On January 16, 2001, on a gravel road in the Maya Mountains of Belize, one of archaeology's most prolific and colorful superstars was fatally injured in the crash of his rental car. Having endured for 82 years despite cancer, heart attacks, a near-drowning, and double bypass surgery, the seemingly indestructible “Scotty” MacNeish was taken from us by accident. Had he lasted 102 years, I would still consider his death premature.

The New Fire Ceremony is one of the few Aztec rituals documented in both the archaeological and historical records. The Spanish chroniclers described the New Fire Ceremony as an imperial celebration of the renewal of cosmic time that was observed on the local level by the renewal of household goods. George C. Vaillant first proposed the identification of artifact dumps at Aztec sites with descriptions of these local celebrations. We describe unpublished artifact dumps excavated by Vaillant at Chiconautla and Nonoalco in the Basin of Mexico and by Smith at Cuexcomate in Morelos and show that their context and content support Vaillant's hypothesis. Our data suggest that the New Fire Ceremony was an ancient and widespread ritual in Postclassic central Mexico that was appropriated by the Aztec empire as part of its program of ideological legitimization and control.

In the early 1880s, a finely carved Maya shell picture plaque was found at the Toltec capital of Tula, central Mexico, and was subsequently acquired by The Field Museum in Chicago. The shell was probably re-carved in the Terminal Classic period and depicts a seated lord with associated Maya hieroglyphs on the front and back. Here the iconography and glyphic text of this unique artifact are examined, the species and habitat of the shell are described, and its archaeological and social context are interpreted. The Tula plaque is then compared with Maya carved jade picture plaques of similar size and design that were widely distributed throughout Mesoamerica, but were later concentrated in the sacred cenote at Chichen Itza. It is concluded that during the Late Classic period, these plaques played an important role in establishing contact between Maya lords and their counterparts representing peripheral and non-Maya domains. The picture plaques may have been elite Maya gifts establishing royal alliances with non-local polities and may have become prestige objects used in caches and termination rituals.

This paper describes 15 stone monuments documented until the 1995 field season at Río Viejo, the largest settlement in the alluvial plains of the Río Verde drainage in Coastal Oaxaca from 100 B.C. to A.D. 1100. The monuments, all seemingly dating to the Classic period (A.D. 600–900), include mainly carved stelae that most often depict elaborately dressed human figures accompanied by their calendrical names. The large size of these monuments and the political primacy of Río Viejo strongly suggest that the named individuals were local rulers. We posit that additional flattened sculptures and slabs riddled with small circular depressions were foci of sacred activities aimed at petitioning favors from supernatural forces. The analysis of the inscriptions is framed in terms of graphic similarities with highland scribal traditions in the central valleys of Oaxaca, the Mixteca Baja, and the Mexican Highlands.

The God C title, found in numerous hieroglyphic texts, refers to junior members of the royal court and is therefore crucial to our understanding of Classic Maya political structure. Over the past two decades, the amount of epigraphic work on the God C title has been significant. A consensus on its reading and meaning, however, has yet to be reached. In this article, we build on earlier research to suggest new ideas for reading this glyph, based on semantic and grammatical re-evaluations of the title. Our proposed readings are Ajk'uhulhun, which might be read as “he of the holy paper” (expanding on previous interpretations), or, alternatively, Ajk'uhun, “one who obeys, venerates” or “one who keeps,” based on a grammatical reassessment. In addition, we suggest a new understanding of the aj- and ix- agentive prefixes, traditionally understood as masculine and feminine markers, respectively. We examine these possible readings in archaeological and iconographic context, using subsidiary nobles of ancient Copan as a case study. Through our discussion we aim to illuminate the meaning and significance of the God C title, and in doing so to highlight the evolution of the methodologies employed in Maya hieroglyphic decipherment over the past two decades.

Models of polity organization in the northern Maya lowlands are often based on the distribution of ceramic types. These models do not account for crucial links between the processes of ceramic production, distribution, use, and discard and sociopolitical relationships. We discuss several models of ceramic economy. These models suggest that the distribution of some serving vessels may encode information concerning sociopolitical relationships. These models are evaluated in light of stratigraphic evidence from Yaxuna and Uxmal, in order to elucidate the nature of polity at Chichen Itza. We argue that the ceramic data are ambiguous concerning the proposed existence of a large conquest state centered on the capital.

Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico, was the most prominent Maya ceremonial center from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. The city was a religious center for surrounding Maya populations. Its construction was linked through cyclical reasoning to a chain of antecedent centers, the ultimate link of which lay in creation. In the heart of Mayapan lay its exemplary center, an architectural model of cosmogony composed of five temple assemblages. The central building of each assemblage was a temple decorated with serpent imagery. These five serpent temples were depicted on a mural in Structure Q-80 at Mayapan, with additional symbolism suggesting that each building was tied to a specific elite official, likely the Ajaw B'atab'ob, Jalach Winik, and AjK'in as described in ethnohistoric documents. The serpent temples also depict the primordial flood crocodilian, who was both the world and the world destroyer—hence, a symbol of both order and chaos.

This issue's special section presents a series of papers focusing on recent research on ancient Maya causeways, or sacbeob (“white roads”—a reference to their gleaming, plastered surfaces). Often relegated to the status of “minor architectural features,” even a casual perusal of the literature quickly convinces one that sacbeob were a major feature of the ancient Maya landscape. Throughout the Maya lowlands from at least the Late Preclassic onward, these elevated roads facilitated internal and external transportation within and between Maya centers for a combination of economic, political, social, and ritual purposes. Constructed as an organic element of the built environment, road systems grew in size and expanded in complexity as the Maya centers themselves did (Andrews 1975:89, 323, 428).

This article reviews currently available data on Lowland Maya sacbeob (raised roadways) to create a tripartite system of road classification and explore why the Maya built such constructions. Rather than simply classify sacbeob as “intrasite” or “intersite,” roads are divided into “local intrasite,” “core–outlier intrasite,” and “intersite” based on length and function. This classification system is then employed on a data set of 190 sacbeob to explore the degree to which it may have been some sort of a reality for the ancient Maya. The practical and symbolic aspects of roadways are also discussed, with the aim of beginning to explain why sacbeob are present at some sites while absent at others. Possibilities from environmental to temporal variation are reviewed, as are the ways in which plazas may or may not have been able to substitute for constructed routes. The Inka road system is also briefly summarized to provide an analogy to better understand Maya systems. Finally, an appeal is made to researchers to view sacbeob not as a single type of artifact, but as a class of features with a range of types and functions.

Statements concerning the function of intrasite Maya causeways often focus on inferred ritual purposes or on symbolic kinship alliances rather than on the more practical roles that such roads may have served. Data collected on an extensive intrasite causeway system at Caracol, Belize, demonstrate that the primary role of its sacbes lay in facilitating the administrative control of people, goods, and services. An estimated 75 km of roads not only served intrasite communication and transport; they also affected the political and economic integration of this huge center.

In this paper, we present the results of our recent research on the ancient causeways at the site of Chichen Itza, Yucatan. We first discuss some of the field methods we employed to map and facilitate the discovery of previously unrecorded causeways at the site. We also consider the spatial patterning and chronology of the Late and Terminal Classic periods causeway system at Chichen Itza and make inferences about the functional significance of linked terminal groups and the site-core. The Chichen Itza causeway systems reveals two important moments of Chichen Itza internal structure. During the Late Classic period, Chichen Itza was a socially homogeneous community organized by a loose and decentralized government. During the Terminal Classic period, the causeway system mirrors a centrally governed hierarchically organized community.

Las ruinas de Calakmul se encuentran en la cuenca del mismo nombre localizado dentro del 723,000 ha Reserva de la Biosfera Calakmul en el sureste del Estado de Campeche. Investigaciones del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas y Sociales de la Universidad Autónoma de Campeche han demostrado que Calakmul formaba una de las más grandes centros regionales en el área maya desde 600 a.C. hasta los fines del siglo IX dentro de su estado regional de 13,000 km2. Investigaciones de prospección remoto alrededor de Calakmul combinado con trabajos topográficos dentro de la ciudad misma han revelado 15 sac beob identificados por nosotros entre los tipos de vías terrestres descritos en los diccionarios de la idioma Maya formados durante el período colonial. Entre estos sac beob se encuentran tipos regionales, estatales y los sac beob registrados dentro de la ciudad de Calakmul. Aunque existe un traslapo entre varios tipos de sac beob, pensamos que excavaciones futuras van a ayudarnos a clasificar cada sac be en una forma más precisa.

The archaeological evidence for pre-Columbian roadways in the northern Mayan area is well documented. These range from broad intracity causeways and long, raised intercity roadways to small local pathways. In the colonial Mayan–Spanish and Spanish–Mayan dictionaries written by Franciscan friars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there are various references to roadways. These references were located through a computer-aided search through the dictionaries. Supplementing these references is the information given in various documents written by Franciscan historians, as well as the variety of documents written by the Maya. This information was also located through searches in computerized versions of these documents. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate these references to determine how the information in them can be used to broaden our understanding of Mayan roadways, culture, and society.