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At La Venta, Mexico, the Middle Formative Olmec regional center, the existence of individual leaders is interpreted from the evidence of monumental stone portraiture and several tombs believed to house the bodies of a sequence of kings late in La Venta's history. The status of these latter features as graves, however, has been debated since soon after they were excavated in the 1940s, especially because they generally lacked osteological material. What remained was arrangements of costume items as if adorning a body, usually associated with a stone container. Most archaeologists have advanced the reasonable explanation that bones and teeth would not have survived in tropical environments and accepted both the tomb attribution and their function as individual funerary monuments. A detailed review of available information from the La Venta excavations reveals these assumptions are not warranted. Field data indicate the absence of expected taphonomic evidence of bodily decay. Analysis of the stratigraphy of Mound A-2, aided, by computer-enhanced imaging of field drawings, demonstrates its tomb-like features were erected in a single, short construction phase, not over a span of decades as individual kings died. These conclusions call for alternative explanations of these “surrogate burials,” absent bodies materially evoked by ritual officiants.

For the Maya reality is a unified whole within which every entity shares in the same fundamental animating principle. This is a relational ontology whereby no phenomenon is self-contained but emerges from relations with others, including humans and non-humans, in various fields of action. This ontology correlates with a more encompassing “process metaphysic” in which reality is in constant flux, continually “becoming.” The process metaphysic envisioned by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead provides a technical language for analyzing the composition and extension of Maya persons, using the model of personhood developed by anthropologist Marcel Mauss. In life individual Maya persons assembled divergent components endowed by their maternal and paternal ancestors, which were subsequently disassembled upon their deaths. They also assembled non-corporeal components–souls and names–that linked them to existences beyond the physical boundaries and timelines of their bodies. Aspects of personhood were also shared by objects worn or manipulated by humans. Persons were thus extended in space and in time, outliving individual human beings. Maya belief and practice reveals the fundamental process known as k’ex, “replacement” or “substitution,” accounts for much of the flux and duration of the universe as a Maya-specific mode of “becoming.”

This article briefly considers early monumental constructions in North America, including Mesoamerica, presenting similarities and differences with the African examples in this special issue. Comparing monumentality in Africa with another major world area expands the potential types of archaeologically visible processes involved in building monumental or quasi-monumental structures, while still recognising their different material and historical trajectories. Such comparison reveals the great variety of types of monumental constructions and of the theoretical approaches that are being engaged to investigate them. What the selected examples of early North American monumentality discussed here have in common, which can be of value for African archaeologists, is attention to building as a form of social practice, rather than to the design forms or functions of built structures, or the intentions of their makers.

Scientific drawings, including maps, are increasingly recognized as theory-laden media for conveying information. The degree to which this quality impacts archaeological interpretations is revealed in the history of the published maps of La Venta, a Formative period Mesoamerican regional center. La Venta is pivotal to understanding the Olmec culture of Mexico’s Gulf Coast, yet archaeological knowledge is based primarily on one small portion of the site, Complex A, excavated in 1955. Since destroyed, Complex A is now known especially through visual representations. A review of the Complex A maps in the original field report and subsequent publications demonstrates how these technical drawings have sometimes superseded the textual excavation data in generating and disseminating archaeological knowledge. Over time the maps have become more schematic and misleading, impeding understandings of La Venta and its role in regional cultural manifestations. Reliance on totalizing plan maps has led most archaeologists to overlook the 1955 excavators’ major interpretations of the construction history of Complex A. However, the 1955 conclusions regarding the longevity of the formal design rules of the complex, reiterated by later archaeologists precisely because they are clearly visible in plan maps, are less well supported by the stratigraphic evidence.

At Chalcatzingo, Mexico, an early regional center, the common location for burials was under house floors, but some high-status burials occurred in more open spaces. These latter were also residential burials, interred within the landed domain of social units. Although both “inside” and “outside” burials drew on claims of ancestral continuity, it is important to explore the differences they entailed. Investigating how repeated mortuary practices at Chalcatzingo evoked referential networks—endowing those practices with intelligibility and enabling identity formation over time—can broaden understandings of residential burial practices and bridge various classificatory separations imposed by archaeologists, including those between public and private mortuary spaces. [mortuary practices, citation, social houses, complex society, Mesoamerica]

The critical role of social or collective memory in ongoing processes of societal reproduction and transformation is well acknowledged by anthropologists and is being increasingly modeled in archaeological interpretations as well. Investigating how social memory impacted the materialities and historical trajectories of the Maya civilization has great potential for advancing archaeological methodologies as well as enlarging our knowledge of the Maya. In addition to the wealth of epigraphic, ethnographic, and early historical information available for the Maya, archaeologists are examining enduring architecture, representative imagery, and even mundane artifacts that constitute a “technology of memory” for clues to the interplay of recollection and forgetting in the operation and transformation of Maya societies. This commentary reviews issues and problems in archaeological studies of social memory and addresses the specific prospects for investigating social memory among the pre-Hispanic Maya, drawing upon the analyses provided by the papers in this special section.

The prehispanic Maya are known to have commonly interred their dead beneath the floors or within the platforms of domestic structures. This custom has been interpreted as part of a larger complex of rituals and beliefs associated with ancestor veneration. By continually curating the bones of deceased family members within their own domestic space, the surviving members of the household may have strengthened their rights to material property believed to have been acquired by these ancestors. Maya residences have thus been considered domestic mausolea: “places of death.” However, archaeological interpretations of burial practices should take into account the likelihood of customs and beliefs regarding the proper disposition of the nontangible components of deceased persons along with their physical remains. These components include names and souls, which may have been the property of specific corporate groups who transferred them from the dead to the newly born as an expression of group continuity. Archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence from Maya peoples is examined here to suggest that residential interments may have served to ensure control over the souls of the dead. Ancestral spirits were important nontangible property belonging to prehispanic Maya corporate kin groups, known as “houses.” They were carefully safeguarded for reincarnation in subsequent generations, thereby perpetuating the kin group. Rather than a place of death, Maya domestic space is therefore better considered a place of curation, transformation, and regeneration of enduring social personae.

The archaeological identification of individuals has been an important component of both processual attempts to characterize social organization by the treatment of individuals in mortuary ritual and more recent agency theory applications to studies of political economy and social change. Both approaches have been critiqued for failing to adequately define the individual, instead applying the Western concept of the individual to other societies. These shortcomings are shown to be part of a larger problem in social theory: the continuing polarization between individualism and holism. They point to the need for renewed interest in the anthropological analysis of the “person”—a socially shaped construct—in order to better understand social relationships and recognize the collective aspects of agency. A case study from the Classic Maya civilization illustrates how emphasis on the individual, as represented in mortuary events, artistic depictions, and texts, has resulted in interpretive difficulties that can be avoided by viewing these data from the perspective of the social collectivity from which personhood was derived. Maya corporate kin-based groups, known as “houses,” were a major source of the social identities expressed in political action and represented in mortuary ritual and monumental imagery.

Long-standing disagreements concerning prehispanic Maya kinship and social organization have focused on the nature of their corporate groups, generally presumed to have been lineages. Specific debates center on whether the lineages were patrilineal or incorporated some kind of double-descent reckoning, how descent was combined with locality to define a group, and the status of lineage-outsiders within a group. It is argued here that Maya social organization is better approached within the contemporary critique of kinship, replacing "lineage" with Levi-Strauss's model of the "house"—a corporate group maintaining an estate perpetuated by the recruitment of members whose relationships are expressed "in the language" of kinship and affinity and affirmed by purposeful actions. In this perspective, the operation of corporate groups is the primary concern, and relationships construed in terms of consanguinity and affinity are seen as strategies pursued to enhance and perpetuate the group, [ancestor veneration, house society, kinship, Maya, social organization]

The study of deity images in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artworks and pictographic texts has been dominated by a concern to classify them for identification of the individual gods. The usual approach has been taxonomic classification, emphasizing the attributes consistently shared by various images to distinguish them as members of a single class (i.e., a single deity). However, identifying criteria are shared by more than one deity class, and the desired consistency in a set of traits for class membership has never been realized, such that scholars still disagree as to the proper identification of these images. This study takes a different approach, by examining the relationships among gods manifested in both imagery and text. It focuses on the Maya God L, who shares some identifying features with God M and also shares certain contexts with the God Bolon Yokte. These associations reflect their spatiotemporal alignments, with God L representing the stability of the primordial cosmic center, whereas Gods M and Bolon Yokte are “travelers” who move within the periphery. From these relationships we begin to explain not only the fluidity of deity imagery, but also how deities served as metaphoric representations of dynamic social and cosmic processes.

Etude sur le role des jeux de balle dans les rituels mesoamericains et son importance dans l'organisation de la societe, de l'architecture et l'organisation des rituels politiques

In influential studies over the last 10 years, cultural diversity within Mesoamerican has been categorized according to two opposed political-economic strategies. In the network strategy power is wielded by individuals, while in the corporate strategy power is shared among large corporate groups. The Classic Maya are believed to have followed the network strategy, whereas teotihuacan exhibited the corporate strategy. Maya emphasis on depictions named kings, elaborate burials, and palaces are considered evidence for the individualizing network strategy. However, the archaeological distinction between the two strategies relies on the presence of representations of persons. The anthropological literature on personhood demonstrates difficulteies in distinguishing the person and agency of individuals versus groups. Raising doubts about the utility of the corporate/network dichotomy. Classic Maya kings are shown to have embodied their royal houses. Examining how their bodies represented corporate groups reveals new into Maya political strategies.

Llano del Jícaro, Veracruz, is a workshop site where Olmec monuments were carved from exposed boulders of Cerro Cintepec basalt. The site, which lies in the hinterland of the major Olmec center of Laguna de los Cerros, was discovered in 1960 by Alfonso Medellín Zenil, who moved one of its unfinished monuments to the Museum of Anthropology in Jalapa. In 1991 more intensive archaeological investigations at Llano del Jícaro located nine additional boulders, including a tabletop altar, with evidence of carving. Excavations around four of these monoliths uncovered debitage and hammerstones from the manufacturing process. Survey also located the remains of the probable residences of the stonecarvers.