Over the last 30 years, there has been a revolution in knowledge of ancient Maya writing and iconography that, with the help of ethnohistory and ethnography, has given us a rich understanding of the meanings and beliefs that underpinned Classic-period (AD 250–900) societies. This revolution has also revealed the micro-histories of a score of city states, laying bare the dramas of royal actors, courtly treacheries and inter-polity relations. Although we lack texts from farmers, fishers and other folk, research in some parts of the Maya world approaches a type of historical archaeology. This concern with history, meaning and political competition brings studies of the ancient Maya close to the interpretive archaeologies that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Each of the three books reviewed here manifests this trend in different ways. Whereas Haviland's book provides the history and archaeology of a single household at Tikal, Guatemala, the books by Scherer and Iannone et al. compare material from several sites, focusing on mortuary ritual and termination deposits respectively. None of the books venture far beyond the southern lowlands. The Iannone et al. volume departs from the others because it addresses a cross-cultural model of political organisation, thus adding a generalising push to the otherwise particularistic and historicised case studies.

The contributors to Ritual, violence, and the fall of the Classic Maya kings, edited by Iannone et al., set out to test the scapegoat king model, in which kings take credit in times of prosperity and where followers treat them as scapegoats in times of hardship. More so than most analyses of Maya leaders, the scapegoat model acknowledges that followers play an active role in political dynamics and can terminate kings and their office. In the hope that the essays can tease from the archaeological record the acts by which people ousted their rulers, the book focuses on the ninth century AD, a time not just when individual kings faltered but when the institution of kingship itself crumbled in many places. In the context of drought-based explanations for the fall of Classic Maya kings, the authors recognise that human agency mediates between environmental downturns and socio-political calamities. In other words, in the face of climatological or other challenges, humans have the ability to adjust (or not) their political systems in a variety of ways, some successful, some not, even though they may not foresee the consequences of their actions.

In their introduction, the editors suggest that the scapegoat model does not imply long and static periods of well-being occasionally punctuated by exogenous crises such as drought or military defeat. Rather, internal considerations such as factional competition made politics fluid, conflictive and subject to constant negotiation. The chapters by Golden et al. and Demarest et al. recognise this and argue that the failure of the institution of kingship at Piedras Negras and Cancuen resulted not from military defeats of the final epigraphically recorded rulers of these sites, but from political processes with deeper chronological roots. For Demarest et al., these processes include internal divisions and the proliferation of sub-royal elites. Focusing on subtle differences in who ate what and with which kinds of pottery, Golden et al. document a rupture in the practices that maintained the political and moral community at Piedras Negras. Unlike at Cancuen, leaders attempted to re-establish kingship at Piedras Negras in the ninth century AD following military defeat, but failed to do so due to a lack of support from the populace. Since people continued to prosper in the ninth century, Golden et al. challenge the scapegoat model.

In his own chapter, Iannone is pessimistic about uncovering transcripts of resistance to royal authority. Some of the other chapters do nevertheless document the involvement of ordinary people in critiquing fallen kings, if not contributing directly to their decline. In these chapters (e.g. Guderjan and Hanratty, Houk, and Inomata), deposits of rubbish that effectively terminate royal palaces and plazas are often composed mostly of common pottery and other low-status goods. Navarro Farr also detects the actions of common people in post-royal deposits at M13-1, the main public civic/ceremonial shrine at El Perú/Waka, but she argues that these deposits indicate a reverential memory of the site's deceased rulers. Unlike deposits such as those reported by Inomata for Aguateca, which reflect a single episode of destruction of royal spaces, Navarro-Farr records multiple deposits, reflecting a range of different rites spanning many years. Schwake and Iannone present the most remarkable deposit in this book: a 5m-deep layer of stone, covering hundreds of square metres, in the royal courtyard of Minanha, Belize. As with some of those discussed by Houk, this deposit is difficult to explain: even though stucco friezes were destroyed, royal buildings were carefully preserved and even referenced in new buildings, suggesting the kind of local reverence discussed by Navarro-Farr. Schwake and Iannone make good use of a multiscalar perspective to understand the history of Minanha, a small kingdom often manipulated by more powerful kings as part of their own strategies for bolstering legitimacy. Inomata's thoughtful chapter contends that legitimacy, a concept derived from Weber, may not be accessible to Mayanists.

Termination deposits are largely absent from Tikal, the capital of one of the two most powerful Maya polities in the Classic period (AD 250–900). Between 1956 and 1969, the University of Pennsylvania made Tikal the focus of an investigation more comprehensive than any previous Maya research project. Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continues to publish the reports from this project, and William Haviland's monograph on an architectural compound called group 7F-1 joins a spate of recent Tikal Reports. In 1957, group 7F-1 was the focus of the Penn project's first excavations at Tikal because the group was located over a kilometre to the south-east of Tikal's centre yet had a carved stela (stela 23) depicting a royal Maya woman. These excavations showed that the stela was initially set elsewhere at Tikal, probably in the centre, and later moved to 7F-1. As part of his research on architectural compounds at Tikal with temple-like structures on the east side, Marshall Becker trenched the eastern pyramid (structure 7F-30) of the group in 1963 and found a vaulted tomb (burial 160) whose main occupant, a man, was accompanied by two sacrificed retainers and extremely rich offerings. In 1965, Haviland dug two large residences (structures 7F-29 and 7F-32), a small residence (7F-35) and minor trenches elsewhere in the group. In the 1970s, as progress on the decipherment of Maya glyphs permitted Clemency Coggins and other researchers to refine the dynastic sequence at Tikal, Haviland and others came to see group 7F-1 not just as an elite household compound, but as the resting place and residence of some of Tikal's royalty. By the late 1970s, Haviland completed most of the manuscript, now published as Tikal Report 22.

Haviland does two major things in this monograph. First, he provides exemplary documentation of group 7F-1. While some information is published elsewhere (e.g. images of stela 23 and photographs of artefacts from burials), Tikal Report 22 contains highly detailed interpretations of the stratigraphy and chronology of the buildings, including excellent plan views and profile drawings and thorough documentation of artefacts, miscellaneous carved stones, all 16 burials and all 13 caches and problematical deposits. Second, Haviland uses the excavation data to argue that 7F-1 housed a royal family, and, in conjunction with the textual evidence, to provide a history of that family. In short, Tikal's eighteenth ruler, Chak Tok Ich'aak II, died in AD 508 leaving a four-year old daughter, Lady of Tikal (depicted on stela 23), who became queen in AD 511. Lady of Tikal's regent, Kaloomte’ Balam, was named the nineteenth ruler of Tikal, but the two fell from power by perhaps AD 527, Kaloomte’ Balam having died. Haviland argues that Lady of Tikal evicted a modest family from ‘Old Group 7F-1’, and then constructed ‘New Group 7F-1’ as a place to bury Kaloomte’ Balam (burial 160) and house herself and her kin. In the context of the group's opulent caches, vaulted stone domiciles and richly furnished burials, Haviland interprets the presence within 7F-1 of modest houses and unadorned skeletons as evidence of resident servants. Citing a 60-year-old book on social stratification, Haviland does not consider other options (such as the possibility that there can be inequality within kin groups), and he elides a pair of concepts—class and status—that others insist on keeping separate.

Lady of Tikal's descendants occupied 7F-1 for at least three centuries. Although Haviland believes 7F-1 was continuously occupied, he encountered lulls in construction activity and the sequence of burials. He suggests that these lulls correspond to times when Lady of Tikal's descendants were re-welcomed into dynastic life, some being buried in the centre of Tikal. The final alterations of 7F-1 during the Terminal Classic (ninth century AD) followed the same patterns of previous constructions but on a much smaller scale. This finding leads Haviland to conclude with a suggestion supported by several chapters in the Iannone et al. book: people who occupied places such as Tikal after the collapse of kingship were not squatters, but people from those same communities, carrying on previous practices, entanglements and memories.

In his book on mortuary ritual, Andrew Scherer does an excellent job of using the rich and emergent corpus of knowledge about Maya worldviews to interpret Classic burials. While Scherer does not abandon the goal of inferring status, health, diet and identity from skeletal material (Chapter 1 reviews these themes), he focuses primarily on burials as rites that, on the one hand, expedite the departure of the soul and facilitate its rebirth and renewal in later generations, and, on the other hand, mediate and transform social relations (often politically charged) among the survivors. Only a small fraction of the book concerns landscapes, so the title, Mortuary landscapes of the Classic Maya, is somewhat misleading.

Scherer concentrates mostly on the region where he works in the upper Usumacinta river valley, with secondary attention to Tikal and El Zotz, and occasional mention of sites such as Caracol, Copán, El Perú/Waka, and Kaminaljuyú. Scherer emphasises that mortuary traditions, even within a relatively small area, can vary greatly: the people of Piedras Negras buried their dead quite differently from their nearby political rivals at Yaxchilan. Despite this local variability, Scherer bases his explanations of specific practices, such as child sacrifice, bundling and offerings of varied objects, on widely held Maya ideas about life, death, supernatural beings and cosmology. Scherer's extensive command of iconography and ethnography allows him to make plausible revisions to older questions such as why pots placed over the head sometimes have holes in them, why the ancient Maya often buried people in houses and why burial symbolism usually focuses not on the putrid lords of the dark, cold underworld, but on the heat of the soul, the rebirth of maize and passage to the sky.

Scherer makes his arguments more compelling through the inclusion of 225 black-and-white figures and 20 colour plates, ranging from ethnographic photographs and illustrations of burials to drawings of important Maya sculptures and paintings. The central role that such eclectic illustrations play in Scherer's argument drives home the point that understanding burial requires an appreciation of a much broader range of meanings within the Classic Maya world. I applaud the University of Texas Press for allowing so many figures, and, more importantly, commend Scherer's ability to couple art history with bones-and-dirt archaeology. The broad scope of the book—burials are only one part of the story—will make it useful to all Mayanists, not just those interested in bioarchaeology. At the same time, as the book is not intended for a lay audience, abbreviated citations could have been more usefully placed within the text, rather than making readers tack back and forth between the text and the endnotes in order to discover what literature Scherer cites.

For the most part, Mayanists have not been at the forefront of conceptual innovations or theoretical debates in archaeology. On the few occasions that Maya archaeologists have made it to the grand stage of archaeological theory, they have done so as the butt of critiques by processual archaeologists. Although theoretically understated, the three books reviewed here show that Maya archaeology today is, in fact, quite robust, using solid empirical data to address meaning, motivation and political action in the past.