This book is about the practice of ancestor veneration in ancient Maya society. Written while I was a visiting fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., this work metamorphosed from an earlier project on Maya economic organization. The more I researched economic aspects of Maya society—land tenure and agriculture in particular—the more I came to appreciate the strategic role played by ancestors in legitimizing claims to land and in the inheritance of everything from field plots to orchards and houses. From this, I reasoned that ancestral Maya burials and the ancient structures in which they were interred have the potential to tell us something about larger forces at work in society. They provide a strong link between the material basis of life and the ideological framework which both reflects and creates reality.

Ancestor veneration, as a creative social practice, is about naming and claiming—naming progenitors, naming descendants, and by virtue of these proper nouns establishing proprietary claims to resources. This point was brought home to me one day during the Fellows' luncheon at Dumbarton Oaks. John Yellen had joined us and I was describing this book project to him. Given the fact that John has spent his entire research career either following African hunters and gatherers or mapping and excavating what little they left behind, I was not sure that he would be particularly interested in my research on the link between ancestors and land. Quite to the contrary, he parlayed my rather stiff narrative with a story about fieldwork in the Kalahari Desert that so perfectly characterizes the counterpoint to my thesis of Maya perspectives on land and resource claims that I narrate it here.