Introduction

Sacred Spaces as Subject and Study in the Mesoamerican Landscape

KEITH M. PRUFER

It can't be that we just clear the land, that we just cultivate the earth, that we just dig and scrape. That can't be how it is. Rather, it must be as in the story in my opinion, as far back as I can tell. Because the earth is alive. The earth also has virtue. The earth is also just earth, but it has awareness. Therefore, it has remained like this. Back when the first man asked for work it was given to him. But the earth requested our bodies in return. That's how I have heard it. I haven't invented or dreamed it up.

Jilotepequeño Poqomam text (Smith-Stark 1976: 86)

Populating Sacred Places

Sacred spaces are human constructions. They do not merely exist to be discovered. They are places in nature or in the built environment that are made sacred by the actions of people. For archaeologists and art historians sacred spaces are found or reflected in architectural configurations, iconographic representations, and as modifications to and activity residues from significant landmarks such as caves, grottos, rockshelters, and mountaintops.

In the simplest of terms, sacred places emerge as one of many ways people know their world. As humans map their lives onto the terrain of their landscapes they are constantly creating and re-creating senses of place: domestic place, human place, wild place, death place, sacred place. This is a crude model, in that such categories are never static or bounded; within the life cycles of individuals and the generational cycles of societies, senses of place can and do shift or change. It still stands as valid, though, in that "cultural landscape[s are] fashioned from the natural landscape by a cultural group" with culture as the "agent," the natural area or space as the "medium," and the "cultural landscape" as the product (Sauer 1963: 343).

As prominent locations within cultural landscapes, sacred spaces are imbued by people with notions of both power and history. Sacred spaces are conservative, in that they generally change slowly and are considered places for conserving cosmological information that is socially encoded. The perception that they are symbolically charged with supernatural forces gives them the potential to guide socially transformative processes, including those linked to a range of life-cycle events (birth, death, social personhood) and a broad range of political and prestige interactions and other behaviors.

Sacred spaces are also one of the best windows into pre- Hispanic cosmologies. Cosmologies are literally "sciences of nature," from the physics of Aristotle and Newton to the mythical cosmograms of Tibet. A cosmology is any composition or cultural construct relating to the structure and process of systems of creation. Included are the origins of physical elements of earthly or astronomical spheres, the genesis of the material world, and the order and function of the observable universe, including the planets, the solar system, and celestial bodies. Quite simply, a cosmology is any cultural belief related to the creative forces responsible for the composition of the universe.

Cosmologies are reflected in the patterning of material constructions and in iconographic representations of sacred space, but for people who consider those spaces sacred, the links between cosmology and place are usually actualized through ritual. The archaeologically detectable uses of the sacred places by pre-Columbian people, as well as our interpretations of material evidence of Mesoamerican religions, center on the remains of ritual activities. In contexts considered sacred, rituals are forums for the expression of religious ideas and events where shared cultural ideas are given meaning by participants (Lawson 1993: 185). Simply, ritual "imposes an order, accounts for the origin and nature of that order, and shapes people's disposition to experience that order in the world around them" (Bell 1997: 21). Societies have rich and varied types of rituals reflecting the milieux of religious and secular traditions. Anthropologists worldwide have studied the multivocal ways rituals enter into peoples' construction of identity on a number of different levels — personal, domestic, political, and religious (Bastian 1978; Hill 1988; Williams and Boyd 1993). For archaeologists the task of identifying and categorizing ritual behaviors is difficult, since they deal largely with the material remains of activities that occurred in the distant past, sometimes with the benefit of analogous behaviors that must be carefully evaluated through the filters of historical change.

The discussion of pre-Columbian religion almost always refers to some type of specialized activity, and therefore, in all likelihood, to the actions of ritual specialists. While specialists need not mediate or conduct rituals, they often do, and as discussed below, most rituals associated with the sacred places involve religious practitioners who specialize in mediating with cosmological forces. Anthropologists have frequently gauged the importance of rituals based on the presence of specialists (Bell 1992: 130). Mary Douglas (1966), in a survey of ritual events, found a higher propensity for religious specialists in societies that are more highly stratified. Max Weber's entire premise of the evolutionary development of religion through rationalization had at its core three types of authority — the magician, the priest, and the charismatic prophet — with only the priest and the prophet falling into the realm of his definition of religious specialist. In a view that has found favor in sociology and religious studies, priests are seen as influencing gods "as part of the functioning of a regularly organized and permanent enterprise" that is distinct from the activities of individuals or magicians (Weber 1963, 28). Prophets, on the other hand, have a personal calling from which they derive their power, and this power is manifested in terms of a "charisma" that is distinctly individual.

In the anthropological literature, the distinction between the priest and the prophet has...