each place is connected in this chainlike grid that reflects an individual's current kinship group as well as ancestral validation of links to the land (Morphy 1995: 199). The landscape is seen as composed of segments that reveal ancestral ties to specific areas of the land. "Because ancestral beings not only created the landscape, but also placed people in a particular relationship to it as perpetuators of the ancestral inheritance, the landscape is viewed simultaneously as a set of spaces for people to occupy" (192). Even in land disputes, such as when a group moves into a new land and takes over, they view this as the land taking over the people, thus preserving the "continuity between people, place, and ancestral past." When previously unoccupied land (or that for which direct links are no longer articulated) is settled, there exist "mechanisms for creating or recreating the linkages" (186).