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

Jon M. Weeks & Jane A. Hill (ed.). The Carnegie Maya: the Carnegie Institution of Washington Maya Research Program, 1913-1957. JON M. WEEKS & JANE A. HILL (ed.). The Carnegie Maya: theCarnegie Institution of Washington The introduction to this article may be too long. Please help improve the introduction by moving some material from it into the body of the article according to the suggestions at Maya Research Program, 1913-1957.xx+804 pages, 23 figures, 44 tables, CD-ROM. 2006. Boulder (CO):University Press of Colorado The University Press of Colorado is a nonprofit publisher supported partly by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, the University of Colorado, the University of Northern Colorado, and Western ; 978-0-87081-833-2 hardback with CD-ROM$275; 978-0-87081-8349 CD-ROM only $200. In 1913, the young Sylvanus Morley This article is mainly about the archaeologist. For the professor of Spanish see the section The other Sylvanus G. Morley. put an ambitious proposal to theCarnegie Institution of Washington. His plan was to investigate the Mayacivilisation of Central America Central America,narrow, southernmost region (c.202,200 sq mi/523,698 sq km) of North America, linked to South America at Colombia. It separates the Caribbean from the Pacific. , concentrating on the great site ofChichen Itza in Yucatan, brought to recent notoriety by Edward H.Thompson's dredging for treasure in the Sacred Cenote (orwaterhole waterholeNouna pond or pool in a desert or other dry area, used by animals as a drinking place ). The Carnegie Institution accepted, but strained relationsbetween Mexico and the United States Relations between the United States and Mexico are among the most important and complex that each nation maintains. They are shaped by a mixture of mutual interests, shared problems, and growing interdependence. following the Mexican revolution of1910 led to work at Chichen Itza being shelved for a decade. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Morley, who had already worked at Quirigua, with its toweringstelae, and visited other Maya sites, suggested that meanwhile he shouldconduct expeditions into the jungles of Peten and Yucatan in search ofinscribed and dated monuments. These stelae, tall stone pillars usuallybearing the image of a Maya king, often used the Maya Long Count, acalendar with a base date in 3114 BC and precise to a single day. TheMaya calendar had been correlated with the Gregorian in 1900 by JosephT. Goodman, placing the Classic Period between AD 300 and 900.Morley's ambition was to establish an overall chronology of Mayacities: in 1914 the 'non-calendric glyphs' were thought toencode astronomical and astrological materials--few scholars, certainlynot Morley, believed that they contained secular history. From 1916 onwards he led a succession of Carnegie expeditions insearch of dated stelae, and enrolled the chicleros--chewing-gumgatherers--in Peten with placards that said iOjo!iOjo!iOjo!--'look!look! look!'--offering $25.00 in gold for being led to a site withinscribed monuments. Morley hit pay dirt in his first season, findingUaxactun with its Stela 9, the oldest monument then known. Uaxactunlater became a laboratory for studying all aspects of a Maya city,including the dissection of the A-V palace complex and the discovery ofthe Preclassic Mamom and Chicanel periods, estimated (with surprisingaccuracy) to go back to 600 BC. Structure E-VII-Sub was the firstexposed Preclassic building, and the Uaxactun ceramic sequence becamethe yardstick for lowland Maya chronology. An impressive series ofmonographs published this work, and that eventually begun at ChichenItza. Both projects ran for more than a decade, employing a staff ofcompetent field archaeologists more concerned with accuratedata-collection than with theoretical musings, and their publicationsare still immensely useful today. The view of the Ancient Maya thatdominated the field for the middle decades of the last century,concentrating on temples, tombs and elite culture, was the product ofthe Carnegie programme. A major development was the appointment of Alfred V. Kidder Alfred Vincent Kidder (October 29, 1885 - June 11, 1963) was considered the foremost archaeologist of the southwestern United States and Middle America during the first half of the 20th century. as headof the Division of Historical Research in 1929, who initiated apan-scientific research agenda which greatly enlarged on Morley'svision and persisted through the final Carnegie project, at Mayapan inthe 1950s. The Carnegie had two principles that made its Mesoamericanwork easier: it did not collect, all artefacts remaining in theircountries 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 inthe Carnegie's Year Books Books of legal cases, or reporters, published annually in England from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.The development of English Common Law was based on the law of the case. , which embraced the whole of the CarnegieInstitution of Washington's work, not just that of its Mayaprojects. The present compilation (which comes with a searchable CD-ROMtucked in the back, also available by itself for those who don'tneed hard copy) brings these scattered sections together, so that we seea coherent picture of Carnegie Maya research as it happened, site bysite, year by year. Weeks and Hill have organised the pieces into tenthematic sections, such as 'administrative'--includingMorley's original 1913 rationale--and 'ethnohistory', anda further 32 regional archaeology ones ranging from Belize to Mayapan.Surprisingly, Uaxactun occupies only some thirty pages, Copan less thantwenty, and Mayapan less than seventy (although much of the latter wascovered in a separate series of Preliminary Reports, for which Weeksplans a second compilation). When I was first asked if this book was worth publishing, I saidyes: this impressive volume and CD-ROM, providing easy access to a lotof hard-to-ferret-out evidence of lasting importance to Mayaarchaeology, confirms my opinion. NORMAN HAMMOND Department of Archaeology, Boston University, USA (Email: ndch@bu.edu)