ABSTRACT
Maya civilization is alive and well. Modern Maya men and women walk the streets of Mexican, Honduran and Guatemalan towns today (see Figure 1.17, above). Their culture has neither collapsed nor gone through anything like devolution. It has simply mutated into a new form incorporating western ideas and religion. It has done so not because of long-term laws of behavior or environmental forces. It has changed since the Spanish conquest because of and at the pace of changing historical, political and economic circumstances. In this book I have tried to move away from our own hitherto accepted assumptions about cultural change in general and about Maya civilization in particular. For too long these have caused us to misunderstand the Preclassic Maya, to devalue their achievements, to search in vain for the correlates of idealized social types in the archaeological record, chiefdom and state, so that at times we could fit the Maya into one or other category. And we are constantly playing catch-up from the expected correlates to institutions. Institutions are always believed to precede the correlate in development. Without the material correlate, the institution is invisible and unknowable to us. Therefore, by chasing institutions through their material correlates, we play a self-defeating game (Yoffee 2005; Pauketat 2007: 20). But the old assumptions of earlier generations of archaeologists are bending and breaking under the weight of an avalanche of new data.
