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The Naming Insight: Hieroglyphic Names & Social Identity in the Pre-Columbian Americas1

Marc Zender, Peabody Museum, Harvard University mzender@fas.harvard.edu

I therefore propose a dynamic model of name acquisition. Name acquisition was a means to enhance and legitimize power throughout a kings life. It was an ongoing and gradual process. The accession was one such decisive moment, but others were equally important. Pierre Robert Colas (2001:9) As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled onto the other the word water... and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! ... Everything had a name... Helen Keller (1903:28) Introduction In several seminal papers (2001, 2003, 2006, 2007), and in the publication of his dissertation (2004), Pierre Robert Colas developed a dynamic model of Classic Mayan onomastics that remains both foundational and insightful, with much still to contribute to our understanding of the structure, acquisition, and significance of the personal names and titles of Classic Mayan elites. Colas (2001) initial insight that Classic Maya dynasts did not so much change their names throughout their careers as acquire novel nominal elements and epithets in accordance with their evolving sociopolitical roles (e.g., accession, death) served to harmonize previous observations by epigraphers that Mayan rulers took new names upon their accessions (Eberl and Graa-Behrens 2000, 2004) with the classic anthropological concept of rites de passage (Gluckman 1962, Turner 1967, Van Gennep 1909), which several scholars had already shown was significant to the interpretation of accession rituals and iconography (Bonavides 1This is a preliminary paper prepared for the conference Maya Culture: Identity, Language and
History A Celebration of the Life and Work of Pierre Robert Colas held at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, September 26-27, 2009. As this is still very much a work in progress, please do not cite without written permission of the author.

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1992, Le Fort 2000). This convergence further allowed Colas to identify a crucial separation in the names of Classic Maya rulers between personal names serving as rigid designators (i.e., invariable, unambiguous referents to a kings self, see Kripke 1972:270) and more ambiguous names, titles and epithets which designated a kings socially-defined person (Colas 2001, 2003). Colas model has been of immense utility in teasing apart concepts of individual and sociallyconstituted identity, as well as for the investigation of Classic Mayan concepts of divine authority (cf. Houston and Stuart 1995, Zender 2004). It may perhaps come as something of a surprise that Pierres model, initially conceived in his early twenties, should have proven so robust and productive, but there are several reasons why this should be so. For one, his work always took full advantage of the fruits of Mayan decipherment, to which he was an active contributor. For another, his knowledge of hieroglyphs was balanced by his familiarity with modern Mayan languages (particularly Yucatec) and their semantic, morphological, and syntactic possibilities. But perhaps most importantly, Pierre was always careful to position his theories thoughtfully within broader anthropological and philosophical discourses, and he took crosscultural comparisons very seriously, finding much of interest in more than a century of onomastic and philological studies of the elite inscriptions of Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Pierres most recent papers, and in a book in preparation at the time of his death, he continued to refine his dynamic model, becoming increasingly concerned with regional and temporal variations in Mayan naming practices. His identification of an ethnic boundary running roughly along the Usumacinta river drainage, proposed largely on the basis of the geographic distribution of two distinct types of names in the region (Colas 2006), is well borne out by recent work on language variation in the Classic Maya lowlands. In another paper (Colas 2007), he revisited the topic of name acquisition once again, showing that this perspective still had much to contribute with his demonstration that Classic Maya kings acquired yet further names upon their deaths, surely the most poignant of all rites of passage. It is a tragedy of the first order that Pierre never had the opportunity to continue his onomastic research in all of the promising directions that were constantly being suggested to him. This paper touches upon many of the aspects of naming and identity that were of great interest to Pierre, but it treads lightly in evaluating and extending those concepts, its purpose being rather the consideration of Pierres model in light naming traditions elsewhere in the New World. Following a review of the key anthropological, philosophical, and literary concepts of naming, I suggest some tentative first steps towards an integrated view of the pictorial and glyphic representation of names among the Classic Maya (ca. AD 600-900), the Late Postclassic Aztecs (ca. AD 1300-1521), and in the Plains Pictographic tradition of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. If this perspective is valid, then the remarkable similarities between these traditions may suggest new possibilities for cross-cultural comparisons in the domain of names and social identity in the pre-Columbian Americas.

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Whats in a Name? The potential for the confusion of name with named is an ever-present peril, and the question of identity is a correspondingly rich one in literature. As the immortal Bard himself famously asks: What's in a name? that which we call a Rose By any other word would smell as sweete; Romeo and Juliet, II, 1, First Folio (1623: 59) Shakespeare's argument, which no doubt many of us share, is that while a thing and its name stand in a powerful and important relationship, the name is nonetheless not the thing itself. But that he even presents this idea for contemplation suggests that Shakespeare understood the complicated, interdependent relationship of name and named. At the very least, he understood that it was a problematic one for much of his audience. Jorge Luis Borges, for his part, presents an even stronger view of the relationship between name and thing, though he could only bring himself to do so in the conditional: Si (como el griego afirma en el Cratilo) El nombre es arquetipo de la cosa, En las letras de rosa est la rosa Y todo el Nilo en la palabra Nilo. Jorge Luis Borges, El Golem (1964) (If, as Plato affirms in Cratylus, the name is the archetype of a thing, then in the letters R-O-S-E one can find the rose, and all of the Nile in the word Nile.) We may disagree with Plato, but the sentiment is familiar, and significant enough that Shakespeare and Borges discuss it. The question is: are names natural i.e., inevitable? Do words in fact have an intrinsic relationship to the things they signify? Or is language, as linguists tell us, just a system of arbitrary soundmeaning pairings? Today, the strong form of the name-entity relationship isn't pursued by many scholars. While the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1905) argued that most or even all English names described (or at least indirectly referred) to named entities, most scholars would now follow the causal theorist Saul Kripke (1972, 1980), who argued that names are best seen as rigid designators: terms referring to entities independently of any properties held by them. To the extent that names and entities do frequently seem to be natural or conventional i.e., if the word valley sounds appropriate for a low-lying area between mountains, or vine sounds like something that ought to wind its way around trees Kripke would have explained this as the result of a long-term causal connection with the named object as mediated through communities of speakers. In other words, we all conspire to habituate words and their referents. So much so, in fact, that very few English speakers are aware that both valley and vine are words that English borrowed from French. Indeed, every English

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word that begins with a v- was ultimately borrowed from French (or Latin). But such is the power of the consensual use of vocabulary that hundreds of these words now sound as English as any others. The active creation of meaning, in which human agents and cultural memories both play major roles, is nowhere more visible than in the domain of personal names and titles, the subject of this paper. Cross-culturally, as mentioned above, names are frequently bequeathed in ceremonies associated with rites de passage (Van Gennep 1909). One such context is baptism. Such ceremonies are not by any means restricted to newborns or young children; the key feature is the receipt of a new name corresponding to a new social identity. Marriage is another significant event of this kind. In English-speaking countries, and in many other parts of the Western world, it has until recently been traditional for a woman to take the surname of her husband at their wedding. Again, the new social identity compels the change of name. Going one step further, we might reasonably ask whether the name of the present Roman Catholic pope is more appropriately Joseph Alois Ratzinger or Benedict XVI. Cross-culturally and diachronically, many high or sacred offices require the adoption of new names to mark the successful transition to a new social status. In the ancient world, many rulers are known to have marked changes of identity, role, and responsibility by the acquisition of a new name (Beckerath 1984; Colas 2001, 2003; Eberl and Graa-Behrens 2000, 2004; Quirke 1990). Hieroglyphic Names in Ancient Mesoamerica Let us now turn to Mesoamerica and examine some of the artistic, epigraphic and material correlates of these principles of naming in the rich material culture of this region. I hope to show that many of the features of what we have so far rather uncritically called names their use as rigid designators, their cultural continuity, and their adoption to mark a transition to new social identities are in fact present in all of the cultures in this region, beginning at least 3,000 years ago, and quite possibly significantly earlier. Secondly, in my opinion, rather too much has been made of distinctions between writing and art (or pictography) with respect to the recording of names. Although it is obviously significant to know whether a graphic communication system had recourse to phonetic signs or not, I would like to show that all of the writing systems of Mesoamerica had recourse to the pictographic principle and regularly used it alongside and occasionally even in lieu of phonetic writing. As we will see, these observations have interesting implications for the study of Plains pictography, suggesting that a widely-shared repertoire of pictographic signs is at least a valid possibility, albeit one that will need to be carefully demonstrated in such documents as we have. These considerations are taken up again towards the end of the paper. Name glyphs appear as integral parts of some of the oldest known portraits of the Americas. Although still more than a little enigmatic, the colossal sculpted heads of the Olmec are agreed by most scholars to represent the individualized portraits of powerful individuals, most likely rulers. To take just one example, Colossal Head 2 from the site of San Lorenzo (Figure 1), three evident macaw

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heads are lined up in the headdress of this stately if battered portrait of an early potentate. Are we justified in regarding this as his name, or could it just have been a decoration on his headband? As David Kelley (1982) noted some years ago in an important paper published in Visual Language, all later Mesoamerican cultures visually associated name glyphs with the head or face. As the seat of an individual's most distinctive physical characteristics, the head is a very logical locale for these all-important linguistic badges of identity. Moreover, the principle may well be a universal one, appearing as it does in Egyptian sculpture, Etruscan painting, and even the Plains Pictographic tradition. No visual culture known to me regularly wrote the names of depicted individuals beside their feet. Whether one is willing to follow specialists in identifying Olmec Colossal Heads as the named portraits of historical individuals or not, still clearer examples of the principle appear about 2,000 years ago in the Highlands of Guatemala. On Kaminaljuyu Monument 65 (Figure 2), three cross-legged personages wearing jade necklaces and seated on small benches each wear distinctive headdresses containing glyphs known from later contexts in the Lowlands. The topmost is named, in part, Sky, the middle is Sun, and the lowest is Snake's Tooth. If later Classic Period namesakes are any indication, his name may have been pronounced *Ukohkan Kaan, though the divide in time and possibly even language makes any such attempt hazardous in the absence of phonetic evidence. What seems certain is that Snake's Tooth or a successor had an interest in recording his military successes against at least two named contemporaries. Each of the depicted lords receives two kneeling, nearly naked prisoners with hands lashed together in front of them. The prisoners, too, wear their names as distinctive headdresses and hairstyles. A much more detailed arrangement appears on Piedras Negras Panel 2 (Figure 3), commissioned in the late 7th-century. Here, king Turtle Tooth I receives the allegiance of six young lords from the nearby city-states of Yaxchilan, Bonampak and Lacanja. The entire scene is dated by a framing hieroglyphic text to November 11th, AD 510 (Martin and Grube 2008: 144). Above the kneeling figures are their personal names, titles, and cities of origin. The central figure's decorative headdress sends a spray of feathers through the main text precisely where his name is to be found. This kind of text-image interplay, well documented in Maya monuments of the period (Wald 1997), leaves us with no doubt as to when and where the exploits of this king took place. Like the Piedras Negras ruler, the account of the Aztec Emperor Axayacatl's conquest of Tlatelolco in AD 1473 is a model of detailed reporting (Figure 4). Produced in the early 16th-century, the Codex Cozcatzin combines indigenous hieroglyphs and narrative pictography with a Nahuatl text written in the Roman alphabet. The two accounts are parallel, with significantly more detail provided in the alphabetic text, yet all of the key historical facts are presented in the indigenous system: the year of event (top left), the place from which Axayacatl came (Tenochtitlan), his name glyphs attached to his head, the day on which he arrived at Tlatelolco, the name of his adversary (Moquihix), and the name of the temple at Tlatelolco upon which he slew his rival. Clearly there is a disparity between the amount of detail provided at early Kaminaljuyu and that among the later Maya and Aztecs, yet there is also a conservative thread: names and their

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privileged associations with the heads and faces of their owners. This is where identification begins and ends; that is, it would appear to be the minimal necessary identifier, both in contemporary and later traditions. I would like to turn now to a brief consideration of the aptly-named Palace Tablet of Palenque, originally situated in the long northern structure of the site's royal residence (Figure 5). Commissioned by K'inich K'an Joy Chitam II in AD 720, its motive was to explain his assumption of power at the rather advanced age of 57. Such lengthy texts are usually responses to some real or perceived irregularity in dynastic descent (Martin and Grube 2008). More than two hundred hieroglyphs recount the king's birth, coming-of-age, and the accessions of a long-lived father and elder brother, striving to set forth his own claim to the throne with the maximum amount of possible detail. For our purposes, the most important portions of the panel are those which reflect the king's changes of name. At birth he is called Uhx Ak'iin(?) Mat, and he carries this name for 57 years. Then, at his accession, we are told that he takes the royal name K'inich K'an Joy Chitam II (Eberl and Graa-Behrens 2000, 2004). There are several parallels here with Pope Benedict XVI. Not only did this ruler assume a new and sacred identity very late in his life, but he also took a new name to mark it. Further, he isn't the first to have held that particular royal name; such names were often passed down within descent lines, sometimes for hundreds of years. Names were both descriptive and predictive in Ancient Mesoamerica. In one scene from Bernardino de Sahagn's Florentine Codex (Figure 6), an Aztec diviner reads the fortune of a child born on the day Mahtlactli Tochtli (10 Rabbit). Among the Aztecs, children were named after the day on which they were born, and since each day had an associated significance, so too did children have readymade personalities, behaviors and social roles ascribed to them.2 The Structure of Classic Mayan Hieroglyphic Names Now that we have explored the functions of some of these names we can pass to a consideration of their structure. In Figure 7, I have collected three different versions of the name of K'ahk' Tiliw Chan Chahk, or Thunder burns the sky with Fire, a Late Classic ruler of Naranjo (Martin and Grube 2008: 74-77). The first is a painted example from the famous Buenavista del Cayo vessel (K4464), the second is a drawing of his name as carved on Naranjo Stela 23, and the third depicts the king seated on a throne conjuring wind and lightning, his name literally incorporated into his elaborate headdress, as carved on the face of Naranjo Stela 22. What's fascinating about all of these variants is that the signs involved in this name have rather heterogeneous origins. For example, the first sign in all three spellings is KAHK fire. It is an evident pictograph: a pictorial sign used to communicate the word for the object it depicts. Flames are depicted, and flames are meant. This sign is followed in the 2Unfortunately for the poor mother, 10 Rabbit is a day associated with drunkenness. Resolute in the face of adversity, she's doubtless thinking great, just like his father.

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first two examples by the pictograph of a tapir, an endangered relative of the horse native to Central and South America. The word for tapir in Classic Ch'olti'an was TIL, but the sign doesn't mean tapir here. Rather it stands for the homophonous verb til to burn. This is what we call a rebus, which is a pictorial sign used for its sound value instead of its meaning. Rebus is a handy principle to have, since many words and concepts are not easily depicted. And certainly any sign for burning would be apt to be confused with one for fire proper. In the third example, if we decipher the signs in the king's headdress we don't find a picture of the tapir, but we do find two purely phonetic signs ti and li, which together spell til to burn. That a verb is indeed intended rather than the word tapir is indicated by the wi phonetic sign which appears in all three examples; this provides us with a verbal suffix that could not appear on the noun tapir. The remaining signs are also pictographs: CHAN sky is somewhat stylized, but essentially represents a bright surface; CHAHK thunder is itself a portrait of the Maya Storm God, Chahk, whose name literally means Thunder. (As does the name of the Norse God Thor.) Perhaps a word is in order here about the translation of this rulers name as Thunder Burns the Sky with Fire. As Nikolai Grube (2002:348) has pointed out, royal names of this formi.e., complex predicates involving aspects of one or more named deitieswere exceedingly common during the Classic Period (see also Houston and Stuart 1995; Grube 2001; Martin and Grube 2008). Such names are remarkably different from the kinds of names we find in the 7th-9th century Southern Lowland inscriptions and those documented for the much later Colonial period (e.g., Roys 1940, Carrasco 1964, Feldman 1983). For one thing, calendar names, common in the Colonial era (Baroco 1970) are very rare in the hieroglyphs. For another, patronyms and matronyms, also well-known from later sources, seem not to have existed in Classic times (cf. Bricker 2003 and Grube 2003: 344-348). Clearly there have been substantial changes in naming patterns in the seven centuries separating the Classic period from our first documentation of Mayan names in the Roman alphabet by early 16th-century friars.3 Having dissected a typical royal name of the Eastern Classic Maya Lowlands, it is now time to revisit a little of the unfortunate history of the terminology of writing. Ignace Gelb (1952) is largely to blame for a now thoroughly discredited view of the evolution of writing from pictures and pictographs to rebus and, eventually, fully phonetic systems such as syllabaries and alphabets. The problems for such a view are many, but the two most devastating are, first, that scholars have yet to find evidence that any one system passed through any of these stages. Communicative systems are conservative entities, and while scripts 3To be clear, it is important to note two limiting factors on this conclusion: first, only the names
of apical elites are available to us from Classic times, leaving open the possibility that commoners names may have shown more continuity; second, there is pronounced regional variation in these naming patterns, such that most royal names west of the Usumacinta do not show the predicate structure involving deity names (Colas 2006). Nonetheless, it cannot be gainsaid that all of these names are still of a different kind than those documented in our Colonial-era sources. More work is needed to explore the reasons for this divide.

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frequently change character and composition when borrowed from one group to the next no known writing system ever passed from logographic to syllabic to alphabetic stages. Second, as we have just seen in the name of K'ahk' Tiliw Chan Chahk, pictographic, rebus and purely syllabic signs comfortably cohabit in Mayan writing, as indeed elsewhere. For these reasons, I much prefer a view of pictography, rebus and phonetic writing as contemporary and largely independent communicative tactics. To be sure, they certainly interact, and some individual signs in Egyptian, Akkadian Cuneiform and Mayan do indeed move from pictography to rebus, or from rebus to the purely phonetic. But movement in the opposite direction is also known, and such cases are better seen as sporadic, historical changes affecting individual signs, not as developmental stages undergone by entire systems. To argue otherwise would be tantamount to a claim that the use of the English letter X in Xmas (Christmas) means that the English alphabet as a whole is becoming logographic. Hieroglyphic Names of the Aztec Emperors Let us turn now to the Aztecs, and to some specific examples of the use of name glyphs that I believe will prove most instructive when we pass on to a brief comparative look at Plains Pictography. First of all: how were Aztec glyphs deciphered? Here we are indebted to early Franciscan missionaries like Sahagn who provided us with a Rosetta Stone in the form of lists of hieroglyphic names and contemporary translations and interpretations. Yet this has also proved something of a two-edged sword in that the translations were so thorough that scholars neglected until recently to study the internal systematics of Aztec writing itself. This is only being done now, in work led by the Spanish scholar Alfonso Lacadena (2008), but at last we can begin to offer an internal critique of early Spanish interpretations using the Aztecs' own writing system as our basis (see also Zender 2008). As we know from both written and oral histories, the name of the 8th Aztec Tlahtoani of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was Ahuitzotzin, literally Revered Otter. Yet his name was almost always written with but the single pictograph AWITZO, a depiction of the river otter. The element meaning revered or sacred was provided by the reverential suffix -tzin, but while often written in toponyms and the occasional personal name it is never (to my knowledge) included in Ahuitzotzin's name glyph. Rather, as can be seen in a compilation of several examples (Figure 8a-d), his name is usually indicated only by the stylized portrait of a river otter, often either attached to the king's portrait by a thin line or hovering just above his head. The water cascading down the creature's back serves as a useful diagnostic, separating the sign for otter from that for dog. Indeed, so distinctive was this name glyph that it could appear entirely divorced from iconography as a name-stone associated with the Tepozteco temple in Morelos (Figure 8-d). Here there is still no -tzin suffix to be seen, and the abbreviation would therefore appear to be standard. Only the unlikelihood that the temple carvings would be referring to an actual otter (as opposed to a commissioning ruler named otter) stands in the way of potential ambiguity.

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Abbreviation is even more rampant in the name of Motecuhzoma II, literally He Frowns like a Lord or He is Angry like a Lord (Figure 9). In all instances known to me the only element written is TEKW, in origin a complex pictograph representing the turquoise headband and nose-plug of royalty, but used metonymically for the Nahuatl word tekw-tli, lord (David Stuart, personal communication 2006). It is important to point out that Aztec writing had the capability to write the initial m- (a pronoun) as well as the final verb-root sma to frown, be angry, and did so in numerous other script contexts where ambiguity may have been more of a factor. Whatever the reason for its lack here, it was apparently considered sufficient to write the head noun tekw as a clue to the full name Motecuhzoma. I have always found such abbreviations fascinating in their own right, but in the space left to me I would like to explore their implications for Plains pictography. Plains Indian Pictography The recent rediscovery of the Houghton Ledger provides a welcome opportunity to tests models and interpretations of Plains pictography first advanced more than 120 years ago.4 According to the analysis of Castle McLaughlin (2009), folio 56 of the ledger (Figure 10), one of 77 painted by some five different artists, depicts a Lakota Warrior probably named Thunder Hawk in battle with a rival Indian. Thunder Hawk is astride a horse, and fires his rifle at his adversary. A spray of smoke and gunpowder issues from the weapon, and a line traces the path of the bullet. Thunder Hawk's name is given above his head, to which it is attached by a thin line. Two signs seem to be involved, so this glyph is already twice as complex as those employed for the names of most Aztec Emperors. The first is a raptorial bird, so indicated by its spread wings, as a hawk coasting thermal winds. The second sign is a jagged line indicative of sacred noise. Taken together, Thunder Hawk (Lakota Cetan Wakiyan) seems a very reasonable interpretation. As I will show below, however, Medicine Hawk or Sacred Hawk are additional possibilities which might be considered. The study of Plains pictography began with the remarkable pioneering work of Colonel Garrick Mallery. A well-known lawyer in mid-19th century Philadelphia, Colonel Mallery received his commission during the Civil War, and eventually served as President of the Philosophical Society of Washington. But his true passion was Plains gestural and pictographic communication. Working closely with Sioux speakers, Indian agents, and missionaries, Mallery published several influential studies during the late 19th century. His modestly
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The Houghton Ledger was acquired by James Howard during the 1870s, who retitled it The Pictorial Autobiography of Half Moon, an Uncpapa Sioux Chief and bound it in along with an introduction before selling it to a New York book dealer, after which the volume came to Harvard's Houghton Library as part of a bequest in 1930. This layered document reflects a history of violent interactions between Lakota Sioux and Anglo-Americans as they fought for control of the Great Plains during the 1860s and 1870s (McLaughlin 2009). Now Houghton MS. Am 2337, this manuscript is the focus of ongoing research by the Houghton Library, the Peabody Museum, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

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titled Pictographs of the North American Indians, a Preliminary Paper, published by the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology in 1887, ran to 256 pages and included over 300 figures. But his magnum opus was Picture-Writing of the American Indians, first published in 1894, and containing 807 quarto pages and over 1,000 figures and plates. This is literally an embarras de richesses, but instead of prompting continued work on the system, Mallery's detailed catalog instead seems to have misled his contemporaries and followers into the mistaken belief that the depths of Plains pictography had been plumbed, and further systematization has hardly been attempted by modern students. The parallel story of Aztec decipherment could hardly be closer (Zender 2008). Yet the data are there, and there are many powerful models available from studies of writing sytems south of the border. Let us hope that the rediscovery of the Houghton Ledger may provoke some of this necessary work of systematization, preferably by those already familiar with Lakota and other relevant Siouan languages. As but one example of the richness of Mallery's work, let us look at a page from Pictographs of the North American Indians (Figure 11). As indicated, this is a copy of a drawing made by Lean Wolf of the Hidatsa, a Siouan people who today prefer the name Minitari. Mallery's description is a model of succinct iconographic interpretation: The horns on the head-dress show that he is a chief. The eagle feathers on his war-bonnet ... show high distinction as a warrior. His authority as ... leader of a war party is represented by the elevated pipe. His name is ... added with the usual line drawn from the head (Mallery 1894:168). In addition, Mallery cites Lean Wolf as explaining that the outline character of the wolf, having a white body with mouth unfinished was drawn this way to show that it was hollow ... i.e., lean (ibid. 168). Finally, he points out the diagnostic tail, a feature distinguishing wolf from coyote, and reminiscent of the disambiguating water scrolls of the Aztec otter. Among the brightest jewels scattered through Mallery's works is the publication of the pictorial roster of 84 families in the band of Chief Big Road of the Oglala Sioux. Submitted to Major McLaughlin, the Agent at Standing Rock in the Dakota Territory, it seems to have been drawn shortly before 1883. It then came into the possession of one Rev. Hinman, who informs us that the portraits were numbered and the names translated by the agency interpreter and although not as complete as might be, are, on the whole, satisfactory (Mallery 1887:174). The roster is now in the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Just as the translations of early Franciscan missionaries provided scholars with the key to Aztec hieroglyphic writing, Mallery recognized that here in the unnamed agency interpreter's reading of Chief Big Road's roster was a potential Rosetta Stone for the interpretation of Plains pictographs. Of the 84 named individuals in the roster, Figure 12 shows a detail of 35 of them along with the names provided by the interpreter. At the front of each line is a chief marked as such by distinctive red-and-blue face paint, and a decorated pipe and pouch. Certain high-ranking warriors are indicated by their face-paint and warclubs. Many intriguing patterns emerge from examination of these name glyphs, and here are just a few of them:

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(1) The color BLUE clearly equates with Iron in the translations. Thus, Iron Hawk (46), Iron White Man (76), and Iron Boy (81). But sometimes BLUE just means blue, as we can see with Blue Cloud (62) and Blue Hawk (79). In Lakota, Blue Cloud is Arapaho, though here the context suggests a personal name rather than the well-known ethnonym. (2) Note the generally consistent visual differences between CROW (51, 59, 78), HAWK (47, 53, 73, 79), OWL (67) and EAGLE (53, 69). As raptors, the signs for hawk and eagle share certain conventions, but the diagnostic for the former is spread, pointed wings, whereas the latter always involves a white feather with black tip. This is perhaps clearest in the name Eagle Hawk (53), where the features of both birds merge. There are some inconsistencies, however, and were the signs entirely canonical, we would expect the name Blue Hawk (79) to be in fact *Blue Crow. The unlikely color combination may be a factor. In any case, a fair degree of consistency emerges, and I think it clear that the bird in the Houghton Ledger is indeed a hawk as McLaughlin (2009) has proposed. (3) Another fascinating element is the jagged lines sign twice translated as Sacred. Thus, in the name of Sacred Teeth (64), a thin line joins a field of jagged lines to the figure's mouth or teeth. In the name of Sacred Crow (78), the characteristically perching bird emits three jagged lines from the top of his head. Elsewhere, as we will see in a moment, these same jagged lines are translated as Mystic, Medicine and Thunder, raising the possibility that the name of the Houghton Ledger figure may in fact have been Sacred Hawk or Medicine Hawk, though Thunder Hawk nonetheless remains an equally strong candidate. In Figure 13, I have compiled several examples of the jagged lines element from three different sources. The five examples on the upper line come from another interpreted roster commissioned in 1884 by Red Cloud, Chief of the Pine Ridge Lakota, and reproduced here from Mallery (1887). I have also included the two examples from Chief Big Road's roster, and three iterations of the Thunder Hawk name from the Houghton Ledger. Note that Thunder, Medicine and Sacred all emerge as equally valid interpretations. It's quite probable that there is a semantic linkage between these concepts, as Mallery himself allows. Indeed, in explaining the name Medicine Bird in Red Cloud's Census, he observes that The word medicine is in the Indian sense ... and would be more correctly expressed by the word sacred, or mystic, as is also indicated by the waving lines issuing from the mouth (Mallery 1887: Fig.289). I strongly suspect that working from the original Lakota terms would be very helpful in searching out further relationships, since it is only in this domain that potential rebus usages might be recognized. Others will be better equipped than myself to be able to say whether Medicine Hawk or Sacred Hawk was a documented warrior's name in the era of the Houghton Ledger, but I mention the idea to see whether it generates some possibilities, and in the hopes that it motivates further work on the range of expressions possible in Plains Pictography.

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Concluding Comments This paper has explored several aspects of onomastics and the hieroglyphic representation of names that were of great interest to Pierre Robert Colas during his tragically short but nonetheless highly productive career. While Pierres work focused on the social and political significance of names among the Classic Maya nobilityincreasingly from a broad geographical and diachronic perspectivehe nonetheless found much of value in the consideration of unrelated Old World traditions in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Such comparisons were, however, always grounded in a realistic assessment of the hieroglyphic data on Classic Maya names, and the linguistic evidence for permissible semantic, morphological and syntactic combinations: fields which Pierre controlled admirably. This paper has been offered in the spirit of complementing Pierre's detailed look at Maya onomastics (supplemented with comparable material from other traditions) with a global look at pre-Columbian representation of names from traditions widely separated in time and space (supplemented with in-depth explorations of representative examples from each tradition). Once one discards earlier biases against the Aztec and Plains Indian traditions, surprisingly similar patterns of the pictorial representation of names can be found between to have obtained in the pre-Columbian Americas for some three millennia, from at least the Olmec horizon until the late 19th-century AD. Further, as Pierre noted in his own studies of name acquisition among the Classic Maya, examples from even further afield can also prove instructive and enlightening. There is something so basically human about the naming insightthe discovery that all things have names, and that there is an intimate and interdependent relationship between name and named (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1998)that it cross-cuts many distinct traditions, uniting phenomena as superficially diverse as Shakespeare's plays, the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, Egyptian royal art, Mayan stelae, Aztec codices and Plains Indian ledgers.

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Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Lesley Gill, Sergio Romero, Norbert Ross and Miriam Shakow for the kind invitation to contribute to this celebration of Robbys life and work. I would also like to thank Norma Antillon for her kindness and industry in arranging my travel and accommodations, and for her patience as I struggled to finish this (still very preliminary) paper in time for the symposium. Previous versions of these ideas were presented in a Workshop at Dumbarton Oaks organized by Joanne Pillsbury, Diana Sorensen and Jan Ziolkowski (March 6-7, 2009) and also at the Peabody Museum Weekend of the Americas (April 3-4, 2009) organized by Castle McLaughlin. I would like to thank the organizers of those events, as well as my fellow presenters and the conference participants, for many stimulating suggestions which have improved my thinking immeasurably. This paper is dedicated to Pierre Robert Colas, inwitzin.

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References Baroco, John V. 1970 Notas sobre el uso de nombres calendricos durante el siglo XVI. In N. McQuown and Julian Pitt-Rivers, eds., Ensayos de antropologa en la zona de Chiapas, Mxico, pp. 135-148. INAH: Mexico. Beckerath, Jrgen von 1984 Handbuch der gyptischen Knigsnamen. Mnchner gyptologischen Studien 20. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Bonavides Mateos, Enrique 1992 Ritos de pasaje entre los Mayas antiguos. Estudios de Cultura Maya 19: 397-425. Bricker, Victoria R. 2003 Evidencia de doble descendencia en las inscripciones de Yaxchiln y de Piedras Negras. In V. Tiesler et al, eds., La organizacin social entre los mayas prehispnicos, coloniales y modernos. Memoria de la Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol I, pp. 127-145. INAH: Mexico. Carrasco Pizana, Pedro 1964 Los nombres de persona en la Guatemala antigua. Estudios de Cultura Maya 4: 323-334. Colas, Pierre Robert 2001 Name Acquisition Amongst the Classic Maya Kings: An Anthropological Assessment. Paper presented at the 66th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans. 2003 K'inich and King: Naming Self and Person among Classic Maya Rulers. Ancient Mesoamerica 14(2): 269-283. 2004 Sinn und Bedeutung Klassischer Maya-Personennamen: Typologische Analyse von Anthroponymphrasen in den Hieroglyphen-Inschriften der Klassischen Maya-Kultur als Beitrag zur Allgemeinen Onomastik. Acta Mesoamericana 15. Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein. 2006 Personal Names: A Diacritical Marker of an Ethnic Boundary Among the Classic Maya. In Frauke Sachse, ed., Maya Ethnicity: The Construction of Ethnic Identity From Preclassic to Modern Times, pp. 85-98. Acta Mesoamericana 19. Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein. 2007 The Liminal Deities: Birth and Death Gods in Classic Maya Personal Names. Paper presented at the 12th European Maya Conference, Geneva, Switzerland. Eberl, Markus and Daniel Graa-Behrens 2000 Change of Names, Change of Titles: The Accession Ritual of Classic Maya Rulers. Paper presented at the 5th European Maya Conference, University of Bonn, Germany.

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2004 Proper names and throne names: on the naming practices of the Classic Maya. In D. Graa-Behrens et al, eds., Continuity and Change: Maya Religious Practices in Temporal Perspective, pp. 101-120. Acta Mesoamericana 14. Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein. Feldman, Lawrence 1983 The Structure of Cholan Mayan Surnames in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Manuscripts: Features to Look for in Eighth Century Personal Name Hieroglyphs. Mexicon 5(3): 46-53. Gelb, Ignace J. 1952 A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gluckman, Max 1962 Les Rites de Passage. In M. Gluckman, ed., Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations, pp. 1-52. Manchester: United Press. Gopnik, Alison and Andrew N. Meltzoff 1998 Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grube, Nikolai 2001 Nombres de los Gobernantes Mayas. Arqueologa Mexicana 9(50): 72-77. 2002 Onomstica de los gobernantes mayas. In V. Tiesler et al, eds., La organizacin social entre los mayas prehispnicos, coloniales y modernos. Memoria de la Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, Vol II, pp. 321-353. INAH: Mexico. Houston, Stephen and David Stuart 1995 Of Gods, Glyphs, and Kings: Divinity and Rulership among the Classic Maya. Antiquity 70: 289-312. Keller, Helen 1903 The Story of My Life. New York: Doubleday. Kelley, David H. 1982 Costume and Name in Mesoamerica. Visible Language 16(1): 39-48. Kripke, Saul 1972 Naming and Necessity. In D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language, pp. 253-355. Boston: D. Reidel. 1980 Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lacadena, Alfonso 2008 Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing. The PARI Journal 8(4): 1-22.

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Le Fort, Genevive 2000 The Classic Maya Accession Ceremony as a Rite of Passage. In P. Colas et al, eds., The Sacred and the Profane: Architecture and Identity in the Maya Lowlands, pp. 17-23.Acta Mesoamericana 10. Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein. Mallery, Garrick 1887 Pictographs of the North American Indians, a preliminary paper. Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1886. Washington, D.C. 1894 Picture-writing of the American Indians. Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1893. Washington, D.C. [Reprinted, Dover 1972.] Martin, Simon and Nikolai Grube 2008 Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens. London: Thames and Hudson. McLaughlin, Castle 2009 The Color of Thunder. Symbols (Spring 2009), pp 8-11, 18. Peabody Museum and Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. Quirke, Stephen 1990 Who Were the Pharaohs? A history of their names with a list of cartouches. London: British Museum. Roys, Ralph L. 1940 Personal Names of the Maya of Yucatan. Contributions to American Archaeology and Ethnology 31: 35-48. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Russell, Bertrand 1905 On Denoting. Mind 14. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Turner, Victor 1967 Betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites de passage. In Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, pp. 23-59. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, Arnold 1909 Les rites de passages. Paris. Wald, Robert 1997 The Politics of Art and History at Palenque: Interplay of Text and Iconography on the Tablet of the Slaves. Texas Notes on Precolumbian Art, Writing, and Culture 80: 1-18. Austin, Texas. Zender, Marc 2004 A Study of Classic Maya Priesthood. Ph.D. thesis, University of Calgary. 2008 One Hundred and Fifty Years of Nahuatl Decipherment. The PARI Journal 8(4): 24-37.

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