Construction of Maya Space: Causeways, Walls, and Open Areas from Ancient to Modern Times

This volume aims to explore how “Maya people of the ancient past and more recent present connected and divided the spaces they used” through close attention to causeways, walls, rails, boundary markers, house lots, and features built inside caves (p. 3). The 14 chapters authored by 33 scholars from the United States, Mexico, and Canada, mostly archaeologists, focus almost entirely on Maya sites in Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Belize (rather than Guatemala, Chiapas, or Honduras). Notwithstanding its equally expansive temporal reach, the volume's principal focus is on the Classic and Postclassic periods. Two chapters draw on contemporary observation to elucidate earlier patterns of house lot use and demarcation, and two others consider railways and military fortifications in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Specialists in Maya archaeology will find much of interest. Several case studies highlight new developments in the study of intra- and intersite causeways, as scholars consider them not only as vehicles for geopolitical integration but also in terms of their economic and ritual functions, how they demarcated community spaces, and how they were conditioned on, and contributed to, systems of power, inequality, and exploitation. Chapters consider how walls, beyond the defensive functions that the field tends to emphasize, guide and channel social behavior; connect politics, ritual, and economic life; and spatially demarcate relations between sites inhabited and controlled by commoners and elite lineage groups. Two chapters stress cave archaeology's growing importance in Maya archaeology, emphasizing how caves expressed the cosmogonic features of Maya thought and were important in defining relations between people and between human and nonhuman actors. Students will find methodologically instructive the discussion of how recent technologies like lidar have transformed archaeological research, and they also will appreciate two chapters that stress how contemporary ethnographic and ecological observation of the built environment can enrich archaeological analysis by elucidating the meaning of similar ancient structures. Each chapter provides detailed morphological descriptions and illustrations of sites and features, and each is accompanied by an extensive bibliography of related scholarship, of particular value for specialists.Readers, like this reviewer, without an archaeological background but with an interest in Maya culture and history in more recent periods will also find much of value. To be sure, 12 out of 14 chapters are focused temporally on ancient Maya archaeology, undermining somewhat the volume's claim to consider Maya space “from ancient to modern times.” Nonetheless, ethnographers and historians of the more recent past will appreciate the editors’ call for an approach to the built environment that broaches “memory work” and “placemaking” in ways that attend to the “intent and agency” of Maya people (p. 8; emphasis in original), and in particular their suggestion to do so in ways that transcend the “simple dichotomy of connectivity and barriers” (p. 13). A few contributions will likely appeal to a more interdisciplinary readership, particularly Holley Moyes's excellent analysis (in the vein of Henri Lefebvre) of the “production of space” in ancient Maya cave sites—an archaeological study that also draws on ethnographic literature and iconography to provide a cultural, cosmological, and phenomenological analysis of caves as constructed environments. Other chapters provide interesting points of connection to spatial issues in modern or contemporary contexts: Jennifer Mathews's consideration of narrow-gauge Decauville railways as a form of commodity-production-driven modernizing infrastructure in the late nineteenth century, one she compares to recent train-centered development projects in Yucatán and Guatemala; Alejandra Badillo Sánchez's analysis of how military structures transformed rebel Maya territory into federally claimed territory at the twentieth century's turn; and Grace Lloyd Bascopé and Elias Alcocer Puerto's “ethnoecological” analysis of the vital, yet beleaguered, place of the traditional solar in one contemporary Yucatecan pueblo.Notwithstanding such modern and contemporary points of reference, this volume's ambitious temporal reach is somewhat problematic. The collection leapfrogs from the ancient Maya to the relatively recent past, jumping over the colonial and early national periods. As a result, critical questions relating to the impacts of colonialism, capitalism, and modern governance go unasked. What might the historical archaeology of roads, walls, house lots, and markers reveal about spatial aspects of Maya society under Spanish colonial rule, amid forced resettlement in reconstructed pueblos and towns, forced labor, religious missionizing, and related systems of control and surveillance? How might community titles and land litigation—typically containing abundant reference to boundary markers, and sometimes drafted in Maya by pueblo dwellers—provide historical archaeologists insights into the meaning of walls, markers, and lots for the Maya as they contended with the incursions of haciendas and with the sweeping mid to late nineteenth-century land titling and privatization measures? Do the postcolonial persistence of albarradas and markers in Maya pueblos and towns, the overlay of roads and procession routes over ancient causeways, pathways, and sacred sites, and the solares adjoining housing for indebted workers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century henequen haciendas reflect the colonial or capitalist incorporation of Maya constructions of space? Or does it reflect the Maya's active resistance, adaptation, or innovation in response to the strictures of colonialism, commodity capitalism, and class and racial subjugation?While covering such topics in detail might fall outside any single volume's scope, a concluding chapter or epilogue could have been a way to raise such questions. Even in the absence of that, this valuable volume provides generative interdisciplinary questions to explore in future research into Maya space, whether conducted by archaeologists, historians, or ethnographers.

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