Tz’ite and Sib’aq: The Wrong Materials to Create People in the Popol Wuj

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Many species of plants are named in the mythical narratives of the Popol Wuj. The sixteenth-century text from the K’iche’ of highland Guatemala describes how the gods and the first people used wild and cultivated plants and plant-derived materials in many ways. These narratives convey the cultural significance of plants in rich detail, effectively complementing archaeobotanical data. This includes plants that preserve poorly and are seldom recovered in archaeological contexts but were likely employed widely in ancient Mesoamerican communities. But the interpretation of the poetic K’iche’ text is far from straightforward. The writers employed literary images and polysemous words that lend themselves to variable interpretations. In this paper, I examine the meanings associated with the wood of the tz’ite tree (Erythrina berteroana) and the fibers obtained from the tul sedge (Cyperus canus), known in highland Guatemala as sib’aq and by the hispanicized term cibaque. A reassessment of the well-known passage of the Popol Wuj, where the gods used these materials to fashion people in a former era, yields potentially significant cultural meanings for these plant-derived materials.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37807.0