Copying in clay

Abstract

When Maya artisans began molding and stamping hieroglyphic writing in clay, they were deviating from centuries of scribal tradition. In contrast to the copious texts that they and their peers had been painting, incising, carving, or modeling by hand for generations, their ceramics introduced mechanically replicated text into Mesoamerica centuries before the first European printing press and represented its only application to an indigenous, nonalphabetic script. With the aid of a preform—a stamp or mold inscribed with hieroglyphs— artisans could for the first time generate copies of a text without themselves having towrite it, or even understand it. But the unusual history of this practice raises more questions than it answers, particularly when examined from a perspective informed by recent centuries of industrialization and increasingly proliferating massreproduction technologies (Matsumoto 2018). Although its origins and early generations of use remain murky, Maya hieroglyphic writing was in use by the Late Preclassic period (ca. 400 BCE–100 CE; see Saturno et al. 2006). Ceramic seals and stamps date to even earlier, first attested in Mesoamerica beginning in the Middle Preclassic (ca. 1100–400 BCE; see Causey 1985, 12–18; Halperin 2014, 6). During the Early Classic era a few centuries later (ca. 250–550 CE), Maya potters adopted molding and stamping technologies, sometimes even combining them to preform clay stamps (e.g., Yde 1936, 36). It was not until the Late Classic period (ca. 550–830 CE), however, that hieroglyphic writing was initially created in this manner. This raises the first question: why did Maya artisans integrate the