David Ouellette is on a hunt for history, a journey made in raggedy trucks along jungle roads.
The graduate student in art history spent his last two summers in Latin America, helping to excavate the sites of Mayan ruins.
And whether in Belize – the 2007 photograph shows Ouellette in Caracol, the largest Mayan archeological site in Belize with a peak occupation between 250 and 900 A.D. – or in Guatemala, the mission remains the same.
“I’m concerned with the first times these Maya centers became centralized politically and transformed into these powerful city-states,” Ouellette says. “I’m interested in the processes by which the nobility, or the elite members of the society, would use public art and monumental sculpture, to communicate to the commoners, the ordinary, everyday people who would encounter the sculptures during ceremonies or rituals.”
During a trip to Guatemala last summer with a field school from Vanderbilt University Ouellette worked at a temple known as Structure 1 in the ancient city of Cival.
Two large masks carved from stone and painted red, adorn the structure’s summit temple. These large sculptures represent the deities to whom the temple and its rituals were dedicated. It also served, in a way, to remind the farmers and other commoners of their lower social status.
Nobles and other elites, Ouellette says, were allowed to climb the temple and perform ritual ceremonies in honor of the gods. Commoners only could watch the proceedings, which were typically re-enactments of events associated with the creation of humanity and the cosmos.
“Even if the ritual performances were not going on, the commoners had that memory and that understanding. They were constantly reminded of their place in society: They’re not allowed,” he says. “Whether or not the kings themselves knew to what level this affected them psychologically is one thing, but the clear differentiation between themselves and the commoners is intentional and widely accepted by modern scholars.”
Ouellette, who grew up in nearby Geneva, first combined his longtime interests in history and visual arts when he arrived at NIU. Professor Jeff Kowalski “turned me on to ancient Mesoamerican and Maya areas,” he says.
“All of their art was created for a purpose. These really weren’t just aesthetic objects,” Ouellette says. “I really want to know why these things were made, how they were made and by whom, although that’s a hard question to answer.”
— Mark McGowan, NIU Public Affairs