Revisiting Mayas, Revolutionizing Discovery

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• Revisiting Mayas, Revolutionizing Discovery
• Arturo Arias (bio)

Calculating Brilliance: An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich'en Itza
gerardo aldana
University of Arizona Press, 2022
464 pp. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 3, part 4: Yaxchilan
barbara w. fash, alexandre tokovinine, and ian graham, eds.
Harvard University Press, 2022
108 pp. The Maya: Lost Civilizations
megan e. o'neil
University of Chicago Press (Reaktion), 2022
296 pp. Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art
oswaldo chinchilla mazariegos, james a. doyle, and joanne pillsbury, eds.
Yale University Press, 2022
244 pp.

Simply leafing through the books reviewed here, I was immensely pleased to see the evidence that Maya scholarship has undergone radical transformations in the past few decades, thanks in large part to the discoveries made possible through LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, the decipherment of Maya glyphic writing, and the remarkable growth of ancient DNA research, such as the study evidencing how Chibcha migrants brought improved maize from the Andean region to Mesoamerica (Kenneth et al.). With these technologies, researchers have been able to locate structures and roads normally hidden away by the dense tropical rainforest canopy; to decipher Maya glyphs in their entirety, thus reconstructing their written history, mathematics, and astronomy, [End Page 443] which date back a few millennia; and to establish their genetic heritage, thus understanding better early migratory patterns throughout the Americas and interconnections between vast regions: Mesoamerica, the Andean highlands, and the Amazon. To make sense of connections between the archaeological past and present-day heritage within contemporary Maya communities, there is a need to understand the interconnectivity among hemispheric cultures previously considered isolated from each other in early Preclassical times (roughly 2,000–1,000 BCE), as well as—simplifying it somewhat in this claim to convey the sense of my argument—the extant continuity in Maya organization of sociopolitical territories, local communities, regions, and configuration of states.

The books included here exemplify the broad scope of these advancements in astronomy and the history of science (Aldana); linguistics (Fash and Tokovinine); archaeology, Maya art history, and the Late Postclassic period (Chinchilla, Doyle, and Pillsbury); and cultural history (O'Neil). Together, they undermine an old Eurocentric imposition whereby "Ancient Maya" were "good," while contemporary Mayas were racialized, infantilized, and reduced to the role of white male archaeologists' peons, and their bodies—smaller due to malnutrition—were represented as inherently deficient. These biases linger still as a phantasmatic echo in present-day news from the US-Mexico border.

Literary history is enriched not only when we understand those interconnections that integrate literature with other social science fields but also when these studies incorporate literature into a broader range of global history, thus evidencing how significant knowledge emerged in many corners of the world prior to modernity. Besides elucidating how art and technology surge as city-states grow as of the second millennium BCE, these factors help expose and dismantle racist stereotypes. Engaging literary history provides key perspectives on controversial transregional dynamics, such as those histories of Native Americans, First Nations, and the complex historical patterns that reduced them to stereotypical tropes of biological inferiority.

By contrast, the books reviewed here offer a new understanding of Maya culture that for the most part does not separate pre- from post-, though not always in an entirely satisfactory fashion. Because these works portray a continuous history from roughly 500 BCE to the present, readers can glimpse how most cultural traits ascribed to pre-Hispanic Mayas remain [End Page 444] current in contemporary Maya communities, despite their lack of social and economic empowerment due to half a millennium of state racism and segregationist policies. This analysis breaks the early twentieth-century settler colonial myth that powerful, culturally rich, and knowledge-empowered Mayas were a different people from those "tribes" conquered by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, an idea spread widely by early anthropology along with its admiration of "ancient" Mayas.

Gerardo Aldana's Calculating Brilliance: An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich'en Itza is exemplary in this new wave of Maya scholarship. Its richly detailed chapters provide innovative explanations regarding the role of synodic planetary periods and planetary events in the political and intellectual...