Our interpretations of Classic Maya politics have changed tremendously over the last half-century. Until the 1960s, Maya civilization was conceived as a peaceful Eden dominated by priests who devoted their time to the esoteric arts of calendar-keeping, astronomy-astrology, and mathematics. This view has been completely overturned, and in this chapter, I consider how Maya states have been reconstructed at the macro scale by different scholars and from different perspectives since the 1960s. Archaeologists have used a combination of archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistorical data to reconstruct Classic Maya polities, and I follow how these sources of information have contradicted or supported each other.
Although Classic Maya polities clearly varied in structure and size, as most recent scholarship has highlighted (Marcus 1993, 1998; Pyburn 1997; Haviland 1997; Chase, Chase, and Haviland 1990; Demarest 1996a; Lucero 1999a; Iannone 2002; Munson and Macri 2009; Borstein 2005), previous (and sometimes current) discussions of the Classic Maya have engaged with two polarized models: the centralized model that envisions regional large-scale centralized states (A. Chase and D. Chase 1996; Chase, Chase, and Haviland 1990; Haviland 1992, 1997; Marcus 1993; Adams 1986) and the decentralized model that proposes small-scale weakly integrated polities (Demarest 1992; Houston 1993; Fox et al. 1996; see also reviews in Iannone 2002; Lucero 1997; Sharer and Golden 2004; Foias 2003; Runggaldier and Hammond in press). This debate has so dominated Maya archaeology in the last decades that I first explore its impact on our views of Classic politics.
World History
