ABSTRACT
My coauthor Richard Leventhal, a Maya archaeologist, and I published this essay in 1993. It was originally presented as a contribution to the area of religion and ritual at an invited Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington, D.C. held in 1991 on the subject of Maya culture in the eighth century A. D., a period known as the Late Classic. We sought to bring the archaeological data and glyphic inscriptions dating from that period together with modern ethnography of the Maya-speaking people of Mexico and Guatemala in an effort to use contemporary religious beliefs and practices as sources of inference for the interpretation of religious precepts and ritual practices from more than a thousand years ago.
