Maya Calendar Origins: Monuments, Mythistory, and the Materialization of Time by Prudence M. Rice (review)

The Latin Americanist, October 2008 an account of his reform program aimed at improving the lives of the exploited Maya majority: agrarian reform, education, suffrage for women, and temperance. She also discusses the activities of the resistance leagues (ligas de resistencia) employed by Carrillo Puerto as vehicles for popular mobilization in support of his policies. The memoir ends with a description of the De la Huerta revolt and of Carrillo Puerto’s death. The introduction by Schuessler, author of biographies of Elena Poniatowska and of other literary figures, provides an excellent narrative of Reed’s life and of his search for her memoir. Its major weakness is its failure to assess events in Yucatán in light of recent research by Gilbert M. Joseph and other historians of the revolution in that state. This is especially unfortunate since, as might be expected, Reed’s text offers only a glowing evaluation of everything related to Carrillo Puerto and his administration. To take but one example, the editor does not ask why Carrillo Puerto’s government crumbled so rapidly, a development that Joseph attributes to his reliance on traditional rural power brokers, who proved unreliable, and to the weakness of the resistance leagues, which turned out to be “paper tigers.” There are also several factual errors in the introduction and text that should have been corrected, such as Reed’s statement that Franklin D. Roosevelt was secretary of the navy in 1923. On a more positive note, the numerous photographs of Reed, Carrillo Puerto, and others that are interspersed throughout the book greatly enhance its appeal. Reed’s text should be a valuable source to historians of 1920s Yucatán and to those who study the history of Maya archaeology. It will surely add to the legend of Alma Reed, whose romance with Carrillo Puerto has already been the subject of two motion pictures. Helen Delpar, emerita University of Alabama MAYA CALENDAR ORIGINS: MONUMENTS, MYTHISTORY, AND THE MATERIALIZATION OF TIME. By Prudence M. Rice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007, p. 280, $27.95. On the winter solstice of 2012, thirteen b’ak’tuns—a total period of 1,872,000 days which began mid-August 3114 B.C.—will come to a close. To many of us, this holds about as much significance as the end of 1999 did, just a mildly significant turning of some numbers on a calendar. But for the Classic period Maya, time unified spiritual, political, and practical concerns into a sacred whole, a way of perceiving the world that continues to be felt in the communities of living Maya today for whom 2012 signifies the beginning of a new “Great Cycle.” To understand Maya calendrics is to gain insight into a sacred worldview that lies at the base of their cosmovisión. And, according to Prudence Rice, knowledge of the Maya calendars may help us reconstruct aspects of Classic Maya thought 100 Book Reviews otherwise indecipherable from the meager writings and incised stones that remain. Rice, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern Illinois Carbondale, published a similarly themed work in 2005 entitled Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos. This earlier work utilized data from a number of fields to support a hypothesis that lowland Maya in the Classic period relied on a 256-year cycle called the may as a fundamental ordering principle for their geopolitical organization. Maya Calendar Origins is a book that seeks to answer a concise, but eminently significant question: “When and how were the ideas and structures relating to time, the cosmos, and social order developed and integrated?” (1). In contrast to rather conservative estimates of Mesoamerican calendar origins that locate it in the Olmec culture of the mid-first millennium B.C., Rice believes a far earlier date is likely. She reasons that a concern for cycles of time goes back many millennia to the hunter-gatherers who crossed from Asia to the Americas and that the basis of the sophisticated calendars of the Maya had been established during the fourth and third millennia B.C. According to her, the conservative origin date can be pushed back at least a thousand years. By 1650-1500 B...