Bones of the Maya: Studies of Ancient Skeletons

Preface to the New Edition

Preface to the New Edition It has been more than eight years since the publication of Bones ofthe Maya. Some things have changed: The original edition of the book is out of print, and the Smithsonian Institution Press has gone out of business. The Web site described on p. 231, where updates to the bibliography of Maya osteology were being posted, no longer exists. The email address for Whittington listed on that page is also no longer valid. Whittington, Reed, and many of the chapter authors have changed jobs, graduated, or retired in the intervening years. Academe is populated by migrants. But not enough has changed. Our assessment in the 1997 preface that Maya osteology was on the threshold of coming of age may have been overly optimistic. It is indeed true that descriptions of osteological studies continue to appear regularly in journals and edited volumes -Maya scholars frequently cite the work of osteologists to support their theories, particularly those related to the Classic collapse. However, too many volumes about the Maya continue to appear without any discussion of skeletal analysis (e.g., Adams 1999; Lohse and Valdez 2004). Too few books devote significant space to Maya skeletal analysis, too few journals publish multiple papers by Maya osteologists in a single issue, and too many meetings of archaeologists and physical anthropologists pass without sessions devoted to Maya osteology . By and large, Maya skeletal studies continue to play supporting roles rather than take center stage. Yet this gloomy assessment is not without exceptions, and we would like to focus on some of them. Some books have been published since Bones of the Maya in which osteology is a central topic. Christine D. White edited Reconstructing Ancient Maya Diet (1999), in which eight out of 12 essays focused specifically on approaches to diet through paleopathology or chemical analysis of human bone. Although there is overlap between the authors contributing to that volume and those contributing to Bones of the Maya, White's book involves auXl11 thors, topics, and sites not in our book. Her focus is narrower than ours, but that makes it a valuable contribution to understanding the importance of what the Maya ate during the rise, collapse, and survival of their culture. C. Roger Nance, Stephen L. Whittington, and Barbara E. Borg devoted more than onethird of Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Iximche (2003) to a detailed analysis of burials and the human skeletons that came from them. The book centers on salvaging information gathered from excavations at the Kakchiquel Maya capita] and the first Spanish Colonial capital of Guatemala and shows both the potential of collections stored for decades and the irretrievable loss of data, which can occur when analysis is not performed during excavation or when storage conditions are inadequate. Analyses of the skeletons, many of which came from sacrificial victims, include physical indicators of trauma, infectious disease, diet, descriptions of cultural modifications of bones and teeth, genetic anomalies, and stable isotopes. This book remains one of the few recent studies of skeletons from highland or Late Postclassic sites. In 2002, Allan Maca organized a syrnposium entitled "Kings and Foreigners, Commoners and Kin: The Bioarchaeology of Copan, Honduras" at the 67th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Denver, Colorado. Many participants who were studying human skeletal remains from Copan came together for a stimulating session-including some who had not been working at the site in 1994 when we organized our "Recent Studies of Ancient Maya Skeletons" symposium at the 59th Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California. Jane E. Buikstra and Maca are in the final stage of editing a volume entitled The Bioarchaeology of Copan, Honduras that builds on the papers presented in Denver and promises to make a significant contribution to Maya osteology. Planned chapters focus on archaeology and conservation as well as case studies in bioarchaeology at Copan. A XIV Preface to the New Edition catalogue of all human bones from the site will be included on a CD as a digital appendix to the volume. Meanwhile, analyses of osteological data continue to contribute to a more complete understanding of the rise and fall of Maya polities , particularly Copan. Understanding Early Classic Copan (2004) includes a chapter by Jane E. Buikstra, T. Douglas Price, Lori E. Wright, and James A. Burton on seven interments from the Acropolis, three of which were royal individuals and some of which came from outside the Copan Valley. David Webster, AnnCorinne Freter, and Nancy Gonlin rely on skeletal data...