Recent research in the Maya Lowlands has revealed substantial new evidence for the first pottery producers at about 1000-600 bc, during the early Middle Preclassic period. This comparatively late adoption is a special case in Mesoamerica, where pottery appeared elsewhere up to a millennium earlier. Although archaic lifeways had long been established in the region, and pottery technology was likely known to some archaic communities, these new data reveal the complex set of circumstances that prompted the shift to ceramic production across the Yucatan Peninsula, Peten, and Belize. This article reviews these data from the perspective of the upland region of central and southern Yucatan, known as the Elevated Interior Region (EIR). Its rather complex early settlement links the EIR to contemporary pottery industries throughout the peninsula, suggesting well-established exchange systems were in place even as the first populations chose to settle more permanently on the landscape. Most significant among these cultural shifts was the increasing dependence on maize foodways as a primary subsistence strategy. Intensive maize agriculture has not been documented in Mesoamerica much before 1000 BC, yet ceramic technology was adopted independent of its use in other areas. Current evidence suggests, however, that the two were linked in the Maya Lowlands, where a relatively rapid transition took place as horticultural communities became more dependent on maize crops, followed waterways to settle more permanently on the landscape, and began producing pottery locally.

Yucatec Maya orality has been a popular topic of study of scholars from a wide array of disciplines. These studies often rely on academically generated categories of speech that have often been stylized in forms that descend from Western thought. The generated speech categories may overlook more performance-based forms that are more common of Indigenous knowledge systems. Most of the collected and analyzed Maya oral literature appears to be recounted by men, leaving women’s orality and their unique ways of interpreting the world largely under-documented. In this paper, I expand our understanding of Yucatec Maya women’s oral literature by providing a systematic documentation and description of u t’aan nukuch máak, words of the elders, a ‘speech’ genre that relies largely on performance. The performance of u t’aan nukuch máak are an embodiment of my female collaborators’ culture, as they occur in their daily routines. U t’aan nukuch máak are performed (or uttered) in the context of certain bodies, objects, times, and spaces that index concepts that reflect the strength of Maya cultural memory.

The reading of the T650 glyph has been a puzzle for decades. Here, we analyze the semantic contexts in which the glyph appears together with available phonetic evidence to arrive at a phonetic reading of JOM. We provide grammatical reconstructions of the lexical contexts and discuss the rebuses involved in non-semantic contexts.

The Cuceb is one of the most mysterious texts in the Books of Chilam Balam written during the early Colonial Period. Previous scholars have commented that it recounts a fictitious katun and contains events from different epochs ranging from the 13th to the 17th centuries. The text itself incorporates allusions of historical and mythological stories with origins from the Postclassic and Classic Periods. In this paper I will examine some expressions and key parts of the Cuceb. I propose that these passages interconnect with other texts in the Books of Chilam Balam and Paris codex, which together point to the collapse of Mayapan, the last capital of the Northern Yucatan.

The objective of the present study is to invite the reader to accomplish a reflection reasoned on the acting of the most controversial character of the history of the evangelization of the peninsular Mayas of the century XVI, with the aim of understanding the decisions and the responsibilities he assumed, within the circumstances than, due his condition, was compelled to face.

The discovery of Stela 87 in situ in a secondary context, as a reused element of sacralization in a possibly royal residence from the Early Classic, allows us to locate the time of the original function as a stela in the Late Preclassic. It is in the Late Preclassic that the image and the text with 4 glyphic signs allude to the ruler represented there. It is in the early part of the Late Preclassic that stelae at Tak’alik Ab’aj and other early cities represent their rulers, still without a long count date. This was implemented in the second part of the Late Preclassic, of which a good example is Stela 5 (126 ad). For this reason, the iconography and writing of Estela 87 adds another exponent and opportunity, particularly for the Pacific Coast region, to the study of the still small universe of early texts, and more precisely, of the first part of the Late Preclassic (100 BC-50 ad) (Schieber de Lavarreda, 2020a). It is this opportunity that motivated the present collaborative study.

This paper analyzes the spellings used in two vocabularies and three colonial Mayan grammars. The objective is to see if the missionaries were able to distinguish the Mayan sounds and if their representation is systematic. In order to achieve our objective, we have analyzed the vowel subsystem and its difficulties, as well as the consonant subsystem. We have been able to notice that vowel representation is difficult due to features such as pitch, while consonants are easier to identify. However, we have not recorded systematicity in the representation of either vowels (since the simple vowel can represent any type) or consonants, the latter using different representations for the sounds: digraphs <th>, geminates<pp>, simple spellings <k>; moreover, it is difficult to explain the use of the spelling <z> or <ç> for the Mayan alveolar fricative sound. Finally, we have been able to observe that in the representation we use spellings proper to the Latin alphabet and some used for the Spanish sounds <z> <ç> and <x> of the Sixteenth Century, in addition to the graphic innovation <Ↄ>, which may have its origin in the Hebrew alephate and is also found in Mateo Alemán’s Orthography (1609).

The First Chronicle Matichu is a historical account (kahlay or k’aajlay) found in parallel in the Chilam Balam de Chumayel, Chilam Balam de Tizimín and Codex Pérez books narrating events from the Postclassic (or even earlier) and early colonial periods. Despite its importance, several reasons (including the fact that it is a product of successive copies) have diminished its credibility as a primary historical source for the last phase of the pre-Hispanic period in the northern Yucatán peninsula. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a possible reconstruction of the textual history of the chronicle as a phase prior to the restoration of the original text. Proceeding in this way, it was possible to draw a stemma of the textual history of the Matichu Chronicle, which affirms the existence of an Ω archetype, dated in the first half of the seventeenth century, and a α subarchetype, ancestor of the versions of Tizimín and Pérez, confirming the suggestions made by the literature. It was also possible to find a reconstruction of Ω using the Maasian method. This reconstruction has important properties, such as semantic, chronological, and syntactic coherence, which provides strong evidence of its plausibility.

Studies on the Maya elite mention the existence of titles, objects, gestures, and attitudes that symbolized the status and power of an individual or a social group, which are represented in Classic Maya monuments and objects. This paper briefly discusses the conceptualization of this kind of symbols and based on the studies that have been developed on the subject, the main characteristics that these symbols had among the Mayas of the southern lowlands during the Late Classic period are presented; this serves as a referential framework to evaluate the existence of social status indicators in the elite tombs explored in Yaxchilán between 1978 and 1985.

During the Middle (1000–400 BC) and Late (400 BC–AD 200) Preclassic periods, Yaxnohcah was an extensive settlement containing more than 15 civic-ceremonial complexes spread over 40 km2. Our research focuses on one of the principal peri-urban nodes known as the Grazia Complex, which consists of a monumental platform featuring a triadic group, a ballcourt, and other minor structures. Excavations revealed several construction phases, as well as the remains of repetitive ritual activities. A hearth associated with an altar and a cache deposit with a triadic layout was uncovered on the platform in front of the triadic group. This deposit and its location represent one of the earliest and clearest examples of the conceptual equivalence of household hearths and three stone places in the Maya lowlands. It provides explicit evidence for the replication of household ritual associated with cooking hearths to the public ritual analog, feeding the gods, a religious ideology intimately related to the emergence of kings. Below the Late Preclassic triadic hearth, we identified an earlier altar, and below that, a much earlier Middle Preclassic hearth that probably preceded construction of the triadic group. These ritual contexts evidence the antiquity of community ritual practices at Grazia that involve repetitive ritual burning associated with placemaking activities. Here, we focus on ritual practices as vehicles to construct social relations within the local community, and their implications for the urban landscape at Yaxnohcah.