Preface and Acknowledgments

Summary

Sometimes it takes several attempts before a book takes shape and begins to write itself. In this instance, the gestation period has been seventeen years. My dissertation topic, stone tool acquisition and use (McAnany 1986), whetted my appetite for understanding economic process, and I longed to synthesize what I had learned from excavations in dwellings around Pulltrouser Swamp with the larger story of Maya economic practice. I had the opportunity to do that in 1991–1992, as a resident Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. At that time and as a result of distinctive mortuary deposits that we had excavated at K'axob in Belize, I became deeply engrossed in the topic of ancestor veneration. Elizabeth Boone, then director of Pre-Columbian Studies, consented to my changing the topic of my project. Living with the Ancestors (McAnany 1995, second edition to be published by Cambridge University Press) resulted from that period of research. In retrospect, the shifting of gears was more than fortuitous. In 1991, I lacked a perspective that would have resonated with Maya economic practice; I had planned a book similar to the tomes of Old World civilizations such as Diakonoff (1969) or Oppenheim (1964) on ancient Mesopotamia or, more recently, Greene (1986) on the Roman economy. Such studies tended to isolate an economic sector from other parts of society, often relying on a corpus of ancient texts conjoined to various degrees with archaeological information.