Maya miscitata.

Hammond, Norman

WENDY ASHMORE. Settlement archaeology at Quirigua, Guatemala. xvi+362 pages, 34 illustrations, 22 colour plates (on CD), 95 tables (further tables on CD). 2007. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology; 978-1931707-91-6 hardback $100.

THOMAS H. GUDERJAN. The nature of an ancient Maya city: resources, interaction, and power at Blue Creek, Belize. xii+170 pages, 40 illustrations, 5 tables. 2007. Tuscaloosa (AL): University of Alabama Press; 978-08173-5426-8 paperback.

TRAVIS W. STANTON & ALINE MAGNON1 (ed.). Ruins of the past: the use and perception of abandoned structures in the Maya Lowlands. xviii+364 pages, 101 illustrations. 2008. Boulder (CO): University Press of Colorado; 978-0-87081-888-2 hardback $60.

DAVID M. PENDERGAST & ANTHONY P. ANDREWS. (ed.). Reconstructing the past: studies in Mesoamerican and Central American prehistory (British Archaeological Reports International Series 1529). viii+ 158 pages, 106 illustrations, 5 tables. 2006. Oxford: John & Erica Hedges; 1-84171-751-7 paperback 40 [pounds sterling].

Rudyard Kipling's 1896 poem In the Neolithic Age ends with the lines 'There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays/ and--every--single --one--of--them--is--right'. More or less the same might be said of the variety of ways in which Maya archaeologists currently seek to share their work in publication: the four books considered here are all of different genres, but it would be difficult to say that any one was more useful than any other in putting the subject across. One is a professional monograph, the permanent record of data from a research project at an important Maya site as well as a consideration of what they mean; one is a popular book, clarifying the discoveries at another site and their importance, in terms understandable by a lay readership; one is the revised end-product of a symposium held some years ago at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), intended for professional consumption, combining new field data with theoretical considerations and speculations, within a fairly well-defined conceptual envelope; and one is an eclectic tribute to a dead colleague combining fieldwork reports with appreciation.

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Quirigua

Wendy Ashmore's highly professional monograph is the final updated publication of her 1981 PhD dissertation, as well as the fourth, and perhaps last, in the Quirigua publication series that reports on the University of Pennsylvania's work there in the mid-1970s. Ashmore notes that her fieldwork began in 1974, and this report was written thirty years later. She and Robert Sharer, the project director, (whose 1990 summary volume should be read as a complement to this one) are now to be congratulated on bringing the enterprise to a successful conclusion, and Ashmore on explaining this part of it in an interesting and accessible manner.

Quirigua is a small Maya site in south-eastern Guatemala with a single, very large, plaza in which stand the tallest and some of the most elaborate carved and inscribed stelae known. At its south end is an elite residence compound, a miniature palace, flanked by a ballcourt, a small pyramid and several more stunning monuments, notably the huge carved boulders designated Zoomorphs O and P, with their equally impressive altars. But that is pretty much it: there is no extensive public architecture, no large pyramids, only a swathe of surrounding settlement, the subject of Ashmore's research. In many ways Quirigua is the aggrandised manor-house of an arriviste, with the markers of his newly-acquired status displayed for his and his visitors' pleasure; certainly its florescence was brief and rapid--the monuments were dedicated at hot un (roughly five-year) intervals over a period of less than seven decades, and the most impressive were all commissioned in the long reign of K'ak' Tiliw' (AD 724-785) after he broke free from Copan's overlordship in AD 738. Among them is Stela E (Monument 5, AD 771), at 10.8m (35 feet) the tallest known Maya stela, carved from a long needle of greenish-brown sandy limestone, with the ruler portrayed on both wide sides in superscale, and long texts down the edges; this and the other monuments of the quarter-century from AD 761-785 (Stelae D, E and F and Zoomorphs B and G,) suggest the advent of a master sculptor with few peers in Maya history.

The Penn project defined a supporting periphery around Quirigua--initially almost 200 k[m.sup.2], but reduced on practical experience to half that--and then an outer area of the lower Motagua Valley (LMV). The latter was the subject of Edward Schortman's dissertation and subsequent (1993) monograph, while Ashmore's study looks at the inner support system for Quirigua's rulers, itself divided in survey into the settlement of a 10 [km.sup.2] zone around the site core and a less-intensively examined wider periphery of 85 [km.sup.2]. Somewhat less than half the book (160 pages) is exposition and discussion, the remaining 200 pages being Ashmore's database; there is also a CD-ROM with a further 200 pages of plates, plans, sections, and data from the wider periphery survey. Some frequendy discussed loci (for example the proposed feasting area of Plaza 3C-1) are difficult to locate on the small base maps.

As Ashmore notes in a usefu[ early chapter on the environment, the site lies on the banks of the Motagua, in an active flood plain, and much of the evidence was buried under later Quaternary alluvium. Ali but the most prominent features could only be accessed in the walls of drainage ditches cut for modern banana plantations, something that fortuitously happened in mid-project. Ashmore's wry account of how the initial ambitious Quirigua research design became modified by reality--including the 1976 earthquake--is a useful warning against initial over-theorising (sadly de rigueur for grant-obtaining purposes). She also usefully surveys how Maya settlement research has progressed since her fieldwork a generation ago, and as far as possible has integrated the recent results of work, especially at neighbouring Copan, into her monograph while also considering how lar theoretical notions of heterarchy, social memory, and Maya political dynamics might now be applied.

Her database embraces a hierarchical typology of features, mainly structures and pavements, and then assemblages of structures, organised in functional groupings. Ashmore's discussion advances from that of Tourtellot (1982) at Seibal, and brings into consideration typologies developed for neighbouring regions in the La Entrada valley, the LMV, and at Copan. This classification of the spatial dimension is followed by consideration of the time framework, the four centuries from roughly AD 400-800 during which Quirigua developed and declined: four building stages in the Acropolis (the elite residence compound) are confined mainly to the Late Classic, stages 3 and 2 seemingly marking the reign of K'ak' Tiliw', with a shift in ambition following his defeat of Waxaklajuun Ub'aah K'awil of Copan in AD 738 and Quirigua's consequent independence. Six Periphery Time Spans, the earliest from the Middle Pre-classic down to AD 400, the latest from c. AD 900-1840, are used to organise Ashmore's survey data. She calculates a population of around 1600 + 400, and suggests that Quirigua was an agricultural producer and exporter, citing some interesting parallels with our work at Nohmul on the Rio Hondo in northern Belize (Hammond etal. 1988: 485-92; Pyburn 1989). While our assumption twenty years ago was that Nohmul might have been shipping food upstream into the Peten on the basis of the high population densities proposed for that region--export in the other direction is also possible, as Guderjan (2008, reviewed below) suggests for Blue Creek, further upstream than Nohmul.

Quirigua's overall level of social complexity seems to have been a step or two down from that of its larger neighbour and former suzerain, Copan. The community was ideally positioned to control and benefit from trade down the Motagua, in obsidian from the Ixtepeque source on its way to the Caribbean coast, and in jade from the sources upstream near San Agustin Acasaguastlan, the only ones so far known in Mesoamerica. One surprising result of the Quirigua Project was the paucity of jade recovered: this aspect of a long-accepted model does not hold up. There is also little evidence that obsidian trade was controlled, rather than simply tapped into. Overall, Quirigua looks less like a mercantile node and more like an economic dependency of Copan until AD 738, and then a politically minor (though artistically innovative) independent state for sixty years or so, until rapprochement was reached with Copan early in the ninth century, not long before both polities disappear from the epigraphic record.

Blue Creek

Blue Creek, named for a local stream and Mennonite community, is a smallish Maya centre in northwestern Belize, sitting on a high escarpment overlooking the coastal plain, at an ecological and arguably political frontier. It lacks inscribed monuments, and during the Late Classic after AD 700 had been thought to be subordinate to the much larger city of La Milpa, a short distance to the southwest. Thomas Guderjan's decade and more of research at Blue Creek has however shown that it flourished during the preceding Early Classic (AD 300-600), when La Milpa was initially small (although with monuments) and later on almost abandoned. At this point, Blue Creek must have been a small independent polity, too far from either Rio Azul to the west or Lamanai to the east to fall within either of their ambits.

Guderjan's book is a welcome popular account of the site and his work at it, free of theorising and jargon, although the chapter titles suggest otherwise: 'Public Architecture, Ritual and Temporal Dynamics', followed by 'Spatial Arrangement' and 'Diversity of Power and Authority' might daunt the target audience. In fact, following an introduction that places Blue Creek in its spatial and temporal context, these three chapters outline the results of excavations in the site core and surrounding settlement area in a clear and instructive way.

Guderjan estimates the overall population at around 12 500 (about a quarter of that calculated for La Milpa), and in a chapter on agriculture notes upland dry farming, wetland drained field, hillside terracing, and dry sinkholes with rich soil accumulations (rejolladas) among the means of their support. He opposes Vernon Scarborough's model of centralised water control, although accepting Scarborough's identification of large and centrally-administered reservoirs at La Milpa (in fact, La Milpa seems, like Blue Creek, to have had a multiplicity of small domestic reservoirs, most of them recycled quarry hollows, together with some outlying large natural aguadas).

The chapter on trade deals almost exclusively with the procurement and use of jade: given the surprising amounts found--some 1350 pieces, of which 966 occurred in one Early Classic offering--this is not surprising, although some coverage of obsidian (also a low-bulk/high-value exotic), marine shell, and imported tools of other materials would have been both more useful and more balanced. This immoderate consumption of jade is similar to that at Altun Ha, some 60km east on the coast, and Guderjan notes some similarities in Late Classic architecture at Blue Creek to that site: the axis of influence may well have been ah east-west one, with Blue Creek oriented not towards its large neighbour at La Milpa, but autonomously outwards towards the coastal polities.

In the last two sections Guderjan addresses this question of independence, concluding (in my view correctly) that in spite of its small size, Blue Creek was probably self-governing. He also emphasises the cumulative impact of fourteen summer seasons' work at the site, during which the range of evidence and the conclusions that could be drawn from it shifted drastically. The Nature of an Ancient Maya City is a welcome summary of that decade and a half of work, a complement to the successive preliminary reports that have been issued, and a useful half-way stage towards the final monographs in which all of the evidence from this fascinating Maya centre can be addressed.

Ruins of the past

Stanton and Magnoni have drawn together in (presumably) revised and expanded form a series of papers on the reuse of Maya buildings, given at ah AAA meeting, which inevitably entails time-lapses between inspiration, presentation and publication. Wendy Ashmore notes in her preface that 'the themes underlying this volume have been around for some time'(p, xv); perhaps longer than she means, since some thirty-five years ago this reviewer, citing Crowther and Echenique's (1972) distinction between 'stock'--the buildings--and 'activities' which take place in them, noted that stock 'responds very slowly to the shifting demands of activities, since it is fixed and expensive to after, while activities may alter considerably in volume, kind and distribution over a short space of time ... the focus of administrative, economic and religious government ... may shift ... leaving behind the permanent architectural stock of the old order' (Hammond 1974: 318), a notion relevant to Stanton and Magnoni's observation (p. 10) that when reuse of structures is discussed, the pre-existing pattern is rarely integrated, although memory of prior use could in some cases influence the way in which reuse occurred.

Of their three Leitmotiven of landscape, place and memory, the last is the new arrival on the intellectual scene: a decade or so ago few of us were thinking in terms of 'social memory'. The deliberate curation of structures by enshrining them (as with the Russian-doll succession of ancestor-veneration buildings within Copan's Str. 10L-16, above the tomb of the dynastic founder K'inich Yax K'uk Mo': Bell et al. 2004) was recognised only after decades of regarding older structures as simply convenient cores for their successors whether or not valedictory and dedicatory offerings were found. Curation by continued access instead of burial (as with Quirigua Str. 1B-2 (Sharer 1978: 66) and noted for the tiny Guijarral Str. A-8 by Sullivan et al. in this volume (p. 102) was another inadequately understood phenomenon)). Abandonment as a terminal event was codified by the papers in Inomata and Webb (2003), but in this book (as Canuto and Andrews note in their closing summary) abandonment and reuse are innovatively advanced 'as a catalyst for the interpretation of specific sociocultural and historical contexts' (p. 259). We had realised that 'many vestiges of the ancient world became part of the natural environment' (p. 10): abandoned Classic period pyramids looked like natural hills, bur when fallen stelae were re-erected in front of them (see references in Hammond & Bobo 1994) we should perhaps have thought in terms of agency as well as atavism.

Examples used by the various contributors range from the Preclassic onwards; Hansen et al. note both quarrying and curation as afterlives of Middle Preclassic buildings at Nakbe, followed by a combination of some veneration in, and much ignoring of, the vast abandoned ceremonial precincts of Nakbe and El Mirador by the smaller populations of Late Classic resettlers who returned to the Mirador Basin after a hiatus of some centuries. Aspects of their behaviour do, however, suggest to Hansen et al. that the abandoned cities were recognised as ah ancestral homeland and the original seat of the later powerful Kan dynasty.

A similar recognition of ancestral potency is seen by Child and Golden at Piedras Negras, where the southern portion of the ceremonial precinct, where the earliest occupation had been, was refurbished by Classic rulers as their validating link to the past. Elsewhere in Mesoamerica we see similar ideas on a grander scale, from the Aztec mining of Tula for artefacts that would help create a cultural ancestry to the wholesale Aztec co-option of Teotihuacan as the place of their adopted deities. Such potency of place is recognised at El Peru-Waka by Navarro Farr et al., but in a negative way in which atavistic power was denied rather than co-opted; the same seems to be true for the Preclassic Str. G-103 at Rio Azul, noted by Sullivan et al., where this large building was buried and left strictly alone, and also, Canuto and Andrews suggest, the Northwest Group at Copan.

After abandonment by 'banishment', the term that Canuto and Andrews apply to such cases, or the more common abandonment by 'desertion', at many sites reuse may have been simpler than many contributors suggest: the former florescence of these Maya cities shows that they were founded in favourable locales--reuse for their natural advantages of resources and communications, without necessarily thinking about their prior inhabitants at all, is a position underconsidered here. It is also possible that both recognition and respect occurred, without impacting on the practical motives for resettlement.

The chapter by Manahan documents resettlement at Copan, in which an apparently intrusive population from elsewhere in Honduras set themselves up in a small area southwest of the Classic Acropolis and Great Plaza. They recycled sculpture from royal tombs and dwellings, as though to partake of the vanished glory, bur their domestic habits were different; they imported obsidian from Central Mexico in a pattern similar to that at Chichen Itza (whereas the Classic dynasty had relied almost entirely on the nearest source at Ixtepeque) and were clearly plugged in to a Mesoamerica-wide exchange system. Of more general importance, Manahan's work supports the thesis that Copan was abandoned shortly after AD 820, rather than having three centuries of epigonal occupation, which in turn has implications for the long-standing debate about the reliability of obsidian-hydration dating (see Braswell 1992 and Webster 1993).

Like many of the other chapters, Manahan offers solid archaeological data as well as a perspective on abandonment; that by Brown and Garber reports almost two millennia of continual rebuilding of Str. B1 at Blackman Eddy on the Belize River, a sacred place repeatedly resacralised. The editors, together with Scott Hutson, report on their own work at Chunchucmil, a largish Early Classic urban site in western Yucatan, some 20[km.sup.2] in area and remarkable for the preservation and visibility of its network of walls, defining house compounds, public spaces, and roads linking them, but without the large ceremonial precinct that might have been expected; the estimated peak population was 37 000 [+ or-] 6000. In the Late Classic the population shrank, then in the eighth century the site core was reoccupied with the construction of a dozen and a half large platforms, often with Puuc-style architecture and possibly each housing several families. These families lived among the ruins of the Early Classic city, rather as the people of medieval Rome dwelt amidst crumbled imperial splendour. The authors' concern does not end with the abandonment of the prehispanic community, but continues into the modern occupation by Mexican ejido farmers, and their perception of the past. A similar concern, spanning ancient occupation, ethnographic interpretation, and the distortions imposed by restoration for visitors, is articulated by Antonio Benavides C. for the site of Edzna, east of the city of Campeche, which combines massive (though barely visible at ground level) Preclassic water-management works with a Puuc-style ceremonial precinct where reconstruction and tourism development have been focused. Ruins of the past is more than the sum of its parts: it presents a lot of really useful material from recent projects on the way to discussing abandonment and reuse, and it foregrounds a hitherto neglected aspect of Maya archaeology.

Reconstructing the past

Reconstructing the past is a slightly odd, but useful book. It is an homenaje (the Latin American equivalent of a Festschrift), but while it bears a prominent dedication to Stanley H. Boggs, the late (died 1991) doyen of archaeology in El Salvador and a contributor to the volume (Chapter 11), the editors' introduction makes it clear that the essays were assembled in tribute to the late Hal C. Ball (1916-1984), and that the process of getting them together began not long after his death 22 years before eventual publication. In the interim, most of the authors have either retired or are on the verge of doing so, although apart from Boggs, all are still with us (including this reviewer).

Hal Ball was a retired Eastern Airlines pilot based in Miami, who developed an interest in the ancient Maya and from 1963 onwards used his own twin-engined Piper Apache, nicknamed El Quetzal, to fly down to Yucatan and Belize and visit Maya sites and their excavators. Many of us got used to being buzzed at low level, the first indication that Hal and his wife Alberta were there again, and would duly set off to the nearest airstrip to collect them. Hal was as skilful as he was fearless. He would then take us up to see our excavations from the air, and some of my most useful photos have been taken on stomach-wrenching turns above Cuello and Nohmul.

Hal's friendships were wide, and his knowledgeable interest widely respected (he was a founder of the Institute of Maya Studies at the Miami Museum of Science, and editor of its widely-read newsletter: his resignation in 1979 over the question of accepting looted antiquities engendered wide publicity and a change in Institute policy). Both he and Alberta had Maya sites named after them--Haltunbal in northwestern Belize, which they discovered, and Balberta in Guatemala, The contributors here, almost all American or US-based, are drawn from those whom Hal Bali helped: most of the papers had been in press well over a decade, and it would be fairest to their authors to understand their interpretations as dating to around 1990 (though some updated their then in-press references before publication). Thus R.E.W. Adams' paper on Maya militarism and Teotihuacan intrusion in the light of new evidence from Rio Azul includes his summary article of that year (Adams 1990) but none of the later lengthy monographs which detail his evidence.

Anthony Andrews, Antonio Benavides C., and Grant Jones report on the remote and early Spanish church at Ecab, the first official landing place on the Spanish Main, in the north-eastern corner of Yucatan, relocated from El Quetzal in 1973. Hernandez de Cordoba named the nearby prehispanic settlement, which he saw from his ship, 'Gran Cairo', something that until this report led to ah exaggerated idea of the community's size. The colonial town was abandoned by 1644, leaving the well-preserved sixteenth-century church and casa curial, which are recorded here (in an English version of Benavides C. & Andrews 1979).

The second paper is by Merle Green Robertson, now in her mid-nineties and the doyenne of Maya art history, famed for her work on the painted stuccoes of Palenque and her part in stimulating the decipherment of Maya writing through the Mesas Redondas de Palenque. Here she outlines a theory of colour symbolism (widely accepted in the years since this was written) at Palenque in which red was used for the flesh of human participants in the polychrome relief narratives, yellow (like the red, ochre-based) was associated with death and the underworld, and blue or blue-green with divinity and preciosity, both metaphorically and reflecting the colours of jade and quetzal feathers.

Hammond's contribution, submitted in 1988, introduces the notion of the Group Matrix into Maya archaeology as a way of compacting the combined data from a Harris Matrix and single-context planning, and describes in stratigraphic detail the crucial transition, in 400-300 BC at Cuello Platform 34, from an inward-looking private residential courtyard of the Maya late Middle Preclassic to an open raised temple platform of early Late Preclassic date; this episode, from excavations in 1987, was subsumed, in less detail, into the subsequent Cuello report (Hammond 1991).

Pendergast outlines patterns of cached offerings at the large Preclassic to Post-conquest Maya site of Lamanai; this usefully expands on Pendergast's 1981 summary of his early seasons there, complements Graham's (1987) outline of the Postclassic ceramic sequence, and is useful while we await the final reports. Lamanai's inhabitants seem to have been both idiosyncratic and parsimonious in their offerings: the most interesting are those deposited by the Maya in Spanish times, covertly resisting Catholic suppression of native practice. Stanley Loten's chapter, also based on work at Lamanai, reviews Maya temple types in formal terms, defining a 'Lamanai' type with a building set athwart the stairway, below the pyramid summit which remained open. Such 'Lamanai' temples are found in Belize at Caracol, Altun Ha, and Chau Hiix, he suggests, as well as in modified form in Yucatan.

E. Wyllys Andrew V looks at the iconography of so-called 'knuckledusters' on Gulf Coast and Highland sculptures of the Olmec and allied cultures, and argues that they are representations of cut Strombus shells, used as symbols of sacrifice and thus perhaps of regeneration. The late Stanley Boggs catalogues another set of sculptures, from the Pacific coast region and especially El Salvador, which seem likely to be Postclassic in date. His Balsamo Style includes rather crude squatting figures and tenoned heads, some of the latter of parrots or serpents, and is a useful addition to our knowledge of this Mesoamerican frontier zone. The same can be said of Karen Bruhns' essay, based on excavations at Cihuatan in El Salvador carried out in the 1970s, before the civil war interrupted archaeology. The household debris found in stripping domestic structures, and the employment of local ethnography to interpret it, is material less often considered intelligently, as here, than it should be.

Two chapters deal with experience rather than material culture: Ian Graham resurrects, from the Peabody Museum archives, the stresses of an early season at Copan in the late nineteenth century, and Elizabeth Graham muses on cultural and environmental conservation in the tropics. Pendergast and Andrews are to be commended for their persistence in bringing this tribute to Hal Bali to final fruition more than two decades after his death: in so doing, they and the authors underline their appreciation of Ball's qualities and his friendship.

References

ADAMS, R.E.W. 1990. Archaeological research at the lowland Maya city of Rio Azul, Latin American Antiquity 1: 23-41.

BELL, E.E., M.A. CANUTO & R.J. SHAP, ER (ed.). 2004. Understanding Early Classic Copan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

BENAVIDES CASTILLO, A. & A.P. ANDREWS. 1979. Ecab: poblado y provincia del siglo XVI en Yucatan (Cuadernos de los Centros Regionales). Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia.

BRASWELL, G.E. 1992. Obsidian-Hydration Dating, the Coner phase, and revisionist chronology at Copan, Honduras. Latin American Antiquity 3: 130-47.

CROWTHER, D. & M. ECHENIQUE. 1972. Development of a model of urban spatial structure, in L. Martin & L. March (ed.) Urban space and structures: 175-218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

GRAHAM, E.A. 1987. Terminal Classic to Early Historic vessel forms from Belize, in P.M. Rice & R.J. Sharer (ed.) Maya ceramics: papers from the 1985 Maya Ceramic Conference (BAR International Series 345): 73-98. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.

HAMMOND, N. 1974. The distribution of Late Classic Maya major ceremonial centers in the Central Area, in N. Hammond Mesoamerican archaeology: new approaches: 313-34. London: Duckworth & Austin: University of Texas Press.

--(ed.). 1991. Cuello: an early Maya community in Belize. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.

HAMMOND, N. & M.R. BOBO. 1994. Pilgrimage's last mile: late Maya monument veneration at La Milpa, Belize. World Archaeology 26: 19-34.

HAMMOND, N, L.J. KOSAKOWSKY, K.A. PYBURN, J. ROSE, J.C. STANEKO, S. DONAGHEY, M. HORTON, C. CLARK, C. GLEASON, D. MUYSKENS & T. ADDYMAN. 1988. The evolution of an ancient Maya city: Nohmul. National Geographic Research 4: 474-95.

INOMATA, T. & R.W. WEBB (ed.). 2003. The archaeology of settlement abandonment in Middle America. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

PENDERGAST, D.M. 1981. Lamanai, Belize: summary of excavation results, 1974-1980. Journal of Field Archaeology 8: 29-53.

PYBURN, K.A. 1989. Prehistoric Maya community and settlement at Nohmul, Belize (BAR International Series 509). Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.

SCHORTMAN, E. 1993. Archaeological investigations in the Lower Motagua Valley, Izabal, Guatemala (Quirigua Reports III). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology.

SHARER, R. J. 1978. Archaeology and history at Quirigua, Guatemala. Journal of Field Archaeology 5: 51-70.

--1990. Quirigua: a Classic Maya center and its sculptures. Durham (NC): Carolina Academic Press.

TOURTELLOT, G. 1982. Ancient Maya settlements at Seibal, Peten, Guatemala: peripheral survey and excavation. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge (MA). Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

WEBSTER, D.L. 1993. The Obsidian Hydration Dating Project at Copan: a regional approach and why it works. Latin American Antiquity 4: 303-24.

Norman Hammond, Department of Archaeology, Boston University, 675 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 002215-1406, USA (Email: ndch@bu.edu).