ABSTRACT
The time during which I have worked in Maya archaeology has been remarkably exciting, a period marked by great progress and stunning changes in methods and ideas. When I entered graduate school in the mid-1950s, the criticisms of Clyde Kluckhohn (1940) and Walter Taylor (1948) remained a topic of frequent conversation. But the ruling paradigm was still the Morley-Thompson (Morley 1946; Thompson 1954) model of slash-and-burn farmers of low population density, vacant ceremonial centers and, gentle priest leaders without egos. Sylvanus Morley (1946:262) revealed the attitude toward the inscriptions:
The Maya inscriptions treat primarily chronology, astronomy…and religious matters. They are in no sense records of personal glorification and self-laudation like the inscriptions of Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia. They tell no story of kingly conquests, recount no deeds of imperial achievements; they neither praise nor exalt, glorify nor aggrandize, indeed they are so utterly impersonal, so completely nonindividualistic, that it is even probable that the name-glyphs of specific men and women were never recorded upon the Maya monuments.
