The Comitán Valley: Sculpture and Identity on the Maya Frontier expands the scope of Classic Maya art beyond the now-familiar canon based on sites from the Guatemalan Peten, Yucatan, and Belize. The Comitán Valley, located in the Mexican state of Chiapas, is on the western edge of the continuous distribution of Maya societies. Covering four distinct settlements, Caitlin Earley provides the first regional-scale examination of sculpture from the area, showing how the frontier location fostered diverse developments that explored different potentials within Classic Maya culture. Each chapter provides clear illustration of the known sculptures, their settings, and comparisons with thematically and stylistically related work from other Maya and non-Maya sites.

On one level, the themes of public art in the Comitán region are familiar. We have typical imagery of rulers and captives, ballcourt markers, and scenes of ritual practice by rulers. What is striking is how in each site, innovative formats were developed to express political messages drawn from this common core. The artists working in the Comitán area produced examples of the familiar formats of Classic Maya art, stelae, and altars, and incorporated sculptural programs in ballcourts, a phenomenon that Earley uses to frame continuing comparative discussions (68–73, 142–43). Yet the region also provides examples of less common formats—sculpture in the round.

The Comitán Valley reviews sculptures from four sites in geographical order from west to east: Tenam Puente, Tenam Rosario, Chinkultic, and Quen Santo (just across the border in Guatemala). Sites on the east are distinguished by longer occupation, lasting into the Postclassic period after the ninth century. In each chapter, Earley provides a discussion of the specific forces that may have structured the cultural production there. She shows how they share elements that she argues make up a regional style. 

Starting with Tenam Puente, Earley analyzes how a local style is produced that deliberately makes connections to political centers in the distant Usumacinta region and to Toniná—located in a neighboring region of Chiapas—to emphasize military power. This results in a remarkable corpus of sculptures in the round depicting captives, which Earley convincingly argues were installed in ballcourts. Some of these, she claims, were made with the intention that they be broken—the heads removed from the bodies during public events.

Turning to Tenam Rosario, Earley provides a satisfying discussion of its series of ballcourt markers—round panels set flat in or near ballcourts. She cites previous arguments that these showed sufficient ties to Usumacinta sculptures to represent products of “Maya fleeing the collapsing polities” of that region (45). In contrast, Earley argues these are products of a regional tradition, with debts to neighboring styles from coastal Chiapas and Guatemala. She shows that ballcourt sculptures in the Comitán region are less concerned with cosmology and more with local political history. She compares the dominant iconographic program to a local tradition of ceramic sculptures in squatting posture, establishing broader connections to this local theme.                                                                                                                             

The densest chapter of this book deals with Chinkultic, a site where preservation of inscriptions allows recognition of a multigeneration dynasty. Chinkultic is the largest of the four sites described and has the earliest history, with fragments of sculpture from the Late Preclassic period mentioned, if not described. Use of the site continued after 1050 CE, into the Postclassic period. Earley uses the rich body of works here to describe three distinct themes. She convincingly demonstrates a specific iconography of political accession emphasizing military achievement, local to Chinkultic. She explores the repeated presentation of a ritual in which a subordinate figure defers to a ritual practitioner standing in front of a columnar altar or ornamented post, supporting what she argues are figures emblematic of local identities. From a pair of sculptures that show interactions between two people with relatively similar attention to costume, she posits the recording of relationships among the ruling group. These three themes do not exhaust the inventory of sculpture here. The variety of formats suggests a longer study of Chinkultic would be worthwhile.

The final site-based chapter deals with Quen Santo, a site with over one hundred known sculptures. Stelae and altars exist but without any carved features. Sculpture in the round in a distinctive style that de-emphasizes individuality is notable. Earley suggests these figures represent ancestors, pointing to their presence in caves underlying the site used for rituals, including burial. This chapter alone among the case studies has the advantage of recent, detailed archaeological findings. The distinctive character of these sculptures contrasts with those produced in conjunction with historical inscriptions that are the center of the other case studies. This raises the possibility, though not fully explored, that social organization here was different.

Despite the diversity of sculptural traditions, and notwithstanding the challenge presented by attempting to analyze traditions covering a period that saw significant cultural, political, and economic upheaval, Earley proposes there is something we can recognize as a regional Comitán style. In her discussion of Tenam Puente, she identifies “Stela 1” (65) as purely local in style, contrasting with the echoes of Usumacinta and Toniná styles she identifies in other sculptures. This stela, she suggests, was produced late in the history of the site. She compares it directly to examples from Chinkultic and Tenam Rosario, showing that the artists shared specific iconographic elements, a unique headdress, incense bags, and speech scrolls among them. Also, part of this regional style is the use of trophy heads as ornaments, an iconographic element that brings the otherwise distinctive sculptures of Quen Santo into the regional style.  

Earley offers a major contribution to Maya studies in this volume by bringing together analyses of sites where the shattering of the Classic political system did not follow the familiar trajectory characterized by the word “collapse” (148–152). She tells us that “sites in the Comitán Valley flourished” during the ninth century CE, when the major cities of the Peten and Usumacinta ceased to be political centers (9). She finds evidence of continuity of occupation at Chinkultic and Tenam Puente well into the centuries usually considered as following Classic collapse. She argues that sculptures produced during the Classic period continued to be used in the Postclassic period, exploring through biographies of specific works the idea that a change in the role of sculpture, rather than a complete break in the use of artworks, is indicated. At Tenam Puente, sculptures were formally buried during a period when practices of human burial changed decisively. At Chinkultic, stelae of Classic style were reset in architectural locations dating from 1000 to 1100 CE, again in parallel to changes in burial practices. Incorporated in a chapter following the case studies, her arguments for transformation rather than cessation in use of sculpture between Classic and Postclassic, are significant contributions to understanding Maya art as having continued relevance after the period when Classic sculptures were originally commissioned.                                                          

The final chapter of the book returns to the initial positioning of Comitán as a frontier zone. Earley is careful to distinguish her use of frontier from a simpler concept of a sharp border, noting that architectural and sculptural practices extend across the Maya and non-Maya territories involved. The definition of frontier that she employs, as a zone of transition, allows her to explore the ways that variability in the Comitán region can be understood as a product of cultural exchanges with neighboring peoples, some of them not speakers of Maya languages.

Earley argues against the implicit assumption that the sites in the Comitán region were less sophisticated because of their distance from the larger and more centralized city-states of the Peten. Drawing in part on work by researchers on the other Maya frontier in El Salvador and Honduras, she suggests that as a frontier, the Comitán valley was a place where “new meanings and practices emerge, and they are characterized by innovation and hybridity” (8). This makes her book an important potential resource for comparison for those working in the borderlands of Copán and its non-Maya neighbors, as they think about the ways visual culture was shaped by encounters across linguistic and cultural traditions there. One difference, noted by Earley, is that in the southern frontier, the transition and exchanges involve non-Mesoamerican societies, peoples whose linguistic and social identities were not rooted in the long tradition that grew in the territory from Central Mexico to the western edges of Honduras and El Salvador following the rise of Olmec states in the Mexican Gulf Coast. This distinction remains open for more exploration by art historians and archaeologists building on this important study.

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The author of the book under review, Caitlin C. Earley, took up the role of Field Editor for Art of the Ancient Americas for caa.reviews on 1 July 2024. Earley was in no way involved in the commissioning or editing of this review.