Caterpillar Publishing

This Sunday found me at the Museum of Natural History in NYC drawing Mayan sculptures and pottery. After many days spent indoors working on my BURIED BENEATH US book I thought it would be fun and helpful to go get a look at some source material. At first glance the Central American wing is a little disappointing: it lacks the dioramas, reproduction clothing, educational videos and drawings curated for many of the other civilizations. But at closer look there’s much to see, and the time that I spent there gave me some new ideas for the book.

From the towering reproduction stelae (above) to the tiny figurines, the museum’s collection of Mayan figures wear a dizzying alphabet of marks and lines to describe their clothing, hair, and ornamentation. While this stylized short-hand doesn’t quite compute for modern viewers, it’s a terrific jumping off point for an illustrator. With my walnut ink washes and black line work I focused trying to draw “from the inside” of the figures, looking for gesture and anatomy within the different clay portraits:

My giant Moleskin gave me ample room to play, and I’m already looking forward to my return. In the meantime I may take a trip down to China Town to draw in the markets, the closest stand-in for village life that I can think of in New York City (but I’m open to suggestions!) In other news today I signed the gigantic beast that is my contract for SHARK. I’m a real author!! Huzzah for Macmillan!

Before working on BURIED I really didn’t know much about the Inca. I knew they lived in Peru, in the high mountains of the Andes, and I’d of course seen lots of dreamy photos of Macchu Picchu and llamas with tassles. Oh, and of course there’s that Disney movie. Kronk was surely based on a historical figure, right?

But after months of research there’s one thing I now know for sure: above all else it seems the Inca were big fans of rocks. Big rocks, round rocks, square rocks, little sissy rocks… pretty much any kind of rock. They dragged rocks over great distances to build their homes, they hauled rocks up steep mountains to build castles and temples, they carved rocks to match the silhouettes of mountains of celestial significance, and they did all of it–all of it!!– without iron tools, draught animals, the wheel, mortar, or a written language. Their rock building techniques are still something of a mystery to modern day archaeologists.

Inca Walls at Sacsayhuaman near Cusco, Peru

NOVA even put out a short documentary in 1997 called The Secrets of Lost Empires (Disc 3) that explores efforts to replicate Inca building methods by leading researchers in the field. According to the film, how did the ancient Inca carved 15 ton boulders? With a great deal of patience, human labor… and more rocks.

Inca 1: How are we going to carve this giant rock? All we’ve got is wood, bone, and rock.

Inca 2: Hey! I know! Let’s use this other rock!

The Inca were clearly doing something right; the walls that survived the Spanish conquistadors have withstood dozens of earthquakes in the last 500 years (while the colonial buildings on top of them have repeatedly collapsed. Ha! Take that, Spanish conquistadors!) Archaeologists have an idea of Cusco’s original layout, but, like the present-day city of Alexandria, there’s very little to show for its original splendor.

Inca walls still standing in modern Cusco, built without mortar or the use of iron tools.

Now part of my job as the illustrator for BURIED is to do a spread that depicts ancient Cusco. And for someone who needs to draw a recreation of the original city, a simple archaeological map of scattered foundation lines isn’t all that much to go on. I thought that perhaps I might track down an ink sketch or two from an artistic conquistador’s journal, but the only source image of the city on record is this painting by a Spanish monk, completed after the earthquake of 1650 about 100 years after Pizarro conquered the Inca. In other words, this doesn’t look much like Cusco as the Inca knew it.

Earthquake Painting in Cusco's Cathedral, Peru, from 1650.

The only other illustration leads available to me were the existing foundations of the Temple of the Sun at the Coriancha. Plated in with hundreds of sheets of gold and home to Inca kings and priests, the Coriancha sat at the heart of Cusco and was of course Pizarro’s first place of pillage. Today the foundations of the Coriancha still stand and bear the weight of the Church of Santo Domingo, and (luckily for me!) is the site of ongoing restoration inside the walls of the Church. Between tourist photos online and an archaeologist’s recreated drawing, I could begin to conceive of what this small part Cusco might have originally looked like.

Coriancha, the Temple of the Sun. The original foundation is the dark gray stone beneath the modern church.

Recreated drawing of Coriancha from the book ANCIENT CUZCO: HEARTLAND OF THE INCA by Brian S. Bauer

First I used the photos and the drawing above to make a quick clay model to draw from for my roughs (it’s terribly useful to turn a model in space, and it’s also a welcome break from sketching!) The drawings themselves were easy, but I was quickly frustrated by how un “city-like” the Coriancha appeared. The small handful of steeply sloped buildings felt terribly underwhelming compared to the vast expanse of Copan or Tenochtitlan. (In the case of Copan, the city was abadoned to the jungle, and in the case of Tenochtitlan there was indeed an artistic conquistador on the scene. No such luck with Cusco.)

Clay Model of the Temple of the Sun.

Sketch of the Coriancha.

Sketch of the Coriancha.

Sketch of the Coriancha.

In the end I chose to shift the angle of the drawing, focusing on the view of the Coriancha from below. A little wisp of smoke and some sun breaking through the clouds in the final drawing will help increase the drama of the scene, and I’m much happier with the city spanning the full width of the page spread. And look at all of that beautiful Inca rock that I get to draw for the book!

Final Sketch of the Coriancha.

Coming soon: more on the Maya! Stay tuned!

I have a confession to make: I think I like the Mayans the best.

I feel sort of terrible about this, in the way a parent might feel admitting that they have a favorite child. But it’s right there in front of me and rather undeniable: the Mayans are just way cooler than the other three. If JetBlue offered a special on 4-day, 3-night ancient American getaways you can bet that I’d sign up for Copan (with the optional day trip to Uxmal). Sorry Cuzco and Tenochtítlan, your lack of writing system and brevity is against you. And Cahokia, we don’t even know your real name. Lie about your age, but your name… really?

But if you don’t agree with my instincts, let me point out a few things I’ve learned about the Maya that might just change your mind:

1) For one thing there’s the gorgeous writing and hieroglyphics to consider: Maya script is made up of both logograms (words) and syllabic glyphs (syllables that make sounds, like a consonant and vowel sound together) called a logosyllabic system, a little similar to Japanese. This means that there are over 800 different Maya glyphs which overlap and fit together in different combinations and can be artistically stylized very differently between one scribe and the next. The glyphs are so complicated that the language’s full code wasn’t cracked until the 1980′s, the culmination of centuries of work from archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, art historians, epigraphers, and linguists from around the world. The Mayans were wicked smaht!!

Maya stucco glyphs on display in Palenque, Mexico.

2) Then there’s the Mesoamerican habit of human sacrifice: the Maya weren’t quite as bloodthirsty as the other three seem to have been. (Yes, it’s true, the Maya did make some regular human sacrifices, but heads up, Judeo-Christians of European descent: the Crusades, Witch Trials, and the Inquisition aren’t exactly high points for us either.) The daily Aztec ritual of killing of a war prisoner really grosses me out (cut out his heart, lop off his head, throw him down the stairs, repeat) and so far as we know the Maya didn’t regularly sacrifice children (like the Inca did) or groups of women (like the Cahokians did). Not killing off prisoners and children might mean that the Maya were better neighbors to surrounding tribes, too.

No Mayan ceremony would be complete without feather headdresses and some self-sacrifice (bloodletting).

3) Finally we have their stunning sense of architecture, art and style. Grand civic planning, echoing temples, and stone stela sculptures of great leaders are all standard features of Mayan cities, and in combination with their painted vases, jade jewelry, and ceremonial dress with more feathers than a drag queen at Pride, I suspect they had a deep-running love of order and natural beauty. There is this elegance to everything that is Mayan, a Rome-ness that I can’t help but connect to. And, like the Romans, the Mayans fell from grace, fading away into the jungle after exhausting their land and other resources.

Reconstruction drawing of Copan by Tatiana Proskouriakoff.

They Maya didn’t have their act together in lots of ways, and I’m sure that my preferences have been partly shaped by our culture’s fascination with them (second to our Egypt obsession, of course). But of the four cultures they firmly stand as my favorite. I hope to get to work on another book about them soon!

My rough study of a Mayan king receiving an offering from a servant.