Mottled Materiality and Social Strata of a Maya Jade Plaque

This essay centers on an exceptional object in the corpus of ancient Maya art: a jade plaque currently housed in the British Museum. Famed for its brilliant, verdant hue and expert carving, the plaque has featured in numerous museum exhibitions and publications. Early scholarship noted that the orchestration of its figures—a king and courtly attendant, likely an individual with dwarfism—corresponded to the natural colors of the jade. The king is carved into the verdant section of the plaque, while the individual with dwarfism is relegated to a dark, brown-green part in the lefthand corner. But when worn flush against the body, the plaque’s surface would have appeared highly variegated to the wearer, privileging part of the carving in a way that collapsed the lefthand corner. Taking a material-based approach, I present a twofold argument: that the dark corner of the plaque, through this visual collapse, relayed culturally symbolic values tied to individuals with dwarfism; and that the differential plane of the plaque’s surface, when worn, enmeshed the wearer in a sociopolitical hierarchy. In the absence of hieroglyphic text on the object, I also present the possibility that the carved scene is a depiction of a generic ruler, arguing that the color and shape of material could communicate hierarchy and ancestral connection to both the wearer and those who viewed the plaque on his body.