Macaw Mountain and Ancient Peoples of Southeast Mesoamerica

Summary

In A Forest of Kings, Linda Schele and David Freidel captivated readers with substance and inference about multiple Maya cities and their inhabitants. For Copan, they focused on long- and short-term developments culminating in the death of its last effective king, Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, whose death effectively coincided with the end of both dynastic rule and social cohesion at Macaw Mountain, Copan. Extraordinary finds and ideas have come to light since that 1990 publication, things those authors couldn’t have known when they wrote.

The time is right to explore briefly some theoretical, substantive, and methodological advances for interpreting people’s lives and practices in culturally diverse societies of what are now parts of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Freshly discriminating models and innovative analytic methods continue to enrich greatly our understanding of people, politics, and lived experience at Classic Maya Copan and its vexing subordinate Quirigua, as well as a growing range of their neighbors, whether allies, foes, subordinates, or other. Much remains as told in A Forest of Kings, and as its authors foresaw in their prologue, at least as much has augmented the narrative in the subsequent 25 years.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Contextualizing Maya History and Archaeology Part II: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Forest of Kings   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage