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Near the end of Breaking the Maya Code, Michael Coe (1992) describes a Dumbarton Oaks conference held in Washington D.C. during the fall of 1989. The conference dealt with the Classic Maya collapse and some of the more highly respected archaeologists working in the Maya area presented papers. The audience was full of other specialists, as well as what might be termed Maya "groupies," all present to hear the most recent pronouncements on the causes of the collapse of Maya civilization through much of the southern lowlands, beginning in the 9th century. Coe describes his disgust with the conference because a whole class of Maya experts was excluded from the program: epigraphers. He complains that one renowned scholar concerned with interpreting Maya art who was in the audience was treated with disrespect because she was not a "dirt archaeologist." Cae's dissatisfaction with the conference should strike a chord with researchers working on human skeletons from Maya sites. ThroughPreface out the two days of the conference, not a single presenter mentioned evidence relating to the collapse that could be found on human hones, despite almost two decades having passed since the publication of Frank Saul's (1972a) groundbreaking study of the skeletons of Altar de Sacrificios and the subsequent publication of many other papers, site report appendices, and book chapters. One presenter reportedly did plan to discuss demographic and pathological data pertaining to the collapse found in skeletons from Copan, but his presentation ran long and he skipped that part of his paper. Thus, when osteological data were not ignored by the participants , they were treated like site-report appendices , which is where much of the information about Maya skeletons from decades past is to be found. Frustration with the silence on the rich data set already in existence led one of us (Whittington ) to phone Frank Saul soon after the conference and suggest that it was time to organize a conference on Maya osteology. While Frank IX supported the idea in principle, other concerns quickly forced the abandonment of the notion indefinitely. A number of papers on Maya osteology were presented at the Society for American Archaeology 1993 annual meeting in St. Louis, but they were spread throughout all the days of the meeting and occurred in many different symposia , general sessions, and poster sessions. It was necessary to read the program and abstracts carefully in order to discover where and when there would be presentations on the subject . During the course of the meeting, the two of us (Whittington and Reed) ran into each other and began to discuss the idea of getting as many of the osteologists producing data today as possible together into a single symposium , something that had never been done before . It seemed clear after the St. Louis meeting that there were enough specialists studying diverse topics, from paleonutrition to mitochondrial DNA to artificial cranial deformation, to put together an exciting session at the next SAA meeting. The next meeting was held in April 1994 at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California. Partly because of the venue and partly to convey the excitement ofanswering significant questions about Maya civilization, the proposed name for the symposium was "Maya Bones!" The meeting organizers rejected that name and the title of the symposium became the lyrical "Recent Studies of Ancient Maya Skeletons." A sizable audience, especially given the early Sunday hour and unfortunate technical difficulties , came to hear 11 presentations by scholars and a discussion by Jane Buikstra. Those symposium papers form the core of this book. Since the meeting, and after presenting the book concept to the Smithsonian Institution Press, we decided to invite scholars from Mexico and Guatemala to submit papers, to add an introduction by David Webster putting x I Preface Maya osteology into the wider context of Maya archaeology, to ask Mark Cohen to synthesize the osteological data from the important Tipu project, to invite Virginia Massey and Gentry Steele to discuss the interesting skull pit at Colha, and to include an indexed bibliography of the first 150 years of Maya osteology. Owing to time restrictions of the original symposium and length restrictions of this book the work of many researchers, past and present, does not appear here, and for this we apologize. However , the indexed bibliography does list the publications, through the end of 1994, of those working in Maya osteology. We hope that archaeologists who read this book will be made more aware of the potential human skeletons have to...

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