ABSTRACT
As early as 1904, Franz Boas succinctly described Anglo-American anthropology’s innate dualism: “We find in anthropology two distinct methods of research…the historical method which endeavors to reconstruct the actual history of mankind, [and] the generalizing method which attempts to establish the laws of its development” (Boas 1974[1904]:24; our italics). Insofar as Maya archaeology has belonged to this intellectual tradition, it too has engaged in a century-long struggle between historical and generalizing tendencies. The study of Classic Maya sociopolitical integration has long been riven by this polemic, as research has tended to produce either unitary models based on the history of polity centers or segmentary models generalized from settlement analysis. This struggle of Boasian proportions has fostered the proliferation of other dichotomies as well, such as political versus domestic economy, monumental versus residential architecture, political center versus rural hinterland, that have inhibited a holistic study of mechanisms of sociopolitical integration in Classic Maya society.
