Can we decipher the "meaning" of ancient buildings?

Many people wonder about the "meaning" of ancient buildings and sites. Why was the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan built? Was it dedicated to a specific god? What meaning did it have to the people who built it, and those to witnessed ceremonies there for centuries afterword? I am a skeptic about talk of ancient "meanings" of this sort (see a previous post about high-level meanings.) I agree with my colleagues Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (1993) that this kind of religious symbolism and meaning cannot usually be deciphered without written texts that explain ancient myths and beliefs. There are no such texts from Teotihuacan, so it is unlikely that we can figure out just what this pyramid meant in ancient times. But we do have some clues. This position is explained in general terms by architectural theoretician Amos Rapoport, one of the top scholars on wide urban topics and one of my heroes.

Amos Rapoport

Rapoport developed a very useful scheme of how architecture communicates information. He identifies three levels of communication in the built environment: high-level meanings, middle-level meanings, and low-level meanings (see Rapoport 1988, 1990). High-level meanings communicate messages of symbolism, cosmology, and religion. In ancient societies, these high-level meanings are typically understood by only a small number of specialists and elites; many commoners know little of them. High-level meanings are culturally-specific; for example, Egyptian symbolism is completely different from Mayan symbolism. Today, scholars can reconstruct high-level meanings only if there are explicit written texts, or in some cases, very rich archaeological finds.

Middle-level meanings communicate messages of power, control, stability, wealth, and other positive values that rulers and elites want their subjects to receive. These meanings are more general and widespread than high-level meanings. Big buildings signal power, whether in ancient Mesopotamia or Classical Rome. Because these messages are valid across cultures (and not culturally specific), archaeologists can often interpret them from the mute remains of ancient architecture.

The Aztec Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan

Finally, low-level meanings concern the specific ways that people interact with buildings. They provide cues for how to behave appropriately, where to enter or exit, and other messages concerning movement, privacy, accessibility, and the like.

The Coyolxauhqui stone

The birth of Hutziliopochtli

I will illustrate Rapoport's scheme with the Aztec major temple, the "Templo Mayor" in their imperial capital Tenochtitlan (today the ruins are in the middle of Mexico City). It turns out that we have a good idea of the high-level meaning of this temple, mainly because of a key find of a stone monument, coupled with written evidence of Aztec creation myths. The monument, a stone slab some 10 feet in diameter, depicts the Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui, who has been dismembered. It was excavated in front of the main front steps of the Templo Mayor. This monument illustrates the birth of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, whose first action after birth was to kill his sister Coyolxauqui (yes, that sounds odd; if you want the whole story, check one of the many books on the Aztecs, such as my book, The Aztecs). We know this myth from written sources, and from some early Spanish pictures (see the illustration from Sahagun's Florentine Codex). In terms of religious symbolism (high-level meaning), the Aztec main temple was a model of Serpent Hill, where their god Huitzilopochtli was born and killed his sister Coholxauhqui. The human sacrifices that took place on top of the Templo Mayor were re-enactments of Huitzilopochtli's birth.

The middle-level meanings of the Aztec Templo Mayor were messages of power and wealth. No other Aztec city had a pyramid this big, with such sumptuous offerings. The Aztec emperors were powerful, and the city and empire were wealthy. Visitors to the city from foreign lands may not have known the myth of Huitzilopochtli's birth, but they could clearly understand the middle-level messages being sent deliberately by the Aztec emperors through their main temple. The low-level meaning of the Aztec Templo Mayor concerned access to the temple: who could approach it, who could climb the steps, and what were people expected to do when they approached the building.

Feathered serpent temple, Teotihuacan

Let's return to Teotihuacan to see if we can glean any information about high-level meanings from the main temples. We lack the myths of the Aztecs, in written and painted form. But one of the main temples, the "Feathered Serpent Temple", was covered elaborate carved images. One of the key images is the feathered serpent, a major deity at Teotihuacan. So in this case we can suggest that this temple was dedicated to a particular god. But we can't say much more than that about it's high-level meanings.

A recent discovery at the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan furnishes a clue about possible high-level meanings at this largest temple. Archaeologists have known for some time that another major god at Teotihuacan was the "Old fire god," whose stone sculptures are often excavated in houses. A very large example was excavated a couple of years ago in the Pyramid of the Sun; the photo here shows archaeologists Alejandro Sarabia and Nelly Zoe Nuñez working on this find in the lab. While we are a long way from being able to show that rituals at this temple reenacted key myths (as at the Aztec case), this find does provide a clue about the possible symbolism (high-level meaning) of the Pyramid of the Sun. So while we are not "clueless" about the ancient symbolism of this structure, we really know very little about its high-level meaning. But its middle-level meanings are much clearer, as anyone who has approached the building from the west can attest. We can understand the power and wealth and stability communicated by this building, even if we know almost nothing of the culture, language, or myths of Teotihuacan.

If you want to learn more about the three levels of communication, the place to start is with Rapoport's publications. I discuss them in several papers, and Flannery and Marcus discuss very similar ideas. There are several levels of meaning in the wide urban world, and some are more accessible to us today than others.


References:

Flannery, Kent V. and Joyce Marcus
1993    Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 3: 260-270.

Rapoport, Amos
1988    Levels of Meaning in the Built Environment. In Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Non Verbal Communication, edited by Fernando Poyatos, pp. 317-336. C. J. Hogrefe, Toronto.

1990    The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach. rev. ed. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Smith, Michael E.
2007    Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning. Journal of Planning History 6 (1): 3-47.

2011    Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18: 167-192.

2012    The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Maya

Taliesen West facade

Taliesen West facade

Cindy and I visited the Frank Lloyd Wright workshop/school Taliesen West (in Scottsdale) over the Christmas holiday. Our nephew, Los Angeles architect James Diewald, was in town, as were Cindy's parents. I had heard that Wright was influenced by ancient Maya architecture, so we looked for evidence of this at Taliesen West. It didn't take long to find. Several of the buildings exhibit a sloping exterior wall in a form common in the architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. The outward-sloping panel is called a "talud" by Mesoamericanists. It is most famous at Teotihuacan, where the sloping panels alternate with vertical framed panels called "tableros." But Wright used the talud without the tablero.

Xochicalco, Feathered Serpent Temple

Contrary to various books about Wright's influences, the closest parallels of this talud form are not to the Maya, but to ancient central Mexican architecture, such as the Feathered Serpent Temple at Xochicalco. ((NOTE: I am not providing links for Xochicalco, since the readily available websites (e.g., the Wikipedia entry for Xochicalco) are pretty bad and filled with nonsense. Xochicalco was an urban center southwest of Cuernavaca that flourished from the sixth to ninth centuries AD; I worked at the site as a graduate student. Major recent fieldwork projects were directed by Kenneth Hirth and Norberto González; see references below)). A number of Maya cities did use the talud form, though.

At Taliesen West I asked our guide and some employees at the (very nice) bookstore about Mayan influence on Wright's architecture, but they didn't know much. One person said that this was one aspect of Wright's life that had not been researched yet. That didn't sound correct. I skimmed through various books on Wright's architecture in the bookstore, and they mentioned his explicit use of Maya models as a matter of course, mostly in reference to a set of houses he designed in the 1920s in Los Angeles.

Hollyhock House, Los Angeles

Hollyhock House, Los Angeles

The Hollyhock House was built for Aline Barnsdall between 1919 and 1921, and shows a general formal similarity to buildings and complexes (the so-called "Nunnery  Quadrange") at the Maya city of Uxmal. This is a distinctive and attractive house; see more photos and information at the Hollyhock House website.

Ennis House, Los Angeles

Ennis House, Los Angeles

The Ennis House (built in 1924) uses similar forms and techniques, but has a greater number of specific Maya items in its architecture and decoration.Wright's client evidently had an affinity for Mayan art. Like the Hollyhock House, this is a gorgeous and fascinating structure; see more at the Ennis House website.
This house was used as a set in a number of films and television shows, including  Blade Runner and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

What is Maya about these structures? Two features stand out to me; there are probably others. First, the overall form of the individual structures and their configuration resembles building in the so-called "Puuc Style" of the Yucatan Peninsula. Uxmal is the best-known city with predominantly Puuc architecture, and the well-visited site of Chichén Itzá has much architecture in the Puuc style:

Uxmal

Chichén Itzá

The second Mayan feature of Wright's Los Angeles houses is the use of individual blocks to produce walls with a rich textured surface. Wright called these "textile blocks." The Puuc Maya used varying kinds of blocks to produce textured walls, some depicting the rain god and others geometric in design.

One of Wright's "textile blocks"

Mosaic facade at Kabah (Puuc Maya)

Compare the Kabah facade to both interior and exterior walls at the Hollyhock and Ennis houses. There are other Maya parallels that turn up in Wright's work over a period of many years. They were not at all limited to the Los Angeles houses.

A bit of library research turned up much information about Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan (and more general Mesoamerican) influences.  By far the best account is Barbara Braun's excellent book, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art, which has a chapter called "Frank Lloyd Wright: A Vision of Maya Temples." In a 1930 lecture, Wright said, "I remember how, as a boy, primitive American architecture, Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, stirred my wonder, excited my wishful imagination" (quoted in Braun, p.138). Braun goes on to chronicle Wright's use of Mayan architecture. She does not seem to have a good grasp of non-Mayan Mesoamerican architecture, however, and Wright's use of elements from sites like Xochicalco, Tula, and other non-Mayan cities is a topic that could stand some additional research. Additional information can be found in Ingle (1984) and Tselos (1969), a semi-rigorous article. The 1920s and 1930s were a period when ancient Mesoamerican art and Mesoamerican traditional culture more generally were very popular in the U.S., and Wright was in the midst of this movement (see works by Braun, Delpar, and Park below).

I was particularly interested in the role of the Chicago fair of 1893, the Worlds Columbian Exposition, in the possible development of Wright's appreciation for Mayan architecture. Wright was working in the office of Chicago architect Louis Sullivan at the time, and participated in the design of several structures at the fair. The fair also included full-size replicas for several Puuc Maya structures (from Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, and Labná). When the fair was dismantled, these were later assembled at the Field Museum of Natural History (in Chicago). It was not clear from the sources I consulted (see below), however, how much of an impression these made on Wright, or the specific nature of their possible influence on his ideas.

Puuc Maya replicas at the Chicago Worlds Fair, 1893

I highly recommend this outstanding account of the Chicago fair, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness in the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson. I really enjoyed this book a few years ago (although I can't recall now whether Larson discusses the Maya buildings).

Sources on Maya influences on Frank Lloyd Wright:

Braun, Barbara  (1993)  Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art. Abrams, New York.

Delpar, Helen  (1992)  The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Heinz, Thomas  (1979)  Historic Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright, Ennis-Brown House. Architectural Digest (October):104-111, 160.

Ingle, Marjorie  (1984)  Mayan Revival Style: Art Deco Fantasy. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Park, Stephen M.  (2011)  Mesoamerican Modernism: William Carlos Williams and the Archaeological Imagination. Journal of Modern Literature 34(4):21-47.

Steele, James  (1992)  Barnsdall House: Frank Lloyd Wright. Phaidon, London.

Tselos, Dimitri  (1969)  Frank Lloyd Wright and World Architecture. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28(1):58-72.


On Puuc Maya architecture:

Andrews, George F.  (1995)  Architecture of the Puuc Region and the Northern Plains Area. Labyrinthos, Lancaster, CA.

Gendrop, Paul  (1998)  Río Bec, Chenes, and Puuc Styles in Maya Architecture. Translated by Robert D. Wood. Edited and with a forward by George F. Andrews. Labyrinthos, Lancaster, CA.

Kowalski, Jeffrey K.  (1987)  The House of the Governor: A Maya Palace of Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Pollock, Harry E. D.  (1980)  The Puuc: An Architectural Survey of the Hill Country of Yucatan and Northern Campeche, Mexico. Memoirs vol. 19. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge.

Proskouriakoff, Tatiana  (1963)  An Album of Maya Architecture. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.


On Xochicalco:

de la Fuente, Beatriz, Silvia Garza Tarazona, Norberto González Crespo, Arnold Leboef, Miguel León Portilla and Javier Wimer  (1995)  La Acrópolis de Xochicalco. Instituto de Cultura de Morelos, Cuernavaca.

González Crespo, Norberto, Silvia Garza Tarazona, Hortensia de Vega Nova, Pablo Mayer Guala and Giselle Canto Aguilar  (1995)  Archaeological Investigations at Xochicalco, Morelos: 1984 and 1986. Ancient Mesoamerica 6:223-236.

Hirth, Kenneth G. (editor)  (2000)  Archaeological Research at Xochicalco. Volume 1, Ancient Urbanism at Xochicalco: The Evolution and Organization of a Pre-Hispanic Society. Volume 2, The Xochicalco Mapping Project. 2 vols. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Hirth, Kenneth G. (editor)  (2006)  Obsidian Craft Production in Ancient Central Mexico: Archaeological Research at Xochicalco. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

López Luján, Leonardo, Robert H. Cobean and Alba Guadalupe Mastache  (2001)  Xochicalco y Tula. CONACULTA, Mexico City.