Acknowledgments

Minds much more astute than mine have made considerable effort to improve the ideas and prose in the pages that follow, and the result is far superior to anything I could have achieved alone. Three anonymous reviewers constructively guided me to make each chapter more precise, concise, and accessible. Unhindered by sprained thumbs, Claudia Brittenham generously waded through a full draft of the manuscript in late 2023, gently suggesting how to make more the book readable while assuring me that it was headed in the right direction. Over many semesters and even more time zones, Carly Boxer, Susan Eberhard, Adrienn Kácsor, and Ekaterina Pukhovaia carefully worked through drafts of most of the text, in various states of disarray, and reminded me time and again of the rewards of reading and writing across disciplines.

In the midst of pandemic-induced uncertainty and chaos in late 2020 and early 2021, Stephen Houston, Andrew Scherer, Claudia Brittenham, Paja Faudree, and Simon Martin generously commented on a preliminary draft of Chapter 3 and ideas sprinkled throughout my dissertation that eventually seeded what would become Chapters 2, 4, and 6. I also appreciate Stephen Houston reading through a full draft of Chapter 6 in August 2022, when the book was still very much taking shape. Alex Tokovinine provided his usually engaged feedback on presentations at the 2022 and 2023 Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology, the contents of which informed Chapters 5 and 6. I am grateful to Jeff Moser for a memorable discussion in late 2016 about a very early version of what would become Chapter 3, well before I could have imagined its final form. Alejandra Roche Recinos kindly facilitated the first opportunity to present early thoughts about this project in a talk at Reed College in fall 2021. Almost four years later, she also provided decisive feedback on an uncertain draft of the Conclusion.

Planning and research for this book began while I was a junior fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks during the 2020–2021 academic year. Although the pandemic precluded the usual on-campus residency in Georgetown, Frauke Sachse, Adrienne Varitimidis, and Flora Lindsay-Herrera ensured that the other fellows and I had all the resources necessary to continue our work as normally as possible as we waited out the lockdowns from our homes. Most of this monograph was written in 2023–2024, when fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) allowed me to spend the academic year reading, writing, and thinking in the German capital. For the Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, I am indebted to Iken Papp and the Ibero-American Institute for hosting me in their airy, bright, and well-resourced reading room. I am grateful to the Wissenschaftskolleg’s kind, skilled staff for ten glorious months in an academic’s paradise; here, I thank especially Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger, Iris Fleßenkämper, Dominik Hagel, Nina Kitsos, Francisco Martínez Casas, Dunia Najjar, Jana Petri, Vera Pfeffer, Petria Saleh, Daniel Schönpflug, Eva von Kügelgen, and Katharina Wiedemann for making my stay in Grunewald so professionally and personally enriching. Additional support for the 2023–2024 research leave came from a co-sponsored external fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. I also thank the College of Liberal Arts and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Endeavors of The University of Texas at Austin for subvention grants that supported this Open Access publication.

At Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl remained steadfast in her quiet encouragement of this project over several years, from initial inquiry through final printing. I greatly appreciate her guidance and trust, which made the process much less daunting. For allowing their artwork to enliven this book and make the following pages more than just blocks of text, I am indebted to Nick Carter, Octavio Esparza Olguín, Heather Hurst, Jorge Pérez de Lara, Christian Prager, and David Stuart. I also thank Cindy Mackey (Peabody Museum), Charlene Wesley (LACMA), Darrin Pratt (University Press of Colorado), and Maggie Dram (Carnegie Science) for their time and energy helping secure image permissions, as well as Justin Kerr and Karl Herbert Mayer for making their photographs freely available for research and publication through Dumbarton Oaks and the Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya project’s Maya Image Archive, respectively.

Other colleagues and friends provided more abstract, but no less valuable forms of support over the years that I spent researching, drafting, deleting, rewriting, revising, editing, and agonizing over this manuscript. In August 2021, Simon Martin, Christian Prager, and Frauke Sachse talked me through some early brainstorming; their unwavering faith in the months and years that followed was a much-needed antidote to my ongoing doubts about where this project and I were headed. Charles Golden and Andrew Scherer offered occasional feedback and many sugerencias on long, bumpy drives through lowland Chiapas. At The University of Texas at Austin, I am grateful to my Religious Studies colleagues for welcoming me to their department, and I thank Azfar Moin specifically for pressing me to think about Marshall Sahlins’ metaperson concept and sacred kingship more broadly. Across campus, many Mesoamericanist colleagues, especially Iyaxel Cojti Ren, Julia Guernsey, Danny Law, Kelly McDonough, David Stuart, and Amy Thompson, helped me feel at home before I had even settled in.

In Berlin, the several dozen fellows in the 2023–2024 cohort of the Wissenschaftskolleg patiently endured a two-hour colloquium on a draft chapter that, as I reluctantly realized that day, would not make it into the published book. Individually, they never ceased to amaze me, first with their intellectual achievements and, as I got to know them over the course of lively lunches, museum and concert visits, and walks and runs of various speeds, their humanity and open minds. For their efforts to reach out to this introvert, I am especially grateful to Iveren Abiem, Mina Akbari, Josh Berson, Sophie Cras, Ismaila Emahi, Andreas Føllesdal, Alisa Ganieva, Andrew Hui, Nils Jansen, Niko Kolodny, Michal Kravel-Tovi, Jill Leutgeb, Stefan Leutgeb, Eva Lievens, Artem Malykh, Arwed Messmer, Erika Milam, Eric Monnet, Juliano Morimoto, David Plunkett, Lara Puhlmann, Yanfei Sun, Claudia Verhoeven, Christopher Wood, Bin Xu, and Bee Yun. In greater Berlin, Dorothee Arndt, Susanne Brakemeier, Jorge Coronado, Michael Dürr, Nook Kanokwan, Walter Ludovico Koppmann, Abigail Moreno Pedraza, Ulrike Mühlschlegel, Iken Paap, and Gabi von der Heyden reminded me time and again that the best memories are made beyond the confines of the office or reading room.