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xix Between 1914 and 1958 the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) sponsored extensive archaeological , ethnographic, linguistic, historical, and other related investigations in the Maya region of southern Mexico and northern Central America. During these four decades, the CIW was the leader in the field, with monetary and human resources that no university or other research program could match, then or since. The more than 300 publications produced by CIW researchers remain important, indeed essential, resources for modern scholars. Asummary of the development and accomplishments of the CIW program in the Maya region is available elsewhere (Weeks and Hill 2006:1–26) and need not be repeated here. However, some historical background is necessary to properly contextualize the CIW Current Reports. The administration of the Carnegie Institution of Washington supported archaeological research in southern Mexico and northern Central America for some four decades following its initial approval of a proposal submitted by Sylvanus G. Morley. In 1937 Vannevar Bush replaced John C. Merriam as president of Carnegie Institution of Washington. Bush was a distinguished physicist and dean of the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s primary science advisor during World War II. He also served as chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (1939–1941), chairman of Roosevelt’s National Defense Research Committee (1940), and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (1941–1947). He provided oversight for some 200 defense-related ventures, including the development of nuclear fission and the Manhattan Project. Under his direction , CIW scientists became heavily involved in war work, and it was Bush’s idea of federally funding science that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Not surprisingly, Bush was no Introduction introduCtion xx supporter of more humanistic disciplines, including anthropology and archaeology. As Bush implemented his plan to close the CIW Department of Archaeology, department director Alfred V. Kidder proposed a number of potential final projects. One proposal asked the CIW to underwrite the cost of developing the use of radiocarbon dating for archaeology. This was followed by proposals to undertake a large longitudinal project at the Classic period Maya metropolis of Tikal, as well as a program that would divert attention from the Maya to relationships between the two major centers of civilization in the Americas, Mesoamerica and the Andes. None of these were accepted by the CIW, although excavations at Tikal were soon initiated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum with Edwin M. Shook, a CIW archaeologist, as Field Director. Despite these disappointments, however, Kidder was able to negotiate a final CIW field project in the Maya region of Mayapán. Mayapán: an aRchaeological site Mayapán is one of the largest Mayan archaeological sites dating to the Late Postclassic period (ca. AD 1200–1542), the period immediately preceding the Spanish conquest of the area. The site is located about fifty kilometers southeast of Merida, the capital of the southern Mexican State of Yucatán, and includes a nine-kilometer-long defensive wall enclosing an area of approximately 4.2 square kilometers . Within this area, the Maya constructed more than 4,000 buildings, most of which are residential. The site was densely populated with an estimated population of 10,000 to 15,000 people. The site appears to have been constructed and occupied during the 300 years before the arrival of the Spaniards. Mayapán figures prominently in the various Maya chronicles that were written shortly before the conquest. Together with Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, it was thought to have formed a confederacy that exercised control over most of the Yucatán peninsula following the period of Mexican invasion. This assessment is no longer tenable as Uxmal is known to have been abandoned about 300 years before Mayapán was founded, and Chichén Itzá was reduced to the status of a minor center during the time Mayapán flourished. Bishop Diego de Landa, in Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatán, gives a lengthy description of a Maya capital and describes it as concentrically having temples and plazas in the center, the houses of lords and priests around this center, then the houses of the most important people , and finally the houses of the lowest classes. Because the residential architecture corresponds to Bishop Diego de Landa’s sixteenth-century description of Maya houses, the identification of the residential structures is comparatively definite and precise. According to historical accounts, Mayapán was abandoned...

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