Imagining a Maya Archaeology That Is Anthropological and Attuned to Indigenous Cultural Heritage

Taking an aspirational approach, this article imagines what Maya Archaeology would be like if it were truly anthropological and attuned to Indigenous heritage issues. In order to imagine such a future, the past of archaeology and anthropology is critically examined, including the emphasis on processual theory within archaeology and the Indigenous critique of socio-cultural anthropology. Archaeological field work comes under scrutiny, particularly the emphasis on the product of field research over the collaborative process of engaging local and descendant communities. Particular significance is given to the role of settler colonialism in maintaining unequal access to and authority over landscapes filled with remains of the past. Interrogation of the distinction between archaeology and heritage results in the recommendation that the two approaches to the past be recognized as distinct and in tension with each other. Past heritage programs imagined and implemented in the Maya region by the author and colleagues are examined reflexively.

The lay of the land: a political geography of an ancient Maya kingdom in West-Central Belize

The Belize Valley figures prominently in the history of Maya archaeology as the birthplace of settlement pattern surveys, where Gordon R. Willey and his colleagues conducted their pioneering research project, from 1954 to 1956. Six decades on, settlement surveys are an integral part of archaeological research strategies not only across the Maya area, but globally. With the advent of LiDAR technology, settlement surveys enter a new developmental phase, and we take this opportunity to review the history and progress of these surveys in the Belize Valley. We focus on one particular archaeological site, Baking Pot, so as to better illustrate the methods and technological advances that have been brought to bear in the mapping of one ancient Maya city-state. Now that the survey of this ancient settlement is nearing completion, we veer from traditional settlement surveys that in principle focus on unbounded central places and centroids, in an attempt to tackle an important question, which to date has remained conspicuously understudied, that of borders and boundaries. Using a series of geospatial analyses, we investigate the potential of these approaches for reconstructing ancient polity boundaries and as lessons learned we explore which methods are of greater utility and can be applied to other surveys in the Maya lowlands.

The Role of Maize and the Theoretical Approaches of Archaeology to the Food Resources in the Ancient Maya Culture

Several theoretical approaches exist for the study of ancient Maya cultures. In the beginning, only limited information was available for these cultures and the early portrayals were greatly influenced by European concepts of antiquity. After this period of Early Maya archaeology, however, the newly-developed processual archaeology was applied. Processualist theory focused on understanding the process of cultural change and relating it to environmental adaptation. Soon after its inception, criticism of this approach led to the emergence of post-processual archaeology, which stressed the importance of pre-Columbian Maya symbolism. In this case, the popularity of post-processualism was spearheaded by the decipherment of Maya glyphs and new information supporting cultural continuities between ancient and past Maya groups.Problems related to both approaches are well exemplified by the meaning of maize in the ancient Maya culture. Processual archaeology treats maize as merely a food source, while post-processualism regards maize as one of the most important sym-bols of the ancient Maya, a plant with a special status. Thus, research on ancient Maya subsistence and the meaning of maize in ancient belief systems have been based on interpretations that were constructed from a single perspective. However, to fully understand the role of maize in the Maya culture, we must integrate and apply different perspectives, multidisciplinary appro-aches and methodological dialectics. It is postulated that, in the future, past approaches will be complimented by newly retrieved information thanks to a new paradigm called symmetric anthropology.

How Maya Archaeologists Discovered the 99% Through the Study of Settlement Patterns

This article presents an autobiographical perspective on the changing nature of Maya archaeology, focusing on the role of settlement pattern studies in illuminating the lives of commoners as well as on the traditional emphasis on the ruling elite. Advances in understanding the nature of nonelite peoples in ancient Maya society are discussed, as are the many current gaps in scholarly understandings of pre-Columbian Maya civilization, especially with regard to the diversity of ancient “commoners” and the difficulty in analyzing them as a single group.

Introduction and Historical Context

This chapter explains why the archaeological project was created and in so doing details the research context of Chocolá, both the modern small village and the large ancient city lying beneath and around it. The history of Maya archaeology is reviewed, emphasizing the long-believed-seminal but ironically little studied Southern Maya Region in which Chocolá sits so centrally, including the efforts, in the 1920s, by Robert Burkitt, the first to excavate at the site. The other major southern area sites are described, as is a “German factor” in the South—the particularly strong presence of Germans in Guatemala in both the postcolonial epoch of coffee production and in the early archaeology of Great Southern Maya sites. Throughout, reference is made to a debate about the relative importance of the Southern Maya Region as compared with the northern Petén for the emergence of Classic Maya civilization in the Lowlands.

THE SIZE OF PLAZAS IN MESOAMERICAN CITIES AND TOWNS: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS

We present quantitative data on population size and plaza area in three groups of ancient Mesoamerican settlements: a sample of 30 Late Postclassic cities and towns from throughout Mesoamerica and two regional settlement systems from the Classic period, including south-central Veracruz (the Mixtequilla) and the Palenque region. Plaza size scales with population in a sublinear relationship in all three groups, meaning that larger settlements had considerably less plaza area per capita than smaller settlements. These results suggest that the currently popular interpretation drawn from Classic Maya archaeology that plazas were places designed to hold the entire urban population for passive viewing of spectacles may be incomplete. We argue that the observed quantitative relationships between population and plaza area support the notion that plazas were designed to be used for a variety of purposes—including several types of ceremonies and marketplaces—held at different times following a regular schedule.

Publication as Preservation: A Remote Maya Site in the Early 20th Century

In the late 1800s interest in the Ancient Maya underwent the complicated transition from speculative musings to what modern scholars consider to be systematic archaeological inquiry. During this transformation, Maya archaeology was largely colonized, in a sense, by the American academic empire. Excavation was undertaken to further a structured concept of science and to solidify the idea of archaeology as an institutionalized discipline. The results of archaeological fieldwork on remote sites were not easily independently verified due to the constraints of the forbidding landscape and the vastness of this largely untapped resource. The known character of a particular scholar was considered to be a sufficient recommendation as to the quality of his textual archaeological record. This dependence on text resulted in a number of factual mistakes that have been repeated in publications and museum displays up to the present day. During this period in the development of the discipline, I assert that archaeological publication, not site stabilisation, was regarded as a sufficient means by which a remote site could be effectively ‘preserved’.As a case study I will discuss early 20th century excavations within an early Classic Maya mortuary structure at the site of Holmul, Guatemala. In this extreme case, a report supposedly started by Raymond Edwin Merwin, the only archaeologist who had worked at this remote Maya city, was ‘completed’ after his untimely death by another scholar, George C. Vaillant, who had never visited the site. Due to the perceived notability of Merwin’s role in driving Maya archaeology into the realm of systematic science, Vaillant felt that the information he published was reliable and, indeed, required as the location of Holmul would effectively prevent archaeological work from being conducted there for nearly a century.

Zooarchaeology of the Maya

Maya zooarchaeology can be used to answer a broad range of questions about the ancient Maya environmental and cultural history. Animal remains represent the impact of human activity on animal populations and the landscape as well as the full range of subsistence, economic, political, and symbolic practices of ancient peoples, households, and communities, all at a very local scale. As such, they can provide perspective on many of the major debates in Maya archaeology. Here, I explore the information that zooarchaeology in the Maya area has provided on questions of climate change, deforestation, and animal population management (both hunting and husbandry), as well as the contributions of animal remains to questions of ancient Maya community hierarchy, crafting, and economics, and the interrelated powers of politics and religion.