Jon M. Weeks & Jane A. Hill (ed.). The Carnegie Maya: the Carnegie Institution of Washington Maya Research Program, 1913-1957.

Hammond, Norman

JON M. WEEKS & JANE A. HILL (ed.). The Carnegie Maya: the Carnegie Institution of Washington Maya Research Program, 1913-1957. xx+804 pages, 23 figures, 44 tables, CD-ROM. 2006. Boulder (CO): University Press of Colorado; 978-0-87081-833-2 hardback with CD-ROM $275; 978-0-87081-8349 CD-ROM only $200.

In 1913, the young Sylvanus Morley put an ambitious proposal to the Carnegie Institution of Washington. His plan was to investigate the Maya civilisation of Central America, concentrating on the great site of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, brought to recent notoriety by Edward H. Thompson's dredging for treasure in the Sacred Cenote (or waterhole). The Carnegie Institution accepted, but strained relations between Mexico and the United States following the Mexican revolution of 1910 led to work at Chichen Itza being shelved for a decade.

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Morley, who had already worked at Quirigua, with its towering stelae, and visited other Maya sites, suggested that meanwhile he should conduct expeditions into the jungles of Peten and Yucatan in search of inscribed and dated monuments. These stelae, tall stone pillars usually bearing the image of a Maya king, often used the Maya Long Count, a calendar with a base date in 3114 BC and precise to a single day. The Maya calendar had been correlated with the Gregorian in 1900 by Joseph T. Goodman, placing the Classic Period between AD 300 and 900. Morley's ambition was to establish an overall chronology of Maya cities: in 1914 the 'non-calendric glyphs' were thought to encode astronomical and astrological materials--few scholars, certainly not Morley, believed that they contained secular history.

From 1916 onwards he led a succession of Carnegie expeditions in search of dated stelae, and enrolled the chicleros--chewing-gum gatherers--in Peten with placards that said iOjo!iOjo!iOjo!--'look! look! look!'--offering $25.00 in gold for being led to a site with inscribed monuments. Morley hit pay dirt in his first season, finding Uaxactun with its Stela 9, the oldest monument then known. Uaxactun later became a laboratory for studying all aspects of a Maya city, including the dissection of the A-V palace complex and the discovery of the Preclassic Mamom and Chicanel periods, estimated (with surprising accuracy) to go back to 600 BC. Structure E-VII-Sub was the first exposed Preclassic building, and the Uaxactun ceramic sequence became the yardstick for lowland Maya chronology. An impressive series of monographs published this work, and that eventually begun at Chichen Itza.

Both projects ran for more than a decade, employing a staff of competent field archaeologists more concerned with accurate data-collection than with theoretical musings, and their publications are still immensely useful today. The view of the Ancient Maya that dominated the field for the middle decades of the last century, concentrating on temples, tombs and elite culture, was the product of the Carnegie programme.

A major development was the appointment of Alfred V. Kidder as head of the Division of Historical Research in 1929, who initiated a pan-scientific research agenda which greatly enlarged on Morley's vision and persisted through the final Carnegie project, at Mayapan in the 1950s. The Carnegie had two principles that made its Mesoamerican work easier: it did not collect, all artefacts remaining in their countries of origin, and it promised to restore excavated buildings, initiating Maya archaeotourism, notably at Chichen Itza.

All the time short reports were being generated and published in the Carnegie's Year Books, which embraced the whole of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's work, not just that of its Maya projects. The present compilation (which comes with a searchable CD-ROM tucked in the back, also available by itself for those who don't need hard copy) brings these scattered sections together, so that we see a coherent picture of Carnegie Maya research as it happened, site by site, year by year. Weeks and Hill have organised the pieces into ten thematic sections, such as 'administrative'--including Morley's original 1913 rationale--and 'ethnohistory', and a further 32 regional archaeology ones ranging from Belize to Mayapan. Surprisingly, Uaxactun occupies only some thirty pages, Copan less than twenty, and Mayapan less than seventy (although much of the latter was covered in a separate series of Preliminary Reports, for which Weeks plans a second compilation).

When I was first asked if this book was worth publishing, I said yes: this impressive volume and CD-ROM, providing easy access to a lot of hard-to-ferret-out evidence of lasting importance to Maya archaeology, confirms my opinion.

NORMAN HAMMOND

Department of Archaeology, Boston University, USA

(Email: ndch@bu.edu)