Iconography of remarkable cosmological motifs of Sky Bands in Classic Maya art

Posted November 13, 2024
by Nicholas Hellmuth

Sky Bands have a row of celestial motifs of stars, planets, and constellations that the Maya could see from Mesoamerica. We have dedicated many months this year to preparing six FLAAR Reports to show tons of documentation from Maya murals, stucco sculptures, stone stelae and panels, and all sizes and shapes of pottery (especially plates, vases, and bowls). The only Sky Band report that we are still working on is Sky Bands in the Maya codices. But in the meantime, here are six Sky Band reports to show you lots of remarkable information.

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Part I: Sky Bands on Plates of Classic Maya of Peten	Part II: Sky Bands on Classic Maya Vases and Bowls	Part II: Sky Bands on Kerr and Hellmuth Rollouts of Vases
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Part IV: Sky Bands on Stelae, lintels and other sculptures of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize	Part V: Sky Bands of Late Classic Maya on stucco reliefs and sculptures at Palenque	Part VI: Sky Bands on woven textile hems of Maya clothing at Palenque, Tikal, Yaxchilan

List of dozens of reports on Maya iconography

Posted Octuber 16, 2024
by Nicholas Hellmuth

This 33-page document lists the names and page quantity of all the books and reports on iconography of Maya vases, bowls, plates, cache vessels, etc. photographed during the 1970’s-1990’s. Also lists all the ethnohistory reports on Cholti-Lacandon of Chiapas and Maya cultures of Peten.

We are working to find each of these original hand-typed reports so we can scan them and make them all available as a downloadable PDF. Several libraries such as Harvard, Yale, etc. probably have 90% of these titles but once in PDF format on the Internet these documents can assist more students and more scholars.

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Peten Ytza, Quejache, Verapaz Chol, and Toquegua Maya ethnohistory

Posted by Nicholas Hellmuth
October 10, 2024

This report is an introduction to four Maya ethnic groups of Guatemala based on ethnohistory research conducted by Hellmuth in the archives of Sevilla, Spain, June-August 1971.

Discussed different Maya languages, agriculture, etc.

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Full-figure personified Maya hieroglyphs and traditional Maya house architecture

Posted by Nicholas Hellmuth
September 19, 2024

Each July each year there are international symposia on Maya topics in Guatemala City. There is a MUNAE conference and a Museo Popol Vuh conference (which is also held at MUNAE and/or Universidad Francisco Marroquin).

This July (2024), I prepared a lecture for the MUNAE event on what the ancient Maya used as roof material and as material for the walls of their thatched domestic structures. This is based on over a decade of field trips to remote areas of the Q’eqchi’ Maya Highlands where the Carnegie Institution of Washington did not reach in their helpful research on Maya houses of other Maya areas. The FLAAR Reports on roof thatch may be the first with photographs from inside and outside of the Maya houses of roof thatch of heliconia leaves and other leaves that are neither guano nor corozo palm. Plus grass thatch roofs (documented by CIW but for other parts of Guatemala). The PDF is an updated English edition of the Powerpoint.

The second lecture was for the epigraphy conference organized by Camilo Lujan, Museo Popol Vuh, held at MUNAE. This shows the largest, longest text in the entire Maya area of personified full-figure hieroglyphs (so hieroglyphs where the head glyph has an entire body). These glyphs are from Copan Temple 26; we went to Copan in 2024 to accomplish this close-up photography of each individual glyph for the symposium. Over 40% of these full-figure glyphs are Tlaloc, as would be expected at Copan, Honduras. But these are all Late Classic, long after the imperial Teotihuacan capital collapsed. There is one PDF in Spanish and a separate PDF in English from the original Powerpoint.

All of these PDFs are in horizontal format, so they can be used by professors in their classroom.

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Iconography and PSS Hieroglyphs on Altun Ha style Late Classic Maya vases

Posted by Nicholas Hellmuth
September 12, 2024

I am working at finding Primary Standard Sequence hieroglyphs. Here is a FLAAR Reports on the PSS of Altun Ha Style vases and bowls.

The style of these glyphs and the style of these ceramics from the area of the Maya site of Altun Ha, Belize is very different than the style of adjacent Peten to the west.

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Hunting the Principal Bird Deity

Posted by Nicholas Hellmuth
September 11, 2024

Month by month we are trying to find Hellmuth’s 1990’s reports, especially those written while Hellmuth was at Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology (for six months in 1996). We scan these old publications and turn them into a PDF to make them available at no cost to students, scholars and the interested public.

We have multiple reports on iconography of hunting, since this theme is rarely done in PhD dissertations or articles. The present report is on Hunting the Principal Bird Deity. This sacred bird (a snake hawk) is often associated with God D (that we will show in another report later this month).

You can also see the Hero Twins with blowguns shooting at the Principal Bird Deity on the Blom plate (another report by Hellmuth).

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Iconography of God D in three FLAAR Reports

Posted by Nicholas Hellmuth
September 10, 2024

God D is one of several “old men” deities (God D, God L, and God N are the three that have been identified so far).

God D has higher status than God L or God N. God D shares his headdress with some representations of the Principal Bird Deity.

Today we are publishing two iconography reports on God D and one short iconography report documenting that the Principal Bird Deity often wears the same headdress as God D.

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FLAAR Report on iconography of God N

Posted August 29, 2024
by Nicholas Hellmuth

Here is a 169 page catalog of God N scenes that were known in the 1990’s. In early October we will publish more of the photographs in new year 2024 FLAAR Reports.

This discussion of God N also mentions God D and God L (since all three are very old men). We will be preparing separate reports on God D and God L.

If you are at a university with a large library, if you have a 1990’s Hellmuth report on God D and separate report on God L please let us know, since we need to scan these reports and make them available as PDFs.

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Several FLAAR Reports on the Maya ballgame

Posted August 26, 2024
by Nicholas Hellmuth

During the 1980’s-1990’s I wrote over 3,000 pages on Maya iconography. Over 2,000 pages were on iconography of Maya ballgames and hunting (scenes which are related to each other). I wrote a lot of this during the 1990’s when I was in Japan for six months at their national museum (MINPAKU). Separately FLAAR organized international conferences at Brevard Community College in Florida. I wrote over a thousand pages on iconography as handouts to attendees. We are now working to find as many of these reports as possible, scan them, and turn them into PDFs to make they available to students, professors, and to the interested general public.

No scanner can turn a publication into an MS Word without hundreds of spelling errors (the scanner mis-reading different letters in the book). So each book has to be corrected line-by-line, page by page. We are now presenting several ballgame and associated publications. So don’t be surprised to find a few spacing errors and other hiccups.

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The first report is on the ballplayer stelae of the Cotzumalhuapa culture of Bilbao area, Guatemala. These eight stelae are in a nice museum in Berlin, Germany.

The second book is the red cover with the black skull on it. The title is “Human Sacrifice in Ballgame Scenes on Early Classic Cylindrical Tripods from the Tiquisate Region, Guatemala.” 182 pages of text and about 62 pages of photographs of these ballgame scenes from the Early Classic.

The third report is on the “Pseudo-God L Headdress…” that is associated with warriors and with ballplayers.

You can share these with your friends after you download them.