Maya household archaeology and settlement survey, then and now.

Yaeger, Jason

CYNTHIA ROBIN (ed.). Chan: an ancient Maya farming community, xix+393 pages, 66 illustrations, 21 tables. 2012. Gainesville: University Press of Florida; 978-08130-3983-1 hardback $79.95.

THOMAS F. BABCOCK. Utatlan: the constituted community of the K'iche' Maya of Q'umarkaj. xxxii+341 pages, 99 illustrations, 31 tables. 2012. Boulder: University Press of Colorado; Albany (NY): Institute for Mesoamerican Studies; 978-1-60732-154-5 hardback $75; 978-60732-155-2 ebook.

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Over the last 30 years, household archaeology and settlement survey have become essential components of most archaeological projects in Mesoamerica. The two books under review here demonstrate the enduring roles of these research domains for understanding ancient social and political organisation. At the same time, they show how much household archaeology and settlement survey have changed in the Maya area, both in their methods and in the questions we use them to address.

Chan: an ancient Maya farming community presents the results of a remarkable interdisciplinary project directed by Cynthia Robin at the site of Chan, Belize, from 2002 to 2009. The project's researchers included graduate students and established scholars who dedicated their energies and expertise to collectively address the role of farmers and farming communities in the history of Maya civilisation. Chan accomplishes this goal admirably through 14 empirically rich contributions, bracketed by an introduction and conclusion.

In the introduction, Robin sketches out the volume's theoretical framing, succinctly weaving together theories of practice and of everyday life; scholarship on farmers, small-holders and peasants from cultural anthropology; and household and community archaeology. She then contextualises Chan in terms of the local geography, culture history and prior research in the region.

The chapters that follow summarise the data recovered by the Chan Project. While space constraints understandably preclude full presentation of the data, the authors make their arguments robustly, thanks to close editing and excellent graphics that are simultaneously detailed and clear. The interested reader will be pleased to know that the data are available in much more detail in the project's annual reports, which are available online, and in the theses and dissertations written by project members. Of particular note is the way that the researchers couple cutting-edge methods like micro-artefact analysis, soil chemistry and taphonomy with traditional survey and excavation methods.

Robin's concluding chapter is especially valuable. First, she synthesises the data and arguments presented in the preceding chapters, arguing strongly that farmers played an essential role in shaping Maya civilisation and its technology, politics, economy and religion. Of greater interest, she then contextualises Chan and its 2000-year history within various frames and, in doing so, addresses key issues in Maya archaeology and the study of ancient complex societies more generally. Most salient of these is the relationship between hinterland households and communities on the one hand, and higher-order political institutions and the people who direct them on the other.

Many archaeologists today eschew top-down models of social change, asserting that hinterland populations actively shaped polity-wide institutions and the decisions of the ruling elite. While such claims are common, few projects have actually collected the rich data needed to convert these assertions into empirically supported arguments. The Chan Project is a welcome exception, and its members persuasively argue that farmers and leaders at Chan were able to exercise a high degree of autonomy in their daily lives, and that they actively shaped broader regional political and economic dynamics.

Thanks to the long history of research in this part of Belize, Robin can draw on data from other projects to complement the data from Chan and strengthen her arguments. At times, her conclusions run counter to previous interpretations of that data. In these cases, Robin engages with competing interpretations fairly and in detail, and she lays out her arguments in a logical and compelling manner. While not every reader will agree with all of Robin's conclusions, her concluding chapter is a fitting close to an excellent book. It is guaranteed to stimulate debate, and it will serve as a catalyst for future research, both in the Maya area and in other ancient complex societies world-wide.

Utatlan: the constituted community of the K'iche' Maya of Q'umarkaj presents settlement data from the K'iche' capital of Q'umarkaj (today, Utatlan), Guatemala. During the 1970s, a large multidisciplinary study of the Postclassic K'iche' kingdom included archaeological investigations of Q'umarkaj's monumental core, its second-tier communities and its residential sectors. The latter areas--greater Utatlan in Thomas Babcock's terms--were the topic of Babcock's dissertation research. Utatlan represents the first full publication of those data, and it provides much-needed contextualisation of the studies of Q'umarkaj's central zone.

Through survey and testing of the settlement zones on the plateaus and ridges surrounding Q'umarkaj, Babcock was able to establish the size and internal organisation of greater Utatlan. These data allow him to advance several arguments regarding Utatlans urban character and organisation. He interprets statistically significant differences in ceramic densities between spatially delimited settlement zones as an indicator of differential occupational intensity. Through a subsequent cluster analysis of the spatial distribution of various ceramic wares, he argues that some zones were occupied by groups of different social status. The sceptical reader will ask whether these differences might be artefacts of sampling, but the patterns are intriguing nevertheless, suggesting at least three social groups. These plausibly relate to K'iche' groups described in colonial documents: the ruling elite living in Q'umarkaj itself; non-ruling elite engaged in crafting and military activities living in higher status sectors in greater Utatlan; and commoners.

Babcock's work largely follows and corroborates the history of the K'iche' people as derived from colonial Mayan documents like the Popol Vuj and archaeological evidence. For example, an elaborate tomb complex in the greater Utatlan area dates roughly to the time when the first K'iche' royal lineages are said to have arrived at Utatlan. Paradoxically, however, he finds evidence of settlement in the region that predated the putative arrival of the K'iche' by over 500 years. Unfortunately, the larger implications of this interesting contradiction go underdeveloped.

Utatlan has its origins in a dissertation completed in 1980, and this is evident at times. For example, it follows a classic dissertation format, which introduces unnecessary redundancies. Furthermore, the line drawings lack the clarity of today's computer-generated illustrations. While the graphics may be somewhat dated, Babcock has gone to lengths to engage with contemporary debates in anthropological archaeology about the archaeology of communities, urbanism and political organisation, as well as local debates about the origins of the K'iche' ruling lineages and the nature of the K'iche' state. He is to be commended for immersing himself in these bodies of literature, but readers studying these topics will find key sources absent and, despite the author's best efforts, the implications of this mote recent literature for his interpretations of greater Utatlan are sometimes underdeveloped. In many ways, this is not the author's fault; rather it is due to the fact that the greater Utatlan research was conceived 35 years ago, at a time when archaeologists were asking different questions and answering them using a different epistemology. Thus the data presented in Utatlan are not always well-suited to address contemporary questions in detail. Tacitly acknowledging this, Babcock indicates ways in which the data and interpretations he presents could serve as catalysts for future investigations of ancient communities, Maya urbanism and the relationships between different social status groups. In this regard, Utatlan provides a window into Maya household archaeology and settlement survey when they were in their infancy; Chan is a tour de force that shows how those research domains have matured and how productive they can be for understanding Maya civilisation.

Jason Yaeger, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA