ABSTRACT
Interest in ancient Maya skeletons has grown dramatically since the landmark studies by William Haviland (1967) at Tikal and Frank Saul (1972) at Altar de Sacrificios. Indeed, Maya bioarchaeology has blossomed in the last fifteen years to a very active field, with a large number of new scholars. Many of these new scholars have focused their work in Belize; however, research at Guatemalan, Mexican, and Honduran sites is also on the rise, both by both local and foreign scholars. Many of the issues addressed in the early works of Maya osteology (Haviland 1967; Saul 1972) remain key areas of active research for bioarchaeologists, especially questions about the health costs of population density in a rainforest setting and the biological correlates of social status. Yet the scope of Maya bioarchaeology has broadened considerably to incorporate new tools for hypothesis testing, such as stable isotopic studies of ancient diet and migration, biodistance studies of dental traits, as well as ancient DNA.
