A conspectus of Maya archaeology was overdue. The last was the late Robert Sharer's sixth edition of The ancient Maya in Reference Sharer and Traxler2006, further updating Sylvanus G. Morley's pioneering synthesis of Reference Morley1946. The present amount and pace of Maya research is too much for one scholar to codify: hence this collective volume, which is both a welcome and a worthy successor.
This is one of Routledge's planned 50 ‘magisterial surveys of key historical epochs’. The prices are high, the visual values (for the Maya at least) low—for £190 one might expect polychrome mural art at least to be reproduced in colour, rather than muddy monochrome; Routledge should also have employed a copy-editor to iron out inconsistencies and errors. There are, however, relatively few frustrating citations of unpublished papers delivered at obscure conferences and a heartening number of unpublished but accessible recent dissertations noted. At a hefty 918 pages and two kilograms this is suited more for the library desk than the armchair: the intended audience is definitely professional rather than popular.
While both editors do their fieldwork in Yucatan, they have involved many scholars working in the tropical forest zone to the south, and in the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas beyond. Almost 70 authors, ranging from graduate students to emeriti, mainly in midcareer and from the USA but with a fair number of Mexicans and two Guatemalans, contribute to seven sections with 43 chapters. The active field of European Maya studies, with major projects emanating from France, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and the UK, is under-represented; the important discoveries by Ivan Šprajc since 1996 in southern Campeche are unmentioned.
Each of the seven sections (Beginnings, Bodies, Landscapes, Relations, Production, Interactions, Resilience) has five to eight chapters and a useful introduction by the editors. Articles of 12–15 pages provide very up-to-date (some 2020 publications are included) and very useful bibliographies.
‘Beginnings’ traces the origins of Maya civilisation down to the end of the Preclassic (c. AD 250), the point at which Classic Maya cities such as Tikal, Palenque and Copan appear. Lohse summarises the evidence from the Early Holocene onwards, much of it from Belize and from very recent work. It is only after about 1500 BC on the Pacific slope and 1100 BC in the tropical forest lowlands, where the greatest cities later flourished, that settled villages and the beginnings of public architecture appear. The Middle Preclassic, down to c. 300 BC (Brown and Stanton), and the Late Preclassic in the lowlands (Doyle), highlands (Arroyo) and on the Pacific slope (Guernsey and Love; later periods there are covered by Chinchilla Mazariegos) see the emergence of a level of complexity definable as ‘civilisation’, albeit without writing until after 400 BC. Relations with the Preclassic Olmec area to the west are discussed by Inomata in section VI.
This setting of the stage is followed by ‘Bodies’, not just the corporeal but the social. Tiesler reviews advances in bioarchaeology, which now extend to diet, health and personhood, while Scherer relates burials and their furnishings to social structure and Ardren to questions of gender and sexuality. Freiwald shows how stable-isotope analysis has enabled population movement between communities to be traced, something now allowing both élite spouse-trading and sacrificial victim-capture to complement the epigraphic evidence.
Animals as the source of imagery as well as economy are examined by Boileau et al., and favoured plants from maize to chocolate by McNeil. These studies tie in well with later sections, where Beach et al. establish the palaeoecology underlying Maya tropical-forest farming (Dunning et al.), and Ford reminds us of the horizontal and vertical complexity of that forest and the subtle sensitivity with which the Maya exploited an unlikely milieu for the genesis of a civilisation. The ‘artificial rainforest’ created by selective culling and conservative extraction allowed Maya civilisation to burgeon for over two millennia.
That landscape supported a broadly distributed rural population: this settlement system, as Garrison shows, was initially mapped along forest trails or in fortuitously cleared areas, later by cutting survey grids. The advent of airborne lidar penetrating the canopy to give a ‘bare-earth’ view has transformed understanding: the Chases summarise their pioneering survey of the large Classic city of Caracol in Belize, where agricultural terraces demonstrate dramatically the huge investment in landesque hardware to support a far larger and denser population. Lamb shows how rural settlement beyond urban peripheries shares some of the cities’ complexity of social layering and occupational specialisation, while Hutson argues against the accepted élite-commoner dichotomy in favour of a social continuum as reflected in residential groups. Gonlin examines these groups and the diurnal and nocturnal activities that took place in house and demesne, and Harrison-Buck argues for reciprocal human-material relationships—“humans make houses but […] houses make humans” (Hutson, on p. 386).
Not all cities were alike: Palenque was densely nested on the stream-dissected edge of the limestone uplands looking north-west over the broad coastal plain, its noted epigraphic and iconographic record documenting four centuries of royal power (Liendo Stuardo). Ek’ Balam in contrast lay on the flat plain of northern Yucatan away from water sources except cenote sinkholes. It had a shorter documented monarchy, but one which created spectacular architecture under the ruler Ukit Kan Lek Tok’ at the end of the eighth century AD, as Vargas de la Peña and her colleagues describe. Royal art embraced murals (Hurst) and sculpture (O'Neil), with hieroglyphic inscriptions announcing the marital and martial achievements of the rulers within the frame of an intricate calendar (Matsumoto and Carter; Alcover Firpi and Golden; Martin; Stuart). Altar 3 at Altar de los Reyes, with its enticing parade of Emblem Glyphs (Šprajc Reference Šprajc2004: 399–402), is a surprising absentee.
The cities were linked into a Maya oikumene by exchange networks extending far beyond the Maya area—to Teotihuacan and subsequently Tula (Sugiyama and Sugiyama; Ringle) and northwards to Nevada, one of the sources of turquoise; and south-east past Honduras (Schortman and Urban) to Panama, whence came gold ornaments. Andrews outlines what we know of ports and navigation, King our growing understanding of the marketplaces where local trade took place, Callaghan and Kovacevich the domestic multicrafting that supplied both peasantry and palace. Sanctuaries included caves, which, as Moyes shows, extended the community into communion with the earth deities.
The final section deals with the traditional ‘Collapse’, now a more nuanced ‘transformation’ (Yaeger), the Postclassic metropolis of Mayapan (Masson and Hare), survival and change among the Lacandon (Palka) and the drastic material changes seen in Yucatecan henequen haciendas (Hernández Álvarez et al.), matched by the impact of Colonial on Indigenous culture studied by McAnany et al. at Tahcabo. Classic Maya civilisation is long past, but the Maya survive.
