Ancestral Maya Economies in Archaeological Perspective

Patricia McAnany is Kenan Eminent Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and President of the Society for Economic Anthropology. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr McAnany is the principal investigator of the Xibun Archaeological Research Project (in Belize, Central America). She is the author of Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society and editor of K'axob: Ritual Work and Family in an Ancient Maya Village and Sacred Landscape and Settlement in the Sibun River Valley.

• 1. The materiality of practice in ancestral Maya economies; 2. Situating Maya societies in space and time; 3. Feeding a hungry landscape; 4. Gendered labor and socially constructed space; 5. Ritual works: monumental architecture and generative schemes of power; 6. Naturalized authority of the royal court; 7. Social identity and daily practice of artisan production; 8. Places, practices, and people of commerce; 9. Flowery speech of Maya tributary arrangements; 10. Skeining the threads.