Reviews in Anthropology

ISSN: 0093-8157 (Print) 1556-3014 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/grva20

Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya

PAUL SULLIVAN

To cite this article: PAUL SULLIVAN (2014) Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya,
Reviews in Anthropology, 43:4, 260-281, DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.964061

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 Reviews in Anthropology, 43:260–281, 2014
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online
DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.964061

Anthropology and Ethnohistory

of the Maya

PAUL SULLIVAN

Hanks, William 2010. Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
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Jackson, Sarah 2013. Politics of the Maya Court: Hierarchy and Change in the Late
Classic Period. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Knowlton, Timothy 2010. Maya Creation Myths: Words and Worlds of the Chilam
Balam. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Miller, Mary, and Claudia Brittenham. 2013. The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court:
Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Palka, Joel. 2005. Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of

Indigenous Culture Change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Solari, Amara. 2013. Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in
Colonial Yucatan. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Stone, Andrea, and Marc Zender. 2011. Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to
Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. London: Thames and Hudson.

Anthropological, linguistic, historical, and archeological research

on the Maya proceeds today amidst public contestation, for polit-
ical and economic reasons, of the identity of Maya people and
the nature of Maya culture. Neo-liberal multiculturalism, struggles
over dwindling land and forest resources, the intensification of
international tourism, and the growth of pan-Maya movements
repeatedly raise the question of who and what is authentically
Maya. Our scholarship, while motivated by quite different con-
cerns and interests, unavoidably touches on similar issues in its

Address correspondence to Paul Sullivan, 256 Pearl Hill Road, Fitchburg, MA 01420, USA.
E-mail: p.r.sullivan@verizon.net

260
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 261

exploration of the forms and meanings of Maya expression, belief,

and ritual from ancient times to the present.

KEYWORDS Maya, mythology, hieroglyphics, Yucatan, multicul-

turalism

Do the Maya really exist? Is the word Maya properly used to describe any
contemporary or historical ethnic group? If the answer to either question is
yes, why do those Mayas not act more self-consciously as ‘‘Mayas’’? Why
do so many of them today deny that they actually are Maya? Dozens of books
and articles about Mayas are published each year in multiple languages, so
one might find it odd that these questions have vexed some Maya scholars
of late. It can get downright awkward for folks like myself who still write with
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some abandon about ‘‘Mayas.’’

Doubts about the validity of Maya as a category of humankind has been
raised most eagerly by some scholars of the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula.
Their qualms are well founded empirically. Most Maya of the peninsula have
chosen to call themselves mestizos, deny that they are Indians, and assert that
the true Mayas were those people who built temples and pyramids and died
out or disappeared underground at the time of the Spanish conquest
(Gabbert 2004; Hervik 2003; Castañeda and Fallaw 2004; Armstrong-Fumero
2013; Loewe 2011). This apparent disconnect between academic naming
practices and local identity preferences was present from the start of modern
anthropological study on the Yucatan Peninsula. But it has grown more
acutely embarrassing in the light of three developments over the last 30
years.
First, there rose a self-styled pan-Maya movement from the ashes of a
crushed insurgency in Guatemala and stalemated rebellion in Chiapas. Mayas
who had been recruited and organized to fight for their rights as workers and
peasants in a Marxist paradigm of armed struggle eventually turned instead to
non-violent means to advance their rights as indigenous people—as
‘‘Maya’’—still suffering under the vestiges of Spanish colonialism. But not
in Yucatan, where Mayas opted neither for armed struggle nor peaceful
ethnic mobilization. What is wrong with the Mayas there?
Jarred by their near-death experiences with popular revolt, national
elites in both Guatemala and Mexico reconsidered the ethnic and racial
premises of national unity and discovered the benefits of at least token
multi-culturalism. More than tokenism, perhaps, neo-liberal realignments of
governance and national economies dictated a retreat of elites from the
micromanagement of social and economic order, and a permissiveness
toward social and cultural diversity, so long as it did not threaten the existing
distribution of wealth and power. (Charles Hale has charted this movement
in most detail [2006].) Suddenly, it seemed, Mayas could be not only
 262 P. Sullivan

non-threatening but downright cool. In any event, many things Indian came
to be appreciated by international partners in multi-national economic
networks. So state- and business-sponsored Maya-appreciation initiatives
flourished on the Yucatan as much as anywhere else, only there without
the driving force and involvement of Mayas themselves. In Guatemala, Mayas
apparently joined such multi-cultural reform of the nation and the economy.
Why were the Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula holding back?
Finally, the international tourism industry has found the promotion of
things Maya to be profitable. The growth of their financial interest in
Maya-watching (even if just from the vantage point of Caribbean beaches)
shows no sign of abating. On the contrary, the nation-state’s interest in
promotion (to a point) of multi-culturalism, indigenous rights, and Maya
appreciation dovetails nicely with an expanding range of international tour-
ism from traditional sightseeing to eco-tourism, solidarity-tourism, and NGO
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work in Maya areas. Here the Yucatan Peninsula has been fertile ground,
though it suffers the lingering inconvenience of having so many Mayas as
yet unwilling to embrace their own Mayan-ness. That is changing only
slowly.
Such are the reasons, among others, for the recent spasm of scholarly
angst about the nature and validity of Maya as a cultural or ethnic category,
one so readily exploited and deformed by other national and international
actors for their own political and financial gain. The collection of books
reviewed in this essay do not directly engage that debate. Rather, they take
the discussion to its next logical step: If those about whom we write (describ-
ing present or historical people) are Maya, then what is or was truly Maya
about them? Each book here reviewed takes as the hallmark of Maya the
beliefs, language, practices, technologies, and so on of people on the Yuca-
tan Peninsula, the rest of the Maya lowlands and highlands before the arrival
of the Spaniards. So the question of Mayaness is less one of cultural essenti-
alism than it is a question of cultural survival. What is left of Mayaness among
the Mayas of today (or of the colonial period or early republican periods in
Mexico and Central America)? And by what complicated historical processes
were these elements of Mayaness retained, perhaps modified, and other ele-
ments discarded? Put that way, it can sound like an old scholarly issue—one
of cultural persistence, syncretism, change. But the approaches developed in
these books emerge from newer paradigms of cultural hegemony, resistance,
dialogism, habitus, and ethnogenesis, in a context, as described above, of
national and international promotion, for reasons political and economic,
of multi-culturalism.
William Hanks’ monumental work, Converting Words: Maya in the Age
of the Cross, is perhaps the most ambitious, systematic attempt yet to question
what of pre-Columbian Mayaness survived Spanish conquest and missioniz-
ing. This book represents a meticulously crafted rejoinder to Nancy Farriss’s
(1984) equally ambitious study of the Yucatec Maya under colonial rule.
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 263

Farriss had found that despite Spanish conquest and rule, Maya culture
survived, by which she meant that the evidence showed ‘‘the preservation
of a central core of concepts and principles’’ and the ‘‘persistence throughout
the colonial period and beyond of a cultural configuration . . . [that] remained
for all the transformations distinctively and identifiably Maya’’ (Farris 1984:
8–9). Hanks finds something quite different. Early Spanish missionaries
among the Maya doggedly pursued a ‘‘total project’’ aimed at remaking Maya
space, conduct, and language so as to transform the Maya people themselves
into Christian citizens of a new colonial social order. Transforming the
Yucatec Maya language was central to the project, and in that the missionaries
succeeded. Mayas survived, but only as ‘‘Maya in a particular way,’’ according
to Hanks (p. xvi). Hanks nods to the ‘‘dynamic fusing of elements’’ of Maya
and European that was fashioned over centuries after the Spanish conquest
that many other scholars have described. But the thrust of this important study
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is not about fusion or survival or resistance among the Maya, but, rather, about
the profound manner in which, by planting seeds of change in the Maya
language itself, Europe got into the heads of the Maya and altered them
forever.
Many have written about post-conquest programs for the reduction, or
reducción, of indigenous peoples in the early Spanish colonies. Indians were
congregated into a smaller number of larger settlements that could better be
overseen by Spanish authorities and missionaries. There they were subject to
regimens of production, taxation, tribute, and governance designed to estab-
lish order and extract wealth from the Crown’s new subjects. Hanks discusses
these elements of reducción of the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, and he
agrees with other Yucatecan scholars that such measures themselves had lit-
tle cultural consequence on the demographically dominant Indians (p. 50).
However, according to Hanks, those newly formed communities and social
structures created new ‘‘fields of communicative practices’’ within which
the meanings of Maya words and syntax were inexorably altered (p. 87).
As an anthropological linguist, William Hanks explores more thoroughly than
any scholar before the subtle and very consequential project of the reducción
of the Maya language itself.
The reduction of the Maya language first involved the destruction of an
entire ancient sector of Maya discourse—books of Maya hieroglyphic writing.
Spaniards burned what books they could find. Next came the creation of
new, improved works for the Maya and the missionaries charged with guid-
ing their reformation: Maya-Spanish dictionaries, grammars, and religious
tracts in Maya, including catechisms and sample sermons. Hanks provides
a brilliantly insightful introduction to and analysis of these materials. Most
of us scholars have long relied on some of these works as apparently trans-
parent (if sometimes limited and incorrect) descriptions of Maya as it was
spoken in the early colonial period. Other kinds of writing generated by mis-
sionaries for Mayas we have mostly just ignored, such as the excruciatingly
 264 P. Sullivan

obtuse and boring renderings of Christian prayers and basic points of doc-
trine into Yucatec Maya. Hanks’ analysis overlooks none of those materials
in a treatment too detailed and complex to summarize here. What Hanks sug-
gests, however, is that colonial dictionaries and grammars were not so much
descriptive works presenting the Yucatec Maya as very able missionaries had
found it. Rather, these new books were prescriptive works, in which linguis-
tically skilled missionaries shaped and presented a new Maya language for
deployment in still higher-level Maya-language writings (sermons, for
example) and, ultimately, for use by Mayas themselves.
One of the most common changes missionaries introduced, according
to Hanks, was to redefine pre-existing Maya expressions and integrate them
‘‘into a range of relatively fixed phrases indexically bound to Christian refer-
ents.’’ So, for example, the Maya word keban, which originally meant some-
thing like betrayal, was appropriated by missionaries in a variety of new
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expressions to refer to sin and to moral and emotional states associated with
sinning, confession, and absolution in accordance with Catholic thought.
Such manipulations of Maya and European signs were the opposite of syn-
cretism, Hanks notes. They did not produce the kind of European overlay
of surviving indigenous meanings that Mesoamerican scholars expect to find
(i.e., Virgin Mary images who are actually fronts for local indigenous god-
desses). Instead, they produced ‘‘indigenous signifiers paired with European
concepts’’ (p. 203). That is to say, words and expressions that continued to
look and sound like Maya came instead to convey European concepts, not
Maya ideas. This gets to the crux of Hanks’ overall argument—after the Span-
ish conquest, Maya often was not really Maya anymore.
First came the extirpation of the Mayas’ own books. Then came the
creation of new books. Then, goes Hanks’ analysis, Mayas were taught to
recite fragments of the new texts containing the new Maya: basic prayers,
proper responses to Catechism dialogs, and so forth. Rote recitation, over
and over again, was the key to the entire reshaping of Maya minds.
Prayers and other elements of Christian doctrine selected for Maya missio-
nization were modular, fragmentary, and easily dispersed into other gen-
res of Maya speaking. The spread of those bits and passages of new ways
of speaking throughout the Yucatan Peninsula ‘‘brought with it a correla-
tive dispersion of the meaning structures’’ that the missionaries had
encoded in them (p. 244). Hanks documents in vivid detail how Maya
scribes, trained to use the new Christianized Maya language, deployed
most immediately for the teaching of Catholic doctrine to the Mayas, in
turned used that language in drafting legal documents for civil authorities
under colonial rule. As Hanks put it, ‘‘the voices of prayer commingled
with the voices of rule’’ (p. 276). What is more—and this appears to bear
upon Hanks’ key purpose in writing this grand volume—the Maya lan-
guage the missionaries crafted drifted not only into secular use among
Maya of Yucatan’s colonial towns, but it penetrated as well into the outlaw
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 265

hinterlands and into furtive, forbidden genres of Maya expression such as

the Books of Chilam Balam.
The colonial-era Maya Books of Chilam Balam, filled as they are with
history, prophecy, myth, and more, have longed been mined by scholars
for insights into pre-conquest Maya religion and culture. Hanks’ work chal-
lenges such use of these seemingly Maya texts. These writings (forbidden
in their time by the Spanish) convey not just the content of pre-conquest
Maya codices salvaged in the new format of Maya written in a Latin script.
Rather, these colonial-era texts are thoroughly infiltrated by the influence
of Christian missionizing and, especially, the new ‘‘reduced’’ Maya language
that missionaries fashioned to promulgate Christian forms of thought and
behavior. The Books of Chilam Balam may provide scholars with an invalu-
able window upon the past, but what we in fact view is not the ancient Maya
past. It is the colonial past we see, including the seminal years of the Age of
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the Cross among the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Hanks does an exhaustive job of documenting and analyzing the early
missionary effort to transform Maya and, thereby, the Maya. The program
of the missionaries was laborious, ingenious, and ultimately—as Hanks
points out various times—self-propagating once an early generation of Maya
men learned to pray and write in the new language Franciscans had fash-
ioned for them. But did a change of language truly change the minds of
Maya, as Hanks suggests? On this question, scholars will continue to differ.
Hanks believes that the constant rote repetition of prayer, doctrine, and other
new texts in time engendered corresponding belief among the Maya (p. 281).
The fact that missionary-engineered expressions propagated far beyond the
orbit of their parishes in settled parts of Yucatan suggests that new beliefs did
also spread from Maya to Maya across the peninsula. However, right until the
very end of the colonial period, missionaries themselves remained plagued
by doubt as to how genuinely converted to Christianity the Maya were. Since
then, of course, scholars have eagerly taken up the search for Mayan survi-
vals hidden behind seemingly orthodox expressions of Christian doctrine,
ritual, and sacred history.
In her book, Maya Ideologies of the Sacred, Amara Solari also carefully
examines missionary practice among the Maya of Yucatan but comes to the
opposite conclusion from Hanks. Franciscan missionaries used Maya-built
structures for conversion. They knew Mayas considered their temples and
pyramids as powerful sacred places, and they sought to ‘‘usurp that sacrality
as a means of transferring native veneration to the Christian structure, religi-
on, and godhead’’ (p. 14). But the missionaries did not understand the nature
and depth of Maya views of their built and natural landscape. By reusing and
reshaping Maya buildings and towns for Christian purposes, Franciscans
inadvertently reinforced indigenous belief systems. Solari examines at length
the Franciscan use of Maya urban forms, particularly their use of the decrepit
but still sacred ancient pilgrimage site of Izamal to build their principal
 266 P. Sullivan

monastery and headquarters for the campaign to Christianize the indigenous

people of the Yucatan. Unbeknownst to the missionaries, Mayas held the
landscape to be animate, made from the body of a deity and endowed not
only with an identity but with a narrative history as well. Perhaps no place
in Yucatan was more steeped in such Maya histories as Izamal. Solari care-
fully reviews what can be known about Izamal’s pre-conquest religious
importance and how early missionaries came to choose that site to be the
Franciscan headquarters on the peninsula. She then observes that the
decision to erect Christian temples upon and amidst the ruins of Izamal led
inadvertently to the joining of the new Christian enterprise with a thousand
years of prior Maya sacred history, a history still evocative to the colonial-era
Maya.
Hanks had found that Mayas subjected to missionizing remained Maya,
but Maya only in a particular way. Solari turns that observation on its head, so
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to speak, to find that Mayas became Christians, sure enough, but Christian
only in a particular way. Drawing upon chapter-length discussions of a cre-
ation story and historical narrative in the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, and of
colonial-era cartography subtly influenced by Maya belief and practice, Solari
continues exploring the endurance and subversive character of the Maya
sense of place. Before the conquest they held that the earth had been formed
from the dead body of their god Oxlahun-ti-ku. After the conquest, the ter-
restrial corpse was conflated with the body of the crucified Christ, for
example (p. 70). What is more, Solari argues that a Maya ‘‘spatial ideology
was integral to the formation of community identity,’’ and that ‘‘this core spa-
tial conception singularly defined the Maya of Yucatan as a cohesive, cultural
unit distinct from the peninsula’s Spanish and Creole population’’ (p. 65).
This finding contradicts the view promoted most convincingly by historian
Matthew Restall that conquest-era Mayas lacked broad ethnic consciousness
and identified rather with their spatially limited communities called cah and
groups sharing a common patronym, chibal (Restall 1997). (To make his
case, Restall had to argue away a variety of instances in colonial-era texts
in which Mayas referred to themselves as, well, ‘‘maya.’’ He allowed, how-
ever, that over time in urban settings like Izamal where Mayas lived in
multi-racial settings, an implicit ethnic identity had slowly developed [Restall
2004:77].)
Solari’s work raises this awkward issue again, not by reference to Maya
use of the word maya but by careful examination of indigenous cartography
in the early colonial period. She finds that Maya identity and allegiances
evolved rather quickly during the first half century of Spanish rule, to the
point that it became ‘‘more firmly rooted in a more generic ‘Maya-ness,’’
based on broader ethnic, linguistic, or cultural associations’’ (p. 101). (Solari’s
reliance not only upon textual sources, but architectural, cartographic, and
other visual sources as well makes her book a particularly unique
contribution to colonial Maya studies.)
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 267

It is Solari’s contention that, for Mayas, abstract space was made

meaningful place through human action and through rituals that repeatedly
reenacted the original creation of the world beneath Maya feet. What is more,
colonial-era Maya recounted their narrative histories not as human action
structured in time, but, rather as human movement through space and
around, circle-wise, their meaningful landscapes. While European-Christian
history was structured upon an armature of sacred time, Maya-Christian his-
tory was erected upon armatures of place and spatial movement. Ultimately,
missionary efforts to subvert Maya thinking by manipulating Maya places
backfired, as Mayas refashioned Christian belief and practice to accommo-
date a more ancient ideology of the sacrality and animism of space and
the permanent linkage of present human action to the very origins of the
earth we share.
Much of the textual evidence for such assertions in Solari’s work comes
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from colonial-era Maya writings known as the Books of Chilam Balam.

(Solari drew heavily on the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, one of nine extant
manuscripts in this genre of colonial-era Maya discourse.) Many scholars like
Solari have plumbed these difficult compendiums of Maya history, prophecy,
myth, astrology, and more for insights into pre-conquest Maya culture and
for evidence that culture survived the crush of European conquest and colo-
nialism. The use of the Maya books is precisely why William Hanks targeted
them in his exposé of the deep Christian missionary influence upon the lan-
guage and ideas of colonial Mayas even as expressed in such forbidden writ-
ings. Timothy Knowlton’s new study, Maya Creation Myths, also turns to
those Books of Chilam Balam, translating and analyzing some of the most dif-
ficult passages in them. Knowlton’s work is exceptional and timely both for
the careful thoroughness of his translation of those difficult passages (many
have tried before with very mixed results) and for his clear and compelling
framing of that age-old problem: Are the ideas expressed in these texts really
Maya? The answer, for Knowlton, is yes. Sort of. Maya writers under colonial
rule generated creation stories that drew both upon traditions derived from
the Classic Maya of a thousand years earlier and from European sources,
as well. Maya writers engaged in a sustained dialogue with these two vastly
different traditions and gave rise thereby to a ‘‘heteroglot colonial world of
novel cultural categories and possibilities’’ (p. 6). For Knowlton, influenced
by Bakhtin, dialogue is key. He emphasizes again and again that the mythic
texts of the esoteric Maya Books of Chilam Balam were not ‘‘simply uncritical
borrowing or capitulation’’ to the onslaught of Christian missionary teaching,
but, rather, the product of a ‘‘dialogic process in rejoinder to literary sources
of both pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican and European cosmologies’’ (p. 93).
These texts were produced in accordance with the perspectives and needs
of a local Maya literary elite coping with conquest and colonization by the
Spaniards. Is this feature or that of colonial Maya cosmogony derived from
ancient Maya or from medieval European tradition? The answer is often,
 268 P. Sullivan

‘‘Both.’’ Elements of colonial-era Maya language changed to become, not

covert vehicles for propagating Christian concepts (á la Hanks), but
‘‘double-voiced,’’ and ‘‘capable of simultaneously expressing ‘heterodox’
Maya and ‘orthodox’ European understanding of divinity’’ (p. 100). So, for
example, when passages from the Chilam Balam mention the ‘‘Three-
Cornered Stone Grace,’’ we are supposed to understand the referent as
both the three hearthstones set in the firmament at the time of creation
according to Classical Maya mythology and as an image of the trinary
Christian divinity.
More precisely, colonial-era Maya readers were supposed to understand
such double-voiced meanings. We were not supposed to. We were not the
intended audience of Maya writers who did not want their writing to be clear
to the uninitiated. Hence the notorious difficulty of translating these texts
compared, even, to other well-known post-conquest Maya writings such as
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the Popol Vuh. The implicit, even hidden, meanings of these Maya writings
can be teased out partly, Knowlton demonstrates, by recourse to the intertex-
tuality of these myths with other contemporaneous Maya writings and rituals
(p. 101). Close comparison of related passages in different writings from the
colonial period helps hone his translation and interpretation. I would add
only that this kind of dedicated exploration of intertextuality should extend
not only to other Maya texts and practices of the time, but also, one would
hope, to the many efforts already made to translate these same Maya pas-
sages. Unfortunately, in one way Knowlton’s approach is like that of virtually
all other scholars who have tried to elucidate the meanings of the Books of
Chilam Balam. One translator after another declines to engage in dialogue or
carefully detailed dispute with other translators. Rather, for the most part
each new translator asserts that his or her new translation is simply better.
Period. Expectedly, this makes it hard for readers to know the reasons for dis-
putes among translators and provides poor basis for judging which transla-
tions are superior. Knowlton’s otherwise superb and groundbreaking work
suffers some from this common malady, and errors are introduced that might
otherwise have been avoided.
A single example of this common failing in Maya scholarship must suf-
fice. In one of the myths Knowlton translates, we learn that the god Bolon-ti-
ku captured the god Oxlahun-ti-ku, roughed him up rudely, and then did
something else, something that leads to the destruction of the world and
the subsequent creation of a new world with new plant life (p. 57–62). What
Bolon-ti-ku did was col the other god’s cangel and holsabac. Knowlton says
this means Bolon-ti-ku ‘‘tugged’’ on the other god’s ‘‘archangel’’ and removed
it from its station. The key to this passage for Knowlton is that cangel is a
colonial-era Maya rendering of the Spanish term arcangel. He goes on to
note that colonial-era Maya associated European angels with their own gods
of the four directions, including the rain gods. So in this instance what
Bolon-ti-ku did caused a rain god to be displaced from its proper place in
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 269

the sky, setting up the watery end to the world of that mythic time. For that
key identification of Maya cangel as Spanish arcangel, Knowlton simply cites
a personal communication from another scholar, one who did elsewhere use
modern ethnographic evidence to argue that colonial Maya in Yucatan came
to identify European archangels with their own rain gods of the four quarters
of the sky (Bricker and Miram 2002:78). However, yet another scholar dec-
ades ago argued at length in the footnotes to his translation of those same
passages from the Chilam Balam of Chumayel that in this instance cangel
meant ‘‘scepter’’ and holsabac referred to’’ ink’’ or ‘‘face paint’’ (Roys
1967:67, fn. 5, and p. 99, fn. 7). The evidence favors Roys, in my opinion:
Bolon-ti-ku despoiled the other god of his scepter and ink pot. The scepter,
as Roys argued, was a vestigial reference to the Maniken Scepter familiar to
ancient Maya scholars as a symbol of rulership and an icon of God K, a god
of rain and lightning and maize (Taube 1992:69–79). The passage Knowlton
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translated dealt not only with the onset of the world-ending flood after the
loss of the cangel, but also with the subsequent genesis of maize. Such reti-
cence to confront Roys’ alternative translation leaves readers largely unaware
of lingering disputes and unable to evaluate the discordant voices that are
speaking to us about these difficult Maya texts. (In her discussion of the same
myth from the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Amara Solari chose can-
gel ¼ arcangel from Knowlton and sabac ¼ ink from Roys [p. 61]. But why
those choices, she does not say.) I would urge future translators of Maya texts
to let their footnotes blossom.
That said, Knowlton nonetheless charts new paths for Maya scholars to
follow, in part, by bringing to the study of Maya texts a deeper grounding in
often obscure elements of Euro-Christian tradition. He is wrong about cangel
not being Maya, but he is persuasive at other points in arguing that some of
‘‘the most basic aspects of ‘traditional’ Maya cosmology are . . . objects of
indigenous expropriations of Euro-Christian ontological discourses with
meanings renegotiated in the context of colonial dialogue’’ (p. 125). Under-
standing that allows us better to fathom difficult Maya mythologies, and that
is important because, as Knowlton argues (and Solari promoted a similar
view in her book), ‘‘rather than simply isolated instances occurring in the dis-
tant past, the events of the cosmogony establish the basic human condition
and, by extension, those events that follow’’ (p. 151). That is to say, even long
after the conquest, Maya kept living, over and over again, but each time dif-
ferently, the events related in obscure texts that we struggle even today to
understand. To properly interpret those texts and to understand Mayas of
the colonial period or today, the implication is, it would help to understand
their original concepts of their own beginning.
New evidence concerning ancient Maya creation mythology recently
came to light with the discovery of the spectacular, two-thousand-year-old
murals of San Bartolo, Guatemala (Saturno et al. 2005; Taube et al. 2010).
The murals sport scenes of bloody births from broken gourds, auto-sacrifice
 270 P. Sullivan

before world trees in which exotic birds perch, ornately bejeweled women
assisting the maize god newly emerged from a cave. The scenes are as diffi-
cult to interpret, and every bit as obscure, as are the written mythologies of
the Books of Chilam Balam. Still, though these expressions of Maya creation
mythology—the murals and the texts—were separated by centuries in their
preparation, the study of each such body of Maya work can illuminate the
others.
The work of deciphering and interpreting ancient Maya expression has
fallen to two closely related classes of scholars. One class consists of the epi-
graphers who decipher Maya hieroglyphic writing and who have received
much-deserved popular attention for cracking the Maya code. Numerous
books published in just the past decade attest to the enormous progress
made in the decipherment of Maya writing, including its logographs (sym-
bols standing for words), syllabographs (symbols standing for sequences
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of consonants and vowels, used to spell out the sound of words), and gram-
mar (Coe and Stone 2001; Johnson 2013; Macri and Looper 2003; Macri and
Vail 2009; Montgomery 2002; Montgomery 2004; Wichmann 2004). The other
less well-known but equally important group of scholars are the iconogra-
phers and art historians who explicate ancient Maya imagery displayed in
murals, on painted vases, and carved in wood, stone, and bone. It is one
of the premises of a marvelous new volume by Andrea Stone and Marc Zen-
der, Reading Maya Art, that the two approaches to understanding ancient
Maya expression—decoding of the writing and interpretation of artwork—
cannot really be separated. The ancient Maya scribes were artists, too, and
vice versa. Hieroglyphs and short written texts jostle for space amidst natu-
ralistic figures in larger painted scenes, or march around the rims of Maya
bowls and vases. Much of the imagery in Maya art was meant literally to
be read for encoded information, according to Stone and Zender, who write
that ‘‘symbols populate Maya art with an intensity and flair not seen in any
other art tradition, and this is precisely why their art is so compelling and
worthy of our attention’’ (p. 7).
In this profusely illustrated volume, Stone and Zender present 100 com-
mon symbols found in the art of the Classic Maya (A.D. 250–900). Almost all
the symbols discussed are logographs, complex signs that stand for entire
words, of which there are some 560 found in Classic Maya writing and art
(Macri and Looper 2003:23). In an ancient image, a Maya lord sits on a
throne, but not just any throne: the throne is portrayed marked with a logo-
graph for ‘‘stone,’’ or ‘‘bones’’ or ‘‘soft material.’’ A mural shows a woman car-
rying a jar on her head, and the jar is inscribed with a logograph denoting the
color or exact nature of the contents of the jar. As the authors note, ‘‘Maya
iconography was a tour de force that could represent composition, color,
quality, texture, and even sounds and smells in a detailed visual and symbolic
language that correlated closely with speech’’ (p.15). If we are armed with a
book like this one, Maya murals and decorated vases can still be made to
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 271

speak to us. In this book each of 100 symbols (one per page, with one
accompanying page of illustrated examples) is ‘‘defined’’ but also discussed:
where the symbol likely came from, what other symbols does it commonly
accompany, what does it mean in different contexts, and how did meaning
change over time.
The authors prepared a 27-page introduction to their catalog of symbols
in which they briefly introduce the Maya, their ancient writing system, their
use of (writing-like) symbols in art, and the importance and complication of
metaphor for sorting among at times numerous possible meanings of a
painted scene. So rightly triumphant has the epigraphy school of ancient
Maya studies become (cf. Houston, Chinchilla, and Stuart 2001:3) that one
is not puzzled by the absence here of mention of the other school, the art
history approach, to interpreting Maya art. Not so very long ago one rep-
resentative of that school, Arthur Miller, argued cogently that Maya inscrip-
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tions and Maya art were two quite different things (A. Miller 1989). Maya
art was not writing, was not linear, and could not be ‘‘read.’’ Maya art was
multi-dimensional and its interpretation, unlike the decoding of written texts,
was completely dependent upon its positioning in a particular time and parti-
cular space. ‘‘Image,’’ he wrote, ‘‘tends to expand upon experience, whereas
text compresses it’’ (p. 180). The ancient Maya, he concluded, exploited two
different communicative modes—writing and imagery—to communicate dif-
ferent kinds of messages, and to understand those messages we will require
different modes of analysis and interpretation.
If this important new book by Stone and Zender is indicative, and I
think it is, Arthur Miller’s dictum—which was at that time far from contro-
versial in the broader scholarship on writing and art—has fallen on barren
soil in Maya studies. Stone and Zender believe that Maya art can, to a great
extent, be read. ‘‘The formal character of Maya art in its conceptual mode is
in lock step with the writing system’’ (p. 16). ‘‘Maya art and writing are essen-
tially linear ’’ (p. 17). ‘‘[I]mages often served as mnemonic devices for oral
recitations, and in this sense were probably read like texts’’ (p. 15). Pictures,
in fact, might supply narratives that complemented and extended infor-
mation provided in brief associated written texts (p. 16). The authors are
not here making a more general statement about art and writing systems else-
where in the world. Rather, they are suggesting that specific features of the
Maya writing system made it readily interact with art. For example, they
argue, ‘‘most of the [hieroglyphic] signs that make up the writing system have
evident pictorial origins,’’ the easier then for Maya artists to re-incorporate
them into pictures (p. 11). (This was only true, they note, of logographs,
though. Syllabographs, representing spoken combinations of consonants
and vowels, found much less use in pictorial art [p. 19].)
Despite bold attempts by a scholar or two to break out of the mold, for
the time being the interpretation of Maya art will be an act of decoding its
meanings much as epigraphers have done with linear hieroglyphic
 272 P. Sullivan

inscriptions. (Note Adam Herring’s masterful but unappreciated attempt to

escape that gilded cage [2005] and epigrapher Stephen Houston’s response
[2006].) Maya pictures have stories to tell, so scholars tell us, and we will lis-
ten to them. For now I find Stone and Zender very persuasive, not least
because their catalog of signs is not a simple, authoritative dictionary. That
would not do, for as the authors note, so many of the signs they present have
multiple meanings and were deployed in art metaphorically. ‘‘The extensive
use of metaphor requires that the viewer be educated in the Maya system of
metaphorical reference in order to grasp the imagery on all its levels’’ (p. 23).
Each page of this book is devoted to one sign, but the discussion of the
appearances, uses, and meanings of each single sign continually spirals out-
ward into myriad other realms of Maya art and life—until the reader turns the
page, a new sign is introduced, and new insights and new paths explored.
Reflections upon the difference and interplay of text and image in Maya
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art and writing is not completely passé. In fact, it’s been given new impetus
by publication of a major new work, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court:
Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak by art historians Mary Miller and
Claudia Brittenham (2013). Bonampak is a relatively small collection of
ancient Maya structures in the lowlands of Chiapas near the Usumacinta
River. In 1946 the world learned of a low, three-room building there whose
interior was completely covered with murals depicting sumptuously dressed
members of the royal Maya court engaged in music, dance, visiting, and sac-
rifice, as well as vivid scenes of woodland battle and the taking of captives. In
the estimate of the authors of this book, those murals represent ‘‘one of the
greatest paintings to survive from the first millennium of our era from any
part of the world’’ (p. xxii).
The discovery of the murals caused immediate stir among Maya aficio-
nados. The unmistakable imagery of the brutal chaos of battle and its cruel
aftermath in the torture and sacrifice of anguished prisoners made obvious
at a glance that the ancient Maya had not just been the peaceful, gifted star-
gazers and mathematicians popular archeology had built them up to be. That
had become obvious. Beyond that, however, the meaning of the murals
remained elusive. Three rooms provided 12 surfaces on which some 280
individuals were depicted, half to two-thirds life size, surrounded by about
a hundred short caption texts, with painted gods gazing down from the raf-
ters watching the scenes below. So many people, so many texts, it must all
tell the story of someone important doing something memorable. But just
who and what?
Mary Miller explored that question in an earlier book on the murals
(M. Miller 1986). This new volume substantially revises her previous view
of the story told in the paintings. That is in part because restorative work
on the murals in the 1980s and 1990s brought to light a great many additional
details not previously discernable through thick coatings of minerals and
grime deposited over a millennium of neglect. The present massive volume
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 273

is published in part to provide a new, complete record of the murals as

revealed now in hundreds of color and infrared photographs, line drawings
and sketches, close-ups of glyphic texts, and a full-color reconstruction of the
murals on three foldouts. (Comparable documentation of the murals with
color photographs only was published in a two-volume edition by the Centro
de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Méx-
ico [Staines 1998], which volumes the Centro has made available online.)
Mary Miller and Brittenham discuss the history of the various projects to
restore and document the murals and devote Chapter 2 of their book to
examining the artistry and architecture of the building. What can be inferred
concerning the planning of the mural project by ancient Maya artists? What is
the broad subject matter of the murals in each of the three rooms? How do
the techniques employed by the artists relate to what is known of the form
of Maya artistic and literary expression at other sites, and what can one infer
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about the training, interests, and identity of the artists?

In Chapter 3, the authors pivot to that perennial subject of the narrative
in the murals. What was it ancient Mayas had intended to say by spending so
much time and paint on the walls of what we now call Structure One? ‘‘From
the moment of the discovery, all eyes have been focused on the concept of
‘the’ story in the Bonampak murals, as if there were a single and coherent
strand that could be unraveled’’ (p. 63). In her earlier book, Mary Miller
had joined in making just such an assumption—that there was a single nar-
rative here, told more richly in image than possible in writing: ‘‘The paintings
of Bonampak may be,’’ she once wrote, ‘‘the only monumental works of
Maya art that surpass visually the narrative complexity of Maya writing’’
(M. Miller 2001:213). The master story of the murals evidently involved a lord
of Bonampak, Chan Muwaan, who, according to the longest text in the mur-
als, found in Room 1, presided over the inauguration of the building in 791
A.D. Chan Muwaan was portrayed in the murals as the most prominent of
several captors of the defeated enemy in the battle scene of Room 2. On
another wall in that room, he was shown again standing tall over crestfallen
prisoners who awaited the end of their tortures and the loss of their heads
and hearts. The courtly celebrations depicted in Room 3—elaborately cos-
tumed courtiers amidst dismembered enemy—seemed clearly to represent
a post-battle celebration back in Bonampak (cf. A. Miller 1989; Arellano
1998).
In this present volume, M. Miller and Brittenham, however, cast doubt
on the notion that the murals could contain any such a concisely narrated
story. Rather, they suggest, the murals present a series of vignettes of uncer-
tain or arbitrary order, depicting aspects of courtly life in complex ways
riddled with ambiguities, counter-narratives, silences, omissions, and unin-
tended meanings. And what of the written texts that go with the murals?
Do they not tell a story, or at least identify the actors and actions depicted?
It seems not, as according to the authors, ‘‘text and image are strikingly
 274 P. Sullivan

independent, convergent but only loosely related, leaving the task of

connection and interpretation to the viewer’’ (p. 68). A point to which the
authors turn again and again is that the murals were designed, as was the
architecture of the building itself, purposefully to draw the viewer into active
engagement with the imagery both as a whole and in its myriad parts. ‘‘Our
sense here is,’’ Miller and Brittenham write, ‘‘that the paintings were painted
in order to be inhabited, indeed, shared, and in this respect they exceed in sen-
sory potential any other surviving set of Mesoamerican monuments’’ (p. 94).
To this discussion of the text of the murals of Bonampak there is, one
suspects, a sub-text, the kind of silence between lines or absences in por-
trayals that the authors so eloquently highlight in their discussion of the
Bonampak murals. For some, including author Mary Miller, reading the terse
written texts of Bonampak was once quite important to interpreting the mur-
als, starting with the long inscription in Room 1 that appears to refer to and
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date the inauguration of the mural building. Scholars have differed on how to
read that date, with consequences for their overall interpretation of the sig-
nificance of Bonampak. Read that date much earlier, and the murals rep-
resent the pinnacle of ancient Maya artistry at the height of their golden
age, the Classic. Read the date as much later, and we have here a beautiful,
quixotic splash of artistic and calligraphic skill deployed on the walls of a
settlement about to be abandoned with the onset of the great Maya Collapse.
The most important inscription in the room with the battle scene provides
only an abbreviated date for the event, leaving its relationship to the other
scenes and the erection of the whole building in some dispute. (M. Miller
and Brittenham refer to some of these controversies, and one can find
additional discussion in Arellano 1998; M. Miller and Houston 1998; Pincemin
and Rosas 2005; Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006:247–150). By choosing
now to interpret text and image as relatively independent in the murals of
Bonampak, the authors reduce the vulnerability of their discussion to future
alternative decipherments of a few poorly preserved and little-understood
glyphs.
The murals of Bonampak are an image of the ancient Maya court on the
eve of its drawn-out collapse. The lavish portrayal of courtly pomp con-
cealed, the authors suggest, a bleak reality. In the last chapter to this volume
the authors explore the political context in which decisions were made to
erect the mural building, adorn its walls with expensive pigments, and por-
tray some scenes and individuals while ignoring or downplaying others. The
end of the eighth century was a time of both great political upheaval and
great artistic innovation and activity among the ancient Maya, especially
along the Usumacinta River where endemic warfare among rival cities
reached feverish intensity and population-induced environmental degradati-
on may have been by then well advanced. In part, the authors suggest, the
murals were designed to overlook the growing crisis and reassure viewers
of the continued wealth and normalcy of the royal court even while, they
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 275

note the evidence suggests, the wealth portrayed in art no longer existed in
fact, and the institutions of royalty itself were under challenge from within. In
other worlds, the rich court depicted in the murals may have been a
Potemkin village (M. Miller 2001:208).
The ancient muralists of Bonampak wanted viewers to see courtly life as
it once was, or as they or their patrons thought it should be. But how did the
ancient Maya think of the courts of their kings and nobles, source ultimately
of so much of the monumental architecture, hieroglyphic inscriptions,
painted walls, and pottery upon which scholars today rely to reconstruct
ancient realities? Answering that question is the endeavor of Sarah Jackson
in her book Politics of the Maya Court: Hierarchy and Change in the Late
Classic Period. Jackson plumbs documented hieroglyphic texts from any
and all sources to illuminate ancient Maya political hierarchy and the social
organization of the Maya court. More specifically, she identifies five titles that
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occur in classic Maya texts and which appear to designate members of a spe-
cial level, a higher level, of the Maya court below the more ancient and
supreme position of ‘‘holy lord,’’ k’uhul ahaw, the Maya ‘‘king.’’ These titles
stand out because they are all textually associated with an event that Maya
scholars call ‘‘accession’’—holders of these titles rise (actually, ‘‘sit’’ or are
‘‘knotted’’) to their special position within Maya society, and just when they
do is clearly dated in texts that Maya scribes wrote or carved about these
people at various points in their careers, or, often, after their deaths.
Previous work on the Maya court has also focused on these same offices
and titles, among others (cf. Houston and Stuart 2001; Houston and Inomata
2009:168–176; Reents-Budet 1998). Jackson provides in this book the most
complete collection of instances of such titles identified in Maya writing,
she provides numerous excellent illustrations of the relevant glyphs in con-
text, and she organizes and analyzes the distribution of title usage spatially
and temporally. The last is her most important contribution.
It is a source of some continuing embarrassment to the project of hiero-
glyphic decipherment that the meaning of deciphered glyphs can remain
stubbornly opaque, as is the case with the five noble titles Jackson and others
have identified. We know, for the most part, what the titles were. We just do
not know what they meant. Of the 221 tokens of these titles in Maya writing
that Jackson is able to identify, half are the title sajal, another third the title
ajk’uhuun. What sajal meant and what duties, if any, sajals had in Maya
courts (maybe authority over outlying settlements) remains uncertain. So,
too, for the second most common glyphic title, ajk’uhuun. Its meaning is
similarly opaque, and the decipherment of its glyphs remains in dispute
(Jackson and Stuart 2001). (After all, if a glyph decipherment produces a
word with no known meaning, one doubts the decipherment.) Jackson can-
not say with much certainty what the titles meant, nor whether they denoted
specific roles, duties, or prerogatives within Maya society. But she can show
that the usages of such noble titles exploded in the late Maya Classic—in
 276 P. Sullivan

response perhaps to burgeoning populations and to a reduction in the

centrality of power in the Maya royal court—and were especially common
in the so-called west of the Maya lowlands, along the Usumacinta River
and its tributaries where late classic period warfare raged between Maya
cities. Jackson further explores the significance of such noble titles by exam-
ining their appearance and combination within the lives of five individuals
for whom hieroglyphic texts provide mini-biographies of sorts.
From what Maya texts can tell us about the role of nobles in classic Maya
society, Jackson has wrung most possible insights, it seems. Pictures, how-
ever, can tell us still more, and Jackson joins others in turning to murals, car-
vings, and painted pots where ancient Maya showed titled nobles engaged in
things that apparently mattered: feasting, dancing, bearing tribute to the king,
drawing blood from their penises. None apparently are shown doing a lick of
other work, and maybe life for Maya nobles was, well, just plain good. For a
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while, at least.
The man who discovered the murals of Bonampak in 1946 had not gone
looking for ancient Maya art. He had been sent to film the Lacandon Indians
of lowland Chiapas. The world media that heralded the amazing archeologi-
cal discovery of that year also thrust into the global spotlight the Lacandon,
some of whom led outsiders directly to Bonampak. The Lacandon were not
new to Maya scholars and Mexican historians, but mid-century media hulla-
baloo was effective in promoting an idea that endures to this day: that the
Lacandon are the direct descendants of the ancient inhabitants of that forest
in which once flourished the great Maya civilization, the dwindling remnants
of the people who built Bonampak, Yaxchilan, Tikal, and the other ancient
Maya cities of the lowlands.
With his new book Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and
Archeology of Indigenous Culture Change, Joel Palka aims to dispel that myth
once and for all. The Lacandon Maya are no more directly descended from
the ancient Maya than any other contemporary Maya people, nor are they
‘‘relics of the age of the ancient Maya,’’ but, rather, the product of waves
of conquest, contact, and commerce from colonial times to the present (p.
3). Palka’s approach is three-pronged. He first summarizes at length the eth-
nohistorical literature on the Lancandon from colonial times through to the
early 20th century. Second, as Palka is an archeologist by training, he pre-
sents the findings of field surveys and excavations he conducted and super-
vised at several abandoned Lancandon settlements in Guatemala’s Peten
district. Third, Palka traces strands of culture and social change that evidently
make today’s Lacandon quite different from those of previous centuries.
This work of myth-bashing is relentless and effective. Ethnohistorical
research establishes that the Lacandon who lived along the Usumacinta River
and its tributaries in early colonial times were speakers of a Cholan Maya
language who were exterminated by the 18th century. Subsequently,
migrants, refugees, and fugitives from other Maya areas moved into the
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 277

empty lowlands, reconstituted themselves as a new, hybrid culture and

society (with a principal foundation in use of the Yucatec Maya language),
and got labeled by outsiders as ‘‘Lacandon.’’ These new Lacandon did not
live in blissful isolation in the forest, but were repeatedly subject to missioniz-
ing and to contact with merchants and lumbermen through the 18th and 19th
centuries. (Much of this ethnohistoric ground was amply covered in two
volumes by historian Jan de Vos [1988].) Palka’s archeological findings dem-
onstrate what the ethnohistorical record made very likely: Lacandon living
deep in the forest used imported metal tools, ceramics and glassware, while
still relying extensively on their own stone tools and cotton cloth for many
domestic purposes. The detritus of their old home sites revealed, according
to Palka, that these Lacandon had ‘‘common, extensive . . . long duration’’
interaction with outsiders (p. 183). And for that contact, they changed.
To one who expects usually to find cultural and social change among
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any people observed over centuries, these findings are hardly novel. (Pro-
nounced change among the Lancandon was already discussed in Bore-
manse’s earlier ethnography [1998:9–13].) But the Lacandon case is special
because, as Palka notes at the beginning of his book, the modern Lacandon
have long borne the weight of Western misconceptions about their primeval
nature and the notion that this dwindling people alone carry what is left of
ancient Maya culture.
The Lacandon have been dwindling for some time. Palka accepts that
the current population may number only four to six hundred (p. 95). He
argues that the 19th-century Lacandon were much more numerous—maybe
three to five thousand—but that is still not very many (p. 107). And just who
are these brave souls of the Maya forest? This is the issue that has vexed and
animated scholars and other observers. Palka’s book marshals much of the
evidence available, but still falls short of a cogent answer. The Lacandon
are a small population of people, derived from varied cultural and social ori-
gins, whose hybrid Maya culture has changed steadily over centuries of con-
tact with outsiders. Palka concludes that the Lacandon ‘‘largely remain in
their lowland communities, retain their language, perceive themselves to
be culturally and physically different from foreigners, and continue to self
identify as Hach Winik [True People]. They have also been given extensive
lands by the Mexican government. Thus, instead of succumbing to the final
conquest and assimilating, the Lacandon continue to retain their ethnicity
and pursue their lives as they, and not others, choose’’ (p. 292).
‘‘They have also been given extensive lands by the Mexican govern-
ment.’’ That simple observation conceals a whirlwind of controversy over
who the Lacandon are, regardless of how they self-identify. A decree by
the president of Mexico in 1972 granted to 66 Lacandon families control over
1.5 million acres of forest to the west of the Usumacinta River. The idea
apparently was that Lacandon representatives would then be free to sign tim-
ber contracts with favored Mexican companies, which they did, for the
 278 P. Sullivan

extraction of mahogany and other valuable woods (de Vos 2002:112–113;

Boremanse 1998:9). The presidential decree cruelly nullified by omission
the competing claims of thousands of other Mayas—Tzeltals and Chols—
who in previous decades had spread into the lowland forest to eke out liv-
ings from subsistence farming and the raising of livestock. That made those
spurned colonists all the more receptive to the proselytizing of Maoist orga-
nizers just then finding their way into the forest from the cities of central Mex-
ico (Tello Diaz 1995:59–62; de Vos 2002). Little by little discontent grew. The
discontented organized and trained. And finally it all erupted to world atten-
tion as the Zapatista uprising of 1994. Subsequent presidential orders greatly
modified the legal basis for land use in the Lacandon Forest, and even added
to the ‘‘Lacandon Community’’ numbers of Tzeltal and Chol Indians who had
established themselves in the forest. After an attack that left a village of rival
interlopers destroyed and inhabitants dead or dispersed, a communique from
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the ‘‘Lacandon Foundation’’ claimed the aggression was necessary to defend

the Lacandon forest from ruinous exploitation, and it further claimed that the
membership of the ‘‘Lacandon Community’’ legally entitled to live and work
in that forest had grown from the few who received the grant of forest in
1972 to almost eighty thousand by 2006 (de Vos 2010:227).
The question of who the Lacandon are is not just academic. Of course,
there can be no definitive answer to the question, as Palka’s book so clearly
demonstrates, and as events on the ground continue to demonstrate, some-
times in blood, with each passing year. So too with the larger question with
which this review commenced: Who were the Maya? Who today is really
Maya? Who can properly lay claim to the rights, benefits, and popular atten-
tion people bearing that label are poised to receive under today’s linked
regimes of national multi-culturalism, global NGOs, and international tourism?
Each of the books reviewed here, by linguists, art historians, iconographers,
anthropologists, archeologists, and historians broaches this question, which
in its crudest form (appropriate for dust jackets and editorial blurbs) can seem
like antiquated essentialism, a quest for the last, true, authentic Maya, as
though there ever was such a thing. It was not the purpose of the authors
of these books to re-fight those battles of a bygone era in the scholarship of
the indigenous peoples of the Americas. But the larger context, political,
economic, and media-saturated, into which our works are published con-
tinues to force the issue upon us, not least as Maya people themselves take
up the cause of finding, recovering, and promoting the true Maya among
themselves, the true Mayan-ness of themselves. In each of our respective
fields the histories of our disciplines, the nature of our methods and materials,
and the interests of our scholarly audiences will continue most powerfully to
shape our research and our publications. But each publication inevitably
enters then into a larger dialogue (like the colonial-era dialogues about which
Timothy Knowlton wrote that shaped Maya creation mythology) in which we
are important participants, but hardly privileged voices anymore.
 Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya 279

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 280 P. Sullivan

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PAUL SULLIVAN, independent scholar, is an anthropologist

who has studied the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula for 30
years. He is the author of Unfinished Conversations: Mayas
and Foreigners between Two Wars (Knopf, 1989) and Xuxub
Must Die: Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan Peninsula
(University of Pittsburgh, 2004). He is currently completing a
book on Yucatec Maya prophecy.