ABSTRACT
In 1986 The Blood of Kings, the great exhibition and catalog by Linda Schele and Mary Miller, burst upon the Maya scene and radically transformed our understanding of the way the rulers of the Classic lowland cities ruled, behaved, and thought. What made The Blood of Kings so revolutionary was that for the first time our newfound ability to read, or at least to understand, figurines, pottery vessels, and other artworks of the lowland Maya. The well-documented Aztec court has been effectively described in this volume by Susan Evans and presented as a possible analogy to the Classic Maya one. In combination with deciphering historical texts, Mayanists can now associate known Maya royalty, both male and female, with specific royal spaces and deduce the rituals that were carried out in them. Possibly this focus reflects the material-determinist bias of anthropologically trained archaeologists that ancient mental systems are irrelevant superstructures, mere epiphenomena when considered against the deeper reality of economic systems.
