I conclude that Hanns Prem's article in this issue is correct in the assessment that the Canek Manuscript is a forgery. This evaluation resulted from extensive communication with Prem and from additional research suggesting that the author of the Canek Manuscript used a 1917 publication by Philip Ainsworth Means and the writings of Sylvanus G. Morley as aids in constructing the text of the document. The forger's references to the Itza capital as Tayasal and to the Tayasal peninsula follow modern, not seventeenth-century, conventions, an error that reinforces Prem's conclusions. The discovery of a family of forgeries, of which the Canek Manuscript is a particularly convincing one, should make future researchers wary of single documents that differ significantly from others of the Colonial era.

In this article we discuss the results of the re-examination of a terracotta head of supposed Roman origin found in a pre-Hispanic burial offering near Mexico City. A thermoluminescent age test performed in 1995 at the Forschungsstelle Archäometrie in Heidelberg, Germany, set the age limits of the artifact at 1780 ± 400 b.p., which is consistent with the Roman-origin hypothesis. A review of the circumstances of this discovery did not demonstrate any sign of possible post-Columbian intrusion and permits the acceptance of the object as the first hard evidence from Mesoamerica to support pre-Hispanic transoceanic contacts between the Old and New Worlds.

This article summarizes the Late Classic history of the Maya city of Quirigua, Izabal, Guatemala, emphasizing its relations with other polities. Quirigua's origins as a kingdom are traced to a.d. 426, when the rulers of nearby Copan established it as a colony. For the next three centuries, the site apparently mediated an intense interaction between Copan and Tikal. In a.d. 736, a personage from Tikal's rival city, Calakmul, acted with the current king of Quirigua—Buts' Tiliw—shortly before his a.d. 738 revolt against Copan. This suggests that Quirigua's revolt may have been, in part, externally stimulated. The revolt of Quirigua against Copan initiated a series of wars by Buts' Tiliw and his successor, Sky Xul, directed against two unknown sites. At least one of these sites was probably within the Copan hegemony. In contrast to the reigns of Buts' Tiliw and Sky Xul, that of the last known king of Quirigua, Jade Sky, seems to have been free of warfare. In fact, in his final monumental text, Jade Sky indicated his reconciliation with Copan. This interpretation of the texts of Quirigua suggests that changes in alliance and wars played an important role in the development of the site during the Late Classic period.

This article takes two new approaches to the “enigmas” of La Venta. First, it examines the form of the site in relation to the region from which the La Ventans procured their stone: primarily, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. La Venta's north–south axis pointed to the nearest high mountain south of the site. The bar-and-four-dots design on the Mosaic Pavements corresponded to the duality of the female earth and its four-directional maize plants crossed by the east–west path of the male sun. The Massive Offerings, previously interpreted as effigies of seas, are noted to be on the north of the ceremonial court and to correspond to the ocean a few kilometers north of the site. Second, this paper augments the current understanding of the ideological or spiritual motivations for the design and construction of La Venta's Massive Offerings and Mosaic Pavements by looking through the lens of contemporary Mixe ritual practice and shamanic cosmology. The Mixe are probably the linguistic descendants of the Gulf Coast Olmecs. Using these two lines of analysis, the paper advances several related proposals. It argues that the La Ventans planned Complexes A and C (the designations for the ceremonial court containing the Massive Offerings and other deposits and for the big mound) to replicate the topography of the region important to La Venta as a source of materials and food and, by extension, of knowledge. It specifically correlates the Massive Offerings, Mosaic Pavements, and almond-eyed supernaturals on stelae at the foot of Mound C to the principal “supernatural reality configurations” of the contemporary Mixe. Furthermore, it contextualizes the problem of shamanism by arguing that these supernaturals were not “gods” but sources of shamanic power and that the many buried offerings at La Venta are best seen as similar to aspects of Mixe ritual, which they call “work of the earth.” Finally, the paper reconsiders the existence of “gods” among the Olmecs, concluding that a more appropriate way to express their notions of the sacred is that they conceived supernaturals as meta-cosmological or meta-meteorological forces.

Las Ruinas de Arenal is a small “major” Lowland Maya center located at the southwest edge of the upper or western Belize Valley. This paper presents a preliminary description of Las Ruinas in formal, spatial, and temporal terms and reports the results of two short seasons of archaeological investigations carried out there in 1991 and 1992. Some aspects of the site's likely cultural, historical, and sociopolitical significance also are discussed.

The colossal “Coatlicue” sculpture has usually been interpreted as a representation of the female supernatural Coatlicue (Serpents Her Skirt) who gave birth to the Mexica patron deity Huitzilopochtli, or it has been identified as the cult figure of Cihuacoatl (Woman Serpent) or Tlaltecuhtli (Earth Lord). This paper offers an alternative reading of the monumental statue, one that recognizes the existence of at least three nearly identical “Coatlicues” and thus recontextualizes the monument as one of a larger set. The iconography of these great stone females points to their identity as Tzitzimime, celestial demons who were understood to descend to devour humankind if the sun were to fail. According to the Mexican chroniclers, a cadre of these fearsome monoliths dominated the sculpture progam of the Templo Mayor.

This article examines early colonial Kaqchikel Maya notions of the self, souls, and the heart. By integrating ethnohistorical data and contemporary ethnographic observations, we show that Kaqchikeles viewed the self as contingent on a dynamic balance of cosmic forces acting on the individual. The ways in which these forces are seen to effect one's state of being are documented through an extensive discussion of Kaqchikel metaphors of the heart and soul. We conclude by noting the importance of understanding processes of continuity (as well as change) in cultural constructions and argue for the continued utility of such approaches in ethnohistorical research.

During the last two decades, four manuscripts have surfaced, all purportedly of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century origin and each describing historical episodes of the contact between the Maya and Spaniards. Although some of them received scholarly attention and have been used as authentic sources of Maya history and culture, their identification as modern fakes can be established beyond a reasonable doubt. The texts show characteristics identical to the Spanish translation of Sylvanus G. Morley's The Ancient Maya (1947), and they possess specific information and illustrative material (i.e., Mayan hieroglyphs) that were drawn from this work, indicating that these manuscripts were created between 1950 and 1965.

In pre-Columbian times the famous dance drama, known as the Rab'inal Achi, but whose indigenous name is Xajoj Tun, ended in a human sacrifice. A comparative study of the native documents shows that the victim, an important prisoner of war, died by being shot with arrows. The tun dance was part of a larger festival, which served propagandistic aims. The ritual of the arrow sacrifice highlighted crucial political moments, for example, when new lords were installed, titles were handed out, or glorious battles that led to the power and hegemony of one or more ruling lineages were commemorated. In the case of the Rab'inal Achi, it is the heroic past of the Toj lineage, rulers in Late Postclassic Rab'inal, that proves to be the main subject. Interestingly, when focusing on the language used to describe the arrow sacrifice, we see that the victim, who was tied to a scaffold, a stake, or a column, was considered game, and the archers as hunters. The stake had a symbolic meaning, as well. It represented a tree of life, a tree we have come to know as the World Tree growing in the center of the earth and holding up the sky. In the Rab'inal Achi, that tree, the place where the Warrior of K'iche' is shot, is named the Maize Tree, the same fictitious tree that is depicted on the Tablet of the Foliated Cross of Palenque.

Three Maya women served as documented rulers during the Classic period. The expressions of their names and titles, unlike those of all of their contemporaries, share a unique syntactic variation throughout Mayan hieroglyphic inscriptions: their systematic lack of feminine prefixes. In addition to this variation, the bestowing of the na bate warrior title upon other exceptionally prominent Maya women suggests that women of extraordinary status in Classic-period Maya society were “masculinized,” or granted male attributes, in order to accommodate their sharing of status or occupancy of roles that were traditionally masculine. Since some male rulers were similarly portrayed with certain feminine traits, it is suggested that the Classic Maya concept of gender was based on a complementary, or balanced, relationship of masculine and feminine. The projection of one gender's traits onto individuals of another sex indicates that gender was not polar but rather inclusive and reciprocal, such that characteristics could be adopted and utilized by members of both sexes in order to make them suitable for specific roles.

Recent archaeological and geological surveys, combined with a neutron activation analysis, have located a new obsidian source in San Luis in the Department of Santa Bárbara of Western Honduras. From the Early Preclassic through Late Classic periods, the ancient inhabitants of the neighboring region of La Entrada acquired obsidian from San Luis and Source Y directly from outcrops and nearby streams in the form of small cobbles. These cobbles, due to their small size, were employed exclusively for the unspecialized production of percussion flakes, using a bipolar technique, for household consumption. Political boundaries played an important role in the distribution of certain imported commodities having a high exchange value: among others, Ixtepeque obsidian. It is our belief that political control over the distribution of Ixtepeque obsidian was confined more to smaller spatial configurations than to the suggested territorial political control of the segmentary states in the Maya lowlands. The distribution of goods with lower exchange values, such as the San Luis and Source Y obsidian, may have escaped political control. Small obsidian cobbles from San Luis and Source Y were apparently not distributed over long distances, but were rather essentially local resources.