Archeological research about Maya stelae stone carvings demonstrate the innate desire of the West to categorize, decipher, and conclude. Presumptions about what an entire civilization prioritized, believed, and its histories are ultimately at the hands of archeologists, reducing complex cosmologies into neatly presented academic frameworks. Literally reflecting the viewer’s gaze back on themselves, the Transcending Stela is not a study of the Maya, but a study of the way we categorize the "other". It does not attempt to recover lost meaning, but confronts the systems that have buried it.