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There exists a significant theoretical imbalance in the archaeological study of domestic and public domains. Although the domestic has been an important focus of theoretical discussion, there is not an adequate archaeological theory on the public, and the study of the public is often confused with that of elite strategies. We believe that this theoretical imbalance strongly shapes interpretations of early Maya society, leading to the problematic assumption that the domestic existed before the public. Jurgen Habermas's concept of public sphere provides a logical starting point for the exploration of this issue. At the lowland Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, a public ceremonial complex was built around 1000 B.C.E. when some groups began to adopt a sedentary and agricultural way of life, but some populations probably maintained residential mobility and a mixed economy for the next few centuries. During this period of profound social change, the new public sphere probably served as an arena of negotiation between diverse groups through communal rituals. The construction of minor temples and the disappearance of figurines several centuries later signal a transformation of domestic ritual through its integration into a more homogeneous system of ritual practice rooted in earlier public rites. [public sphere, political process, Maya, archaeology]

The discovery of mural paintings at the Classic Maya site of Xultun, Guatemala, provides an important context for the study of ancient literacy and writing in practice. The mural chamber was a place of writing where the hands of multiple scribes recorded events and astronomical tabulations on walls that were also painted with portraits of ritual specialists and the reigning king. We present evidence suggesting that creation and inscription of indigenous Maya books, called codices, also took place onsite by a specific cohort of ritual specialists called taaj. In this article, we seek to archaeologically “situate” these codex-like inscriptions in the mural room—revealing a crucial and distinctly Precolumbian window (as opposed to colonial Spanish view) into Maya bookmaking, its practitioners, and the physical contexts in which it was carried out. Together, the images, texts, and archaeological materials found in and around the chamber enable us to contextualize acts of writing and their authorship as well as engage larger questions regarding the social and political structures shaping literacy in Maya society during the eighth century.

Anthropologists of science conventionally examine the cultural politics of natural sciences. However, historical and social sciences also have cultural contexts and consequences. This article extends science studies to public engagement with Maya hieroglyphic decipherment. In the 1970s several scholars claimed to discover Maya hieroglyphs’ grammatical structure. Linda Schele popularized decipherment through sites including the Maya Meetings, public workshops at the University of Texas–Austin. As archaeologists and competing camps of hieroglyph experts challenged Schele and her colleagues’ interpretations, the Maya Meetings established a public of witnesses committed to these experts’ claims. The Maya Meetings cultivated assent through highly regulated practices enabling participants to imagine that they independently confirmed decipherments. Public engagement bolstered experts’ problematic claims to have imparted “voice” and “history” to the ancient Maya by transforming this complex medium into writing. I show how such public engagement did not simply democratize knowledge production and intensified hierarchies within Maya studies. [public science, Maya hieroglyphs, witnessing, anthropology of science] RESUMEN Los antropologos de la ciencia examinan la politica cultural de las ciencias naturales. Sin embargo, las ciencias historicas y sociales tambien tienen contextos culturales. Este ensayo amplia los estudios culturales de la ciencia a la participacion del publico en el desciframiento de los jeroglificos mayas. Durante la decada de 1970, unos expertos pretendieron haber descubierto la estructura gramatical de los jeroglificos. Linda Schele popularizo las tecnicas de desciframiento a traves de talleres publicos en la Universidad de Texas–Austin. Mientras unos arqueologos y campos de epigrafistas dasafiaron el desciframiento, los talleres establecieron un publico de testigos comprometidos con estos expertos. Los talleres permitieron a los participantes que imaginaran que habian confirmado los desciframientos. La participacion publica reforzo los reclamos problematicos de expertos que habian impartado “voz” e “historia” a los antiguos mayas. Muestro como la participacion publica no democratizo la produccion de conocimiento y intensifico jerarquias en los estudios mayas.

Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants' Struggle for U.S. Residency. Susan Bibler Coutin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 228 pp. The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. Leon Fink. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 254 pp. The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border. David Bacon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 348 pp.

This article focuses on the role of water control in the emergence and demise of Classic Maya political power (c. C.E. 250-950), one that scholars have long underestimated. The scale of water control correlates with the degree of political power, re- flected in three levels of Maya civic-ceremonial centers—regional, secondary, and minor. Such power derives from a complex relation- ship among center location, seasonal water supply, amount of agricultural land, and settlement density. Maya kings monopolized artificial reservoirs and other water sources during annual drought, providing the means to exact tribute from subjects. Climate change undermined the institution of rulership when existing ceremonies and technology failed to provide sufficient water. The collapse of rul- ers' power at regional centers in the Terminal Classic (c. C.E. 850-950) had differing impacts on smaller centers. Secondary and minor centers not heavily dependent on water control survived the drought and the collapse of regional centers. (Keywords: political power, water control, Classic Maya collapse)

Joyce Marcus has recently proposed a "dynamic model" for the ancient Maya state. In doing so she has emphasized the importance of spatiotemporal fluctuations between centralization and decentralization. Although this idea has obtained wide-ranging support, there has been little consideration of why these oscillations occurred. This article proposes that one of the key factors was the fundamental tension between the institutions of kinship and kingship. Viewed through the lens of Annales, or "French Structural" history, this appears to constitute a classic example of the contradictions between a long-term structure (kinship) and medium-term (longship) cycle. [Key words: Maya, sociopolitics, integration, cycling, Annales]

Subtle differences in the context of feasting and manners of food consumption can point to underlying levels of civil and social competition in state-level societies. Haute cuisine and high styles of dining are characteristic of societies with fully developed civil and social hierarchies such as Renaissance Europe and the Postclassic Aztec. Competitive yet socially circumscribed political and social organizations such as the Classic lowland Maya may have prepared elaborate diacritical meals that marked status, but the nature of feasting remained essentially patriarchal. Ancient Maya feasting is recognizable through archaeologically discernible pottery vessel forms that were used to serve festival fare such as tamales and chocolate. Comparison of ceramic assemblages across civic and household contexts at the site of Xunantunich, Belize, demonstrates that drinking chocolate, more so than eating tamales, served as a symbolic cue that established the political significance of events among the Classic Maya. [feasting, ancient Maya, pottery analysis, chocolate]

In this article I use quantitative data from 91,916 pieces of chipped stone artifacts from the Copan Valley and its hinterland in Honduras to understand better the nature and role of exchange in the development of a Classic Maya state-level society. The results of this study suggest that intraregional exchange was more crucial for state development than was longdistance exchange. The management of procurement and exchange of utilitarian commodities, such as Ixtepeque obsidian blade cores, along with other factors, played a significant role in the development of the Copan state. In contrast to other major Maya lowland states, the Copan state directly obtained obsidian blade cores from nearby sources, distributed them to local leaders at Copan, and exported them to local rulers in neighboring regions. In this sense, the Classic Copan state maintained a centralized and integrated political and economic organization based on far more than kinship, ideology, and ritual, [exchange, complex society, urbanism, Classic Maya state]

Long-standing disagreements concerning prehispanic Maya kinship and social organization have focused on the nature of their corporate groups, generally presumed to have been lineages. Specific debates center on whether the lineages were patrilineal or incorporated some kind of double-descent reckoning, how descent was combined with locality to define a group, and the status of lineage-outsiders within a group. It is argued here that Maya social organization is better approached within the contemporary critique of kinship, replacing "lineage" with Levi-Strauss's model of the "house"—a corporate group maintaining an estate perpetuated by the recruitment of members whose relationships are expressed "in the language" of kinship and affinity and affirmed by purposeful actions. In this perspective, the operation of corporate groups is the primary concern, and relationships construed in terms of consanguinity and affinity are seen as strategies pursued to enhance and perpetuate the group, [ancestor veneration, house society, kinship, Maya, social organization]

Porotic lesions caused by childhood anemia are commonly found on ancient Maya crania and have been cited as evidence for extremely poor nutrition during the Classic Period. We reconsider this characterization in the light of recent data on childhood anemia in rural Guatemala and the prevalence of porotic hyperostosis in crania of forensic skeletal remains of rural highland Maya from Plan de Sanchez, Baja Verapaz, which date to 1982. The abundance of porotic hyperostosis in adults from Plan de Sanchez fits well with the number of modern rural children suffering from anemia, but the lesions are very rare compared to archaeological series. Although some minor change in diet and infection may contribute to differences in porotic hyperostosis, it is likely that higher mortality leads to fewer anemic lesions in modern adult crania. We hypothesize that more anemic children survived to adulthood in the past than do today, [iron-deficiency anemia, porotic hyperostosis, Maya, nutrition, forensic anthropology, osteological paradox]

This case study of the organic farmers' cooperative Indigenas de la Sierra Madre de Motozintla (ISMAM) explores the construction of identity as a dialogic process in which external elements are appropriated to permit resistance and creative adaptation to global processes. Building on indigenous Mam respect for nature, ISMAM forges a corporate image that responds to symbolic demands of the alternative marketplace and a self-image reaffirming traditional values in a modern context.

The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation. Arthur A. Demarest, Prudence M. Rice, and Don S. Rice, eds. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004. 676 pp.

Cross-culturally, settlement location is celebrated in group mythology, raising the possibility that cosmological factors may play a role in the selection of site location. Using ethnographic sources, a model of modern Maya sacred geography is constructed that indicates that caves played an important role in settlement selection and layout. This model was tested for prehistoric settlement patterns at Dos Pilas. A thoroughgoing pattern of locating architecture in relation to caves was found. Data indicate that the pattern may be widespread, and the implications for our understanding of Maya sites are discussed.

For generations scholars have explained the marked difference in the ruins of Chichen Itza by attributing the southern buildings to indigenous Yucatecan Maya and then telling of central Mexican Toltec invaders who built (or forced the Maya to build) the Tula-like plaza to the north. But evidence now suggests that the infamous "Toltec conquest of the Maya" never happened. The story may actually be the manifestation of a Western tendency to express ambivalent attitudes toward Native Americans in terms of polar opposites, in this case, "gentle Maya priests" versus "brutal Mexican warriors." In the end, the story may reveal more about the Western politics of knowledge than about pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history.

Last Rites for the Tipu Maya: Genetic Structuring in. Colonial Cemetery. Keith P. Jacobi. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. 400 pp.

In this study, I develop a theory of landscape archaeology that incorporates the concept of "animism" as a cognitive approach. Current trends in anthropology are placing greater emphasis on indigenous perspectives, and in recent decades animism has seen a resurgence in anthropological theory. As a means of relating in (not to) one's world, animism is a mode of thought that has direct bearing on landscape archaeology. Yet, Americanist archaeologists have been slow to incorporate this concept as a component of landscape theory. I consider animism and Nurit Bird-David's (1999) theory of "relatedness" and how such perspectives might be expressed archaeologically in Mesoamerica. I examine the distribution of marine shells and cave formations that appear incorporated as architectural elements on ancient Maya circular shrine architecture. More than just "symbols" of sacred geography, I suggest these materials represent living entities that animate shrines through their ongoing relationships with human and other-than-human agents in the world. (Maya architecture, animism, relational ontology, landscape archaeology, agency)

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The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan. Don E. Dumond. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.571pp. The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom. Grant D. Jones. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.568 pp. Rio Azul: An Ancient Maya City. Richard E. W. Adams. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. 238 pp.

On April 18, 1998, Linda Schele, one of the century's greatest Mayanists, died of pancreatic cancer in Austin, Texas. At her death, she was John D. Murchison Regents Professor of Art at the University of Texas. Her brilliant career in Maya studies could never have been predicted from her childhood and upbringing. She was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to a family that she once described to me, probably with some exaggeration, as "essentially redneck." Linda had always wanted to be an artist, but she had to make a living, so in 1960 she began taking commercial art courses at the University of Cincinnati, graduating in 1964. Her horizons were broadening to include literature, and after another four years in Cincinnati's graduate program, she was awarded a master's degree in that subject. In the same year, 1968, she married the architect David Schele, beginning a partnership that was to last the rest of her life. The young couple moved to Mobile, Alabama, where Linda began teaching art at the University of South Alabama, a position that she held until 1980, all the while continuing to paint. The year 1970 marked a crucial point in Linda's life trajectory, for she and David had decided to spend Christmas vacation travelling through Mexico. Their journey, accompanied by five Alabama students, took them to the Maya ruins of Palenque, about which they knew next to nothing. "Palenque hit me in the gut," she once said, and she returned the next summer to study and draw the architecture. Another milestone year for Linda was 1973. That summer she worked as Merle Greene Robertson's assistant in photographing the stucco reliefs of Palenque and the great burial chamber of its ruler K'inich Hanab Pakal. Then, in December 1973, during the epoch-making First Palenque Mesa Redonda, she not only gave her first professional paper, but also collaborated with the young Australian scholar Peter Mathews to present to the conference members, for the very first time, the virtually complete dynastic history of a great Maya city. This meeting established the previously unknown Linda as a major figure in Maya studies, with an impressive command not only of art and art history, but also of dirt archaeology and epigraphy. This was also a turning point for Maya epigraphy, for it brought together the twin threads of the decipherment: the historical approach of Heinrich Berlin and Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and the phonetic (logosyllabic) approach of Yuri Knorosov. Linda was always a great believer in collaborative scholarship, and soon after participated in a series of miniconferences at Dumbarton Oaks with Floyd Lounsbury (who was a mentor throughout her scholarly career), Peter Mathews, and David Kelley, further refining the Palenque sequence and opening new epigraphic frontiers. By this time, Linda had become so committed to her life as a Mayanist that she "burned her bridges," resigning her post at South Alabama and enrolling as a graduate student in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas (Austin). Her 1980 doctoral thesis, "Maya Glyphs: The Verbs" (published by Texas in 1982), was the first major work on the grammar of Maya hieroglyphic writing and cleared the way for further structural studies of the script by such figures as Victoria Bricker, Katherine Josserand, and Nicholas Hopkins, among others. The very next year she was appointed as Associate Professor of Art by the University of Texas, where she began to attract a host of students who have since become leaders in the field. Linda, in fact, was a truly great teacher and a mesmerizing speaker. In 1977, while technically still on the staff of South Alabama, she initiated the first of 21 consecutive workshops on M ya hieroglyphic writing at the University of Texas. These were a resounding success and probably introduced more interested persons to the Maya field than ma y a "popul r" book on the subject. She was unforgettable when she strode onto the stage, Coke bottle in hand and wearing t e most informal of clothes; Linda's humor, salty sp ech, a d infectious enthusiasm brought the ancient

This article uses archeological data to examine how social relations allocate economic and political power in ancient complex societies. Based on recent excavations in the Copan Valley, Honduras, the socioeconomic organization of the basic residential group is reconstructed and the existence of a pervasive social hierarchy demonstrated. I argue that during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, the Maya were organized into a series of internally ranked and externally stratified status lineages (Goldman 1970) that structured social, economic, and political relationships.