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3 Introduction Between 1914 and 1958 the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) sponsored extensive archaeological and other 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 universityorotherresearchprogramcouldmatch,then or since. The more than 300 publications produced by CIW researchers remain an important, indeed essential ,resourceformodernscholars.Some,however,have characterized the CIW program as barren and narrow, without any real anthropological purpose. Although there is some truth to such harsh critiques, these criticisms miss the essential contribution of the CIW. From its beginning, the program was designed to study a single civilization in its entirety from a variety of perspectives .Thisresearchproducedsignificantresultsthat have had an impact unmatched by more recent efforts. Information about the inception, progress, and results of various CIW-sponsored research programs was published annually in the CIW’s Year Books. Each annual report followed a standard format. An introductory essay prepared by the chair of the Historical Division summarized the general activities and accomplishments of the past year. This essay was usually followed by a series of authored reports on a variety of specific research projects. A final section would detailrecentCIWmonographsorotherseries,followed by a bibliography of publications by CIW researchers. These reports are remarkable for a number of reasons. They often provide detailed justification for projects and permit the reader to monitor the development of a research concept or direction. Many reports provide detailed information and primary data that was not subsequently published in other formats. This is especially true of the extensive ethnographic, linguistic, ethnohistorical, and some minor archaeological investigationscarriedoutundertheMayaresearchprogram . Taken as a body, these reports present the history of the CIW investigation of Maya civilization as well as the development of Maya archaeology as a scientific discipline. Introduction T H E C A R N E G I E M A Y A 3 4 INTRODUCTION This volume makes available once again the annual reports of the CIW Maya program, issued between 1914 and 1958, and originally published in the Year Books series. For historically minded readers the main contribution of these reports lies in the information presented on the development of Maya studies, from the unsystematic pursuit of adventurers, explorers , and crackpots, to the professionalization and formalization of a scientific pursuit. For the specialist in Maya archaeology and ethnography, these reports represent essential primary data not otherwise easily available. MAYASTUDIES BEFORE THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON When the CIW entered the field in 1914, the anthropological study of Mesoamerica was still at a formative stage. Although many fundamental changes in Mesoamerican research occurred during the middle and late nineteenth century, most of these contributions continued, as in earlier periods, to be textual and derived from research libraries (see later discussion on Brasseur de Bourbourg and Förstemann). Fieldwork remained of minor importance. Prior to this period, published archaeological studies were few and, almost without exception, were the work of Mexicans, such as the explorers of the Classic-period Maya site of Palenque (e.g., Guillermo Dupaix, José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, Antonio de León y Gama, and José Fernando Ramírez). Contributions of another kind came from the great travelers, led by John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, or from historians (e.g., William H. Prescott, Manuel Orozco y Berra, and Hubert H. Bancroft). A lively debate had raged earlier between scholars who tended to promote indigenous American civilizations and others who considered the American cultures barbaric, a legacy from the anti-indigenists of the Age of Reason. From the 1840s there began in the United States, under the leadership of Lewis Cass, Albert Gallatin, and others, a revisionist and anti-RomanticmovementstemmingfromWilliamRobertson ’s important The History of America (1777), which held that the aboriginal Americans were incapable of ever havingreachedahighculturallevel.Thosewhoshared these blatantly racist views wished to apply to Mesoamerican cultures the same conclusions they had come to in their work on North American Indians. By the 1880s the direction of Mesoamerican studies was altered significantly by a group of European and American scholars whose collective research would show that only after the careful study of all evidence could one hope to arrive at accurate conclusions without getting lost in a maze of speculation. This is when modern archaeological science began in Mesoamerica. These studies, which continued to appear until 1910, are diverse. There are bound together intellectually by their “scientific positivism,” a realism that rejects general theorizing in favor of a...

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