The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya

1
THE GROWTH OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC ARCHAEOLOGY
"I'm not particularly interested in ancient objects." This seemingly heretical statement for an archaeologist usually takes aback friends who believe that the best way to entertain me is to show me the local museum. On more than one occasion, I have had to explain that beautiful Classic Maya vases or finely carved jade pendants hold less interest to me--and to many of my colleagues--than the scientific investigation of ideas about why and how ancient cultures like the Maya developed. I do not have dreams of finding a fabulous burial chamber with hundreds of beautiful art objects, like a modern-day Howard Carter entering King Tut's tomb.
While I am impressed by those archaeologists who can look at a variety of objects and tell you their age, place of origin, and function, such activities are not the primary concern of many archaeologists, including myself. For us, the traditional "what," "where," and "when" questions of the archaeological enterprise are no longer ends in themselves, but have become means to answering the questions of "why" and "how." We want to understand what made an ancient people as they were, and we are eager to use all sorts of nontraditional methods to find out.
If you ask people on the street to picture an archaeologist, they are likely to describe a person digging in the middle of an excavation (probably dressed in khaki and wearing a pith helmet!) as dirt flies in all directions. But while contemporary archaeologists can often be found in the trenches, they are just as likely to be found seated at a computer terminal running multivariate analyses of distributions of artifacts found on a cave floor. Or they may be found hunched over binocular microscopes examining thin sections of prehistoric pottery sherds, or inspecting large satellite images for signs of early watercourses, or peering through high-tech, laser surveying instruments while mapping preindustrial urban centers. In attempts to link the material remains of a dead civilization with modern cultural activities, the graduate students who are studying with me are just as likely to be excavating in the house or yard of a modern Mexican peasant family as they are to be digging through an ancient Maya palace. Moreover, if you run into them on campus, they are as likely to be carrying a book on sampling strategies as on the Pre-Conquest Maya.
The practice of archaeology today is significantly different from that of just a few decades ago, not only in the battery of new hardware and sophisticated technical analyses now available, but in new approaches to interpreting the past and new methods of studying ancient remains. These differences are the result of a series of intellectual upheavals in the discipline of archaeology since the early 1960s. The importance of these upheavals has been so far-reaching that some scholars describe them as having revolutionized the field.
In the past two decades, the transformation in archaeology, coupled with a vastly increased data base from recent research projects, has changed our understanding of many of the peoples of the ancient world. One dramatic example is the radical alteration in the archaeology of the ancient Maya, the vanished civilization that existed on and near the Yucatán Peninsula in Precolumbian times. In recent years, important new research has revolutionized interpretations of the growth of ancient Maya civilization. Because of the drastic revision in our understanding of the ancient Maya, as well as the familiarity of the general public with some of the great achievements of that culture, the archaeology of the Maya provides an ideal case study of the shifts that the discipline has undergone all over the world in the past few decades.
THE CHANGING NATURE OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Archaeologists, both traditional and modern, have always begun their work by examining the artifacts and debris left by ancient civilizations. The accumulated remains of past cultures are known as the archaeological record; they range from large buildings and monuments through skeletons, tools, and jewelry to tiny chips of stone or pottery. Relying on the archaeological record as their only physical evidence, archaeologists try to reconstruct the development of dead civilizations--to draw a picture of the daily lives of their people, and how those lives changed through time.
Until recently, archaeologists were concerned above all with deciphering the function of artifacts and placing them in time and space. Suppose that an archaeologist was interested in a ceramic vessel. He or she would first ask, What is this ceramic vessel? What did the ancient people use it for? After careful reasoning, the archaeologist might decide it was a cooking pot. In this most fundamental yet treacherous task of archaeology, the archaeologist has taken a meaningless piece of material and given it a significance and purpose. He or she has taken the first step in interpreting a culture.
Traditional archaeologists would go on to ask, Where was the pot manufactured and when? If they were studying the ancient Maya, for example, the answer might be, along a stretch of the Pasión River in Guatemala between A.D. 300 and 600. After examining and reaching conclusions about a large number of artifacts, archaeologists would be in a position to tackle larger issues, such as, When and where did the Classic Maya civilization arise? Whether speaking of the simplest implement or an entire civilization, traditional archaeologists would still couch most questions in terms of "what," "where," and "when."
Modern archaeologists still ask these questions, but they don't stop there--the goals of archaeology today are far more ambitious. Beginning in the early 1960s, certain archaeologists, foremost among them Lewis R. Binford of the University of New Mexico, argued that archaeology should adopt the goal traditionally held by anthropologists of explaining the process of cultural change over long periods of time. Although lip service had been paid to anthropological goals prior to the early 1960s, little had been done to advance these ends, and theories of why cultures changed were either ignored or derided as speculation. Rather than focusing their attention just on the traditional "what," "where," and "when" questions that had dominated archaeological practice, scholars today agree on the need to zero in on the "why" and "how" questions of culture process. The shift in goals has been perhaps the most significant change giving rise to the "new" archaeology.
For Maya archaeologists, the recent attention to culture process means that instead of concentrating solely on particular artifacts and their place in time and space, they are now also investigating how Maya civilization flowered. Did it develop because of growing internal complexity or because of influences from more advanced neighbors? Did growing population cause internal conflicts, which in turn led to the more complex political organization needed to raise armies and build defensive structures? Or, on the other hand, did increasing political complexity come about because expanding long-distance trade required more sophisticated means of handling exchanges, production, and distribution?
Maya archaeologists excavating a site in the tropical lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula might find pieces of obsidian, a volcanic glass, in their trenches. In the past, they would have compared these artifacts with similar ones from other sites and inferred that their bladelike form with its sharp edges indicated that the artifacts probably were used for cutting. They also would have pointed out that the lack of volcanoes in the lowlands meant that the obsidian must have been traded into the site from the adjacent volcanic highlands.
Maya archaeologists today would go much further in their analyses. Using new chemical techniques, archaeologists can pinpoint exactly from where in the highlands the obsidian pieces derive. Depending on the specific research questions they are pursuing, they might carefully sift and screen the excavated earth in search of chipping debris that would reveal if finished tools were being traded or if the tools were being manufactured on site. They might examine the area of the discovery to see if the obsidian tools are found in domestic settings, and, if so, whether they are found only in elite residences or in peasant ones as well. They might measure the widths and lengths of the blades and compare them with ones from other lowland sites to see if the size of the blades changes with the distance from the highland source. They also might try to find out if these sizes changed over the years. These and other analyses might then be used to test different hypotheses about where the trade routes began and where they went, how they were controlled, and whether they changed through time. Allsuch research would be part of more general strategies aimed at understanding the nature of Maya civilization--in these cases, its economic or political aspects--and how and why it evolved over the centuries of its development.
As the new archaeology began questioning what factors were involved in the growth of cultural complexity, interest also grew in the role of the environment. The older "possibilism" had held the environment more or less constant in archaeological thinking--the environment was seen as "background" or the "setting" for cultural development. This view was replaced by a modified determinism that recognized the environment as a factor in cultural change.
To successfully broach "why" and "how" questions, the new archaeologists maintained that new views of culture were necessary. The traditional or normative view, which was derived from the perspective that dominated American cultural anthropology for most of this century, emphasized shared ideas. According to this view, all members of a culture shared an ideal mental template that they were taught as children. These shared ideas were expressed in cultural traits, and cultures were characterized by long lists of these traits. Such traits included the way pottery was made and decorated, the method for building houses, or the nature of the spiritual world and the deities populating it. The overall emphasis was on the homogeneity of cultures.
The new archaeologists argued that the normative view ignored or deemphasized the variability of culture. Moreover, its stress on ideas and mental templates made it difficult for archaeologists to employ. The new archaeologists championed a systems view of culture, which has rapidly won wide adoption among scholars. Following a minority strain of thought in cultural anthropology, they viewed culture as a system with different subsystems having changing adaptive roles through time. The technological subsystem, for example, would consist of the workers, tools, materials, and techniques linked with exploitation of the environment, while economic and political subsystems would be in charge of organizing such exploitation. The new archaeologists contended that one of the archaeologist's tasks was to correlate material remains with different cultural subsystems. Once archaeologists had identified different subsystems, they could attempt to understand how these subsystems were linked together. The advocates of a systems view maintained that instead of sharing culture, people participated in culture, and that they participated differently.
The adoption of a systems perspective of culture had immediate implications for archaeological methodology, because if cultures are not generally homogeneous, then the question of sampling becomes critical. Since it is usually not possible to study an entire site in detail, archaeologists perforce must examine only parts of sites--sometimes only small parts. If culture is conceived as being homogenous, it is not a critical matter where one excavates, because excavations anywhere at the site should produce similar materials. However, if archaeologists want to understand variability, then they must employ sampling strategies that will give them confidence that their sample is representative of the whole site.
If archaeologists plan to excavate a limited number of houses, for instance, they need to devise a sampling procedure that assures them that they are not missing out on an important class of house. On a finer scale, they cannot simply dig a pit in the middle of the remains of a house, but need to sample the interior and exterior of the house, as well as seemingly vacant areas adjacent. Fortunately, with the aid of computers, archaeologists today can use a variety of statistical techniques to grapple with the problems of sampling. Furthermore, such techniques help archaeologists recognize meaningful patterns in a confusing jumble of data. Analyses of this kind might reveal, for example, that small flint chips are consistently found off the back end of platforms supporting residential structures. After follow-up excavations, archaeologists might be able to infer that family workshops were located off-platform and that certain flint tools used in domestic activities were manufactured there. Excavations made solely within rooms or just on top of platforms would miss such potentially important patterns.
The new archaeologists defended all of these new initiatives as making procedures in the discipline more "scientific." In effect, they were arguing that the field had reached a dead end because it lacked rigorous methodologies--that is, useful, systematic research procedures. By the 1960s, field and laboratory techniques for obtaining data had become quite sophisticated and highly productive--archaeologists were now able to measure the age and composition of a wide range of artifacts and reconstruct changing environments in great detail. Yet some means was needed to combine these techniqueswithin a systematic set of procedures designed to answer specific questions. Researchers had to set out to solve clearly stated problems and then design a methodology for each problem. For example, if an archaeologist was interested in understanding how ancient peoples adapted to an environment, then he or she would need to employ a methodology that would show how peoples distributed themselves over the landscape and whether there were correlations between certain features of the landscape and features of the settlement. Sound methodologies would permit scholars to validate hypotheses unambiguously; no longer would an idea be judged according to the prestige of its proponents.
By the 1970s, it became clear to some scholars, such as Michael Schiffer of the University of Arizona and Lewis Binford, that one of the key methodological issues is how to link cultural activities of the past with the archaeological record of the present. What can piles of broken pottery or faded murals tell us about how a people lived? Two kinds of issues are involved here. One is the whole question of how the archaeological record--the remains on and beneath the ground that scholars view at the present moment--is formed and what transformations it undergoes between its original formation and the modern day. The archaeological record of today is not a direct reflection of ancient activities--the material remains of a past civilization have been altered both by natural processes such as the decay over time of wooden walls and thatched roofs and by cultural processes such as reuse by a later culture. Archaeologists may not find any cut stone around ancient Maya houses because modern peasants have removed these stones to use for walls or road bedding, or recent plowing might have destroyed some remains and rearranged others. Sites along river banks might become covered with alluvium that buries formerly visible artifacts. Surveys that do not dig below the surface might arrive at totally inaccurate conclusions about how ancient peoples exploited the river shore. Therefore, archaeologists must understand the kinds of transformations that the record might undergo from the time artifacts are discarded or a site is abandoned.
The second issue is how to link the present record with past behaviors in as unambiguous a fashion as possible. Archaeologists now believe that the archaeological record has no inherent meaning. A particular feature of the archaeological record, for instance, does not mean "house." Rather, the archaeologist of today sees a rectangular alignment of rocks and begins to look for clues as to what these rockscould have been. Finding that modern peasant houses have wooden walls and a single row of stones as a foundation, the archaeologist might infer based on analogy that the pattern of rocks is the remains of an ancient house built many centuries ago of mostly perishable materials. In other words, the modern archaeological record cannot "speak" to archaeologists as informants speak to ethnographers. Rather, archaeologists imbue the record with meaning. How they do this is the critical issue.
When traditional archaeologists had spotted a repeated feature of the archaeological record, they would usually assign a particular meaning to that feature by making an informal inference. For example, Maya archaeologists inferred that bounded open spaces in ceremonial centers were marketplaces. The inference was arrived at through analogy to modern Maya communities where markets are held in large plazas. This procedure had a fatal flaw: the inference was not investigated further, and after a while it became an assumption. What originally had been a tentative statement of the form "because x (a feature of the archaeological record) shares certain characterisitics with y (a known feature of the present), then other aspects of y can be inferred for x" turned into a given. In other words, a potential meaning derived from a tentative analogy became over time a stipulated "fact" of the record. More general inferences, such as"historic and modern Maya agriculturalists practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, therefore the ancient Maya did, too," also, through time, were accepted as facts. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, such "facts" are not facts at all since the inferences they were based on now appear to be unwarranted. When two archaeologists "saw" different "facts"--that is, recognized similar patterns in the archaeological record and offered different analogies to assign meaning--more often than not the scholar offering the interpretation would be judged rather than the rigor of his or her analogy.
Most archaeologists now recognize such procedures as unproductive and therefore unacceptable. Archaeologists today are searching for much more rigorous means to bridge the archaeological record and past activities--in particular, stronger and better analogies that attempt to link the static record with dynamic behavior. These analogies are no longer assumed to be true, but are subject to testing and validation.
Finally, along with clear goals, new perspectives on culture, modern field and laboratory techniques, and more rigorous methods, the new archaeologists have brought to the discipline a new optimism. Archaeology had long been regarded as a second-class citizen in the house of anthropology, able to explore only limited parts of the material world or peoples of the past because of the supposed inferiority of the archaeological data base. Time destroys many aspects of material culture, and in societies without written records, nonmaterial features of culture such as kinship terms or religious observances cannot be observed. The new archaeologists contended that with stronger, more explicit methods, they would be bound not by the limitations of the archaeological record but by the limitations of inferences. And, as inferences became better, so would the possibilities of testing hypotheses about how and why cultures develop over long periods of time. Although the data and methodologies archaeologists work with are different from those of ethnologists or cultural anthropologists who study the cultures of modern peoples, archaeologists potentially have just as good an opportunity to learn about the nature of culture change as their ethnological colleagues. In fact, with their long time perspective, archaeologists might even have some advantages over ethnologists, whose time scales are usually measured in months or years, not centuries or millennia.
In sum, archaeologists are now attempting to employ much more rigorous or "scientific" research procedures. Assumptions are being made explicit, research strategies are carefully delineated, and hypotheses are put forward in testable form. With such a methodological framework in place, older, intuitively based understandings are being challenged and either strengthened or replaced.
THE ANCIENT MAYA AS A CASE STUDY
"Tall temple-pyramids towering above a jungle canopy." "Long, multiroomed palaces looming over broad, open plazas." "Intricately carved stone monuments with stern-visaged, elaborately garbed figures surrounded by complex hieroglyphic inscriptions." These romantic visions might well come into the minds of knowledgeable readers and even professional archaeologists when the words "ancient Maya" are uttered. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the early intensive field research on the Maya, from the late nineteenth century to the middle of this century, concentrated on such obvious traits as temples and palaces and on the materials in tombs and caches found with the great architecture and the carved monuments.
The romantic image of the Maya was encouraged by their exotic location and distance in time. The heartland of Maya civilization lies in the lowlands of the modern countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. The lowlands are situated in the vast Yucatan Peninsula and the immediate surrounding area, and they cover approximately 390,000 square kilometers. Dense tropical rainforest or jungle cover most of the Southern Lowlands, while the Northern Lowlands are dominated by scrub forest. The distinct rainy season yields a high annual rainfall, with up to 400 centimeters falling each year in parts of the Southern Lowlands. Although rivers such as the Usumacinta on the western frontier of the lowlands and the New and Hondo in Belize played important roles in moving goods and peoples, much of the Maya realm is landlocked and must have seemed remote and inaccessible to most Westerners.
Another group of Maya lived in the vastly different environment of the highlands. This upland area is centered in modern Guatemala but stretches from the Chiapas highlands of Mexico in the north to the mountains of El Salvador in the south. Rugged volcanic peaks and high ranges separate valleys of differing size. The Maya of this upland area spoke languages related to those of the lowland Maya, but formed distinct cultural groupings.
The Maya had settled in the lowlands by 800 B.C., if not earlier, and flourished in various lowland regions until the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century A.D. Millions of Maya-speaking peoples thrive today in both the lowlands and highlands. Yet although some Maya traditions survived the Conquest, their modern culture is vastly different from that of Prehispanic times. In effect, the Conquest destroyed Maya civilization, and the Maya had to adapt to a radically altered cultural world.
Archaeologists traditionally have divided ancient Maya history into the three principal periods shown in the chart on the following page: the Preclassic (800 B.C. to A.D. 300), the Classic (A.D. 300 to 900), and the Postclassic (A.D. 900 to 1520). Each of these periods had distinct styles of ceramics and architecture. The Classic period, with its beautifully built temples and palaces, its intricately carved stelae with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and its elaborate polychrome pots, has been traditionally seen as the height of Maya civilization. The relatively modest agricultural villages of the Preclassic period lacked these impressive achievements, while the Postclassic period was a time of decline in the high artistic and architectural skills that had flourished during the Classic.
The early archaeologists focused on the impressive Classic monuments of Maya civilization; in so doing, they were emphasizing that civilization's elite features--those aspects of culture having to do with upper-class priests and rulers. This preoccupation with the upper class was very much in keeping with the mainstream of archaeological research in the Americas and was further fueled by the demands of museums for fine display materials--the products of elite culture. In the decades around World War II, the results of continuing field research were crystallized in a model of how Maya civilization functioned--a model that emphasized elite accomplishments. This model, particularly as expounded by the great Maya archaeologist J. Eric S. Thompson in his popular writings, gained widespread acceptance and has had much influence on archaeologists' thinking about the Maya until very recently. It is a view that tourists to Maya sites are still apt to hear from guides and read in the popular literature.
In the past three decades, however, new research has shown that many of the tenets of this "traditional model" are incorrect. In part, its mistaken views were the result of the relatively limited field data available until recently. But new data were not the only factor undermining the prevailing model of Maya civilization. New techniques, in both the field and the laboratory, and innovative methodologies also made available new kinds of information. In addition, the wide-scale attempts to make archaeological procedures more rigorous encouraged archaeologists to reinterpret existing data and threw light on evidence that had been ignored. As a result of this work, a broader, more encompassing model of Maya civilization has recently emerged in the archaeological literature. In the pages that follow, I will examine first the traditional model of Maya civilization and then the new model, showing how shifts in the science of archaeology have transformed our interpretation of lowland Maya civilization.

Copyright © 1990, 1994 by Jeremy A. Sabloff