Mending the past: Ix Chel and the

invention of a modern pop goddess

Research
Traci Ardren∗

For modern communities, she is the moon goddess and protectress of Maya culture and women;
for scholars she is one of a number of deities with different roles in the Postclassic period. Which
is the real Ixchel? The author excavates the story of the Maya goddess and her re-invention by
myth-makers – including archaeologists.
Keywords: Maya, Postclassic, religion, symbolic archaeology, post-modern archaeology,
feminism

Introduction
Archaeologists have begun to examine the ways in which knowledge about the ancient
past is consumed and appropriated. The Postclassic period supernatural patron of weaving
known today as Ixchel, the Maya Moon Goddess, has become a common image in both
modern marketing and cultural revitalisation movements within the greater Maya area. A
simple search for ‘Ixchel’ on Google or any other search engine produces almost 50 000
instantaneous results for everything from resorts to language schools to feminist retreat
centres. How has this relatively obscure deity from the Maya ethnohistoric literature
penetrated so deeply into modern popular consciousness? This essay explores the history of
an idea based on archaeological evidence, and attempts an archaeology of knowledge about
an ancient deity with modern significance. The study documents the modern appropriation
of academic scholarship for deliberate re-imaginations of the past, by exploring the relevance
of a re-imagined ancient deity to modern communities as both a native symbol of gender
specific household roles and an exoticised commercial symbol of Maya-ness. I use the
popularised spelling ‘Ixchel’ to refer to the modern re-imagination of the ancient deity
known in the academic literature also as ‘Ix Chel’. Three well-known modern examples,
each using the icon of Ixchel, are examined for evidence of a pattern of interpretation and
intention. I conclude with suggestions about why the study of archaeological knowledge
production is important today, and why myths about the weaving goddess continue to retain
meaning and significance among various modern communities along the Caribbean coast
and beyond.

Modern citations of Ixchel

Perhaps the best-known museum of Maya textile arts is the Museo Ixchel in Guatemala
City (Figure 1). Opened in 1973, the museum claims to have taken its name from the
∗
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Dept of Anthropology, University of Miami, P.O. Box 248106, Coral Gables,
FL 33124, USA
Received: 9 June 2004; Accepted: 10 October 2004; Revised: 20 January 2005
antiquity 80 (2006): 25–37
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 Mending the past

Figure 1. Museo Ixchel, Guatemala City. Photo courtesy of Barbara Knoke and the Museo Ixchel.

pre-hispanic Maya goddess of fertility and weaving arts. It displays hand-woven fabrics
from 120 highland Maya communities, some produced as early as the nineteenth century,
but focuses upon a large number of huipiles and other fabric arts from Maya weavers
working today. Rotating exhibits of photographs, sculpture and painting centre on so-called
‘folk artists’ of Guatemala, some of whom are culturally Maya. The café and gift shop are
popular places for tourists, and as one of the most popular museums in Guatemala, the
Museo Ixchel receives thousands of visitors a year. One of the explicit aims of the Museo
Ixchel is the preservation, promotion and documentation of traditional Maya weaving
technology, and to that end weaving classes and demonstrations of the back strap loom
are given, and a library of specialised literature on the Maya textile tradition is available
to scholars. The Museo Ixchel also publishes books devoted to Maya textiles, such as the
Bibliography of Maya Textiles (Randall 1993) and The Maya of Guatemala: Their Life and Dress
(Peterson 1976).
The Ix Chel Tropical Research Foundation in Belize, better known as Ix Chel Farms,
is a 35 acre private foundation and forest preserve in western Belize on which popular
naprapathic healer Rosa Arvigo lives and cultivates medicinal plants. Dr Arvigo is best known
as the author of Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer (1994) which chronicles her
apprenticeship with Don Eligio Panti, a traditional Maya herbalist of Belize, but Arvigo has
also written other popular books on herbal healing and sells a line of products based on
Maya recipes called Rainforest Remedies. The remedies use a prominent popularised image
of Ix Chel (Figure 2) on their label, and literature from the preserve says Ix Chel Farms is
named in honour of the Mayan goddess of healing.
‘Dr Rosita’, as she is known, was a student of alternative healing and moved her family from
Chicago to Belize in order to live in a country where herbal healing was culturally accepted.
She soon heard of Don Eligio’s practice, and subsequently began a ten-year apprenticeship

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to the Maya healer that included

instruction in traditional herbal and
spiritual healing. In Sastun, Arvigo explains
that Don Eligio introduced her to Ix

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Chel as the goddess of medicine during a
herb gathering session, when he claimed
it was easier to find herbs with a female
companion because the goddess has her
subjects show themselves to the female
healer more readily (Arvigo 1994: 56).
The lack of young people of Maya descent
interested in traditional healing knowledge
prompted Dr Rosita to found the Don
Eligio Panti Medicinal Trail on her 35 acres,
and she subsequently collaborated with
scholars like Dr Michael J. Balick of
Figure 2. Popularised Ixchel on label of rainforest remedies, the New York Botanical Gardens on the
produced at Ix Chel Farms, San Ignacio.
Belize Ethnobotany Project, and helped to
establish a series of training conferences for Belizean and foreign practitioners of natural or
herbal healing (Balick & Cox 1996). Ix Chel Farms is open to the public and has become
an important tourist attraction in the popular Cayo district of Belize.
The Cozumel-Playa del Carmen area along the so-called Mayan Riviera of Quintana Roo,
Mexico, supports an escalating tourism industry based primarily upon marine or coastal
diversions for foreign visitors. The scuba and snorkelling opportunities off Cozumel island
are world renowned, and the comfortable coastal village of Playa del Carmen now sees
thousands of cruise ship visitors on an almost daily basis who wander the main pedestrian
walkways looking for souvenirs. Many commercial enterprises in the Playa-Cozumel area
use the name Ixchel or other closely related appropriations of an imagined Maya-ness based
in part on the actual prehistory of the area (Figure 3). The pricey Villas Ixchel on Cozumel
is a bed and breakfast in a residential district in San Miguel, the main city on Cozumel,
but also the point from which John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood toured the
ruins on the island in the nineteenth century (Stephens 1841). La Ruina campground and
restaurant in Playa are popular spots located literally next door to a small Postclassic temple
like the ones Spanish accounts describe as dedicated to the worship of idols of Ixchel.
Although the use of Ixchel and related iconography of Maya-ness for commercial purposes
is overwhelming along the Riviera, a popularised icon of Ixchel is also the ‘patron saint’ and
logo for the very large local tricycle taxi union of Playa, whose members are required to wear
their union t-shirts to work. In this small beach town tricycle taxis remain the preferred
means of transportation for locals, and the union established in the early 1980s claims
thousands of members. In this case the iconography of Maya-ness is more closely bound to
Maya people and presumably in some way to their identity as Maya, than to the touristic
gaze.
Although separated by significant geographical and cultural differences, these three
examples of the numerous uses of the Ixchel signifier share certain characteristics which

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Figure 3. Ixchel convenience store, Playa del Carmen.

illuminate how archaeological knowledge about the past is consumed in the modern setting.
All three locales represent a relatively modern use of the Ixchel icon, certainly post 1970.
Each makes explicit claims to Maya-ness, including in some cases the preservation of, and
education in, Maya cultural values. These claims are used to support institutional roles as
cultural mediators or translators, and the prehistoric iconography of Ixchel is used to authen-
ticate their position of legitimate cultural translator. One might even argue that while simul-
taneously using the Ixchel icon for authenticity, there is an invocation of Ixchel as exotic –
a representation of Maya cultural values perceived as ‘lost’ in the ancient past, especially
aspects of female power and knowledge that appeal to western desires (Ardren 2004).

Scholarly images of Ixchel

Let us now review the scholarly discourse on Ixchel for evidence of how this image entered
mainstream popular consciousness. A self-reflexive history of knowledge production and
consumption will also illuminate the interpretive gap between popular and scholarly
understandings of Ixchel. The history of scholarship on Ixchel is intimately connected
to the exploration of the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo and especially the island of
Cozumel. The earliest contact between Maya people and Spanish invaders occurred in this
corner of the world, and a flourishing religious practice dedicated to ‘aixchel’ or ‘yschel’ is
briefly reported by Spanish travellers from each of the earliest voyages in 1517, 1518 and

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1519 (Roys et al. 1940). Worship of Ixchel persisted until at least 1579 when Diego de
Contreras Duran, the encomendero of Cozumel, recorded the practice this way:
‘And of the island of Cozumel . . . all the Indians of this land commonly went to the said

Research
island to worship a certain idol . . . And this idol was named “yschel”, and by this name
they called this idol. And the Indians were not able to inform me what “yschel” meant
nor why they gave it that name’. (Diego de Contreras Duran in Roys et al. 1940: 5)
Worship of Ixchel perhaps continued into the early seventeenth century when Lopez de
Cogolludo wrote his Historia de Yucatan, although it is certain that Cogolludo read earlier
sources. In 1841, when John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood visited the ruins
of San Miguel on Cozumel, they found the island abandoned, and the resident population
of Cozumel apparently suffered tremendous decline during the seventeenth century along
with the rest of Yucatan.
None of the Spanish accounts mentioned above was particularly accessible to the general
intellectual community until after the late nineteenth century when Bishop Diego de Landa’s
Relación de las cosas de Yucatán was published for the first time (Restall & Chuchiak 2002).
Written in part in the 1560s while he awaited trial for an overly aggressive campaign of
extirpation in Yucatan, the Relación is a curious assemblage of recollections and observations
meant to vindicate Landa in the eyes of the church. Although of dubious authorship, the
Relación has come to be used as a key ethnohistorical source on early contact Maya culture
and spurred many scholars to examine Colonial documents for evidence of pre-contact
Maya culture (Restall & Chuchiak 2002). Landa described many Maya gods and goddesses;
relevant to this study he says:

‘So many idols did they have that their gods did not suffice them, there being no
animal or reptile of which they did not make images, and these in the form of gods and
goddesses . . . at the time of accouchement they went to their sorceresses, who made them
believe all sorts of lies, and also put under their couch the image of an evil spirit called
Ixchel, whom they call the goddess of childbirth . . . there were many who in times of
lesser troubles, labors or sickness, hung themselves to escape and go to that paradise, to
which they were thought to be carried by the goddess of the scaffold whom they called
Ixtab’. (Gates’ translation of Landa 1978: 47, 56, 58)

Notably none of the early sources indicates that Ixchel was a moon goddess, but rather
confirm her role as patroness of childbirth and healing.
Following upon the popularity of Stephens and Catherwood’s travel accounts, many
late nineteenth–early twentieth century scholars such as Daniel G. Brinton attempted
a reconstruction of indigenous religious practice from ethnohistoric accounts and newly
published iconography (Brinton 1896). Ralph Roys added to this intellectual trajectory with
his publication of previously obscure native language documents such as the late Colonial
Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Roys 1933) (in which Cozumel is described as a centre of
pilgrimage) and his synthesis of earlier ethnohistoric sources, The Political Geography of
Yucatan (1957). But ultimately it was two publications by the eminent Mayanist, Sir
J. Eric S. Thompson, that most directly influenced the elevation of Ixchel from one of

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many deities in the ethnohistoric documents to the well-known and popular Maya Moon
Goddess.
An entire chapter is dedicated to the influence of Thompson upon the early history of
Maya hieroglyphic and iconographic decipherment in Michael D. Coe’s Breaking the Maya
Code (1992). Regarded in his era (and today) as an intellectual powerhouse, Thompson was
both a prehistorian and an ethnographer, and spent many years working in Belize where
he made close friends within the Mopan Maya communities near Socotz. He held research
positions at the Chicago Field Museum and the Carnegie Institution, finally retiring to
his native England, and published well over 250 articles, monographs and notes on various
aspects of Mesoamerican prehistory. While the influence of Thompson upon Mesoamerican
studies was immense, his intellectual heritage is mixed. With Juan Martinez Hernandez,
Thompson proposed a system for correlating Maya and Christian calendars that remains
the standard today as does his classification system for glyphic elements. But Thompson’s
lifelong insistence that Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions did not represent a phonetic writing
system is now completely disproved. Many scholars, like Coe, agree that while Thompson’s
influence upon Maya studies remains great, certain modern trends such as the advancement
of phonetic decipherment only flourished after his death, given his force of personality and
scholarly influence.
In 1939 Thompson published a study entitled ‘The Moon Goddess in Middle America’,
a largely iconographic analysis of images from central Mexican and Maya codices, in which
Thompson chose to illuminate iconography through the use of ethnographic analogy to the
modern mythology of Middle America and the North American south-west. Thompson
stated his conceptual model was that of Imperial Rome, where deities were absorbed due to
contact between cultures and attributes of nature were both personified and later codified
by clergy (Thompson 1939: 127). Also significant to an understanding of this study is the
perception held by Thompson, following Edward Seler, that the Maya area was ‘profoundly
influenced by Mexican concepts even before the development of their specialised art and writing
concepts’ (Thompson 1939: 127). Despite no mention in any of the Spanish or other
ethnohistoric literature of an association between Ixchel and the moon, Thompson used a
modern (c . 1940) Mopan Maya myth which describes the Moon as the wife of the Sun,
as his basis for designating the deity described by Cogolludo and other Spaniards as the
wife of the Sun and the patroness of weaving, to be the deified Moon. Thus the one Maya
moon goddess was born. Likewise, Thompson made weak arguments for Xochiquetzal and
Tlazolteotl-Toci being the two moon goddesses of central Mexico, and acknowledged his
epistemological difficulty in the statement, ‘thus the Mexicans obviously had confused ideas
concerning the moon’ (Thompson 1939: 130).
Furthermore, Thompson conflated the various female deities from the Postclassic Maya
codices or sacred almanacs, into variations of a single goddess. Although he acknowledged
that there were older and younger female deities, Thompson interpreted the different
glyphic phrases or names associated with the younger set as various titles for the same
goddess, a deity he had already assumed to represent the moon. In discussion of the
many different activities portrayed in the codices he concludes that the largely domestic
activities in which codical goddesses were portrayed such as spinning, weaving, sending
water from above, holding children and cohabitating with other deities all ‘accord

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well with the exploits, functions, and character of the moon goddess’ (Thompson 1939:
163).
His insistence on the conflation of Ixchel into the moon/weaving/healing goddess of
Maya culture was repeated in the less academic but very popular Maya History and Religion

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(1970). This book is surely responsible for the penetration of Thompson’s ideas about Ixchel
as moon goddess into the mainstream popular consciousness, both in the English speaking
world, but also importantly in the Spanish speaking world, where Maya History and Religion
was one of the first popular paperbacks available on this topic and remains in print today in
its tenth edition (Thompson 1997).
In addition to his universalising ideas about a single all powerful lunar goddess in ancient
Maya culture, in Maya History and Religion Thompson choose to illustrate the moon
goddess with a page from the Dresden codex
that depicts the young goddess I, known today
as ‘Ixik Kab’, an earth-related deity (Figure 4).
The young goddess I is not typically named
‘ix chel’ or the related ‘chak chel’ in the
hieroglyphic corpus, and probably represents
not the younger version of the moon deity as
Thompson hoped, but a separate earth and
fertility goddess with some lunar aspects (Vail
& Stone 2002). Because of the popularity
and accessibility of Thompson’s book, it is the
young and voluptuous Ixik Kab who has been
appropriated and reinvented in the popular
imagination as ‘Ixchel’.
Recent careful considerations of the icon-
ography of Maya goddesses have set aside
Thompson’s notion of a single moon goddess
in favour of strong evidence for at least two
deities with moon-related attributes, as well as
the recognition that in both Maya codices and
highland Maya mythologies of the ethnographic
period, the moon and the earth are closely
associated with a number of male and female
deities (Taube 1992; Brisko 1994; Milbrath
1999). While certainly less well known than
Thompson’s popular works, a parallel intellec- Figure 4. Ixik Kab, from Dresden Codex. Illustration
tual trend established the existence of multiple courtesy of Gabrielle Vail.
Maya goddesses as early as the turn of the
twentieth century. This interpretation includes the younger female goddess known as
Goddess I and named ‘Ixik Kab’ (lady earth) in the Dresden and Madrid codices who
has earth, fertility and lunar aspects, and the aged Goddess O named ‘Chak Chel’ (red
rainbow) in the codices who is the female half of the original creator couple (Seler 1904;
Knorosov 1958; Kelley 1976; Coe 1977; Stone 1990; Taube 1992, 1994; Vail & Stone 2002)

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(Figure 5). This older figure is most closely associated with all aspects of weaving and cloth
production, but also with water, curing, divination and even destruction, and most closely
corresponds to the deity known as Ixchel in the ethnohistoric literature (Vail & Stone 2002:
211). A distinctly aged version of the earth goddess Ixik Kab is also present in the codices,
and is associated with weaving and bee-keeping activities.
Thompson’s misidentification of Ixchel as the moon goddess was consistent with the
intellectual trends in the time in which he worked – Ronald Hutton has shown that in
the 1800s the Romantic Movement in
Europe and the United States searched for
the divine feminine as an antidote to the
growing industrialisation of Europe (Hutton
1997). In writings of the early 1800s the
divine feminine was seen as personified by
either the moon or the green earth, and
by the late 1880s, the idea of a single
idealised, all powerful goddess worshipped
by prehistoric cultures was a well-accepted
idea within archaeological circles. In 1901
Sir Arthur Evans (a contemporary of New
World scholar Daniel G. Brinton) published
his analysis of figurines from Knossos in
which he associated them directly with a
mother goddess of Babylonia and, by 1921,
Evans was convinced they were evidence for
a Great Goddess who encompassed elements
of the earth and moon (Evans 1921: 45-52).
Similar interpretations of archaeological mate-
rials as evidence for a unifying faith in a
single great goddess were written by English
intellectuals between 1940-1960, such as
Figure 5. Chac Chel, from Dresden Codex. Illustration Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, Gordon
courtesy of Gabrielle Vail. Childe, Graham Clark and O.G.S. Crawford,
all contemporaries of Thompson during his
retirement in England and subsequent induction as a Fellow of the British Academy (Hutton
1997: 96; C. Hawkes 1940; J. Hawkes 1945; Childe 1954; Crawford 1957; Daniel 1958).
Archaeological evidence for religious practice dedicated to Ixchel is similarly ambiguous.
The dense prehistoric settlement of Cozumel, where over 30 distinct sites have been
identified, has not yielded specific evidence of ritual activities, although generations of
archaeologists have used the ethnohistoric documents described above to interpret the
large number of temples on Cozumel as evidence that the island was the seat of a cult
dedicated to Ixchel (Sabloff 1977; Freidel & Sabloff 1984; Ramı́rez & Azcárate 2002;
Sabloff 2002; etc.). Distinctive features of this settlement are the isolated shrines located
along the eastern coast of the island, which, although they have yielded very little artefactual
data to confirm or deny a religious function, are interpreted as pilgrimage shrines and

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defensive outposts as mentioned in early Spanish accounts. The largest site on the island,
San Gervasio, has long been identified as the commercial hub of the extensive Postclassic
trade network through which the Cozumeleños were linked to other coastal trading centres
throughout Mesoamerica. In addition to a market area and extensive residential zones,

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San Gervasio is described in the archaeological literature as the seat of the main shrine
to Ixchel. The Harvard–Arizona Project identified structure C22-41-a, a complex tandem
plan structure with a prominent central altar on which an idol of the deity could have
been visible to pilgrims climbing the 4m pyramid, as the structure most similar to Spanish
accounts of Ixchel worship written by Gomara and others (Freidel & Sabloff 1984: 64). This
identification was based on architectural design, and not on the presence of an actual ceramic
or wood idol, the remains of offerings or other artefactual debris. Such ritual debris is rare at
prehistoric Maya temples, and the absence of evidence for ritualised practice certainly does
not negate the hypothesis offered by Freidel and others, but archaeological evidence for the
worship of Ixchel, especially as the pre-eminent Postclassic Maya moon goddess, remains
slight, despite decades of research on the island (Lothrop 1924; Sanders 1960; Freidel &
Sabloff 1984; Robles Castellanos 1986; Sierra Sosa 1994; Ramı́rez & Azcárate 2002).

Issues surrounding the re-invention of the past

Thus an interpretive gap exists between the current scholarly perception of the existence of
a multiplicity of ancient Maya deities with moon and weaving associations and the popular
conception of a single Maya deity of healing, weaving and the moon, named Ixchel. We
have seen that the gap was caused in large part by the wide distribution of an incomplete
or simplified representation of Classic Maya religion, but the western public’s willingness or
need for compartmentalised prehistoric deities that correspond in some way to those of the
Classical Mediterranean is also an obvious factor. These issues are reinforced by the current
use of Ixchel as a modern representation or convention of pre-contact Maya female power,
in such places as the Ix Chel Farms and Museo Ixchel, but also in less visible locations.
At Ixchel, a Women’s Development Center in rural Guatemala, a sustainable agroforestry
programme aimed at education and empowerment of Guatemalan Maya women draws
upon the name Ixchel in order to ‘rescue and support an ancient cosmovision’. At Ixchel
Restaurant in Mexico City, an upscale crowd enjoys pasta dishes in an historic building
where the Ixchel signifier is used to accentuate an imagined ‘Mexican-ness’ comprised of
exotic indigenous influence and modern buying power. These are only two appropriations of
the prehistoric icon (among many) in which very different motivations serve to perpetuate
the reinvention of Maya-ness along modern agendas.
Stephanie Moser recently argued that it is dangerous for archaeologists to assume we are
the only people to create meaning out of the past (Moser 2001: 281). Post-processualism
has taken care to demonstrate that archaeological knowledge generated by academics is
produced in historically contingent ways, but more importantly for this analysis, such
knowledge is also consumed (much as any text is read) in diverse ways by various interested
sectors – the meaning drawn by an academic from a field report is not equivalent to
the meaning drawn from the same text by a member of the public. This observation has
long been acknowledged, and although the production and consumption of archaeological

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knowledge within the academy has been the subject of recent study, few attempts have been
made to follow and analyse how archaeological knowledge is consumed by non-academic
communities. A perception that such arenas are less important is not sustainable when
one acknowledges that visualisations about the past, especially visualisations within popular
media, directly and deliberately blur the boundaries about how one knows the past. In the
examples analysed here, the popular or commercial appropriation of the icon of Ixchel has
become an unavoidable way for many tourists and local inhabitants of the Maya region
to know the past. In this case, the introduction of tourists to Maya prehistory is not via
scholarly discourse but popular representation and reinterpretation, an especially powerful
means by which to experience a reconstructed ‘past’ (Moser 1998).
Scholarly inquiry is not immune from the influence of such popular reconstructions,
just as scholars are not divorced from popular culture – reinvented versions of the past
shape academic research by affecting scholars and those who fund or consume the products
of scholarly discourse, ultimately colouring the lens through which everyone sees the past
(Castañeda 1996). A study by Sandra Cypess documented how scholarship on the historic
person of the contact period known as ‘Malinche’ evolved from the depiction of her as
an important elite woman within the Cortez expedition during the early colonial period,
to a traitor to the Mexican people during the nineteenth century, to a modern symbol of
Chicana identity and power today, largely due to shifts in political consciousness (Cypess
1991).
Thompson’s portrayal of a single Maya moon goddess as one of the major figures of
ancient Maya cosmology has been uncritically adopted by later scholars within the fields
of archaeology and art history but also by historians and scholars of religious studies who
are less qualified to evaluate Thompson’s intellectual biases and the recent progress made
in hieroglyphic decipherment. A large body of scholarly secondary literature employs the
concept of a single pre-eminent moon goddess of ancient Maya culture, further cementing
the misperception published first by Thompson, but also adding intellectual legitimacy
to this modern reconstruction. Historian Pete Sigal’s From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The
Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire is a perfect example; in the course of conducting
an important analysis of changing ideas towards sexuality in early Colonial Yucatan, Sigal
accepts the pre-contact existence of a single moon goddess wholeheartedly, and proceeds
to utilise this deity as a metaphor for pre-contact Maya notions of female sexual roles
(Sigal 2000). In The Cosmos of the Yucatec Maya, art historian Meredith Paxton continues
to conflate the young goddess I, ‘Ixik Kab’ and the older deity of the moon, ‘Chak Chel’
based on a single example where the young goddess is named with the older goddess’ glyph
(Paxton 2001). Despite many examples in the codices and ethnohistorical literature of a
multiplicity of female deities, the intellectual urge to meld them into a single all powerful
goddess is still very much alive.
As archaeological knowledge of the ‘Neolithic Great Goddess’ is consumed and
appropriated by the feminist theological community, archaeological knowledge of ancient
Maya culture is actively deployed in modern ethnic claims and identity politics. As Lynn
Meskell observed in a critical evaluation of scholarship on the ‘Great Goddess’, ‘archaeologists
often function as external judges of what is meaningful in other cultures’ when claims of
scientific legitimacy are employed to justify a re-imagined past (Meskell 1995: 75). The

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interface between academic scholarship and popular movements is a particularly sensitive

one, an arena in which intellectual agendas must be made explicit and misrepresentations of
the past exposed as much as possible. Certainly the use of a modern image of Ixchel as a logo
for a Mexican tricycle taxi union or Maya women’s weaving cooperative is a fully legitimate

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deployment of iconography in service to modern identity issues. As Joan Townsend has
said about modern scholarship on goddesses, ‘the argument is not with the myth and use of
the myth . . . but with the tendency of some to treat the myth as historical fact’ (Townsend 1990:
182).

Conclusions
The modern appropriation and mobilisation of Ixchel as a symbol of Maya-ness takes a
bewildering array of forms. Spanish citations of ‘yschel’ provided a template on which early
scholars projected western notions of female roles and reproductive capacities. Modern
revitalisation movements have utilised these imaginations as a way to empower Maya
ethnic identity and authenticate their roles as cultural mediators. Simultaneously, western
imaginations of Ixchel were appropriated by commercial enterprises as a satisfyingly exotic
representation of Maya-ness, a conflation of female sexuality and traditional gender roles
comprehensible to foreign tourists. Popular representations of Ixchel now far outnumber
academic decipherments of her prehistoric record, and thus the production of meaning
about this particular aspect of the ancient past is contested and has shifted largely out
of the hands of anthropologists or archaeologists and into the less predictable arena of
public imagination. Situated in this locus of power, the icon of Ixchel need not bear any
strong association to actual archaeological data, but only to the popular imagination of an
archaeological past. An investigation into why one particular contact period Maya deity has
become so deeply entrenched in popular consciousness does little to diminish the presence of
that icon in common parlance of the past, but it does illuminate the ways in which popular
imaginations are drawn only in part from academic scholarship and why archaeologists must
acknowledge their role in myth-making, no matter how complicated that may be.

Acknowledgements
This research was originally presented in the session, ‘The Importance of Textiles in Mesoamerica’, organised by
Billie Follensbee for the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Montreal. The author
would like to acknowledge conversations with Rebecca Biron, Matthew Restall, Martin Carver and especially
with Gabrielle Vail that substantively improved this work as well as the comments of two anonymous reviewers.
All errors of interpretation remain the responsibility of the author.

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