History, politics, art, and ideology: Progress and perils

The scale of the progress in some of these areas cannot be exaggerated. Epigraphy is one subdiscipline that has made an extraordinary contribution in the last two decades. After the epigraphic revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the progress reached such a level by the early 1990s (and even more so today) that those working in some areas in the Classic period are almost doing historical archaeology. Interpretation of political dynamics and political history has generated competing definitions and concepts (Becker 2004; Chase et al. 2009; Demarest 1996; Fox et al. 1996; Gillespie 2000b; Hageman 2004; Martin and Grube 2008; Rice 2004; Scarborough et al. 2003; Watanabe 2004), but all have a deeper understanding of Maya political structure, inter-state and inter-elite interaction, palace life, details of ideology, even concepts of the body and corporality (Gillespie 2001; Houston et al. 2006). The texts demanded drastic changes in culture-history in some regions, such as the central and western Peten, the Copan Valley, and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere. In some zones, major changes in material culture now can be tied to specific historical events, strategies, and actions by ruling elites. In both positive and negative ways, these epigraphic findings have overturned the dominance of cultural materialism and the ecological “metanarratives” of the previous k'atun of the late sixties, seventies, and early eighties.

However, as with all advances, they also have a negative side, or at least they generate new problems and challenges. In the case of the historical texts, it cannot be emphasized too much that the texts represent elite life, elite concepts, and elite sociopolitical and ideological systems. Still, while they are fundamentally elite propaganda, the oft-expressed earlier concerns that this would make facts unreliable have proven to be unfounded (Fash 1994). With only a few nuanced distortions, the historical record appears to be remarkably consistent. This accuracy was probably due to the widespread knowledge of historical events by elites and even by the general populace, making it difficult to present flat-out falsehoods or major distortions. Of course, as in all history, successful battles were deliberately confounded in texts with general conquests, and the victories or resurgence of dynasties were presented in the hyperbolized form of tales of symmetric justice and vindication (Culbert 1991; Houston et al. 2000; Martin and Grube 2008; Vail and Hernandez 2007). Also, as always in Mesoamerica, events were often fitted into conceptual structures of cyclical time, space, and mythic repetition. Yet similar problems are the norm in historiography everywhere.

The most significant limitation to historical studies has been uneven coverage by the epigraphic record in terms of time, regions, and subject matter. Most syntheses and interpretations now heavily emphasize historically well-documented regions. Yet there are many centers, zones, and time periods underrepresented in discussions because their textual record is insubstantial. Some regions with few texts are among the most complex and the most critical for understanding the florescence and declines or transformations of Classic period Maya states—Puuc, Rio Bec, Chichen Itza, and others. This erratic patterning is also a factor in “frontier” areas of heavy highland-lowland or Classic period Maya-periphery interactions like the far southwestern Peten (Barrientos et al. 2001; Demarest et al. 2007; Dillon 1979; Forné et al. 2007; O'Mansky 2003; Woodfill et al. 2006) and the Honduran periphery (Boone and Willey 1988; Dixon 1992; Fowler 1991; Manahan 2004; Pahl 1987; Robinson 1987; Schortman and Urban 1994; Urban and Schortman 1986). In those important interface zones, half of the interactive equation is completely without written history, a frustrating asymmetry in knowledge.

Another problem with interpretation of texts is the dangers of projection of their elite content on ancient Maya society as a whole regarding basic conceptions of ancient religion, worldview, family, self, “memory,” identity, death, corporality, gender, etc. In all societies, particularly in complex and literate ones, there can be a huge disjunction between elite dogma and “high culture” and more general world views and practices. This disjunction is more notable in societies in which there is extremely restricted literacy.

For example, in Medieval Christianity and even in contemporary Latin American Catholicism the detailed descriptions of their religion in texts, iconography, and religious philosophy are unknown or irrelevant to most of the society. Maya beliefs and worldviews may have been comparable to the Medieval Latin mass, Latin bible, and dogma. In historical and even contemporary popular Catholicism, the “Trinity” is an unclear concept, the “Holy Spirit” plays almost no role, “God the Father” is an otiose being, and I have never met a Catholic, practicing or wayward, who knows the critical “Ten Mysteries” (including myself, although I do remember a few favorites from catechism like the “Immaculate Conception”!). The church texts and even prayers on the nature of the soul, the concepts of self, and so on are unimportant to daily practice, which focuses on the parables and Bible stories (parallel to the Popol Vuh, etc.), on the Ten Commandments, and on the powerful family metaphor of Jesus and his grieving Virgin Mother. Prayers are most often to Mary or to the saints, who are essentially deified historical ancestors.

For these very reasons, I believe that recent research into ancestor worship and household religion and ritual is an important contribution to Maya studies (Gonlin and Lohse 2007; Kunen et al. 2002; McAnany 1995, 2004; McAnany et al. 1999; McAnany and López Varela 1999; Robin 2003). There is every indication that, outside of state rituals and hieratic elite thought, ancestor worship was a, if not the, central component of “daily” religion. Other aspects of nonelite ancient Maya worldview might have important structural elements in popular practice, and some details may have been drawn from elite dogma, but the connections are more often assumed than explored.

A greater problem, already seen in many presented papers and edited volumes, is that inferences from the textual record can impose those elite presentations of gender, self, religious dogma and the like, to purely archaeological contexts of nonelite or intermediate classes. Often these are contexts that have not been subjected to the full range of new data recovery techniques (see below). Particularly with the pressure to apply this past k'atun's fashionable interpretative concepts—identity, agency, self, gender, habitus, memory, etc.—we face the problem that we must invent correlations or project interpretations from elite intellectual texts, without any proof or reason to believe that any but the most general concepts described within them were common to the society at large.

An opposite peril produced by the progress in epigraphy is its misuse to justify the growing return to tomb, temple, and palace archaeology. The research for texts and images has sometimes become a rationalization for a return to a pre-Gordon Willey focus on the centers and their royal and courtly architecture. This problem and its academic contexts are discussed further below.

The abuse of epigraphy, however, is merely the inevitable byproduct of its elevation to a central role in interpretation. This does not diminish in any way the positive, indeed transformative, effect of the ever richer historical record in Maya studies, particularly for the Classic period in the Southern Lowlands. But here in the spirit of end-of-the-k'atun dread, I have emphasized above the gray lining of our silver cloud, as I will below. There lies the possibility of thunderheads of misdirection for the coming years.

Other related categories of evidence or approaches to Maya culture, such as iconography and paleolinguistic study, have experienced a related quantum leap in the quantity and quality of evidence and interpretation (Hanks and Rice 1989; Houston et al. 2006; Koontz 2009; Kaufman and Justeson 2009; Miller 1999, 2001; Taube 2003; Vail and Hernández 2007). Also through feedback from phonetically deciphered texts, paleolinguistic studies are reaching a more precise level of interpretation, looking not only at broad language groups, but also at aspects of temporal and regional variability, grammatical details, person, and their social implications (Colas 2006; Josserand and Hopkins 2002; Macri and Looper 2003).

Iconographic interpretations have now been corrected, refined, and redirected by the writing with which the iconography is often linked and intertwined (Houston et al. 2006; Miller 1999; Taube 2003). In turn, these more specific and reliable interpretations have been successfully applied to periods, regions, and contexts that do not have writing, which is most of the ancient Maya world. Thus, as always, iconography provides a potential bridge between elite dogma and popular religion and ritual. The epigraphy helps to inform (and keep honest) the iconographic studies, yet the iconographic studies can suggest which elements of belief and ideology had a broader outreach.

For iconography and studies of art, the dangers, like the progress, are also parallel to those in epigraphy including assumptions that project elite ideology as the central aspects of general ancient Maya belief. However, since iconography and image are often intended for a broader audience than written text, perhaps this danger is less. On the other hand, there is more ambiguity in meaning in art and iconography, so misinterpretation by scholars is more likely, and there may have been differing “readings” by ancient Maya elites and especially the nonelites themselves. Thus, there has been both a positive and negative feedback between writing and iconography.

The perils for study of iconography and art are also similar: an uneven, albeit better, distribution of monuments or other imagery over different regions and periods and sometimes overreaching projections of such imagery into ideology and identity at the nonelite level. The greatest cost is, again, an encouragement of looters and an incentive for archaeologists themselves to pursue research oriented toward art and treasures.

Settlement, ecology, subsistence, and material culture: An analytical revolution

The developments and new approaches in the fundamentals of scientific archaeology, paleoecology, settlement study, and material culture analyses have followed a more gradual trajectory guided by the cumulative work of a much larger pool of scholars. The substantial advances in settlement pattern studies (Ashmore 2009; Brown and Witschey 2001; Culbert and Rice 1990; Dunning 1992) and geoarchaeology and hydrology (Dunning et al. 1997; Harrison 1993; Scarborough 1993, 1998, 2009; Sheets 1992) have built upon a long tradition of such studies, now with enhanced tools including geographic information systems (GIS), NASA imagery, and a host of new surface and subsurface analytic techniques. The impact of these advances has now reached a point that requires new concepts of project research design.

Meanwhile, there have been such a large number of new or greatly improved techniques in bioarchaeology, paleoecology, compositional analyses, subterranean archaeology, and other focused subdisciplines that these have redefined the very role of each of these approaches in Maya research. By the 1990s the quantity of changes had created a qualitative difference. For example, the importance of paleoecological studies has gradually increased over the past 40 years due to continuing improvements in analytic techniques such as phosphate studies, residue analyses, sediment analyses, palynology, phytoliths, etc. These must be central elements in research design (Beach and Dunning 1995; Bozarth and Hansen 2001; Cook et al. 2006; Dunning et al. 1997; Dunning and Beach 1994, 2004; Fedick 1996; Lentz 1999). Yet, again, the range of skills, resources, and personnel needed requires independent paleoecological projects.

Similarly, when constructing multidisciplinary research designs it is now necessary to take an entirely different view of osteology or, more broadly, bioarchaeology. Previously, project directors felt an obligation to include in their monographs droll appendices on osteology and on fauna as a necessary, but minimally informative, element of data presentation. Yes, some ancient Maya had diseases, different burial forms, stature variation, etc., but this was purely supplemental information. Yet in the past decades, new chemical compositional studies and other techniques have made profound contributions to our understanding of the ancient Maya and the interpretations of the results of specific projects.

On the Petexbatun project, for example, bioarchaeology was directed by Lori Wright and paleozoology by Kitty Emery. Both were largely independent subprojects. Their studies confirmed there was no evidence that the early collapse in the Petexbatun was driven by drought or famine (Wright 1997b, 1997c, 2006). At the same time, Emery approached the Classic Maya collapse following the work of the leading scholars of this new age in paleofaunal studies who are elucidating major episodes in Maya history (Brown 2006; Carr 2000; Emery 2004, 2008; Emery et al. 2000) and testing hypotheses and cultural and environmental history “through the eyes” (actually the bones) of deer and other animals (e.g., Emery et al. 2000). In the Petexbatun kingdom so much more was ascertained by the work in bioarchaeology and paleoecology that I can only refer you to their publications (especially Emery 2008; Wright 2006) and those of others reviewed by Spence and White (2009; White, Schwarcz, and Longstaffe 2004) that address topics ranging from aspects of social structure to subregional diet variation, economic change, production and specialization, and other aspects of society well beyond cultural ecology and subsistence.

Compositional analysis is another discipline with a long history that has achieved a high degree of reliability over the past 30 years in analysis and interpretation. Now instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and other compositional analyses have become indispensable to ceramic research (Bishop 1994; Bishop and Beaudry 1994; Bishop and Blackman 2002; Bishop and Neff 1989; Glascock et al. 2007; Neff 1992; Speakman and Neff 2005). INAA, petrographic studies, X-ray diffraction, laser ablation, and the other approaches to the compositional study of ceramics and lithics have enhanced the study of ancient Maya exchange and production. These have facilitated and tested hypotheses of long-distance and local production and exchange as well as interregional affiliations and “identity” (Forné et al. 2009). Since 1977, ceramic collections from many sites have been subjected to these tools (e.g., Bishop et al. 1989; Foias and Bishop 1997; Sears and Bishop 2002). When combined with careful and detailed ceramic analyses these methods help plot the physical movement, or lack thereof, of ceramics and lithics rather than stylistic influences.

However, now the danger that lies behind the promise in material culture studies is of two types: the failure to use these methodologies or the use of them without an awareness of their limitations or of the need for excellent archaeological control of materials tested. When the techniques are applied, they are often assumed to be magical instruments that can resolve issues by mere chemical analysis alone.

The first problem is easily resolved—you shouldn't even talk about ceramic or lithic exchange if you don't have compositional results. As with all of these new analytic tools, a burden is placed on all project directors—now we have it, so now we must use it! Stylistic similarities alone have proven to be totally unreliable in the interpretation of the exchange of artifacts versus modes, styles, and techniques, which can move freely in time and space. Only compositional tools, if properly used, can tell us when actual objects were being exchanged.

On the second issue, some see the techniques as providing quick answers to culture-historical questions. In fact, once the chemical composition is determined, the work has only begun. The evaluation of the meaning of the results depends upon an array of statistical tools, the reliability of which depends upon comprehensive awareness of the details of the specific ceramics being studied and how those elements fit into the structures of different assemblages (Bishop and Blackman 2002). When INAA or other chemical studies are applied to ceramic assemblages that are insufficiently studied or poorly classified in terms of context, modes, types, chronology, and variability, the resulting statistical analyses can generate impressive fallacies. Some of these recent mistakes have formed the basis of proposed “world systems,” market exchange networks, migrations, and the like. Because chemical groups in the database are created by joining the most similar samples without specifying how similar those samples are, INAA applications in areas with little previous detailed study are much less accurate. Furthermore, those utilizing compositional studies must first be cognizant of precisely what ceramic elements are being classified. Even so, the results seldom, if ever, lead to a single interpretation.

Other additions to our inventories of approaches and subprojects include new developments in lithic studies. Lithic technological study going well beyond classification has brought about important insights into Maya production and trade (e.g., Aoyama 2001; Clark 2003a; Hirth 2003b) and will help us to understand the complexity of Maya economic organization. These have been more systematic in comparisons between different regions, cities, and periods (e.g., Andrieu 2009a, Braswell and Glascock 2003, Braswell 2004) in the Maya world, rather than assumptions about variability and research that are site-focused. Also important are more critical analyses of the very nature of midden deposits and intrasite distributions of debitage of various classes (Andrieu 2008, 2009a; Moholy-Nagy 1990). New approaches to lithics can lead to the generation of hypotheses on interaction, exchange, variation, and temporal shifts in ancient production and economy. The more recent developments of systematic use-wear analysis on large samples are shedding light on daily activities, craft persons, and artistic creation (Aoyama 2009).

The discovery of jade workshops in the Motagua Valley (Rochette 2006; Taube et al. 2006) and recently the recovery of a large elite-controlled workshop in the lowlands themselves at Cancuen (Andrieu 2008, 2009b; Barrientos et al. 2001; Kovacevich 2006) have together multiplied the possible approaches to studying this material. The introduction into Mesoamerica of serious cross-cultural studies of the technologies of jade production now allows analyses of jade artifacts at the higher level of technical sophistication. For example, research is now utilizing the knowledge of the Projet Jade of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, a long-term worldwide comparative investigation of jade production technology (Andrieu 2009b; Pétréquin 2000; Pétréquin et al. 2006). With such international collaboration, details of production, technology, and contextual interpretation can go well beyond the traditional Mesoamerican studies focused on symbolism, distribution, and ethnohistorical descriptions. Jade has joined obsidian, chert, and other lithics as a material that can be studied using the full range of analytic techniques.

On a path of its own, beginning precisely with this last k'atun, there has been a true revolution in Maya cave archaeology. Frankly, few of us had really taken cave studies very seriously until the 1990s. Then a small but steadily growing group of scholars began to take Maya archaeological cave research “out of the darkness” and developed serious methodologies and paradigms for investigation of caves as ritual space and especially for the study of the materials recovered to address many aspects of anthropological archaeology (Brady 1989; Brady, Scott, Cobb, Rodas, Fogarty, and Urquizú Sánchez 1997; see also chapters in Brady and Prufer 2005). Of course, more traditional studies, like those in iconography have been given a boost by epigraphic advances in even more convincing study of the distinctive topical matter of Maya cave texts and paintings in studies of Maya ritual belief and sacred geography (e.g., Stone 1995).

Without denying that caves are sacred spaces and that cave assemblages are the result of ritual activities, there is an increasing incorporation of subterranean research into general project structure and a greater emphasis on interpreting the same issues studied on “the surface,” albeit with a very different data set. Such research has included defining basic cultural-historical sequences and resolving important issues of ceramic interpretation. Ceramics from cave assemblages are now being used more frequently to reconstruct the changing “surface” patterns of interregional exchange, population movements, and general culture history (Brady et al. 1998; Woodfill et al. 2006). Other studies have demonstrated the importance of caves in ancient Maya sacred geography, in surface site placement, and even in details of surface architectural configurations (Brady, Scott, Cobb, Rodas, Fogarty, and Urquizú Sánchez 1997; Ishihara 2007; Prufer and Kindon 2005). The economic impact of cave ritual has been demonstrated by the quantity of ceramics and exotics found in the caves and has even led to some interpretations that many of the nonperishable sumptuary goods such as jade may have been cached in caves and other ritual contexts as a way of ensuring constant demand (Brady 2005; Woodfill 2010).

Radical restructuring or fragmentation

For project directors, all of these breakthroughs mean that research must not be merely multi-disciplinary, but multi-project, and, in most cases, multi-institutional. The days are long past of the great Mayanist “Project Director”, his “Big Dig”, and his subordinate archaeologists and “lab people,” and now even the approach of a hegemony of subprojects is over, or it should be soon. Realistically, the amount of material, funding, and personnel involved is just too great, and the subprojects need to be more specialized in their knowledge. Furthermore, collaboration by intellectually independent subprojects provides a cross-checking dialectic within the project. While many projects continue a single primary institutional base model (one encouraged by the sponsors, media, and our universities), others have shifted to the form of a hegemony of independent subprojects and, even better, fully independent multi-institutional work.

In the Petexbatun region, our huge multi-disciplinary project had a hegemonic structure of independent subprojects (Demarest 2006:Chapter 4), with many led by prominent scholars (Brady, Scott, Cobb, Rodas, Fogarty, and Urquizú Sánchez 1997; Demarest 2006; Dunning et al. 1997; Escobedo 1997; Foias and Bishop 1997; Inomata 1997, 2006b; Palka 1997; Valdés 1997; Wright 1997b, 2006). The resulting mass of articles and volumes could never have been generated by a single controlled hierarchical structure. Nonetheless, having one primary institutional base with Vanderbilt created almost unbearable stresses on structure, management, and funding (Demarest 2006: Chapter 5). Such a project centered on a single institution, even if hegemonic in structure, should not be replicated today.

A more sustainable approach was that advocated by William Fash in the Copan Valley. There was a twenty-year sequence of the centralized Harvard project led by Gordon Willey, then the Honduran project led by Claude Baudez, and then the Penn State project led by William Sanders. Subsequently, Fash and colleagues (Fash 1991) completely fragmented the hegemony into independent Honduran, Penn State, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Tulane projects. While also a political nightmare of a different kind (Fash, personal communications 1990–2005), the multi-institutional phase at Copan, for example, produced a flood of new data on all topics and issues and a rather harsh, but healthy, internal dialectic. The multi-institutional structure of different projects at a single site or in one subregion is likely, as in the Copan case, to be most productive in findings and publications.

Yet a multi-institutional approach faces challenges from university support, funding levels, and with permit solicitation, but these can be overcome. Egos and the “Indiana Jones syndrome” (see below) must also now be put aside. Most major Maya projects in the Peten and many in Mexico still have something like a “territory” and, in general, a principal dominant director and institution. This leads to some uneven, weak, or totally superficial subprojects within the region of research. Sometimes ecological studies consist of little more than some pollen cores, short visits by paleoecologists, and sending physical samples to labs. The standard now, however, must be fully independent major ecological and agronomic subprojects (e.g., Dunning and Beach 2004, Scarborough et al. 2003). Similarly, epigraphers, ceramicists, culture specialists, osteologists, lithicists, and others must be more involved in the field where they can interactively determine aspects of research design and changes in those strategies in the light of discoveries. Subfield specialists need to be more than consultants or passive recipients of artifacts or ecofacts for study. Rather what were once “specialists” should now be active participants in the planning and interpretation of all stages of research.

Sadly, such research designs are still rare. Instead, much material culture analyses in the laboratory are being left to graduate students, often without a senior analyst closely supervising or directing the studies. Furthermore, most projects, even in regions with many caves, still do not have an independent cave subproject or project. I could go on. As funding decreases and academic career pressures increase, there is a growing gap between the potential of our techniques and what we even try to incorporate into our work. So, as discussed below, sometimes scholars fill the gaps with lofty verbiage.

Black holes and connecting the dots: The interregional “macro-sampling” issue

Throughout the history of Maya archaeology up to the present there has been a consistent failure to take into account the very unequal sizes of our samples between regions. Instead, we play “connect the dots” by comparing and connecting in our interpretations the known centers, as if they were the complete data universe. Thus, we generate fictive histories that misdirect subsequent discussion and research. I am not talking here about problems of site or subregional sampling, but rather of huge areas of hundreds or thousands of square kilometers in which little or no serious work has been done.

Just a few examples from the last 40 years will make my point. We once discussed the “Middle Classic hiatus” as a period of political problems and change throughout the Maya world, perhaps brought about by the collapse of Teotihuacan. We now know that the cessation of monument erection and short-term “Dark Age” in the central Peten was the result, to some extent, of “macrosampling” errors. Based on a skewed sample, a universal Maya sequence and lowland-wide crisis was proposed. Now we know that the “hiatus” may have been a specific political crisis brought about by the defeat of Tikal and its hegemony of centers at the hands of Calakmul and its political alliance. While more was involved than the Tikal-Calakmul wars, other regions (or those that we know of) had variable declines or florescences depending on their own political fortunes (Martin and Grube 2008).

Other earlier examples of scholars ignoring regional voids to “connect the dots” include the Olmec “sequence of capitals,” which was simply based on ordering the three best-known and excavated sites, though we now know of many more heartland centers. Similarly, the period of Teotihuacan influence in the Maya lowlands was described by connecting, in order of primacy, Teotihuacan to Kaminaljuyu to Tikal. We now know from better epigraphy that the culture-history of central Mexican influences in the Peten was far more complex, involved a number of sites, and predated Mexican “influences” in the highlands at Kaminaljuyu. Similarly, for decades it was believed that Preclassic prehistory in eastern Mesoamerica was a sequence of influences from the Early through Late Preclassic period that could be reconstructed by connecting three “big dots.” First, influence spread from the “heartland” Olmec sites of San Lorenzo and La Venta and then left its heritage in the south to spread from Izapa. This, in turn, was believed to have stimulated the development of complexity at Kaminaljuyu and then from the highlands influenced the backward Maya lowland centers. These scenarios not only ignored extensive unexcavated zones between these distant sites or subregions, but they also ignored the known, but unexcavated, massive sites on the Pacific coast at La Blanca, Ujuxte, Takalik Abaj, and others (Love and Kaplan 2010). Of course, the most notable omissions were the colossal structures and cities of the Mirador Basin whose age and potential importance were not noted until the 1980s.

Now, with some of these regions explored and better samples and chronologies established, we know that the order and nature of these chains of influences was incorrect and had presented obstacles to proper interpretation and testing. Today's reconstructions of Maya culture-history often continue to ignore the extensive swaths of uninvestigated areas and the huge, and possibly early, centers in the far northwestern Peten, southern Campeche, and southern Quintana Roo (Anaya Hernández 2001; Michelet et al. 2000), as well as spotty knowledge of areas in the western Peten and the almost totally unexplored southwestern Peten and western highlands.

Investigations in just the past 15 years have begun to fill in a few of the larger gaps in our geographical knowledge with broad, regional studies opening up new areas to research (Anaya Hernández 2001; Barrientos et al. 2001; Brady 2009; Dahlin and Ardren 2002; Demarest 2006; Golden 2003; Hutson et al. 2004; Ichon 1992; Laporte 1995; Laporte and Mejía 2005; McAnany 2002; Michelet et al. 2000; Monterroso 2006; O'Mansky 2003; Romero 2006; Scarborough et al. 2003; Smyth 2006; Vásquez López 2007; Woodfill et al. 2006). These investigations are exciting examples of pulling up large data sets from what had been huge empty zones. Those lacunae had provided two generations of scholars with a great clean canvas upon which to paint fascinating culture-histories with broad strokes, unimpeded by data.

We now have recovered in some areas enough information to require that we rethink our views on those zones, but not enough information to really understand what is going on. Even excavating important sites in such regions leads initially to only problematic results. For example, the ongoing Cancuen project launched into an expanse of close to 14,000 km² that forms the direct interface and trade routes between the highlands and lowlands. The only archaeological work there was a half dozen test pits and some informal reconnaissance. Progress was made in the first four years at Cancuen, but then our preliminary results began to be overturned by our own continuing research (Demarest et al. 2006). Ceramic evidence from the highland route sites nearby (Monterroso 2006; Woodfill et al. 2006) as well as contradictory results from topographic studies and lab work required regrouping (Barrientos and Demarest 2007). Since then, as Cancuen has been more intensively excavated and the region better surveyed, we have needed to radically revise our interpretations and even our research designs several times (Barrientos and Demarest 2007; Demarest et al. 2008, 2009). This costly history of progress and retreats in our interpretations and approaches demonstrates the great difficulty in beginning research in one of the “regional voids” in Maya archaeology. The only solution—now underway—is that a number of independent projects should enter such terra incognita with differing orientations and goals (e.g., other centers, small sites, geology, ecology, settlement, caves, and so on).

However, while new explorations will gradually provide more information for interpretation, it is even more important that we draw some lessons from these difficulties about how we construct culture-historical interpretations despite the need to extrapolate across such large unexplored zones. We must have an increasing awareness that our interregional sample still constitutes little windows peaking in on grand vistas. With such a realistic perspective we can develop culture-historical interpretations that can generate and more successfully guide meaningful research designs that target and explore new areas more effectively.

Rethinking site size, influence, and expansionism

Given our subconscious constructs and biases in understanding the archaeological record—those of European history, of modern world systems, or from our distorted perceptions of the Aztec, Inca, and other “empires”—sometimes we have created models of the ancient Maya in which size, scale, complexity, and precocity are combined with assumptions about needs for expansionism and/or for large, politically subservient sustaining areas. Larger, more complex, and more sophisticated sociopolitical entities are assumed to have developed or expanded to control smaller centers in the region and communities between large sites. Alternatively, the larger centers or polities are posited to have exerted some type of intense cultural control or influence over the smaller sites.

These “scale equals influence” assumptions have been contradicted by some of the more detailed evidence from those Classic period sites that have a well-controlled chronology and more complete settlement studies in the landscape between the large major centers. In the Classic period Maya region, probable political and economic autonomy has been proven for a number of small kingdoms that are near very large ones (Haines 2008, 2009; Iannone 2005; King and Potter 1994). Evidence is growing in the Maya lowlands for considerable autonomy, sometimes for even small centers and communities near large centers or states (Eberl 2007; Haines 2008, 2009; Iannone and Connell 2003; Scarborough et al. 2003).

Cancuen also provides a striking example of how size and sophistication of centers does not automatically translate into regional control. The site was a Late Classic period lowland Maya center, rich in architecture, monuments, stucco sculptures, workshops, and exotic goods (Barrientos and Demarest 2007); all sitting at the base of the highlands, the “southern frontier,” and engaged in exchange systems in exotics with less complex highland neighbors to the south. Yet moving only 9 km south of Cancuen and into the first passes through the highland ridges, all evidence of Cancuen styles, or even any lowland Classic period Maya traits, abruptly ends—a near total break in material culture (Woodfill 2010). There are many such examples in Maya archaeology and in much better documented historical and modern contexts.

Clearly, it is very important for future culture-historical reconstructions for Mayanists to reject the a priori equation of size with influence and many other such unconscious assumptions. Such correlations often did exist, but they also often did not exist. Before we posit large interregional entities based on site size and/or by broad-stroke artifactual comparisons, we need to first control subregional archaeology between the larger centers. Intersite comparisons must also be based on well-defined artifactual units, more sensitive chronologies, and knowledge, or at least an awareness, of the problems discussed above of the great empty spaces between the “big dots” that we are connecting.

Refining understandings of the structure and nature of ceramic assemblages for interregional comparison

Simple mistakes in comparison of ceramic assemblages can have great consequences. Some of these mistakes could be attributed to rigid adherence to the categories and templates of the type-variety method and others simply to sloppy work, insufficient midden excavation, or insufficient attention to microchronology (i.e., weak archaeology).

Within the dazzle of amazing progress in methodology and pseudo-progress in theory, the mundane critical element of ceramic analysis has been underemphasized. For example, in recent re-evaluation of the southern Maya area I concluded that simple errors in understanding the ceramic associations of two minor ceramic modes had led to faulty interpretations of INAA results. In turn, these errors led to fallacious conclusions about ceramic exchange systems, and thence to the construction of a Late Preclassic Kaminaljuyu-centered, macro-state hegemony or “world system” (Demarest 2010). Based on this type of artifactual “house of cards,” scholars today often go on to such grandiose culture-historical models that become even more impressive when decorated with a sprinkling of references to power, agency, identity, etc. But in the end, if the sherds or contexts or chronologies have been misinterpreted, the models will not stand.

Now, with the possibilities presented by chemical compositional analyses like INAA—together with good control over identification and classification of slips, pastes, tempers, modes, and other features—we have better opportunities for scientific testing of models of exchange (Bishop 1994; Bishop and Neff 1989) and of intersite relations. Yet, these new opportunities, studies of exchange, and interaction can be squandered or can even become obstructions, as seen in the examples cited above and others such as the recent resurgence of the absurd Olmec “Mother Culture” debate fueled by competing compositional analyses (Flannery et al. 2005; Stoltman et al. 2005). INAA and other compositional analyses of ceramics, lithics, and other artifacts must be carefully combined with a detailed and accurate understanding of the specific features and classificatory categories of the materials being studied by such methods. These must overcome the fact that comparisons are difficult in general in Maya archaeology, especially between distant regions (the highlands, central Peten, Belize, Yucatan, etc.) with different classificatory schemes and chronologies with radically different degrees of sensitivity and subperiods. Furthermore, ceramicists tend to know their own materials and categories well but are often insensitive to variability or details of the classificatory units of others. Thus, especially in the light of the “macrosampling” problems discussed above, intersite or interregional comparisons are fraught with serious dangers. There must be more care in ceramic analyses and stratigraphic excavation of the midden deposits that inform these studies. All facets of Maya archaeology need to increase attention to the basics of classifications and comparison, as well as to analytic studies.

Developing microchronologies

New possibilities in microchronology that are critical to, and potentially transformative of, Maya archaeology have developed in the past two decades. Such control would allow refinements of intrasite and even household dating, which might then allow us to more credibly address the popular themes of nonelite activities, gender, and community. Ceramic microchronology has already begun to address important general questions and controversies in culture-history and theory. Scholars associate such refinements with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) carbon dates. However, more fine-grained chronology, extendable to all contexts, is possible through more careful and thorough ceramic studies with larger samples from extensive stratigraphic excavations in middens. Microchronology has long been a topic of great interest in European ceramic studies. Now refinements and meticulous excavations in northern Yucatan and in the western Peten are creating ceramic chronologies based on nonelite, widely distributed ceramic types and modes. These can now date Late Classic period contexts and subdivide periods into units of 20 to 30 years.

In the northern lowlands at Xkipche this precision has been approached through innovative techniques of modal study (Vallo 2000; see also LeCount et al. 2002). In the Middle and Upper Pasión region such fine-grained chronology is, to a large degree, the cumulative result of 50 years of excellent ceramic studies from projects that emphasized residential midden excavations and independent ceramic analyses using all available techniques (Adams 1971; Eberl 2007; Foias and Bishop 1997; Sabloff 1975). The Pasión region also has many political monuments, dated anchors for some types and some periods. As a result, in the Petexbatun, Eberl (2007) can date domestic contexts, using ceramics, to 20 to 30 year periods. In the upper Pasión, Forné and colleagues (2007) have subdivided the eighth century into periods of a.d. 700 to 760, a.d. 760 to 780, and a.d. 780 to 800 with work on subdivision of the first longer phase now underway.

The impact of such microchronology on community studies should be obvious. Eberl (2007) has been able to convincingly describe changes within hamlets and the development of internal differences in material culture and power at the community level. Forné has been able not only to document changes in the history of a site, but to plot areas of differing interregional affiliation within the site and some changes in such affiliations. With these tools we may be able to seriously address some of the contemporary issues and topics at the community and family level. In general, the many recent discussions at that level have been very speculative and, I believe, unreliable because we just did not have the chronological control to address them. In most cases, that problem was ignored and the very imprecision allowed free speculation and clever publications on gender, identity, memory, and other preferred topics without convincing supporting evidence of any kind (see below).

The impact of ceramic microchronology on general issues of culture history and theory will be equally profound. Perhaps the best recent example of this comes from the western Peten. The theories of the Classic period Maya collapse based on drought-related events faced a problem in the late 1990s when the Petexbatun chronology based on stratigraphy, architecture, monuments, and ceramics had dated the destruction of Dos Pilas and the period of endemic warfare to a.d. 760, a half century before any drought (Gill 2000; O'Mansky and Dunning 2004). Then, magically, a new core appeared, and a revision of climatic evidence was used to argue that there was an earlier cycle of drought beginning at a.d. 760 (Gill et al. 2007). Now, however, ceramic chronology in the Pasión region demonstrates what should have been obvious: the destruction of the capital center was not the beginning of the endemic warfare, but close to the end. Eberl's (2007; Eberl and Monroy 2007) dating of small communities indicates that by a.d. 730, if not earlier, nonelite populations were abandoning the zone. The warring Pasión region centers were left with a reduced supporting population. Thus, either a new pollen core must be found—and thus an even earlier cycle of drought—or we must conclude that the political disintegration and depopulation in the west began 40 to 80 years earlier than the beginning of any environmental change, even with the pushed-back late eighth century version of the droughts.

These examples show how chronological refinements in ceramics will play a major role in culture-historical debates. Given the apparent impact on the collapse debate, one can only imagine the potential of applications of microchronology to many of the other major controversies in interpretation throughout the Maya world, as well as its potential for improvement of all chronologies and for the opportunity to develop nonfiction community studies.

Maya Maya archaeology: Yet another crossroads

The role of archaeology in the development and empowerment of the modern Maya cannot be properly treated here. I would be remiss, however, in not at least pointing out that this particular crossroads has been, and continues to be, the most important, most precarious, and—potentially—the most exciting.

In Central America and Yucatan the sacred site vs. archaeological site issues have proven to be somewhat less confrontational than in North American archaeology (Ardren 2002; Ishihara 2008a; Ishihara and McAnany 2007; Sandlin and Bey 2006). Nonetheless, in the past decade Maya intellectuals and racist landowners did form two polar interest groups in Guatemala. Indigenous leaders and North American anthropologists sometimes have argued for a mimicry of the history and approaches to cultural property issues pursued in the United States, Canada, and Australia (see discussion in Demarest and García 2003). In Guatemala, however, the situation is very different from the North American dynamic. Sensitivities to interpretation and obstruction of excavation and physical control of sites are not important tools of resistance, or identity, for the vast majority of the Maya. The difference is simple: the Maya, who constitute nearly half of the population of Guatemala, are becoming politically engaged and realistically seek more direct forms of power and identity in the political and economic forums of the nation.

Without going through the history of developments and struggles to establish a common ground, I move to the anticipated positive outcomes. Formal comanagement of sites has been established between local Maya communities and government agencies at some sites and in some cases archaeological and ecological tourism is managed by Maya community organizations (Ardren 2002; del Cid and Demarest 2004; Ishihara and McAnany 2007; Sandlin and Bey 2006). The razzle-dazzle of tombs and temple publicity is being used by some archaeologists and the Maya themselves to attract attention and to gain support from development agencies that have provided school improvements, water systems, church construction, mills, and—above all—support for Maya rituals, which are often costly in their terms.

A new final phase of these collaborations between some archaeological projects, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development agencies, and Maya organizations has begun with the establishment of some schools of Maya archaeology for Maya students that include archaeology in their basic curriculum (Ishihara 2007, 2008a). All students in these programs will learn archaeology, but some may go on to become professionals in the discipline (Demarest 2009). They will have direct personal experience of excavation and archaeological interpretation, as well as spiritual and economic involvement in site park management. It is hoped that an informed Maya community and indigenous Maya archaeologists will then be able to assess what archaeology brings to their own heritage, identity, opportunities, and future.

What happens in Maya archaeology after that will be guided, to a considerable degree, by their own informed choices. We trust that in the future archaeology will be of even greater benefit to the communities, Maya or Ladino, that surround the sites. We also anticipate that the collaborations involved in Maya archaeology will generate new insights into the ancient Maya while fulfilling our ethical obligations in the present.

Building careers: Caught between Wittgenstein and Indiana Jones

In the real world some of the fundamental problems of the Maya field result from academic career pressures that are pulling archaeologists in two radically different, equally dangerous directions: seeking “tombs and treasures” versus imposing essentially inapplicable fragments of social theory.

At one extreme are the “Indiana Jones Big Digs,” sliding back into a pre-scientific methodology (albeit lightly decorated with flashy bits of analytic science) that concentrate resources on the epicenters and that emphasize spectacular finds, such as tombs, temples, palaces, murals, and monuments. Some of these projects have large “territories” and a single central institutional base. Excavation is centered on the site epicenters, although this fact is masked somewhat by throwing underfunded graduate students or junior scholars into residential areas, popping a pollen core into a nearby bog, or using some GIS or NASA photos. In defense of these large projects, “sexy” treasures are what draw private funding, and government research funds are ever more limited. As mentioned above, the great progress in epigraphy and iconography sometimes encourages royalty-focused archaeology. The amount of emphasis in classes and textbooks on history and symbol also instills these interests in students. Tombs, texts, murals, and palaces are indeed critical to generate history, but it is really the texts that matter and the big ones are on monuments. Most tombs and treasures serve primarily as fundraising devices.

At the other extreme are small projects, subprojects, or even larger endeavors that rely on theoretical terminology more than on actual research results for interpretation and for publications and have a spotty usage, at best, of our many new methodological tools. Often insensitive ceramic chronologies with phases of two or three centuries in duration limit interregional comparison and intrasite interpretation. Low levels of funding are often to blame for such inadequate research, but that problem could be overcome by forming intersite “project alliances” with independent crosscutting projects exploring ecology, artifactual comparisons, ceramic and lithic exchange, and so on. However, career pressures make it necessary for too many scholars to be “project directors” and also make it difficult to have reasonably long seasons for field work. At the same time university employment requires frequent publication, which therefore must be based on a very weak database. It is then that Bourdieu, Giddens, Habermas, various intellectual offspring of Renfrew, and even Wittgenstein ride in to the rescue, allowing the production of articles and edited volumes with lofty terminology, but based on insufficiently excavated and analyzed sites and concepts from philosophy or sociology, which are often inapplicable and/or untestable.

The answer to the elite-oriented “Big Dig” problem is simple and already described above: break up the big territorial projects into a number of loosely coordinated, but still fairly large, institutionally and intellectually independent projects. Only such fragmentation will allow coverage and feasible funding for most of the new approaches. The only challenges to this strategy are the need to maintain coordination and comparison and the acceptance by regional project directors of more limited authority, if not a healthy degree of “status rivalry.” The solutions to the second problem of the pretentious over-interpretation of thin data are, as mentioned, analytic alliances between projects, and so on. At both extremes, however, we face more daunting institutional obstacles.

Publishing in the ruins

In our field, the fully published, easily accessible archaeological monographs or long, data-oriented synthetic articles are no longer the venue of choice, and they constitute an ever smaller portion of the cited corpus of the field. Instead, edited volumes compiled from meeting papers, some comparable journal articles, and, occasionally, books that are heavy on interpretation but light on analysis tend to dominate the immediate discourse and fill the bookstands at meetings. All of these publications present little detail and are often guided by superficial academic fads—assuring a very short shelf life. I see this as a major problem for our contribution to the future.

This problem has broad roots that extend well beyond our discipline. In his classic The University in Ruins (1997), Bill Readings looked at the systematic overhaul of universities that has been going on since the 1960s. With a postmodern theoretical perspective, Readings documents how North American universities have been transformed into something more closely resembling corporations. Parents and students are viewed as purchasers of the product, “excellence,” and a growing professional class of administrators needs statistically citable numbers. Faculty are pressured to generate publication counts in superficial categories with the peer-reviewed, single-authored article, and academic press book being the most valued, whatever the quality, and adding most to the counts (Lerner et al. 2008; Weisbrod et al. 2008). Such counts, along with grant overhead, numbers of delivered papers, and so on, are the presentable “faculty product” that is used in university reports to help impress boards or oversight committees, to move schools up in rank, and to enhance the careers of well-compensated professional administrators.

The above-cited studies—and many others—reveal that the bottom line, literally, is that now institutions, academic departments, and faculty are judged by superficial quantifiable methods. These criteria obviously encourage the current proliferation of edited volumes of collected, revised, data-light meeting papers. There are more thoughtful journal articles, but they are few due to the very limited numbers of venues. While still an improvement over the pre-1970s literature of dry, narrow classificatory descriptions and debates, perhaps the pendulum has finally swung too far—especially given that the new analytic techniques and subdisciplines provide a very fertile “middle ground” for well-documented conceptual interpretation at a “closer” level.

These realities of the modern university are having a very real effect on the discipline because the pressure to pump out publications infringes on the time for application of the techniques and comparative research discussed above. Yet one must produce pseudo-synthetic articles with “theory” as currently defined (see below), and the multi-authored, result-oriented journal articles, reports, or monographs, so highly valued in the hard sciences, are given less weight in such quantified university evaluations and even fewer citations in our field itself.

Theory is dead. It died of terminology

In the 1960s and 1970s we reacted against the narrow classificatory schema of the 1940s and 1950s by launching into a frenzy of producing and replicating “science” with a complete misunderstanding of what science really was. The hypothetico-deductive approach reigned, and all had to cite its tenets or be labeled as theoretical fossils. Just as now with Bourdieu or Giddens, articles and books often began with brief recapitulations of concepts drawn (implicitly or explicitly) from the tenets of Kuhn, Ayer, Russell, early Wittgenstein, and other logical positivists, although really they were just disembodied elements of that work. In the 1980s most of us abandoned in panic that poorly conceived understanding of scientific theory and its ethnographic and archaeological applications in cultural materialism. But, in order to “course correct,” less tyrannical but more pretentious idols were raised in their stead, drawn from literary criticism and continental philosophy or sociology. Now house mounds and smaller centers are being interpreted using Foucault, Bourdieu, Giddens, late Wittgenstein, and even Levinas. However, these “interpretations,” again, are really just some of their terms recycled from secondary sources in anthropology or other social sciences.

Like any faux-Kuhnian revolution, the impact brought about by the attempts of archaeologists to update theory is based primarily on the replacement of the previous jargon with a new and equally arcane jargon. While there is an explicit rejection of overreaching theory and “metanarratives,” we have the imposition of partial concepts or terms drawn from new overreaching paradigms. In place of terms like “culture” or “ethnicity,” which proved to be too broad to be useful, we have even broader and more maleable use of “identity,” “agency,” “memory,” and “habitus.” The last is defined famously as “a structuring structure, which organizes practices but is also a structured structure” (Bourdieu 1984:170). This is one of many such definitions that makes the skeptical thinker wonder what the emperor may, or may not, be wearing.

The sociological or philosophical perspectives are not applied as a whole. Rather, bits, elements, and terms are attached to equally brief and desultory archaeological descriptions. The new nomenclatures are painfully described again and again at the beginning of articles or edited volumes. Almost all of these terms do provide subtle shifts in meaning from pre-existing concepts. So “habitus” differs from “culture” in several nuances in that it states more explicitly the possibility of individual choice and action in operating and altering elements within the confines of social and cultural structures, as does more broadly “agency.” These subtle differences may be very interesting, but fundamentally they are not that revealing or useful in practice in our discipline and are certainly observations that could be taken into account without a new terminology or interpretive structure.

Many of these elements or fragments of sociological theory do, in fact, work well as “cautionary tales” against the tendency toward totalities, which was the mortal sin of metanarratives. Most also hold postmodern/phenomenological connotations of reflexivity—the challenge of subject/object distinction, rule/practice interaction, free will in a social context (“agency,” etc.). Yet does anyone really think that we will be using words like “habitus” or concepts like “structuration” 20 years from now? Many in the 1970s' and early 1980s' cult of hypothetico-deductive reasoning took their borrowed terms, ideas, and neologisms very seriously, yet the application of their concepts to archaeology was, in retrospect, like using quantum mechanics to repair the plumbing. In the same way, the data that we recover cannot be informed, and the research designs cannot be guided by the conceptualizations of most of these terminologies masquerading as theory. Bourdieu drew upon actual direct interactions between secondary school students in France and even there the psychological aspects are contested. Applications of these concepts to clusters of house mounds is a bit absurd, especially if those contexts are poorly dated and have not been subjected to the host of techniques already mentioned.

For these reasons, we can assume that such jargon-laden paradigms will disappear from the written record during the next k'atun. On the positive side, as with Logical Positivism, Structural Marxism, Behavioral Archaeology, Processualism, and Post-Processualism, this phase will leave in its wake one or two applicable and useful concepts and a general awareness of other elements that are beyond the reach of our evidence and techniques. While we can recognize that the archaeological remains were left behind by individuals, it is hard to find them and to demonstrate that they are close to contemporaneous, let alone identifying psychological and motivational factors.

Such over-interpretation, encouraged by currently popular interpretive agendas, is especially dangerous in Maya lowland archaeology, which has so many problematic contexts such as surfaces and middens scrambled by centuries of repeated massive tree fall, looting, and milpa farming. We also have a damaging tendency to confuse living surface deposits and primary garbage with midden soil reused for extensions of house mounds, tree-fall mixed contexts, reoccupational debris, termination rituals, middens mixed in the base of later construction fill, earth piled over abandoned mounds for reuse as gardens, etc. The ambiguity of such critical contexts requires careful stratigraphic interpretation assisted by all the new and old techniques available. It is easier, however, to impose interpretations of gender, identity, feasting, “memory,” etc., without really confronting and resolving such depositional complexities. Add to that partial and skewed sampling of structures' broad and insensitive artifactual chronologies and the incomplete spectrum of analyses applied to most contexts at most sites, and you have a situation where contemporary interpretations about individual or family behavior or practice are problematic at best—or worse, are pure fables with sociological morals and philosophical connotations. Often such sociological interpretations are made possible, not by a rich body of thoroughly studied evidence but by the opposite: the flexibility allowed by half-studied and poorly analyzed remains.

Here I note defensively that I do not make any of these comments from a generally anti-theoretical stance, but from the opposite perspective as a now scared and more cautious theoretician or even as one of “the fallen.” For decades, I followed the trends in theory, first as an undergraduate devotee of Leslie White's version of cultural materialism, then as a Marxist, then a Structural Marxist, and then a French Structural Marxist (utterly enamored of Godelier). But then, after the slow and painful disintegration of Structural Marxism into little more than obscure terminology and incredibly complex graphics, I lost faith in the durability of much of our theory, and since I have wandered about in the confusion of ideologically oriented eclecticism, a wilderness that I still inhabit. But like most professors, I help job-market ABDs and recent Ph.D.s add the necessary elements to papers to “have some theory” so they will not sound like mere culture-historically oriented diggers or analysts. This game only requires briefly referencing the broader schemes and scattering about some of the obligatory new terms. Nonetheless, it is very important in practice to use the appropriate style as an effective exertion of individual agency, taking advantage of the discipline-wide doxa, and, thus, showing the ability to simultaneously operate within, as well as to effectively manipulate, the rules of the habitus of the job market!