The Maya World

Scott R. Hutson, Traci Ardren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351029568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Historia de la educación

The Maya World brings together over 60 authors, representing the fields of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, geography, and ethnography, who explore cutting-edge research on every major facet of the ancient Maya and all sub-regions within the Maya world.

The Maya world, which covers Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, contains over a hundred ancient sites that are open to tourism, eight of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and many thousands more that have been dug or await investigation. In addition to captivating the lay public, the ancient Maya have attracted scores of major interdisciplinary research expeditions and hundreds of smaller projects going back to the 19th century, making them one of the best-known ancient cultures. The Maya World explores their renowned writing system, towering stone pyramids, exquisitely painted murals, and elaborate funerary tombs as well as their creative agricultural strategies, complex social, economic, and political relationships, widespread interactions with other societies, and remarkable cultural resilience in the face of historical ruptures.

This is an invaluable reference volume for scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.

Chapter One

Introduction

Traci Ardren and Scott R. Hutson

Many volumes about the ancient Maya define their subject matter by relying on geographical boundaries and leave it at that. It is our opinion this is an overly simplistic definition, one which simultaneously acknowledges the inherent difficulty of defining ancient Maya culture while circumventing those challenges. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 37 by Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban, in the early part of the 20th century, plenty of ink was spilled attempting to define the borders of what we call “ancient Maya culture,” especially along its southern edge (Longyear 1947; Lothrop 1939; Miles 1957). These efforts acknowledged that settlement patterns and certain other aspects of Maya culture shared many features with other cultures of Mesoamerica, and thus authors relied on Maya art and ceramics, or the presence of hieroglyphic texts, to define the culture area. Eventually these too proved problematic, as Maya ceramics were traded outside their region of origin (they appear famously in large quantities in a neighborhood of Teotihuacan in the Basin of Mexico) as was Maya art. Smaller centers well within what was considered the heartland of ancient Maya society often had no hieroglyphic inscriptions.

Historic descriptions left by Spanish explorers were of little help with this effort, as what we consider Maya people did not self-identify as “Maya” in the 16th century. The word “Maya” almost never appears in colonial documents written in Spanish and it appears infrequently in colonial documents written in Yucatec Maya, the native language of northern Yucatan. Though the word is not associated with a single, consistent meaning, it most often appears in the phrase maya tħan (“Maya speech or language”), serving as an adjective that specifies a particular kind of speech/language, namely Yucatec (Restall 2004: 67). The word may derive from Mayapan, the toponym for the major Postclassic political capital located in the northwest corner of the contemporary Mexican state of Yucatan (see Chapter 41) (Restall 2004; Schackt 2001). Even today, despite centuries of scholarship that identifies a culture known as Maya, people who speak what scholars call one of the 31 distinct Maya languages (estimated to be 6 million people in modern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador) rarely refer to themselves as “Maya,” preferring to self-identify with their language group, region, or town of origin (Schackt 2001). Pan-Maya political movements exist (Fischer and Brown 1996), and an encompassing identity can be deployed strategically in specific situations such as the post-civil war reconciliation processes in Guatemala or in efforts to revive Maya language instruction. But even these movements rarely cross modern national boundaries. Thus scholarly definition of the ancient Maya, which has always been embroiled within arguments about the continuity or discontinuity of cultural practices from past to present, is not resolved by reference to the modern Maya. Rather the boundary between past and present becomes more and more blurred, which seems to reflect the reality of a highly heterogeneous set of historical circumstances across southern Mesoamerica and the Maya region. For this and other reasons, the current book, which focuses mainly on the ancient Maya, extends into the present.

Yet it also remains true that speakers of modern Maya languages shared specific material culture traits prior to European contact—crafting traditions, artistic traditions, and burial practices were remarkably similar within a region which exchanged raw materials like jade and salt and recorded textual descriptions of a shared cosmology. Following Schortman and Urban, we suggest it is more accurate to set aside the idea of a Maya area defined by specific boundaries, and to conceptualize the region rather as a set of social networks that cluster and become denser in certain areas, thinning and intersecting with other networks towards their edges. In Part VI dedicated to interactions, which explores how Maya people interfaced with what scholars consider the other major cultures of Mesoamerica, it becomes clear that recent research acknowledges the movement of peoples throughout this broader region. The result was pervasive cultural exchanges that formed a network of relationships that surely extended from the US southwest all the way through Central America. We believe the data presented in this volume, grounded in a diverse set of material evidence, allow us to make the argument that ancient Maya people shared a coherent and evolving set of material practices that derived from shared beliefs, and that those same people were clustered in the area commonly called the Maya area but that they also moved, settled, and influenced cultures outside of this area in diverse and interesting ways.

The ancient Maya have had an oversized footprint in the imagination of the general public for nearly 200 years, going back to widely circulated books by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood (Stephens and Catherwood 1854). The ancient Maya also figure prominently in academic circles. A study of the journal Latin American Antiquity confirms this. Latin American Antiquity is published by the Society for American Archaeology and can therefore be considered the flagship journal of the Society when it comes to archaeology in Latin America. The first issue of Latin American Antiquity appeared in 1990 and from then until now (summer of 2019), 128 issues have been published. Over the course of its first 30 volumes (ending with issue 2 of volume 30), the journal published 660 articles and reports. Of these 660, 202.5 (30.7%) focus on the ancient Maya (the .5 comes from the fact that some articles focus partly on the ancient Maya and partly on other regions). Table 1.1 breaks down the 30-year run of Latin American Antiquity by editor, showing that the prominence of the ancient Maya has fluctuated slightly, from 24.5% to 39.8%. The list of editors itself highlights the prominence of the ancient Maya. The founding editor (Prudence Rice), her successor (David Pendergast), and one of the current editors (Geoffrey Braswell) are Mayanists and one of the two editors (Julia Hendon) in the upcoming tenth term is also a Mayanist.

Table 1.1 Numbers and proportions of Maya papers in Latin American Antiquity over time by editorial term.

Editors		Years		Maya papers		Total papers		%
Prudence Rice		1990–1992		18		52		34.6%
David Pendergast		1993–1995		20		55		35.5%
Gary Feinman and Linda Manzanilla		1996–...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Chapter One Introduction
• Part I Beginnings: Introduction to beginnings
• Part II Bodies: Introduction to bodies
• Part III Landscapes: Introduction to landscapes
• Part IV Relations: Introduction to relations
• Part V Production: Introduction to production
• Part VI Interactions: Introduction to interactions
• Part VII Resilience, legacies, and transformations: Introduction to resilience, legacies, and transformations
• Index