Light and Dark in the Ancient Maya World

9th Apr 2024

Mexicolore contributor Nancy Goblin

We’re most grateful to Dr. Nancy Gonlin for writing specially for us this intriguing article on the importance of nighttime for the ancient Maya. Dr. Gonlin is a Mesoamerican archaeologist who loves conducting research on ancient nights, household archaeology, and everything Maya, especially chocolate. She is a Professor of Anthropology at Bellevue College (USA).

You might imagine that people in the past, without electricity, did nothing but sleep at night. It was dark after all. You would be partially correct in thinking that sleep was the main activity, but it wasn’t the only one. Ancient people did so much more in the dark and at night. They were creative and innovative in their quest to light up the darkness, so that they could pursue many activities. Once the sun set, nighttime enveloped the tropical Classic Maya world and the creation of lighting technology was essential to carry on. The Classic Maya designed a glyph that denoted night and darkness (pic 1), symbolizing the significance of this characteristic to all who saw it. The cross-hatching was an essential element to denote this property.
Various lighting technologies have been invented across the globe, but light carries deep meaning. Metaphors for good and evil have often used light and darkness to convey essential qualities of morality. Darkness was an ominous time and heralded the beginning of the world, a statement that is true for the ancient Mayas and many groups across the globe. (Read ‘Exploring the Maya Underworld’, Parts 1 and 2 - link below)

The study of pre-modern light and lighting devices is so vital to understanding the past that an entire field of study, called lychnology, flourishes. Lychnology is an integral component to studying darkness, a topic that complements the perspective of the archaeology of the night. Light is apotropaic and was essential to ward off dangers in the dark. By averting evil influences, this quality of light was much valued across the world, in the past and the present. Such dangers existed in the Classic Maya world in the form of nasty beings and ghosts that haunted the night as well as very real animals that sought out humans in the darkness – bugs, snakes, scorpions, and jaguars roamed the landscape in pursuit of prey.
There were many different lighting devices invented by ancient Mesoamericans, some of them portable while others were fixed features. A common portable source of light found throughout the world is the torch. In Mesoamerica, pine wood was the preferred material because it burned well, the resin produced a pleasant aroma, and pine was plentiful. It is rare to find remains of torches, however, because the more they burn, the less there is of them.

Examine this “roll out” of a Classic Maya painted pottery vessel from the ancient city of ‘Ik in Guatemala (pic 3). In this scene, K’inich Lamaw Ek (Holy Lord Completion Star) sits on his throne, a bench, with an attendant holding a torch behind him that illuminates the king from behind. This attendant is smoking, a cue for the night. The two seated nobles bring tribute, such as textiles (yubte’) and an attendant shines a torch into their faces, perhaps so the king can better read their expressions. Note that the torch this attendant is holding has a handle. Sometimes handles for torches made of fired clay were fashioned to better and more safely support the torch. While this depiction emanates from the artist Mo…n B’uluch Laj who painted the vase in 778 CE, there is no doubt that many scenes like this actually took place in the palaces of rulers across the Maya lowlands, and it appears that they happened at night with the aromas of tobacco and pine mingling in the enclosed air of the palace (Houston et al. 2006). The clever use of light and shadow from the torches figures prominently into the scene.

Darkness provided an ideal backdrop to commune with ancestors and propitiate the deities, whether this setting occurred at night, in a dark temple, or in a dark cave. A feature that readily illustrates such ritual activity comes from the city of Yaxchilan in Mexico (pic 4). In Building 13, the sculptor Ah Chak Ah Hol carved into a lintel a remarkable scene with Lady K’ab’al Xok engaged in bloodletting to honor ancestors. Her husband, King Itzamnaaj B’ahlam, wields a large torch to illuminate this event that took place on an October night in 709 CE. Royal blood was caught on the bark paper below the queen so that she could burn it in remembrance of her ancestors. According to David Stuart, epigrapher extraordinaire, “burning and bloodletting went hand-in-hand as modes of spiritual and ritual expression” (Stuart 1988:403).
Such rituals of self-sacrifice took place in Maya households across the social spectrum (read ‘What was life like for most of the ancient Maya?’ - link below). Placed high on a shelf for safekeeping in a structure built for village ceremonies, an obsidian blade was carefully placed in the storage area, along with “large tubular bone beads, variously shaped other deer bone artifacts, a shaped scapula from a young white-tailed deer, two prismatic blades, and a jade axe” (Sheets 2006:110). A deer skull headdress was nearby. Such preservation is extraordinary for the 7th-century farming community of Joya de Cerén, El Salvador that was preserved by volcanic ash, much like Pompeii. Quite likely, one of the sharp obsidian blades had been used in bloodletting: it tested positive for human blood.

While it could be expensive to light one’s house at night and to cook with firewood, it was not just royal people who used torches for nighttime illumination. We can extrapolate back in time from ethnographic observations of modern Maya to understand common ancient practices, in this case, from the ethnographer Charles Wisdom who made many observations during the 1930s of the Chorti Maya in Guatemala. Every household held torches for a wide variety of purposes. For example, it would be remiss of a host not to offer a guest a torch for the journey home. Torches could be used to re-light a fire that had become extinguished in a different household. “For night hunting, torches are carried to light the trails and for blinding the deer” (Wisdom 1940:71). Matthew Looper’s (2019) extensive research on the significance of deer through time and the utility of the torch in the hunt (following Gann 1918) for the Mayas provides a broad base for interpretation. Today, hunters don a headlamp rather than attaching a torch to their hats, as reported by J.P. Jorgenson (1993, 61) who observed Yucatec Maya hunting deer in the 1990s, but the effect on the deer is the same; they are blinded and mesmerized by the light, facilitating the kill for their human slayers.

Fire was weaponized and used in nocturnal battles. Such a scene was painted in a mural at Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico in 791 CE (pic 6). This dark, murky depiction and the cosmic iconography clearly place this event at night where the element of surprise was greatest in the dark. King Yasaw Chan Muwaan, along with his sons and other soldiers, wielded spears and clubs to vanquish their enemies, while a burning temple smoldered in the background (Miller and Brittenham 2013).
The perspective of nighttime household archaeology allows us to peer into people’s homes at night. What were they doing? Many people were sleeping, as one might expect. The ancient Maya built raised benches, of stone or adobe, that had many different functions throughout a 24-hour period. During the day, these architectural features were ideal for working on craft activities and relaxing. One could receive visitors and lounge with them on the benches, some of which were quite large and held more than one adult. Some benches were fancy and had carved fronts that held great symbolic value; such benches were used for political purposes, day and night.

Archaeologist David Webster uncovered many stone benches in the remains of houses that he and his teams excavated in the urban neighborhood of Las Sepulturas in Copan, Honduras. The one pictured here from Group 8N-11 (pic 7) was covered with plaster, though much of that surface has eroded. Stone benches were made quite comfortable with matting from cotton or palm and woven cotton blankets, day or night. It is highly likely that children slept with their mothers, as there was room for a small family. This particular bench was part of a noble’s household, was well built, and was quite large; at 75 cm high, its dimensions were 3.15 m long and 1.9 meters deep (Webster 2023:58) with plenty of room for a number of individuals. Privacy was possible when desired; look at the small niches in the wall. These holes functioned as cordholders for the placement of curtains. People of lesser means built perishable benches or used sleeping mats for repose on the floor and used ceramic loop handles to hold curtains; incredibly such a mat and cordholders were found at the exceptionally-preserved Joya de Cerén farming community as well as benches made of adobe.

A ubiquitous artifact on Mesoamerican sites is the pottery sherd. From fragments of broken pots, one can learn an enormous amount about the various types of vessels people produced, and one of them was for lighting. Apart from the torch, another type of portable light was a pottery vessel specifically designed to hold fire and coals: the brazier. Joe Ball and Jennifer Taschek’s (2007) study of the brasero confirm it was a utilitarian household item of many uses, for reheating beans, keeping away pesky insects through the production of smoke, and warming hands and small rooms alike (pic 8). The brazier would have provided an inviting glow, serving as an ancient nightlight, especially in dark dank interiors of stone houses with no windows, and the fire’s “mystical energy” (Scherer and Houston 2018:116) offered further comfort.

Burn marks on plastered floors (pic 9) attest to the usage of fire in household rooms, as seen in a noble’s house in the urban neighborhood of Las Sepulturas at Copan. The people who resided at 9N-8, the House of the Bacabs, would have been nearby neighbors of those living in 8N-11, The Skyband Group. The source of heat from this vessel would have been well confined and offered a safe way to light up the night.
Another source of lighting commonly associated with Classic Maya home life is the hearth, a fixed feature for cooking, taking the chill off a cold night, providing light, giving comfort, and providing an ideal space for socializing. Typically, three large round stones are used to support a cooking pot or griddle, with the fire in the middle. These stones represent the centre of the universe (see ‘Turtle and Hearthstones’ - link below) and are symbolically valuable, hence one rarely finds such stones in the archaeological record since residents routinely removed the stones when they vacated their houses. All that remains is the fragmented charcoal in the earthen floor, making it difficult to recover hearths in the archaeological record of the tropics.

At the extraordinarily-preserved farming village of Joya de Cerén, residents had to flee in a great hurry from the impending volcanic eruption of the Loma Caldera. In their haste, they were unable to take precious items, such as the hearthstones in the kitchen of Household 1 (see ‘What was life like for most of the ancient Maya?’ - link below). Today, we can see the remains of the kitchen walls and the three-stone hearth (pic 10).
But why venture out into the dark if one did not have to do so? Danger lurked and a varied cast of characters emerged at night, some of whom harbored ill, such as the infamous wahy spirits who were best avoided. You would not want to be out and about without benefitting from the apotropaic qualities of light to show you the way, especially in a deep, dark forest where evil and powerful beings lived, an obscurity likened to primeval night (Coltman 2021, 214).

But one obvious reason why the Classic Mayas may have desired darkness relates to the night sky: astronomy. Stargazing was best performed in the dark, especially on moonless nights where the sparkle of a million stars shone brightly in the night sky. The ancient Mayas knew well the orbits of some of the planets, such as Venus, and accurately tracked them in numerous books. The sight of the Milky Way was perhaps symbolized in Maya iconography as the Starry Deer Crocodile (Looper 2019:105). Entire buildings were dedicated to astronomy, such as the observatory in Uaxactun, Guatemala (Kováč and Karlovský 2015) or Palenque, Mexico (pic 11). Numerous structures were built so that they were oriented to solar or lunar positions.
Astronomical bodies from a Classic Maya worldview were social bodies with personalities and power (Iwaniszewski 2016). The most important was the sun (k’inich), a celestial body whose name was often incorporated into the names of Classic Maya rulers, such as the dynasty founder at Copan: K’inich Yax K’uk Mo ruled from 426 – 437 CE in this southern Maya city. The moon serves as a source of light during the night, past and present. The embodiment of the moon was the Moon Goddess. When at its fullest in a dark sky without light pollution, the moon reflects enough light from the sun for reading and other activities.

The ancient Mayas relied upon light to brighten the darkness and to bring order to chaos. Contrary to most assumptions, the Mayas were very busy at night with many tasks from royal politicking in the palace to hunting in the woods to tracking the planets and constellations. Most Mayas would be sleeping at night however, and evidence for sleep exists in the form of benches which were found in nearly every house. The archaeological record is rich with evidence for light and dark in ancient Maya society.

Sources:-
• Ball, Joseph W., and Jennifer T. Taschek. 2007. Sometimes a “Stove” Is “Just a Stove”: A Context-Based Reconsideration of Three-Prong “Incense Burners” from the Western Belize Valley. Latin American Antiquity 18(4):451-470
• Coltman, Jeremy. 2021. The Cave and the Skirt: A Consideration of Classic Maya Ch’een Symbolism. In Night and Darkness in Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by Nancy Gonlin and David M. Reed, pp. 201-224. University Press of Colorado
• Gann, Thomas William Francis. 1918. Maya Indians of Southern Yucatan and Northern British Honduras. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 64. Bureau of American Ethnology
• Gonlin, Nancy, and Christine Dixon-Hundredmark. 2021. Illuminating Darkness in the Ancient Maya World: Nocturnal Case Studies from Copan, Honduras and Joya de Cerén, El Salvador. In Night and Darkness in Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by Nancy Gonlin and David M. Reed, pp. 103-104. University Press of Colorado
• Gonlin, Nancy, and April Nowell, editors. 2018. Archaeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World. University Press of Colorado
• Gonlin, Nancy, and David M. Reed, editors. 2021. Night and Darkness in Ancient Mesoamerica. University Press of Colorado
• Gonlin, Nancy, and Meghan E. Strong, editors. 2022. After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape and Lightscape of Ancient Cities. University Press of Colorado
• Halperin, Christina T., and Antonia E. Foias. 2020. Pottery Politics: Late Classic Maya Palace Production at Motul de San José, Petén, Guatemala. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29:392-411
• Houston, Stephen, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. 2006. The Memory of Bones, University of Texas Press
• International Lychnology Association. https://www.lychnology.org/
• Iwaniszewski, Stanislaw. 2016. The Social Life of Celestial Bodies: The Sky in Cultural Perspective. In Archaeology on Three Continents, edited by Drahoslav Hulínek, Dominik Bonatz, and Milan Kováč, pp. 13-18. Slovak Archaeological and Historical Institute
• Jorgenson, Jeffrey Paul. 1993. Gardens, Wildlife Densities, and Subsistence Hunting by Maya Indians in Quintana Roo, Mexico. PhD Thesis, University of Florida
• Kerr, Justin. Maya Vase Database. https://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya.html
• Kováč, Milan, and Vladimír Karlovský. 2015. New Maya Observatory Observed in Uaxactun, Guatemala. In Archaeology on Three Continents, edited by Drahoslav Hulínek, Dominik Bonatz, and Milan Kováč, pp. 143-156. Slovak Archaeological and Historical Institute
• Looper, Matthew. 2019. The Beast Between: Deer in Maya Art and Culture. University of Texas Press
• Miller, Mary, and Claudia Brittenham. 2013. The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak. University of Texas Press and Instituto Nacional de Antropologiá e Historia, México
• Scherer, Andrew K., and Stephen Houston. 2018. Blood, Fire, Death: Covenants and Crises among the Classic Maya. In Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice, edited by Vera Tiesler and Andrew K. Scherer, pp. 109-150. Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Collection
• Sheets, Payson. 2006. The Ceren Site: An Ancient Village Buried by Volcanic Ash in Central America, 2nd edition. Thomson Wadsworth
• Stone, Andrea, and Mark Zender. 2011. Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. Thames & Hudson
• Stuart, David. 1988. ‘The Fire Enters His House’: Architecture and Ritual in Ancient Maya Texts. In Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, edited by Stephen D. Houston, pp. 373-435. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
• Velásquez García, Erik. 2007. Contexto Histórico y Cultural de los Vasos de la Tradición “Ik”: El Caso del Pintor Tub’Al ‘Ajaw. PhD Thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• Webster, David. 2023. The Skyband Group, Copan, Honduras: Penn State Excavations 1990, 1997. ArchaeoPress Publications, Ltd.
• Wisdom, Charles. 1940. The Chorti Indians of Guatemala. University of Chicago Press.

Notes on images and picture sources:-
• Pic 1: Source: Stone and Zender (2011:145)
• Pix 2 & 12: photos by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Pic 3: Source: Justin Kerr©K1728 (mayavase.com)
• Pic 4: The scene refers to an event that took place on October 28, 709 CE. Photo © and courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
• Pic 5: image ©, courtesy of and thanks to Joseph Johnston/Arte Maya Tz’utuhil (artemaya.com)
• Pic 6: Source: Reconstruction, Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Bonampak Documentation Project, illustrated by Heather Hurst and Leonard Ashby, courtesy of Mary Miller
• Pic 7: The burn marks are visible on the plastered floor. Source: David Webster
• Pic 8: Source: Ball and Taschek 2007: Figure 1, courtesy of Joseph Ball and Jennifer Taschek
• Pic 9: Source: David Webster
• Pix 10 & 11: photos courtesy of Nancy Gonlin.