The transformative power of fire is the common thread linking the essays collected in the latest volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposia and Colloquia series. As the editors Vera Tiesler and Andrew K. Scherer stress in their introduction, the study of the role of fire in ritual practices is a burgeoning scholarly field, but no study of this kind has yet been devoted to Mesoamerica. Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice is thus a welcome contribution that fills this void.

The volume focuses on the relationships between fire and the human body, both in funerary and nonfunerary rituals. Nevertheless, the chapters also discuss archaeological, bioarchaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data and address the role of fire in a wider set of ritual practices, such as calendric rituals and accessions to political offices.

Despite the variety of disciplinary approaches and regional focuses, some themes crosscut the various chapters, favoring cross-cultural comparison and synthesis. The key notion undergoing most, if not all, of the essays is the ability of fire to induce ontological changes in human and extrahuman bodies. The transformative qualities of fire—and of its most powerful instantiation, the Sun—make it the key agent in liminal moments of human and cosmic life cycles, such as creation events or calendrical, funerary, sacrificial, and political rituals. Several contributors stress how the Nahua and Maya mythological narratives of the birth of the Sun and the Moon from a sacrificial bonfire became the charter for various ritual reenactments that marked the beginning of new cycles. This is the case of an Early Classic Maya double burial from Tikal, discussed by Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, who also brings to light ethnographic and ethnohistorical evidence on a lesser known myth regarding the fiery death of an old goddess. It is also the case of the well-known Aztec New Fire ceremonies whose origins, according to Christophe Helmke and Jesper Nielsen, go back to the Classic Teotihuacan period. These ceremonies were conceptually linked to the cremation of bundled bodies of dead warriors, as well as to shifts in power relations and enthronization rituals that also involved lords from faraway regions such as the Maya area.

The Maya in the Classic period also shared a similar conceptual link between fire kindling, dynastic transitions, and sacrifice, especially of children. This linkage is shown in Scherer's and Stephen Houston's chapter, in which they contrast epigraphic and iconographic data with archaeological information from a royal tomb at El Zotz (Guatemala). During the Postclassic period, the Maya also drilled new fires in ceremonies held to celebrate the termination or beginning of various temporal cycles, as shown by Gabrielle Vail and William N. Duncan. The role of fire in the termination of time periods depended on its destructive, chaos-inducing potential. The destructive dimension of fire is explored in the volume by both Pedro Pitarch, in reference to contemporary Tzeltal rituals, and by John F. Chuchiak IV in a chapter on the role of fire in Postclassic Maya war and diplomacy.

The conceptual link between the kindling of a new fire, penitence, and accession to political and religious offices persists in contemporary Tlapanec rituals, which Danièle Dehouve compares to what she calls the “Fire-Penance Complex” in Postclassic Nahua society. Dehouve's analysis is nicely complemented by Markus Eberl's chapter. Drawing interpretive categories from the work of Jacques Derrida, Eberl summarizes Nahua beliefs and practices in which fire initiates processes of becoming and transformation.

Being transformative, fire is also transportative: burnt offerings and cremated bodies, changed into ethereal essences, can trespass cosmological boundaries and reach otherworldly realms where they are received by extrahuman beings, in a process often conceived in terms of feeding and nourishment. This conceptual framework is clearly delineated by Joel W. Palka in a compelling chapter on Lacandon rituals. The author shows how souls or life forces can pass from the human body to ceramic urns conceived as “new bodies” through an act of burning that is often perceived as a transformative act of cooking.

Archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence reveal a tremendous variety of ritual actions linking fire and the human body, ranging from limited heat exposure to complete cremation, a practice that gained popularity in Postclassic Mesoamerica. Such diversity is well attested in Northern Yucatan, a region addressed in the volume by Vera Tiesler; in the Tarascan territory studied by Grégory Pereira; as well as in the very center of the Aztec Empire, as shown by Ximena Chávez Balderas in her chapter on the funerary and nonfunerary practices revealed by archaeological excavations at the Aztec Templo Mayor. The diversity of practices demonstrated by material evidence seems to be in contrast with narrative historical sources, which largely focus on elite cremation. Nevertheless, a close reading of the sources—at least the Postclassic Nahua ones studied by Guilhem Olivier in his chapter on the meaning and use of ashes—clearly confirms that general notions such as transformation and regeneration were expressed in a very diverse set of narratives.

The many case studies addressed in the volume do not yield any single, unitary interpretation of the ritual role of fire, forcing the reader to deconstruct categorical distinctions among activities such as funerary cremation, sacrifice, offering, veneration, and the like. At the same time, they also show how similar and conceptually related notions were shared by most Mesoamerican societies, many of which are covered in the volume. In this regard, the only minor flaw of the book is the absence of Southwestern Mesoamerica, where sources such as Mixtec pictorial manuscripts could have provided rich interpretive venues.

The volume, offering a rich and nuanced view of the destructive, transformative, and generative power of fire, is an outstanding contribution to Mesoamerican studies that suggests new research directions. For example, various contributors mention the use of fire in mundane activities such as cooking, quicklime production, metallurgy, and agricultural work. A more detailed treatment of the role of fire in such activities, in addition to showing that the limit between mundane and ritual contexts is a blurred one, would further enrich our understanding of the Mesoamerican perceptions of the multidimensional power of fire. Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice deserves to be praised for clearing the path to such an important goal.