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Excavations at Cerro Palenque, a hilltop site in the Ulua Valley of northwest Honduras, revolutionized scholars’ ideas about the Terminal Classic period (roughly ad 850–1050) of Maya history and about the way in which cultures of the southeast Maya periphery related to the Lowland Maya. In this pathfinding study, Rosemary Joyce combines archaeological data gleaned from site research in 1980–1983 with anthropological theory about the evolution of social power to reconstruct something of the culture and lifeways of the prehispanic inhabitants of Cerro Palenque.

Joyce organizes her study in a novel way. Rather than presenting each category of excavated material (ceramics, lithics, etc.) in a separate chapter, she integrates this data in discussions of what people did and where they did it, resulting in a reconstruction of social activity more than in a description of material culture.

Joyce’s findings indicate that the precolumbian elites of the Ulua Valley had very strong and diversified contacts with Lowland Maya culture, primarily through the Bay of Honduras, with far less contact with Copán in the Highlands. The elites used their contacts with these distant, powerful cultures to reinforce their difference from the people they ruled and the legitimacy of their privileged status. Indeed, their dependence on foreign contacts ultimately led to their downfall when their foreign partners reorganized their economic and social order during the Terminal Classic period.

Although archaeological research in the region has been undertaken since the 1890s, Cerro Palenque is the first full-length study of an Ulua Valley site ever published. Joyce’s pioneering approach—archaeological ethnography—will be of interest to scholars dealing with any prehistoric people whose material remains provide the only clues to their culture.

Gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica. Childhood training and ritual shaped, but did not set, adult gender, which could encompass third genders and alternative sexualities as well as "male" and "female." At the height of the Classic period, Maya rulers presented themselves as embodying the entire range of gender possibilities, from male through female, by wearing blended costumes and playing male and female roles in state ceremonies.

This landmark book offers the first comprehensive description and analysis of gender and power relations in prehispanic Mesoamerica from the Formative Period Olmec world (ca. 1500-500 BC) through the Postclassic Maya and Aztec societies of the sixteenth century AD. Using approaches from contemporary gender theory, Rosemary Joyce explores how Mesoamericans created human images to represent idealized notions of what it meant to be male and female and to depict proper gender roles. She then juxtaposes these images with archaeological evidence from burials, house sites, and body ornaments, which reveals that real gender roles were more fluid and variable than the stereotyped images suggest.

Materializing Ritual Practices explores the deep history of ritual practice in Mexico and Central America and the ways interdisciplinary research can be coordinated to illuminate how rituals create, destroy, and transform social relations.
 
Ritual action produces sequences of creation, destruction, and transformation, which involve a variety of materials that are active and agential. The materialities of ritual may persist at temporal scales long beyond the lives of humans or be as ephemeral as spoken words, music, and scents. In this book, archaeologists and ethnographers, including specialists in narrative, music, and ritual practice, explore the rhythms and materiality of rituals that accompany everyday actions, like the construction of houses, healing practices, and religious festivals, and that paced commemoration of rulers, ancestor veneration, and relations with spiritual beings in the past.
 
Connecting the kinds of observed material discursive practices that ethnographers witness to the sedimented practices from which archaeologists infer similar practices in the past, Materializing Ritual Practices addresses how specific materialities encourage repetition in ritual actions and, in other circumstances, resist changes to ritual sequences. The volume will be of interest to cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists with interests in Central America, ritual, materiality, and time.
 
Contributors: M. Charlotte Arnauld, Giovani Balam Caamal, Isaac Barrientos, Cedric Becquey, Johann Begel, Valeria Bellomia, Juan Carillo Gonzalez, Maire Chosson, Julien Hiquet, Katrina Kosyk, Olivier Le Guen, Maria Luisa Vasquez de Agredos Pascual, Alessandro Lupo, Philippe Nondedeo, Julie Patrois, Russel Sheptak, Valentina Vapnarsky, Francisca Zalaquett Rock
 

Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a preeminent student of the Maya, made many breakthroughs in deciphering Maya writing, particularly in demonstrating that the glyphs record the deeds of actual human beings, not gods or priests. This discovery opened the way for a history of the Maya, a monumental task that Proskouriakoff was engaged in before her death in 1985. Her work, Maya History, has been made ready for press by the able editorship of Rosemary Joyce.

Maya History reconstructs the Classic Maya period (roughly A.D. 250-900) from the glyphic record on stelae at numerous sites, including Altar de Sacrificios, Copan, Dos Pilas, Naranjo, Piedras Negras, Quirigua, Tikal, and Yaxchilan. Proskouriakoff traces the spread of governmental institutions from the central Peten, especially from Tikal, to other city-states by conquest and intermarriage. Thirteen line drawings of monuments and over three hundred original drawings of glyphs amplify the text.

Social Archaeology Futures brings together archaeologists from the Mediterranean, North America, and Latin America to consider what a “social archaeology” should be after the emergence of strong commitments to community engagement and ethical conduct in the field, establishing archaeology as a practice that both presents research and theories about people in the past and engages with people in the present to whom those findings matter. These rich narratives present a cutting-edge approach from established and emerging scholars, bridging the gap between the scholarly project of knowledge production and the social projects of care and repair.

What archaeologists say matters because they shape ideas about what is natural, what “past” led to the present, and how people’s identities took form. This leads to concerns with ethical approaches to representation, to amending the fractures archaeology has produced in previous periods, and to ensuring that communities that are sources of information also benefit from the knowledge produced. Contributors share an understanding of the historical development of social life as an outcome of the decisions and dispositions of living people. Reaching beyond archaeology to natural science, social science, humanities, and the arts, they demonstrate the continued and expanding relevance of archaeological work in transdisciplinary, not merely interdisciplinary, contexts.

Social Archaeology Futures broadens concepts around who counts as a participant in the archaeological process and what counts as archaeology, extending the understanding of the practice well beyond the idea of excavation and lab analysis to include community events, reconsideration of museum collections and archives, and engagement in storytelling. Social archaeology is the future of archaeology, making this volume of considerable interest to students, scholars, and general readers interested in anthropology, art history, heritage studies, and museum studies.