Rituals surrounding death are informed not only by biological concerns but also by social and religious norms of behavior. As a primary focus in sociocultural anthropology, the study of death witnessed an explosion in theoretical refinement and scope over the last few decades of the twentieth century, expanding far beyond its modest nineteenth-century origins in the study of social organization to address broad philosophical and anthropological issues.¹ Archaeology has followed a similar path, with speculative, chronological, and cultural approaches to burials supplanted by the concerns of processual and postprocessual theory.² Yet most analytical approaches to death have at their theoretical...

As observed by Alfredo López Austin in his seminal work, TheHuman Body and Ideology,¹ Central Mexican peoples of the Colonial Period saw mortality as an acquired attribute. It was a stigma procured during sex or maize consumption: ingesting maize and participating in sexual activity were ways of consuming death and incorporating it into the body. In eating maize, they brought what was born of the earth—of the realm of death—into their bodies and hence began participation in a larger life cycle.² Knowingin teuhtli, in tlazolli,“the dust, the filth,” of sex was likewise viewed as a...

As can be expected, funerary rites are not generally depicted from start to finish. Perhaps the best encapsulation of behaviors associated with death, burial, and rebirth comes from the aforementioned Berlin vessel (Figure 31). On it, a deceased lord is wrapped within a bundle inside a funerary temple, with mourners outside crying and gesturing toward the pyramid. Although his burial is not shown, it is implied: his bones sit amid watery bands, indicating his entry into the Underworld. He reappears in two forms, as an anthropomorphic cacao tree and as an abstract lunar deity. Even this vessel, however, does not...

Patricia McAnany has observed that creating a “genealogy of place” has been of historic concern to Maya communities. The establishment and recognition of land rights, in both colonial- and modern-era Yucatán, seems to have involved questions of inheritance, habitual encroachment, or primary occupancy. McAnany has suggested that similar ideas existed in pre-Hispanic times, with the “principle of first occupancy” defining lineage customs and conflicts in the Classic Maya lowlands. In essence, the first individuals to colonize a given area gain permanent ownership of the best agricultural lands; families who arrive later are forced to either fight for decent arable land...

Royal ancestors played a vital role in religious and political life, actively taking part in a variety of activities ranging from accessions to birthday celebrations. Dead kings occasionally “saw” or “witnessed” the activities of their descendants, overseeing events from celestial or similar positions in the manner of Classic Maya gods. Caracol Stela 6 (Figure 57), for example, mentions the scattering of incense by Knot Ajaw on the Period Ending date of 9.8.10.0.0 4 Ahau 13 Xul (July 4, 603). His actions at the Five Great Sky place are seen by his dead father, Yajaw Te’ K’inich II:yilaj ux ?...

As Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington have pointed out, divine kings and their relatives are natural symbols of the perpetuity and authority of the social order.¹ Nowhere in Classic Maya society was this perpetuity more important than in the personage of the king; the divine king embodied a force ultimately responsible for the maintenance of his polity religiously as well as politically. His fortunes were intimately linked with the fate of his site: his capture or sacrifice, admittedly the probable result of military or economic misfortunes, was the symbolic collapse of what Stephen Houston and others have termed “moral authority.”²...