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.

George Hasemann, Head of the Archaeology Section of the Instituto Hondureno de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), passed away in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on October 8, 1998, at the age of 54, after a five-year struggle with cancer. He is survived by his wife and colleague Gloria Lara Pinto de Hasemann and children Ana Eugenia, Jose Enrique, Diana, and Dawn.

Excavations beneath the Copan Acropolis provide the most complete record known for the origins and development of an Early Classic Maya royal complex (ca. a.d. 420–650). Beginning at the time of the historically identified dynastic founder, the earliest levels include the first royal compound, centered on a small talud-tablero platform, a vaulted tomb that may be that of the founder, and an adjacent tomb that may be that of the founder's wife and dynastic matriarch. The timing and development of architecture provide evidence of the founding and growth of Copan as the capital of a Classic-period polity during the reigns of the first seven kings (a.d. 426–544). By the reigns of Rulers 8–11 (a.d. 544–628), the Early Classic Acropolis covered about the same area as its final version in the Late Classic. Documentation of specific Acropolis buildings provides evidence of the external connections that reinforced the authority of Copan's Early Classic kings. Building sequences reflect the perpetuation of political power by using important locations as symbolic links to the sacred past. The Early Classic Acropolis also provides new evidence for the beginnings of palace architecture that have important implications for the origins of Maya state-level organizations. Overall, the findings from the Early Classic Copan Acropolis promise to significantly advance our understanding of the origins and development of Maya state systems.

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.

Classic lowland Maya censers can be described in terms of two general categories, image (or effigy) and non-image. The function and meaning of these incensarios is approached through consideration of their embellishment, symbolism, and contexts of use and recovery. It is suggested that in Peten and some adjacent areas, Classic image censers were part of the paraphernalia of divine kingship, associated with termination rituals and a royal funerary cult. Non-image and particularly spiked censers were more associated with birth/renewal, earth, rain, and calendrical rituals involving fire drilling. Their use became widespread in the lowlands during the Terminal Classic period, with the “collapse” of divine kingship and elite power.

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.

Ritual contexts at Laguna de On Island are identified in two structures that form part of a single household cluster in the central area of the site. The features and artifact assemblages of these structures indicate that a continuum of domestic-to-ritual debris is found at each location. Variation in the content of these assemblages is used to identify the degree of ritual activity and the function of each structure. Structure I is identified as a dwelling where ritual activity was conducted. Structure II is identified as a specialized household shrine or oratory. This examination of the contexts for ritual practice at Laguna de On addresses the issue of “secularization” of Postclassic Maya religion and the connection between status and ritual at a small, rural, Postclassic community.

The name “Street of the Dead” used to designate Teotihuacan's main avenue originates from a Nahuatl notation on a sixteenth-century map. Though this “story” is often deemed apocryphal, I argue in this paper that oral tradition preserved conceptual information that may not be archaeologically recoverable. Support for this position comes from comparative cultural analysis of Mesoamerican mortuary bundles as they are expressed in ritual and iconography. Crucial to this argument are the well-known stone masks of Teotihuacan. A case is made that the masks originally served as the faces of oracular mortuary bundles. The likely existence of mortuary bundles at Teotihuacan generates organizational models for the city in which lineage emerges as a fundamental element and suggests new insight into status differentiation and the iconography of power at Teotihuacan.

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.

In this paper, we present a complete list of eclipses documented in the Mexica manuscripts. We use this list together with information in the chronicles to outline a possible method used by Mexica chronologists for linking historical with retrodictable cosmic events that were deliberately chosen to fit historical circumstances. Solar events, particularly eclipses, figure prominently in a scheme that stresses the recurrence of like-in-kind events positioned at multiples of the Xiuhmolpilli (52-year) cycle. Thus, both the foundation of the empire and calendrical adjustments related to the fictional chronology of World Ages are connected to eclipses that were visible at Tenochtitlan and that fell either at the solstices or the equinoxes.

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.

Lack of draft animals is often considered to have been an impediment to urban growth in Mesoamerica. Transport, however, was only one of several factors that influenced the growth of cities. This paper contrasts the effects of energetic efficiency differences between horses and human porters with productivity differences between European and Mesoamerican agricultural systems. Depending on strength and nutritional requirements, horses may be from one to five times as efficient as human porters. Furthermore, horses compete with humans for food. Where the horse played a major transport role, one-third of available, arable land was devoted to oat production. With this in mind, I compare maize versus wheat productivity to show that a unit of land in Mesoamerica could support up to twice as many people as the same unit of land in Europe. Thus, the transport advantage enjoyed by European cities is essentially offset by a more intensive agricultural system in Mesoamerica.

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.

La región del cañón de Bolaños estuvo habitada por sociedades que acostumbraron enterrar a sus muertos en tumbas de tiro. El hallazgo de uno de estos monumentos funerarios sellado proporcionó el conocimiento integral del ritual funerario dentro de esa región.

This issue's special section presents three papers with important new data on the Formative-period village of K'axob, Belize. Until very recently, our knowledge of Formative Mesoamerican villages has been heavily weighted toward that of the highlands (Flannery 1976). These papers on K'axob go a long way toward redressing that imbalance.

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.

Excavations in Formative and Early Classic contexts at the Maya site of K'axob have produced a sample of 2,568 worked-shell ornaments crafted from both marine and freshwater species. Predominantly shell beads, the sample also includes unique pendants, figurines, and tinklers. A high frequency of unfinished beads in Middle Formative and early Late Formative midden contexts provides strong evidence of localized shell working and trading connections with the Caribbean. Personal adornment crafted from shell is an important item in many burials, including those of children. The most lavish disposal of shell, however, occurs in one of the earliest Middle Formative interments at K'axob. An adult male—who may have been a “founder” of K'axob—was buried with 2,019 shell beads. Through time, fewer individuals were buried with worked shell as the intricacy of shell working became more elaborate and possibly iconic of roles of authority. Interpretation of archaeological patterns indicates that shell beads can provide significant insight into the construction of social identities.