Mapping the ancient Maya has been going on for a surprisingly long time: the first distribution map seems to have been that of John Lloyd Stephens in 1841, who marked Copan, Quirigua, Utatlan, Tonina, Palenque and Uxmal, commenting on the unity of culture from Yucatan to Honduras. In 1843, his more detailed map of sites visited in Yucatan included those along the Puuc hills and extended to the Caribbean coast at Tulum. Walter Witschey and Clifford Brown quite rightly treat Stephens in this publication, as in many other aspects of Maya scholarship, as a pioneer and an innovator. They are innovators themselves, as Atlas of the ancient Maya world shows: it is the hard-copy version of an interactive and constantly developing free online resource, which uses Google Earth and ArcGIS, called Electronic Atlas of Ancient Maya Sites (EAAMS; http://www.famsi.org/research/MayaGIS/index.html), on which they have been working and publishing for the past quarter-century. In A3 format and weighing 2.4kg, this is definitely a desk book: in the field, the online version is better.
The chatty preface outlines the genesis of the project in New Orleans, “after a party in which alcohol was served” (p.ix), with the establishment of a GIS and the extraction of site loci from published sources. Beginning with Yucatan, Witschey and Brown moved south and then “decided to expand the project to the rest of the Maya area. It seemed a good idea at the time” (p.ix). In the Introduction to Maya civilisation, they note that “the answers to many of the most fundamental and profound questions about Maya society rely upon geographical data … regardless of your specific interests you should want to know where are the sites … where is the evidence” (p.xv).
Where Maya sites are is shown on 100 superb relief-background maps at 1:310 000, the red triangle site symbols graded by perceived site size, with caves and shell-middens separately marked. Sites with inscriptions, those with an Emblem Glyph (polity name) and those with defences are noted, as well as the extents of some settlement areas around centres and some lidar surveys. All of these fit in without overcrowding the maps, although in some densely populated places (such as the Mirador Basin in northern Guatemala and the Naco and Sula valleys in western Honduras) there are supplementary larger-scale maps at the end of the section. Coverage extends beyond the formal limits of the Maya Area, from the Olmec centre of La Venta on the Gulf of Mexico in the west to sites in the Chinandega province of Nicaragua in the east. Stephens’s 1841 and 1843 maps are appended in the book, also the 1940 Frans Blom and Oliver Ricketson’s Archaeological sites in the Maya Area (an update of their 1924 version), which was the last synoptic attempt before this one.
The achievement is impressive: background maps of physiography and soils show the overall scatter of sites, and one of modern political boundaries across six countries is a needful reminder. What is lacking on the 100-plus detailed maps is any indication of modern roads or settlement, so one would not know that ancient Tiho is buried under colonial Mérida, nor that Kaminaljuyú has been almost obliterated by Guatemala City. The gazetteer of named sites occupies 65 double-columned pages, followed by a further 18 pages of unnamed sites for which only co-ordinates are listed: the authors estimate that the locations of more than 10 000 sites have been documented. The bibliography runs to some 350 items; the seven-page thematic index is modest by comparison.
The overall distribution of known sites clearly follows the course of exploration over the past century or so: the density in the Mirador Basin reflects the work of Richard Hansen and his colleagues, that in the zone southwest of Mérida the efforts of the late Anthony Andrews and his Mexican colleagues, and the recently surveyed area southeast of Calakmul is the work of Ivan Šprajc and his Slovenian team. There are some odd lacunae, even where there is published coverage: in northern Belize, for example, a map in this journal (Hammond Reference Hammond1974: 179) half a century ago showed 53 Maya sites—the Atlas omits 16 of these.
Such minutiae apart, what is the audience for this splendid book (and the EAAMS website)? One answer is Maya archaeologists, obviously, who are best placed to evaluate the data. But the general and informative nature of the Introduction shows that the authors seek a wider readership. Those concerned with the relationship between natural landscape and human settlement and with ancient routes of commerce will also find a rich trove of ideas. As the authors note: “The scientific significance of the Atlas can only be appraised if one understands that [it] represents hypothesis-generating research rather than hypothesis-testing research … to permit and inspire the testing of myriad hypotheses and models” (pp.xvii–xviii). In this, it admirably succeeds.
