Claims to Countermapping at Say Kah, Belize

Abstract

Are we countermapping here? Can the overlay of hieroglyphic ‘property qualifiers’ onto distributions of materials and structural features derived from archaeological excavation at a Late Classic Maya site be considered a shake-up of normative methods of cartographic representation? While most countermapping efforts focus on landscape cognition of under-represented groups – and often are linked to Indigenous land claims or statements of landscape sovereignty (e.g. Wainwright and Bryan 2009, McAnany et al. 2015) – this claim to countermapping is entirely a projection onto the past. The pronounced reflexivity of countermapping efforts among geographers – whether it empowers or harms local peoples, whether it is a genderdiscriminatory process, or whether it creates boundaries where none previously existed – is absent from this study. Yet, this application of hieroglyphic ‘property qualifiers’ arguably does move towards common ground with what Johnson et al. (2006) refer to as critical cartographic literacy, which is a transmodern approach to cartography that is mindful of the call to critical consciousness issued by educator Paolo Freire blended with a desire to grapple with the colonialities of Western cartography, all the while forefronting Indigenous cartographies and ontologies. This brings us to the question of what an Indigenous cartography of Late Classic Maya communities may have felt and looked like and whether this study begins to approximate it? Globally, most archaeological research takes place in contexts that are ‘text free’ in the sense that there are no documentary sources – be they Indigenous writing systems, European chronicles, or other sources of information – against which archaeological materials can be examined. Ever since the decipherment of Classic hieroglyphic texts began to mature in the 1990s, hieroglyphs have provided extraordinarily rich insight on many facets of royal existence, including politics, dynastic histories, and social difference. Probing deeper, Stephen Houston et al. (2009) used texts and iconography to explore the aesthetics of colour and later Classic Maya relationality (Houston 2014), and finally the privileged position of young royal males who are both subject and agent of much that is glossed as Classic Maya society (Houston 2018). From this research and that of many others, we glimpse the decidedly ‘royal male gaze’ that is the positionality of the hieroglyphic record, which gives one pause about universalizing that gaze to all sectors of Late Classic society. Maya hieroglyphic texts contain nothing that approaches social history; the royal court was the be all and end all. For places that did not support a scribe who painted or carved in a durable medium there is scant mention in texts that are preserved in stone, pottery, or stucco at royal courts. Nor is there reference to the thousands of COMMENT