Maya Heritage Research Articles

El patrimonio maya es la tierra (‘Maya heritage is the earth’): the work of contemporary Yucatec Maya artist Luis May Ku

This article investigates Yucatec Maya heritage and identity through the perspective of Indigenous ways of knowing. The focus is the work of Luis May Ku, a contemporary self-identified Yucatec Maya artist from the community of Dzan in the state of Yucatán (Mexico). It considers the interplay of heritage discourses and power hierarchies as they apply to his life in Dzan, in Coba, where he has been teaching, and his outreach to international bodies, like the British Museum, and global marketing. My analysis is a case study of the layered, fluid, shifting, and ambivalent notions of Maya heritage and identity. I situate his artwork and practice in a wider context of Indigenous identity struggles, as seen through Tim Ingold’s relational model and other bottom-up heritage movements. These seek alternatives to capitalism, take strides to de-colonize land, and provide local lessons which – when applied more widely – can help make the more planet sustainable.

Negotiating Heritage through Education and Archaeology: Colonialism, National Identity, and Resistance in Belize

If true historical scholarship is about linking the present to the past and impelling the reader to take action in the here and now, then Alicia Ebbitt McGill's book—a culmination of over 15 years of ethnographic research in Crooked Tree and Biscayne, two Kriol communities of north-central Belize—more than delivers. McGill argues that archaeology and education are intersecting and interconnected institutions through which both official heritage and vernacular heritage (which in McGill's conceptualization comprises local, tangible, and intangible cultural components that are shared by the community) are negotiated and contested. Alongside her deep understanding of the Crooked Tree and Biscayne communities, McGill also engages with British imperial archival sources, providing us with a glimpse into the past that is always in relation to the concerns of the present. In taking on the question of archaeology in Belize, McGill adds to conversations in public history around Maya archaeology begun in recent years by scholars such as Christina Bueno and Patricia A. McAnany on Mexico and Central America.There is a clear logic to the way that the book is organized. While chapter 1 lays out the main thrusts of the book, the rest is organized in chapter pairs. The first pair (chapters 2 and 3) focuses on education, looking at its historical development and linkages to heritage practices as well as its present issues and concerns. The second pair (chapters 4 and 5) picks up the story of archaeology by both giving a long view of this institution in Belize from colonial times to the present and examining current community negotiations and resistance around heritage practices connected to archaeology. The extremely vital concluding chapter is the author's reflection on both her field experiences and her engagement with the communities' youths.McGill's work is full of insights. One of her most illuminating arguments is that even as Belizean heritage practices continue to prioritize Maya history and archaeology, there is a simultaneous lack of initiative to understand the histories of other ethnic groups, particularly Kriol communities. Part of the reason for this failure, according to McGill, is the “thingification” of archaeology, whereby artifacts and ruins become the proofs of heritage. She makes powerful use of the drawings made by students in the schools that she studies, in which Maya heritage was repeatedly signified by the presence of “old things” (p. 103). The danger of orienting archaeology toward artifacts becomes clear in her interviews; even teachers often do not realize that Kriol communities have a tangible history that could form part of heritage preservation. Kriol children in these communities appear to be more familiar with the nation's Maya heritage than their own local history. Second, McGill highlights how official agendas, whether in the colonial or the postindependence period, were supported and bulwarked by the twin pillars of education and archaeology. At the same time, McGill's book, despite showing the constraints and limitations within which Belizean archaeology has developed and continues to operate, is a book that gives hope. In particular, McGill is able to show the vibrancy of Belizean youth and students and the dedicated and often independent-minded teachers whose commitment to community can overcome the systemic problems with heritage practices in Belize.As a historian, I was fascinated by McGill's unique methodology and her ability to connect the past with the present. I did feel, however, that McGill's purpose was somewhat hindered by the structure of the book, with separate chapter pairs respectively addressing education and archaeology. I wondered whether her points about the interconnectedness of these two institutions would not have been better served by more thematic chapter divisions, so that each chapter could examine the intersection between archaeology and education more germanely. I also felt that McGill could have more deeply engaged the institutionalization of Belizean archaeology and the overwhelming presence of US universities and institutions in current Maya archaeology. This would also have tied in nicely with the author's discussion of tourism and heritage practices.Overall, I found McGill's book timely and important. It is one of those rare pieces of scholarship that compels the reader to get up and take action. As such, not only will it be of interest to historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists of Belize and the Maya region, but it would also be immensely helpful for policymakers on the ground involved in shaping education policies and heritage practices.

Tropical Forest and Wetland Losses and the Role of Protected Areas in Northwestern Belize, Revealed from Landsat and Machine Learning

Changes in land-use and land-cover, including both agricultural expansion and the establishment of protected areas, have altered the landscape pattern and extent of forest and wetland cover in the tropics. In Central America, land-use and land-cover change is also threatening the cultural resources of the region’s ancient Maya heritage since many ancient sites have been degraded by burning, deforestation, and plowing. In this study of Orange Walk District of northern Belize, from the 1980s to the present, we used multitemporal Landsat data with a random forest classifier to reveal trends in land-use and land-cover change and the increasing loss of forest and wetlands. We develop a random forest classifier that is time-generalized to map land-use and land-cover across the entire Landsat record, including Landsat 4, 5, 7, and 8, with a single algorithm. Including multiyear and seasonal composites was important for obtaining cloud-free coverage and distinguishing between different land-use and land-cover types. Early deforestation (1984–1987) was in small patches scattered across the landscape and likely driven by small scale agriculture such as milpa and smaller area tractor and horse-drawn plowing. The establishment of protected areas in the late 1980s and early 1990s allowed for forest regrowth in these areas, while wetland losses were high at 15%. The transition to industrial agriculture in the 2000s, however, drove a 43.6% expansion of agriculture and a 7.5% loss of forest and a 28.2% loss of wetlands during the ~15 years. Protected areas initiated in the 1980s led to a nearly 100 km2 decrease in agriculture from 1984–1987 to 1999–2001, and they became essential refugia for habitat and maintaining ecosystem services.

Maya of the Past, Present, and Future: Heritage, Anthropological Archaeology, and the Study of the Caste War of Yucatan

This paper examines the relationship between the past, present, and future of Maya heritage and archaeology. We trace some of the background of Maya archaeology and Maya heritage studies in order to understand the state of the field today. We examine and demonstrate how an integrated and collaborative community heritage project, based in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, has developed and changed over time in reaction to perceptions about heritage and identity within the local community. We also describe the many sub-programs of the Tihosuco Heritage and Community Development Project, showcasing our methods and outcomes, with the aim of presenting this as a model to be used by other anthropologists interested in collaborative heritage practice.

Different Ways of Knowing and a Different Ways of Being: On a Path to Reawakening Legacy of the Maya Forest

Archaeological projects are in a special position to create unique partnerships, with shared goals and intentions, to development Maya anthropological archaeology. This narrative presents an education outreach project in archaeology invigorated with local collaboration. When priorities of active archaeological projects formally include resident community participation, new horizons and accomplishments are achieved. Local and international interests in heritage and cultural traditions create the platform for interactive relationships and identification of common ground. Together, our experience recognizes four educational pillars that revolve around ancient Maya heritage and the fundamental Maya forest garden. Centered on the protected area of the El Pilar Archaeological Reserve for Maya Flora and Fauna, El Pilar and forest gardens are celebrated at the urban Cayo Welcome Center, practiced at the active outfield Chak Ha Col forest garden, and taught at the rural Känan K’aax School Garden. As our experience demonstrates, community partnerships require specific elements of acknowledgment including a valued tangible heritage, a formal information outlet, an education link, and an honored cultural tradition. Together, these provide fertile ground for cultivating collaborations in the Maya region and across the world.

Kojichk’ulal – Kojiq’b’ej – Kojinatil

Brother and sister discuss Maya community organizations in South Carolina and describe how the Church and Maya heritage work together. Their own path to becoming aware of Maya heritage and their establishment of an active and productive Maya youth group give a powerful example of the possibilities for a better future. They hope to connect with and build relationships with other Maya youth groups in the United States.

Prácticas socioculturales, turismo e identidad entre los hijos de migrantes yucatecos en Cancún

El centro turístico de Cancún en el sur de México atrae a muchas familias migrantes mayas originarias de la región maicera de la península yucateca, donde las tradiciones ceremoniales y rituales se conservan. En el nuevo escenario, la transmisión de prácticas y valores indígenas a las nuevas generaciones está en tensión constante con el contexto turístico de la ciudad. Desde la perspectiva de los hijos de las familias migrantes, nos enfocamos en el rol de la cultura maya para dar significado a las prácticas y construcciones sociales que ofrecen un sentido de congruencia a las vidas.

“It’s Good to Learn about the Plants”: promoting social justice and community health through the development of a Maya environmental and cultural heritage curriculum in southern Belize

Indigenous communities have the need to respond rapidly as development processes continue to change global environments. This paper argues that the health of communities, broadly defined, is linked to traditional ecological practices and that this linkage should be considered toward the goal of promoting social justice through education. Using data gathered using multiple methods in and around Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Maya villages in southern Belize, the paper outlines how ecological practices related to land use are valued and valuable in several, interlinked ways: through their contribution to what makes a “healthy life,” through their part in defining what it means to be “Maya” and have Maya heritage, and through their distinct role in the learning of skills as part of the informal education process. Informed by this research and the data collected through the implementation of the lessons themselves, this paper identifies how formalizing these ecological practices as part of an environmental and cultural heritage curriculum for primary schools, while not without challenges, has potential to positively impact well-being in indigenous communities, thereby promoting social justice through the maintenance of the ability to live healthy, valued lives.

Perceptions of the past within Tz'utujil ontologies and Yucatec hybridities

Abstract

7 Sun, Sand, and… Sacred Pyramids: The Mayanization of Cancun's Tourist Imaginary

ABSTRACTFrom its construction in the early 1970s, Cancun has gone through a rapid demographic change accompanied by a transformation in the tourism industry, from having 117 inhabitants in 1969 to over 734,000 in 2014, being visited by more than 3.3 million tourists per year. As a result, Cancun has had to offer up something other than its original Caribbean advertising of “sun, sand, and sex,” now it is offering its Maya heritage. This paper analyzes the origin, development, and evolution of the “Mayanization” of Cancun—the use of Maya imagery and iconography in advertisements, architecture and souvenirs—and the promotion of a “Maya imaginary” through the laborers who fuel the tourism industry, turning cultural, archaeological, and historical patrimony into a commodity.

Maya cosmopolitans: engaging tactics and strategies in the performance of tourism

Maya heritage is embraced throughout Yucatán as a crucial component of tourism promotions. This, coupled with an emphasis on multiculturalism, makes the state itself a local actor in the marketing of Maya identity through the creation and funding of community-based tourism projects. This article discusses the shifting role of the state in shaping these communities, referencing a Maya village in the Mexican state of Yucatán as the context. The aim is an understanding of the articulation of local tactics to conceal cosmopolitanism while remaining competent in the eyes of funding agencies and the strategies employed by the state that reinforce the importance of performance for tourists. The desire on the part of state creates situations in which individuals are expected to exist in concurrent states of authenticity and modernity, as both traditional and cosmopolitan.

The Practice and Perception of Batida (Group Hunting) In A Maya Community of Yucatan, Mexico

The batida, or traditional group hunting, practiced by the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula provides hunters with wild meat to sustain their families. Our study of batida hunting trips in the Los Petenes community during a 6-month period (2008–2009) provided information on the participants, the practices, and the results. Maya peasant-hunters targeted deer (Odocoileus virginianus, 81%) and peccary (Pecari tajacu, 19%), obtaining on average 2.3 kg of meat per participant. In Los Petenes the batida is open to all adult men who wish to participate within its merit-based hierarchical structure, organized by two hunters recognized for their outstanding abilities. Interview data indicates that in addition to meat, the batida provides its participants with a reinforcement of their cultural identity as Maya peasant-hunters, a sense of belonging to the group and the community, and the chance to gain prestige as hunters. We argue that these social dimensions of the batida, complemented by the practical goal of meat provision, maintain this practice in the community, and very possibly in other communities of Maya heritage.

Pastoral Maya and the Maya Project: Building Maya Civil Society in the U.S.

Guatemalan Maya living in the United States as refugees, migrants, or immigrants without official documents do not entirely escape the troubles they previously faced in Guatemala, such as political and social disadvantages, language barriers, and maintaining identity; moreover additional problems result from the complexities of coping with the US immigration system and the likelihood of incarceration and deportation. This situation becomes more ambiguous with the mixed reception they receive from the United States, where some segments of law and society constantly strive to make survival improbable, and other segments such as churches, employers, and human rights organizations strive to protect. Among the multitude of organizations created within this contentious field of "pro" and "anti" is Pastoral Maya, best described as a "self-help" organization for Maya immigrants; and the Maya Heritage Community Project (the Maya Project) at Kennesaw State University. These two organizations have distinct but overlapping goals and methods designed to defend Maya fundamental human rights to life, security, and well-being. Of course, achieving such lofty goals has been problematic, and with anti-immigration laws and high unemployment of recent years many people have had hopes for the future dashed. But positive signs for the Maya exist, for an increasingly sophisticated Maya leadership has emerged with experience and with the security of having obtained documents of residence. These leaders hope to take advantage of their relatively safe space in the United States to promote a force for change that will lift up the Maya in the United States and in Guatemala. The Pastoral Maya organization has developed a particularly strong leadership that strives for these goals.

Survival and Revival of Terminal Classic Traditions at Postclassic Mayapán

AbstractRecent INAH excavations and reanalysis of data from the Carnegie Institution archaeological project document the survival and revival of Classic and Terminal Classic traditions at Postclassic Mayapán, the last Maya capital in Mexico. The survival of some Terminal Classic ceramic types and architectural forms at Mayapán around A.D. 1100–1200 reflects a pattern of continuity. A revival of earlier traditions is notable in the erection of stelae marking the katun endings and in Postclassic architecture that incorporates iconographie elements from Terminal Classic Puuc sites and the city of Chichén Itzá. The rulers and priests of Mayapán displayed their connection with the Terminal Classic Maya heritage to assert political power. The Puuc revival at Mayapán is linked with the Xiu priests, whereas the revival of the Itzá heritage of Chichén Itzá is affiliated with the Cocom rulers. Between A.D. 1250 and 1400, revival-style architecture at Mayapán was inspired by local traditions in the area of Yucatán. After A.D. 1400, trade contact with the East Coast inspired new art forms linked with the international style associated with Mixteca-Puebla art.

The Q’eqchi Healer’s Association of Belize

Since the 1980s, a considerable amount of scholarly activity has focused on Maya heritage and, especially, on the influences of a globalizing tourist industry flooding Maya-land. In this paper, however, we argue that contemporary Maya identity and cultural processes do not simply reflect and refract globalizing influences such as tourism. In some areas at least, on-going historical processes working in combination with much more recent, non-tourism related influences continue to affect Maya views of identity and heritage. We describe the development of an association of traditional healers in southern Belize whose goals include the promotion of both their medical practices and the broader intellectual and cultural heritage in which these practices are entrenched, and whose target population is their own people, not tourists. Our findings prompt us to reconsider how scholars characterize the influence of global tourism on Maya heritage and culture and to appreciate how issues of cultural heritage and its m...

Ch’orti’-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala: Indigeneity in Transition

In recent years, several scholars have discussed issues of Guatemalan history and anthropology, and these studies have, with a few exceptions, only marginally approached the borders of the Ch’orti’-speaking areas of eastern Guatemala. Unfortunately, serious historical and anthropological scholarship on the colonial and modern culture and society of the Ch’orti’ has remained painfully sparse. According to Metz, “Today, no more than twenty thousand people speak Ch’orti’ ” (p. 219). This statement describes the ongoing drama of an increasing Ch’orti’ population, superimposed upon a simultaneously dwindling Ch’orti’ culture in Guatemala’s Oriente. In 1983, Murdo MacLeod asked what happened to colonial Ch’orti’ society and called for a monographic study on the region. A decade later, in the Historia general de Guatemala (1994), Margarita Ramírez Vargas lamented the fact that there was still no exhaustive monographic study on the Ch’orti’. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a handful of doctoral dissertations (including Metz’s and my own) had taken up various topics related to the Ch’orti’. As a result, the historical, ethnographical, and ethnological Ch’orti’ have recently been the topic of increasing academic scholarship and debate.In Ch’orti’-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala, Brent E. Metz searches for indigeneity in eastern Guatemala. His quest (reminiscent of Robert Carmack’s seminal work among the Quiche Maya of the highlands) is fraught with disappointment and misapprehension, because the Ch’orti’ culture Metz searches for — which was described in detail by Charles Wisdom and Rafael Girard over a half century ago — has been systematically undermined by internal and external forces, to the point that the Ch’orti’ they described in the 1940s scarcely exist any longer. Nevertheless, as a result of years of participant observation, Metz provides lucid and critical insights into modern Ch’orti’ cultural and social longevity, all in the face of enormous pressures and conflicts that have threatened the Ch’orti’ with cultural extinction. Metz argues that identifying what is “Maya” is a relatively difficult task, because the definitions continue to evolve through phases of both self-definition and redefinition.The author provides a somewhat terse overview of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala and the remainder of the colonial period in the corregimiento of Chiquimula de la Sierra. He categorizes the hardships the Ch’orti’ overcame, including cultural and linguistic invasions, epidemic and pandemic disease, encomienda and repartimiento grants, and the effects of African slavery. Metz’s narrative is a bit sparse for the period between 1890 and 1930 and also with respect to the political and economic catastrophe contiguous to the transfer of power from Jorge Ubico to Juan José Arévalo, and from Jacobo Arbenz to Carlos Castillo Armas at midcentury.In classic ethnographic style, Metz describes his introduction to the Ch’orti’ villages near Jocotán that would become his summer home for over a decade. He elucidates on a broad range of topics, including subsistence, relationships, morality, linguistics, sexuality, politics, gender, humor, polygyny, reciprocity, and religious syncretism, all within the Ch’orti’ cultural framework. Metz articulately describes Ch’orti’ stoicism in the face of increasing ladinoization, economic marginalization, ethnic abandonment, paternalism, and violence.Metz pays particular attention to the horrors and brutality that afflicted the Ch’orti’ during the 36-year-long civil war that occupied much of the last half of the twentieth century. The Ch’orti’ found themselves caught between the ultra-right-wing conservatism of the military and the oligarchs on one side and the left-wing liberals and radical insurgency movements on the other. While the Ch’orti’ did not overwhelmingly support either side during “Las Ruinas,” Metz argues that neither faction treated them well, and both abused them for their own ideological motives and interests — “the Left seeking a more revolutionary Indian and the Right seeking a more consumeristic Indian” (p. 228). But Metz’s discussion of the more recent Maya Movement offers the hope that the Ch’orti’ will continue to find their place in the broader context of Maya-speaking peoples throughout Guatemala, which will bring them closer to their own Maya heritage and background.Metz makes use of many essential secondary sources in his ethnographic research, but more impressive is his use of archival documents from the AGCA and from municipal repositories in eastern Guatemala. Metz’s command of the Ch’orti’ language is notable, enabling him to conduct interviews with Ch’orti’ informants in Ch’orti’-speaking communities such as Pelillo Negro. These Ch’orti’ Maya provide invaluable insight into their own world, their economics, politics, and apprehensions for future generations of Ch’orti’ speakers. Metz has written an enormously important and essential book on a dwindling Maya culture; this book will be indispensable for years to come. Metz’s book will be of primary significance to upper-level graduate students, graduate students, historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists who are interested in Guatemalan history and politics, the Maya Movement in general, and the Ch’orti’ Indians in particular.