Living ith the Ancestors Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society [Paperback]

This book contains an entirely new introduction that synthesizes scholarship on practices of ancestral veneration that has emerged since the 1995 publication of the first edition.The first edition of this book proved to be extremely useful to students of archaeology because it provided a highly readable explanation for why people might bury valued family members under house and plaza floors in Preclassic and Classic Maya societies of the first millennium BCE and CE. By casting this ancestralizing practice within the larger framework of land, inheritance, identity, and genealogies of place, the author demonstrates the cultural logic of a practice that initially appears alien to Western eyes. This new edition contains an entirely new introduction that synthesizes new scholarship, as well as an updated bibliography.The first edition of this book proved to be extremely useful to students of archaeology because it provided a highly readable explanation for why people might bury valued family members under house and plaza floors in Preclassic and Classic Maya societies of the first millennium BCE and CE. By casting this ancestralizing practice within the larger framework of land, inheritance, identity, and genealogies of place, the author demonstrates the cultural logic of a practice that initially appears alien to Western eyes. This new edition contains an entirely new introduction that synthesizes new scholarship, as well as an updated bibliography.This new edition of Living with the Ancestors contains an entirely new introduction that synthesizes scholarship on ancestralizing practices that has emerged since the 1995 publication of the first edition, which was heralded in Ethnohistory as a gem by Robert M. Carmack. Ancestor veneration in the Maya region traditionally was associated with divine kingship and royal genealogies. In this study, the author challenges this assumption and presents a strong case for agrarian and Preclassic antecedents to the practice of rememló-