The Maya lived with their ancestors in a manner that departs radically from twentieth-century western mortuary practices. Rather than distancing themselves physically from the dead—sequestering the ancestors in cemeteries apart from living spaces—they maintained a proximity between the living and the dead. From 1000 B.C. to the early sixteenth century, this subgroup of the first Americans—Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemalan highlands —interred their ancestors under the floors of their houses, in residential shrines, and within large funerary pyramids right in the center of their cities and villages. Through a complex series of rituals and sacralization of places, the dead were not forgotten; rather, active lines of communication were maintained between the living and the dead. The deathway of the Maya did not emphasize the termination of life as does the Christian deathway (Metcalf and Huntington 1991); instead, Maya celebrated the continued and pervasive influence of the ancestors in the lives of both rulers and farmers—the life that arises from death (Carlsen and Prechtel 1991: 26). Formerly referred to by the antiquated phrase "cult of the dead," this social practice is anything but that. On the contrary, it is about living descendants and their strategies and struggles to chart a course for the future. In this book, I use what I hope is a more appropriate phrase to describe this practice: "living with the ancestors." Communing with deceased progenitors was not a religious experience divorced from political and economic realities (as another antiquated term, "ancestor worship," leads us to believe); rather, it was a practice grounded in pragmatism that drew power from the past, legitimized the current state of affairs (including all the inequities in rights and privileges), and charted a course for the future. Ancestors resided at that critical nexus between past and future, and their presence both materially and symbolically lent weight to the claims of their mere mortal descendants. Because of the important role of ancestor veneration in the context of kin groupings and divine kingship (cf. Feeley-Harnik 1985), a greater understanding of the theory, practice, and material signature of ancestor veneration will lead to a wider comprehension of the economic, social, and political processes that structured Maya society—commoners and elites alike.

In this study, the first goal is to investigate the web of interrelations among ancestors, lineage, and land (Chapters 1-3). These nested relationships are then examined in reference to secondary variables of social inequality and political power (Chapters 4-5). Drawing upon ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological sources, I attempt to fashion a synthesis of the general characteristics of Maya ancestor veneration and lineage organization. Documentary texts are used as a point of departure to the "deep history" of the Formative and Classic periods. While the focus of documentary texts is human action, the archaeological record is largely the material "fallout" of human actions (Binford 1983). The wedding of the two often is a search for plausible matches between human action and material residue. My use of documentary sources is geared not toward establishing matches but toward isolating basic principles of lineage organization and ancestral veneration and envisioning methods by which such principles can be linked to their material consequences. The documentary record from the Maya region then helps to establish a range of analytical analogies that may be relevant to our understanding of archaeological patterns.

In the end, my goal is (1) to reveal rather than to reify, and (2) to examine diachronic and synchronic variability rather than to create a static typology of evolutionary forms. Although this book is about "change through time" (i.e., diachronic variability), I do not adopt an evolutionary stance in which I artificially segment ancestor veneration within arbitrary blocks of time associated with stipulated societal forms such as ranked society, chiefdom, or state. I have chosen not to conceptualize my topic in this way for several reasons. First of all, I give process priority over taxonomic concerns because I am examining transformational processes across traditional typological boundaries. Second, I focus on variability in organizational forms across space, e.g., comparing burial practices at the small Belizean site of K'axob to the large center of Tikal. Third, broad typological frameworks, while useful heuristically, often are discordant with specific historical processes, and the latter is given precedence in this study. In a similar vein, the term "state" is seldom used in this study, not because I do not believe that many parts of the Maya region were organized as autonomous states at various times but because I wish to focus on the interaction between areas of differing political centralization. My primary perspective is grounded in less centralized areas with stronger kinship structures; i.e., in this study you will not find a unitary, from-the-top-down perspective on Maya society. Quite to the contrary, I view the realms of kinship and kingship as an arena of conflict.

This book does not claim to be an exhaustive treatise on ancestor veneration; rather, it is an exploration by an archaeologist of what I perceive to have been "an ancient blueprint" (à la Freedman [1966:31]) for Maya living—one that encoded much information about genealogies of places (de Certeau 1994) including fields, orchards, and gardens as well as residences and funerary pyramids. If these genealogies can be recovered, then our ability to understand the Maya past will be enhanced greatly, whether that reading is based upon hieroglyphic texts, a stratigraphic profile, osteological remains, or macrobotanical specimens. In many respects this book sets up a series of arguments or a theoretical program amenable to further elaboration and "on-the-ground" testing. This research is applicable not only to the Maya lowlands but also to other regions of Mesoamerica, such as the Gulf Coast.

Often noted and frequently chastised for its intellectual parochialism and theoretical naiveté (Marcus 1983), the field of Maya archaeology nonetheless continues to grow, attract more students, and retain its aura of mystery and glamour among lay people. The paradigmatic basis for scholarly research in the Yucatán is diverse, embracing many different schools of thought from the materially based school of cultural ecology to the iconographic emphases of art historians and epigraphers. While paradigmatic clashes often produce growth within a field of study, competing schools of thought in Maya research more frequently result in "separate but equal" programs of archaeological research. It is time for a rapprochement between iconographers and anthropologists interested in ideology and economy. This research is one effort toward such a meeting of the minds insomuch as it links human thought and ritual practice with the material bases of life—land resources, boundaries, and so on—the latter being topics that often fall within the domain of cultural ecology. In short, this research represents the new fusion within Maya archaeology which is a hybrid of advances in both epigraphy and field archaeology (Freidel 1993).

Although this study is not cast within an evolutionary/typological framework, the research is spurred by the larger questions of anthropological theory regarding social formations, political power, the bases of factional conflict, and economic processes. Within the social sciences in general, there has been a trend toward the reevaluation of the role of technology and class conflict in noncapitalist contexts and a resultant reduction in the priority of these variables (Brumfiel 1991; Gailey 1987; Giddens 1981). Instead, greater emphasis has been placed on structures of domination grounded in social authority rather than technological superiority and on the dynamics of factional conflict (as opposed to class conflict). Within the theory and practice of archaeology, this reflection (referred to by a number of terms such as postprocessual archaeology, critical archaeology, and symbolic archaeology; e.g., Hodder 1982, 1986, 1987; Miller and Tilley 1984; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Tilley 1990) has engendered an emphasis on the expression of ideology as an active agent of conflict and change rather than an epiphenomenal expression of infrastructural arrangements. The present work represents a modified approach, employing a contextual-based analysis to explore the interweave of ideology, economy, and power. As such, this study is concerned not only with theoretical issues but also with how we frame our questions about the past and detect and read transformation and conflict in this postevolutionary and postprocessual era of methodological and theoretical reevaluation.

Although this book is not directly about change, it does address conflicts attendant upon the emergence of powerful lineages and centralized kingship among lowland Classic Maya. In the past, this type of change has been dichotomized falsely into voluntaristic and coercive scenarios, most notably in a seminal paper by Carneiro (1970a). Dismissing voluntaristic theories of state formation, Carneiro proposed that warfare was the primary mechanism of social inequality and supravillage political integration. The thesis of the present research is that other mechanisms (not so easily dichotomized into voluntaristic and coercive categories), such as the formation of lineal descent groups with their attendant ancestral-focused ritual practices, provided a vehicle for the emergence of social and economic inequality. In view of this perspective, warfare, as an extreme form of social conflict, represents the failure of other mechanisms of differentiation and confederation to promote the legitimacy and acceptance of a new social order. The rituals of ancestor veneration, on the other hand, mitigated social differentiation by providing a rationale of genealogical depth. In other words, the practice of ancestor veneration is one that bridges two kinds of social formations: egalitarian or weakly ranked on the one hand, and strongly ranked or stratified on the other.

Philosophical and Geographical Frame of Reference

In Maya research, areas termed "peripheral" to large centers or cities are often perceived as passive recipients of dicta issued by the elite literati of the big centers. Because elite Maya of the Classic and Postclassic periods left behind so much physical material relevant to their wishes, desires, edicts, building programs, and so on, often we have failed to note the fact that, in all probability, there were factional conflicts in every realm of Maya life. How do we investigate these hypothesized dissenting voices, particularly those of the commoners who did not participate in "elite" culture? Heads of nonelite lineages, for example, did not leave behind hieroglyphic texts because they did not attend the "schools" for elite children in which such skills were taught. Settlement archaeology is one approach that allows us to document the structures of both the "humble" and elite Maya (Webster and Gonlin 1988), but modest structures and small settlements are more likely to be analyzed in terms of what they lack (i.e., stelae, inscriptions, standing architecture, polychrome vessels, and so forth) rather than what they have.

Here, rather than looking to the cities to explain the smaller settlements, I adopt a perspective in which villages and towns are the primary focus and the city is seen as the aberration. Particularly relevant to this approach is the archaeological site of K'axob, a place to which I turn for exemplary material periodically throughout this study. Located in northern Belize on a patch of high terrain between the New River and the southern arm of Pulltrouser Swamp, K'axob is a pioneer community with roots stretching back to 1000 B.C. The place persisted as a village of about one hundred structures well into the Terminal Classic (McAnany n.d.), with the construction of pyramidal architecture well into the Late Classic. Material remains from K'axob suggest that it was a community that was neither fabulously wealthy nor impoverished. With its ubiquitous pattern of multiplatform dwellings arranged around central patios, it seems to have been a community held together by the web of kinship (McAnany 1986). But it was not an egalitarian village; by 400 B.C. (and perhaps earlier) certain individuals were accorded special burial treatment while others were interred with simple grave goods under the floors of Formative structures. This pattern persists through the Classic period, leading one to ask how the inhabitants of K'axob dealt with the emerging differences in rank and stratification evolving at the large centers. Did K'axob maintain political autonomy, or did it become a dependency of the nearby centers of Nohmul, San Estevan, or the more distant Naranjo? Does the construction of raised fields along the western margin of the settlement (Turner and Harrison 1981, 1983) indicate (1) incorporation into a wider political economy with attendant taxation obligations, (2) population outstripping available land resources, or (3) some type of agricultural specialization (McAnany I992)? K'axob provides a geographical and philosophical backdrop to this study: a small, perhaps politically autonomous place in the eastern Maya lowlands. In many respects, this book is a companion volume to an upcoming K'axob monograph in which a thesis of this study—that the practice of ancestor veneration is linked to the entrenchment of resource rights—is examined in light of archaeological data from Formative-period K'axob.

Primary Themes

The basic postulate of this work is that ancestor veneration was a critically important organizing force in all sectors of Maya society—among commoners and nobles alike. Among Mayanists, rarely has this force been discussed in contexts other than elite genealogies and royal succession; some scholars have even suggested that the social practice of ancestor veneration and concepts of the afterlife were lacking among the nonelite Maya (Carlson 1981: 190; Coggins 1988: 66). On the contrary, ritual practices attendant upon this institution provided a structural charter for the organization of social, political, and economic arenas of action. The following three themes of action and conflict structure my research.

(1) Ancestor veneration, through lineage organization, charted and legitimized resource rights through the mechanisms of oral memory, written records, and, most importantly, the continued physical presence of buried ancestors in domestic complexes which were, in effect, a type of domestic mausolea. Residences and their circumambient spaces were the repositories of ancestral remains. As such, these places were potent links to the past as well as important items of inheritance. Maya expressed their genealogies not only in hieroglyphic script but also in the physical use and reuse of places.

I propose that exclusionary and inherited resource rights go hand in hand with the genesis of ancestor veneration. In other words, strong links to past ancestors also provided nearly unassailable rights and privileges. These included access to land, water, tracts of "forest," and other inheritable goods, properties, and resources. Historical misinterpretations of lowland tropical agriculture, starting with the translation of Maya texts from the early Colonial period (see discussion in Chapter 3), have imposed a barrier to creating a synthetic theory of Maya agriculture, land tenure, and transgenerational inheritance. By approaching the topic of land tenure by way of ancestral veneration, it is possible to build a more holistic model of land and lineage in Maya society.

(2) The social practice of keeping ancestors within the realm of the living to legitimize the claims of their descendants also provided a rationale for emergent and existent social inequality. In reference to the Megaliths of western Europe, Renfrew (1983: 159, 162) has termed these monuments "tombs for the living" and has noted that communities with such monumental territorial markers must have had an "adaptive advantage." Through ancestors, resource rights and privileges were viewed in the conservative light of precedents set by progenitors. This transgenerational quality is critically important to the crystallization of new social forms. It is what Giddens (1981: 34) has termed "the problems of the generations—or how the dead make their influence felt upon the practices of the living."

In anthropological literature, lineage development is often viewed as a mechanism by which social groups are split into many segments (Fox 1987; Sahlins 1961; Southall 1957); however, ethnographic accounts also indicate that lineage structures promote the perpetuity of land tenure systems and, in doing so, augment the partial or total alienation of certain social segments from access to resources (Johnson and Earle 1987:190). In Chapter 4, 1 examine how the corporate nature of lineal social structure provides a viable mechanism of societal differentiation which could, quite easily, become institutionalized.

(3) Maya lineage heads, variously called ah kuch kabob, councilors, or regidores in the ethnohistoric literature, were politically powerful heads of kin-organized groups that engaged in dynamic conflictive as well as accommodative relations with centralizing political forces in Maya society—the ruler or ahaw of the southern lowlands Late Formative and Classic periods and the HALACH UINIC of Postclassic northern Yucatán. This older form of lineage leadership, organizing commoners as well as nobles, persisted into the Postclassic and was an institution that crosscut rank and class. For the most part, organizational structures of this type have not been envisioned as part of Classic Maya society, yet ethnohistoric records (discussed below) document clearly that it was the ah kuch kab who organized production and collection of tribute in Postclassic northern Yucatán. Given the recent decipherment of hieroglyphic texts as well as the discovery of iconography suggestive of endemic interpolity conflict and cycles of conquest (Culbert 1991; Schele and Freidel 1990), we can speculate that the collection of tribute was not a practice foreign to Classic-period kings. In such a context, local leaders such as lineage heads would have played an important role in lowland Maya polities.

The hypothesis of persistent tension between "kinship" and "kingship" (Gailey 1987) is here applied to the Maya region (Chapter 5) with profound implications for our models of Classic-period geopolitics. The existence of this tension (centripetal vs. centrifugal) appears to have been highly variable across time and space in the Maya region. At any point in time, rulers and autonomous lineage heads existed side by side, while other lineage heads were subordinates of the rulers. This pattern certainly existed during the Postclassic period, and a case will be made here that this relationship prevailed during the Classic period as well. Fundamentally expressive of the conflictive relationship between kinship and kingship is the distinctive role of ancestor veneration within royal dynasties. That is, its ritual expression is not just veneration of lineage heads writ large but rather is structurally different in the manner in which genealogy was encoded in written texts and iconography. It is also distinct in that ancestors were invoked to substantiate claims to divinity as well as to the royal prerogative to tax and to draft labor and warriors. In this regard, royal ancestor veneration is an appropriation of a Formative social practice that emerged within an agrarian milieu. In Chapters 2 and 5, the contrastive role of ancestors among kin groups and divine kings is discussed in detail. Carlson's (1981: 190) advocacy of the separation of "ancestor worship and funerary practices of the elite from those involving the common man" is correct in the sense that elite ancestor veneration was qualitatively different from that practiced by nonelite kin groups; however, he is incorrect in assuming that ancestor veneration and principles guiding ancestral interment were not present among the YALBA UINICOB or commoners (Roys 1943: 34)

The intertwined topics of ancestor veneration and lineage structure have a history of impressive anthropological research in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. I am indebted intellectually to this corpus of work, and I hope this study amplifies and enriches earlier research. Below, some of this literature is examined in order to (1) establish a comparative base and (2) indicate the manner in which my research diverges from previous treatment of ancestors and lineage.

Theory and Definition: Ancestor Veneration and Lineage

In the first half of the twentieth century, the topic of kinship organization was particularly popular within social anthropology. As societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas came under the scrutiny of European- and North American-trained anthropologists, it became clear that, for many of these groups, the practices and rituals of dealing with the dead assumed pivotal importance, not just for the duration of the funeral but throughout the life of the survivors. Transmission of property, rights, and privileges was as inextricably linked to death and ancestral veneration as was the crystallization, on a transgenerational scale, of inequalities in access to resources both within and among lineages. In this section, relevant aspects of seminal studies of lineage and ancestor veneration in Africa and Asia are discussed. Then, the manner in which these studies were adapted to the Americas (outside of the Maya region) using the medium of ethnohistory and archaeology is explored. The following chapter is devoted to the study of ancestor veneration in the Maya region exclusively.

Africa and Asia

Since ancestral deities and attention to ancestors are nearly universal social traits, more rigorous definitions have been sought for the practice of ancestor veneration. Drawing upon ethnographic field research among the Tallensi, Fortes (1987:79) defined the legal aspects of an institution that he called "ancestor worship" as "a body of religious beliefs and ritual practices, correlated with rules of conduct, which serves to entrench the principle of jural authority together with its corollary, legitimate right, and its reciprocal, designated accountability, as an indisputable and sacrosanct value-principle of the social system." More importantly, Fortes (1987: 72) goes on to clarify the distinction between "ancestor worship" and the so-called''cult of the dead" in the following way: "An ancestral 'spirit' is not thought of as a kind of nebulous being or personified mystical presence but primarily as a name attached to a relic... standing for ritual validation of lineage ancestry and for mystical intervention in human affairs." In other words, Fortes (1987: 67) argued that the term "ancestor worship" or "veneration" should be limited to those groups who commemorate ancestors by name and not extended to those who display a general attention to spirits of the dead.

Freedman (1966: I45) uses the term "cult of immediate jural superiors" to contrast groups who show concern with the dead (e.g., the Manus as studied by Fortune [1935]) from those who practice ancestor veneration. In a comparative study of Melanesian religions, Lawrence and Meggitt (1965: 8) also distinguish between totemic forebears of named unilineal descent groups and totems from which no descent is claimed but which are adopted as badges by named groups because of some past association. Based on his studies of kinship in the Chinese provinces of Fukien and Kwantung, Freedman (1966: 153) has drawn a further distinction between "ancestor worship as a set of rights linking together all the agnatic descendants of a given forebear (the cult of the descent groups) on the one hand, and ancestor worship as the independent tendance [sic] and commemoration of forebears as it were for their own sake, on the other." For the purposes at hand, the following definition of ancestor veneration is employed: rituals and practices surrounding the burial and commemoration, by name, of apical ancestors of kin groups.

From ethnographic research on ancestor veneration in Africa and Asia, one point in particular is perfectly clear: only specific individuals within a descent line become ancestors (Fortes 1987:71; Freedman 1970). That is, the practice of ancestor veneration and the rituals surrounding the treatment of the dead are not extended equally to all members of a lineage; rather, they are employed preferentially when particularly important and influential members of a lineage die. This pattern is consistent throughout the Americas also, mcluding in the Maya region.

From an archaeological perspective, a critical characteristic of ancestor veneration is that of protracted burial rites. A corpse may be interred only to be exhumed at a later date; Freedman (1966) vividly describes such practices in the "New Territories" of south China: hillsides were covered with pots containing skeletal material that had been exhumed from a primary burial. This secondary context may be the final resting place for less esteemed ancestors, while important forebears of powerful lineages would eventually be entombed in a tertiary burial crypt. At any one of these stages, skeletal parts may be lost or removed so that the final interment of skeletal material from an esteemed ancestor rarely contained 100 percent of the skeleton. Among the LoDagaa of Africa, Goody (1962) describes the elaborate ritual surrounding the protracted burial practices through which a once-living member of the community is transformed into an ancestor. Goody notes that the death of an important family member necessitates the transmission of property, rights, and duties to the inheritors, and, as the group dynamics of competition over inheritance are played out, burial rituals help to smooth over an extremely stressful time for the living. The complex rituals and practices of ancestor veneration have been characterized by Humphreys (1981: 268) in the following way: "secondary burial rituals increase the room for manoeuvre in those aspects of funerary rites which are concerned with renewing, reorganizing and relegitimising relations among the living." Furthermore, in the context of ancestor veneration, the physical remains of a powerful deceased person continue to have potency. Because of this quality, bones of ancestors are often curated by living descendants and can command a prominent place within the household, as Taylor and Aragon (1991) document for the outer islands of Indonesia. Ethnohistoric sources suggest similar practices for ancient Mesoamerica, yet the taphonomic effects of such practices on mortuary assemblages are seldom acknowledged in the archaeological analysis of osteological remains.

In China, the eventual entombment of important ancestors is carried out in accord with a type of geomancy called feng-shui, a technique for siting graves and buildings using astrological reckonings (Feuchtwang 1974; Freedman 1966: 125). Thus, tomb placement on the landscape of China was not done in a haphazard manner. Once a tomb was built, periodic rituals were carried out at the tomb site; Freedman (1970: 172) has described the public, male-dominated nature of rituals surrounding tombs of apical ancestors, contrasting them with the domestic practice of ancestor veneration in which the female is the principal actor. Feng-shui ensures not only that the tomb is placed appropriately but also that it is safeguarded. In interlineage rivalry "the surest way to destroy a rival for good is to tear open his ancestral tomb and pulverize the bones they contain.... bones are descent; without them one is cut off from the most powerful source of ancestral benefits" (Freedman 1966: 139; emphasis added). According to Feuchtwang (1974), the bones of ancestors can become, literally, bones of contention in the conflict between the centralized powers of the Chinese state and rebelling factions; insurgencies were quelled by neutralizing the feng-shui of rebel factions through the pillage of their ancestral shrines. In reference to the Classic-period elite Maya, Carlson (1981), among others, has suggested that the skeletal remains of Maya royalty were interred following a Mesoamerican variant of geomancy— an idea echoed by Ashmore (1991), who has examined the integration of Maya cosmology and cardinality with the placement of the deceased.

The truly universal aspect of ancestor veneration in Chinese society, however, is found in domestic shrines. Here, important ancestors of the preceding three to four generations, symbolized by ancestral tablets, are commemorated (Freedman 1970: 164). In this context, it is the female who conducts the rituals of ancestor veneration, which include special commemoration of the birth date of the ancestor and offerings of preferred food and drink (Freedman 1970: 173). Often a woman will intercede on behalf of an ancestor's descendant to ask the forebear to ensure protection or harmony. By gender of the agent of ritual, the domestic context of ancestor veneration contrasts with the ancestor halls of China, which are emphatically the domain of males. Built only by very successful lineages, these halls contain ancestral tablets of considerably greater genealogical depth than those contained in the domestic shrines. Freedman (1966: 4) specifically refers to a hall with a record of ancestors stretching back forty-two generations. These halls consist of "a building put up and maintained by a patrilineal group to house their ancestor tablets and serve as the center of ritual and secular activities" (Freedman 1970: 168). Essentially men's clubs, Freedman notes that few women ever set foot inside an ancestral hall and, not surprisingly, a low number of ancestral tablets of females are housed there.

In patrilineal systems such as China, a deceased male head-of-household who is a member of a wealthy lineage receives preferential treatment such that his bones are more likely to be entombed and his tablet more likely to be enshrined in the ancestral hall for many future generations (Freedman 1966), Despite this fairly strong gender bias, females do participate in these social practices, both as agents of ritual and as objects of veneration. Bones of important female forebears are entombed, particularly when the patriline desires to emphasize connections with the lineage of the female. In the domestic shrine, tablets of female and male forebears are displayed with equal reverence. Moreover, the female is the important agent of ritual in the context of the domestic shrine, while her male counterpart dominates the more public rituals conducted at the tomb and in the ancestral halls (Freedman 1970: 173),

The practice of ancestor veneration is linked intricately with special consderations of place. In the "New Territories" of China, there were four physical locales of ancestral veneration (Freedman 1970): (1) domestic shrines, tended by women and containing tablets commemorative of both males and females; (2) ancestral halls of successful lineages, which were primarily male-oriented in commemoration and ritual practice; (3) the defleshing grounds of the dead, the final "resting place" for many of the deceased; and (4) burial tombs physically disassociated from the residence, where the bones of important ancestors were interred and where public rituals were conducted by males. Thus, the transport of skeletal remains from the defleshing ground to a tomb signifies the transition from a deceased relative to an ancestor. In Mesoamerica, on the other hand, the common practice of interring dead ones within the heart of cities and villages not only blurred the distinction between deceased relatives and ancestors but also promoted ritual practices that lacked the gender hierarchy so explicit in the Chinese pattern.

In studies of ancient Maya society, the importance of ancestor veneration as an agent of legitimation is being recognized increasingly not only in hieroglyphic texts of royal dynasties but also in nonelite residential compounds. Ancestor veneration, however, does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it is the quintessential expression of lineage structure. As Freedman (1966: 118) notes,"ancestor worship... threw certain organizational principles of the lineage into relief and expressed ideas central to the competition within, and the unity of, the lineage communities." Likewise, Southall (1957: 111) comments on "ancestor worship" among the African chiefdoms of the Alur: "It is not surprising that the Alur ideas of the relationship of lineage and of their development through time find more consistent expression in the ritual context of ancestor worship than in the welter of political activity." Finally, ancestor veneration has been identified as a unifying force in segmentary systems of exogamous localized groupings such as those documented in Africa by the classic studies of Fortes (1965) among the Tallensi and Goody (1962) among the LoDagaa. Thus, ancestor veneration is a potent ritual through which lineage membership is expressed.

The writings of neo-evolutionists stress the importance of descent groups as a vehide of social differentiation and the nexus of residential clusters (Fortes 1953; Fried 1967; Service 1971; Weber 1947). Service (1971:109) distinguishes between residential groups formed by unilineal descent groups (the "lineal tribe") and those formed by marital residence rules without descent reckoning ("bands") Fried (1967:125) examined ranked societies held together by kinship ties among residential groups. While ostensibly not stratified economically, ranked societies nevertheless were noted to be somewhat exclusive in that lineages offered members shared access to restricted resources. The most commonly cited characteristic of residential descent groups, however, is a shared concern with genealogy, defined by Freedman (1966:31) as "a set of claims to origin and relationships, a charter, a map of dispersion, a framework for wide-ranging social organization, a blueprint for action... a political statement." Genealogies provide not only a means by which descent can be reckoned and the web of kinship defined in an exclusive manner, but they also provide a "blueprint for action" in terms of the intergenerational transmission of property, rights, and duties upon the death of powerful members of the lineage. The close linkage between genealogical reckoning and resource rights—in this case, land—has been emphasized by Southall (1957:65) in reference to the chiefdoms of the African Alur: "The few clans which have maintained or achieved complete territorial integrity have, not surprisingly, preserved or involved more highly consistent genealogical charters which are symbolic of it." Thus, although the lineage may not always have a spatial or territorial integrity, more often than not it is anchored both symbolically and materially to the use of a particular landscape.

The construction of genealogies that mitigate competition for resources has a resonance when applied to the Maya lowlands, where there was a striking increase in population over the first millennium A.D. and where the inhabitants employed a variety of strategies to encode and preserve genealogical information. These strategies included repetitive, transgenerational occupation and refurbishing of household compounds (in which ancestors were interred); successive interment of the dead in ancestral shrines and pyramids (Coe 1956); protracted treatment of the dead with display of skeletal parts and ashes in wooden and clay icons (Tozzer 1941); and iconography and script replete with references to ancestors (e.g., Ashmore 1991; Houston 1989; Lounsbury 1974; Schele and Freidel 1990; Schele and Miller 1986).

The rituals and rules of intergenerational transmission of resources, privileges, and obligations is an important part of lineage organization. Most ethnographers who have studied lineage structure have focused on this very public (and easily recorded) aspect of lineage. Upon the death of a leading lineage member, property and goods are passed down to the next generation according to the customs of the lineage (Freedman 1966; Goody 1962; Southall 1957). For instance, it was common among Chinese lineages studied by Freedman (1966: 150) for all sons to inherit equal portions of land, but the eldest son inherited the residence and, along with the head residence, the ancestor shrine. In this way, there is generational continuity in the residence, a feature that, over the long run, is archaeologically visible as a sequence of occupation and refurbishing. Haviland (1988), in fact, has noted such characteristics in the residential groupings of Tikal. Lineages exist not in episodic but in durational time—the longue durée of Braudel (1980)—and thus are appropriate analytical units for archaeological research.

Given their potential for longevity, lineages are neither synchronic nor static social formations, even though the bulk of our knowledge about these structures derives from short-term ethnographic studies. Lineages can undergo rapid or slow cycles of growth, dissolution, or coalescence with other lineages. While less prosperous ones may die out altogether, generally due to demographic factors, other lineages enjoy a longevity that seems legendary by twentieth-century Western standards, such as the forty-two generations of commemorated ancestors documented by Freedman (1966:4). Smith (1959: 191), likewise, noted the antiquity of family ties in rural Tokugawa-period Japanese villages by observing that relatively new immigrants had found that older, established families (who monopolized all the good agricultural land) had been in the village for several hundred years. These ethnographic examples further clarify the notion that lineages, rather than being ephemeral social formations, can persist on a scale of time that is long enough to be detected archaeologically, given that our phases often span two hundred years or more.

Americas

In the Americas of the Pre-Hispanic and Colonial periods, the critical role of the ancestors in social practice and resource rights has been recreated from a fragmentary archaeological record; ethnohistoric accounts of entradas, missionization efforts, and land litigation; and a core of principles and cosmological perspectives that survived the Spanish invasion. Outside of the Maya region, research focused on the practices of "living with the ancestors" has been most prominent in the Andean region of South America and in the Oaxacan (Zapotec) area of Mesoamerica.

We have long known that ancestral veneration was an important aspect of imperial Andean societies, since a mummified ancestor carried on a litter was one of a host of potent images of royal Inka culture provided by Guaman Poma (1980; see also Zuidema 1973). It is increasingly clear, however, that ancestors also played a fundamental role in ayllu organization (nonroyal, landholding corporate groups of the Andes). The Huarochirí manuscript, a colonial document compiled by Father Francisco de Avila "who seems to have used it as secret intelligence for his assault on American deities from 1608 onward" (Salomon 1991: 1) is especially relevant here. The ayllu defined itself most clearly in terms of its ancestor-focused kindred; it included lineages but was not always unilineal (see Spalding 1984: 28-29) and frequently formed a portion of a multi-ayllu settlement (Salomon 1991: 22). As suggested in the Huarochirí manuscript, inclusion within an ayllu was open to political negotiation and not based on hard-and-fast kinship reckoning. Specifically, "One can see in the myths of Concha ayllu... that genealogical connection alone was insufficient to bestow land on the two Concha lineages that had become politically disconnected. But adoption combined with political or marital alliance was seen as suffficient to create ayllu entitlements even when there was no genealogical tie" (Chap. 31, Sec. 403; Salomon 1991: 23). In short, the ayllu was a political entity with the ancestor-focused imagery and huacas (superhuman persons, shrines, or holy and powerful objects) serving as "framing activities" (Douglas 1966:63-64) for economic matters.

As Sherbondy (1982: 22) notes, water rights and canals in the Cuzco area were controlled by the ayllu rather than by individual families. The manner in which ancestors were invoked to substantiate these claims again clarifies the inextricable linkage between ancestors and proprietary resource rights:

These rights are based on claims that their lands and waters were originally distributed to them by the founders of the ayllus. Whether the founding ancestors are deities or real human beings is not important for defining rights. It is only essential to be able to make a claim to lands and waters by citing an ancestor. In the case of a conflict with another ayllu, the older ancestor has precedence.

...the ancestors who were responsible for giving the source of water to the ayllu or who constructed the canal system are called the "owners" (the "dueños" in Spanish). (Sherbondy 1982:22)

So, although the ayllus, strictly speaking, are not descent groups, the rights to water are passed down to descendants through ayllu membership.

Based on passages in the Huarochirí manuscript, Salomon (1991:19) addresses the manner in which huacas are the "spacial [sic] foci of superhuman and human genealogy," particularly as that genealogy is "symbolized by shrines called pacarinas or 'dawning places' that represented founders' and heroes' appearances on earth." Thus, physical landmarks within the territory of an ayllu embody the social identity of a group and their genealogical history within such a territory much in the same way as the warabal ja or lineage shrines of the highland Quiché Maya establish a charter for local resource use (see Chapter 2).

According to the Huarochirí manuscript, mummified ancestors were kept in caves or special stone structures (Chap. 11, Sec. 155, Salomon 1991:20), establishing a sacred geography that linked territorial places to ancestral time. "The pre-resettlement scheme of territoriality, a mental map of social groups attached to place-deities and localized ancestors, still formed a complete and intelligible shadow-geography projected onto the landscape that colonial organizations had already reshaped de facto" (Salomon 1991:23). Likewise, the Quechua word for village, llacta, is not simply a function of demography and geography. Rather, the term encompasses what Salomon (1991:23) refers to as a triple entity of a "localized huaca (often an ancestor-deity), with its territory and with the group of people whom the huaca favored."

The ayllu was not an institution of equality; ranking was omnipresent within the structure of the ayllu. So deeply did the ideology of inequality permeate the ayllu that deviations from rank ordering required long explanations. Such a qualifying description occurs in Supplement 1 of the Huarochirí manuscript, which contains a long description of "the birth of human siblings whose rank order closely approached equality—that is, twins" (Salomon 1991:21).

The recording of ancestral genealogies is a leitmotif of hierarchically organized groups both in South America and in Mesoamerica. In the latter region, particularly among the Zapotec and Mixtec, genealogies were key to the maintenance of elite status. Such constructions of history continued into the Spanish Colonial period as elites strove to maintain their noble status through petitions to the Colonial authorities (Whitecotton 1990:133). So intertwined was the scribal act of writing with the recording of genealogy that "the Zapotec word for book or document—quichi tija colaca (Córdova 1942:244v)— means 'paper of old lineage people' or simply 'paper of my ancestors"' (Whitecotton 1990:133). One preserved document of Zapotec genealogy, that of the Hispanic Society of New York City, indicates the temporal depth of such systems of ancestral reckoning; in a series of bands "fifteen generations of paired individuals (females on the left, males on the nght)" are portrayed (Whitecotton 1990:15). The metaphor of ancestors as emergent from the trunk of a tree is shown in the Codex Vienna (Marcus 1992:274) and is also usefully employed in royal genealogies of the Maya ruler Pakal. Further information specific to ancestor veneration comes from a reinterpretation of the accounts of early chroniclers and missionaries in the Zapotec area who collected the names of local "deities" often by reference to material icons which Spaniards termed "ídolos" (idols). Marcus (1978; Marcus and Flannery 1994) has challenged the notion that the diversity of names given to these icons represents a Zapotec cosmos inhabited by a pantheon of gods in the sense of Classic Greek and Roman pantheons. Rather, she suggests that many of the names of revered individuals recorded by early chroniclers and missionaries were actually the names of apotheosized ancestors. Ancestor veneration is deeply rooted among the Zapotec, where the practice may have emerged as long ago as the Early Formative (1150-850 B.C.) and was represented by figurines (referred to as penigolazaa or "old people of the clouds") which have been found at the sites of San José Mogote, Tierras Largas, Abasolo, Huitzo, and Tomaltepec (Marcus and Flannery 1994).

Significantly, the transition from the village-based ancestral veneration of the Formative to the veneration of royal ancestors within the context of a state religion centered at Monte Albán was not a seamless fusion; rather, the process is marked by the disappearance of the small solid figurines and the transformation of the fire-serpent and were-jaguar motifs (Marcus and Flannery 1994). In other words, state appropriation of ancestor veneration was not simply an amplification of village-based practices but was symptomatic of a fundamental restructuring of the power relationships to which certain ancestors lent tacit consent. That is, the salient links between ancestors, lineage, and land were weakened at the same time that a smaller subset of royal ancestors became increasingly important in providing a bridge between generations in the transmission of political power.

With the emergence of the Zapotec state, "ancestors" were increasingly associated with large, elaborate residential structures (Caso 1938, 1969; Winter 1974). Tombs at Monte Albán were family crypts, reopened and repainted several times (Flannery and Marcus 1983). In residential complexes at nearby Lambityeco, Lind and Urcid (1983) have found iconographic as well as burial evidence which supports the notion that ancestral veneratton was central to the Zapotec. Excavations at one elite residential locale (Mound 195) in particular revealed the remains of six successive elite houses with three associated tombs, one of which was fronted by a frieze (Lind and Urcid 1983 79). The iconographic content of the frieze illustrates the importance of ancestral depiction: "Each of the male figures in the lower friezes carries a human femur in his hand—the femur of his ancestor, a symbol of his hereditary right to rule" (Lind and Urcid 1983:80 and their Fig. 5). This complex also contained a two-meter-high altar complex and a family mausoleum (Tomb 6) built on top of a 1.5-meter-high stone-faced platform. Osteological analysis served to support the iconography; that is, femora, in particular, were underrepresented in the multiple and secondary burials of elite Tomb 6 (Lind and Urcid 1983: 81). This conflation of residential, ritual, and burial contexts is characteristic of much of Mesoamerica. Although the Spanish missionaries of the sixteenth and later centuries forced the separation of the dead from the domiciles of their descendants, ancestors are still perceived as residing in the house among the highland Quiché (Bunzel 1952). Among the highland Mixtec, the word vehe refers to both "house" and "grave" (J. Monaghan, pers. com. 1992).

Examination of ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological research among societies of the Americas as well as Africa and Asia indicates that the rituals of ancestor veneration knit the political and economic spheres together with the ideological sphere in a way that very few social practices have the capacity to do. This summary, not intended as a comprehensive literature review, establishes the intellectual "common ground" of the themes of ancestors, lineage, land, power, and kingship. As applied to the Maya regions, this avenue of research is capable of producing a more holistic view of Maya society. This expanded perspective can provide a basis for modeling expectations of the archaeological record not only in regard to investigations of elite, architectural contexts.

General Sources along the Space-Time Continuum

Subsequent chapters follow the themes of ancestor veneration, lineage, land, inequality, and power into the Maya region. In doing so, a concerted effort has been made to consult major references in four categories of Maya scholarship relevant to these topics. These categories are (1) ethnographic texts; (2) ethnohistoric texts; (3) Maya texts such as the books of Chilam Balam and the Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier codices, as well as legal disputes and boundary settlements; and (4) archaeological literature, including analyses of artifacts, structures, and settlement as well as transliterations and interpretations of hieroglyphic texts and iconography.

Each category has its own geographic and, of course, temporal strengths; for instance, ethnographic sources are rich for highland Chiapas, Guatemala, and northern Yucatán, whereas ethnohistoric texts are abundant for sixteenth-century northern Yucatán, the Chontalpa, and highland Guatemala. While the exact provenience is unknown for the Maya codices, it is generally accepted that they are all pre-Hispanic, and except for the Codex Grolier, which apparently came from a dry cave in Chiapas (Coe 1973), the codices originated in the Yucatán-Campeche area. While Thompson (1972: 15) favored a date of about A.D. 1200-1250 for the Codex Dresden, suggesting that it was a Postclassic version of a Classic-period document, Paxton (1986) has argued that a more recent date is also possible. The lion's share of archaeological data comes from survey, excavation, and iconographic documentation at sites in the Petén region of northern Guatemala, along the Usumacinta River, modern-day Belize, and the southeastern zone of Copán. Areas such as northern Yucatán, the western riverine regions of Chontalpa, and the Guatemalan highlands are underrepresented because less archaeological research focused on the Classic and Formative periods has been conducted in these areas.

Some readers may be startled by the manner in which archaeological examples from the Formative period are juxtaposed, within the same breath, with documentary materials from Colonial times or recent ethnographic observations. While not denigrating the importance of temporal control in Maya studies, I do believe that social practices can be studied both in their historical specificity and across the space-time continuum. As the title of this book suggests, the boundaries between the past and the present are rarely as absolute as the western positivist perspective would suggest. There are certain societal structures—"armatures," as Hunt (1977:248) referred to them— that persevere and, in fact, transcend historical incident. The coalescence of lineage and locality in the practice of ancestor veneration is one such cosmologically robust and temporally pervasive structure.