ABSTRACT
Maya archaeologists have traditionally been fascinated with the big and beautiful, such as royal tombs and monumental architecture. One of the most exciting areas of development, however, is the recent turn to much smaller matters such as the detailed study of artifact distributions and microscopic residues. Research on activity areas, organic and inorganic residues has arrived comparatively late in Maya archaeology. This is partly due to the strong emphasis in American archaeology on model-building on a grand scale. Earlier developments in the analysis of activity areas and residues can be found in Europe (or in projects directed by European archaeologists) where there was a stronger emphasis on empirical methods (see, e.g., Bethell and Maté 1989; Wells et al. 2000:450 for an overview on soil phosphate analysis; Heron and Evershed 1992; Evershed et al. 2001 for organic residues in ceramicvessels).1
