slu samuel johnson bioarchaelology in the maya world

8/13/2019 Slu Samuel Johnson Bioarchaelology in the Maya World

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Bioarchaeology in the Maya World:Changing Perspectives for the Past and Consequences for the Future

Ellery Kate Lungmus

Fall 2007

Great Debates in Archaeology

Dr. Shinu Abraham


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2000:35). The human corpse represents the failure of the modern Western paradigm to

successfully control nature with science. In order to maintain the paradigm we mediate

decomposition (a natural event) culturally by hiding and avoiding it. In the field of Maya

archaeology decomposition is nearly impossible to avoid because interment of family

members beneath structures was a common practice; often to excavate even a residential

platform is to uncover a human burial (Webster 1997:4).

The traditional response to the corpse taboo in the archaeological record is to

create distance. Archaeology and bioarchaeology specifically are historically guilty of

distancing themselves from the physical selves that have comprised cultures despite their

intent to “reconstruct human life in past cultures in past times” (Larsen 2000:xii). The

attempt to maintain a certain amount of distance between the living and the dead is most

evident in a temporal analysis of the discipline of bioarchaeology from its origins through

modern practice. The shift from complete disinterest in recovered skeletal materials or a

purely diagnostic, medical interest has given way to the modern concern for the unique,

individualistic stories of each skeleton and an interest in peopling the past by striving to

interpret the “osteobiography of individuals” (Beck 2006:83). As postprocessualist

thought has largely gained control of the modern archaeological paradigm, the search for

the individual experience in the past has become a primary interest of archaeologists.

These paradigm shifts are by no means descriptive of complete breaks in ideology but

rather general trends, and in fact the history of archaeological theory is rife with

conflicting opinions and methods. As late as 1989 for example, a Dumbarton Oaks

conference held in Washington D.C. on the Classic Maya “collapse” failed to make any

mention of the relevance of skeletal evidence to this question (Whittington and Reed


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1997a:ix). In 1994 this absence was criticized in a collaborative publication entitled

Bones of the Maya, and vocalized the pointed “hope that archaeologists will become

more aware of the potential of skeletal remains and will consider excavation techniques

which permit recovery in better condition and in increasing numbers” (Whittington and

Reed 1997a:x).

Archaeological inquiry is bound to a metanarrative in which the society that

generates research questions is ultimately reflecting itself and its own concerns. The

Maya culture is famous for its demographic collapse in the 10th

century AD, which

involved a 90% reduction in population in a span of 100-150 years (Lowe 1985:62).

Interest in the Maya experience stems largely from our own fear of decline following

cultural decadence, which is increasingly evident in Western society and has crept into

popular culture (for example see Jared Diamon’s recent book, ominously titled simply

“Collapse”). Consequently bioarchaeological research has focused on several aspects of

society highly relevant to the modern experience. Among these are diet and nutrition, the

human/ecological relationship, quality of life, and health, especially in terms of social

stratification and the Classic Maya ‘collapse’ event (Larsen 2000:181). Bioarchaeology

in the Americas has also been particularly emphasized in the midst of an “ongoing

dialogue among economists, historians, and anthropologists about the connection

between economic growth and health,” which is intimately related to many other aspects

of human life in society (Larsen 2000:181-82).

Although not traditionally at “the forefront of innovation in skeletal studies, Maya

archaeology in fact offers a particularly fertile field for recovery of mortuary remains and

development and testing of methods for their analysis” (Webster 1997:4), and


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contemporary cultural concerns have revitalized Maya studies and discovered its

suitability to bioarchaeology. During the Classic period (300-900 AD) the population

densities for the Maya area were very high, and this coupled with considerable biological

and cultural continuity means that the total number of ancient Maya who lived in this

area is extremely large. In addition, the Maya preferred inhumation burials within

residential groups, and “because the Maya built environment is unusually conspicuous

and well-preserved, burials are frequent byproducts of excavation, no matter what the

specific research issues might be” (Webster 1997:4-6). The conservatism of

bioarchaeology because of corpse and decomposition taboos has forced archaeologists to

respond to these discoveries in culturally acceptable ways, however, and even today

researchers often focus exclusively on mortuary space (Ashmore and Geller 2005),

mortuary ritual (Oakdale 2005), and mortuary analysis (Chapman 2005).

Bioarchaeology is a relatively new sub discipline of archaeology largely because

of its dependence on modern technology for many of its current methods. The term itself

arose discretely in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom, where it carries slightly different

connotations. In the 1970s ‘bioarchaeology’ was coined by Grahame Clark in the United

Kingdom meaning “inferences derived from the study of archaeologically recovered

faunal remains” and has since been broadened to include all biological material in the

archaeological record, though it is occasionally distinguished from human

osteoarchaeology (Buikstra 2006:7-8). In the United States Jane Buikstra and Robert L.

Blakely published the term in 1977, integrating archaeology with “human osteology,

burial analysis, social organization, division of labor, paleodemography, genetic

relationships, diet and disease (Buikstra 1997: 67).


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Prior to the late twentieth century, however, skeletal analysis in general lacked

value, standardization, and interest. In order to understand both the origins of

bioarchaeology as a legitimate field of study and the changing response to the corpse

taboo it is important to appreciate how the field has evolved with respect to this issue. A

timeline of the preliminary and key players in Maya archaeology that considers human

remains as critical to archaeology is both relevant and appropriate to an analysis of

bioarchaeology in terms of shifting paradigms. Not all of these figures were significantly

influenced by those preceding them chronologically, but the trends noted are logical

outgrowths of the preceding paradigms. It is important that none of these social

movements be seen as evidence of progress towards a modern apex; instead, they should

be considered the most fitting and current approach for each subsequent period. Trigger

(2006) notes the weaknesses of a unilinear concept of shifting paradigms, identifying its

“failure to account for why archaeologists…never agree about high level theory” (8). He

points to the coexistence of several rival paradigms at any one time as evidence of this

idea, which means that at the core of the issue no one paradigm can provide ‘better’

explanations than another.

When the question of how to evaluate human bones was initially broached, it was

logical that doctors and anatomists in the nineteenth century were the ones to perform the

skeletal analyses. In terms of the corpse taboo these professionals were the best trained

both to distance themselves from the individual and to diagnose pathologies. Skeletal

examples were promptly seized upon especially by medical doctors as a means of

supporting current scientific theories until the reaction against this practice confined the

study of human remains to obsessive classifying and an avoidance of interpretation. This


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approach was later rejected as ultimately worthless to anthropological inquiry and

skeletal samples became the central component of studies, with theories growing out of

the samples themselves. This practice is congruent with empirical science, in which

hypotheses are dependent on evidence, and is indicative of the growing allegiance of

archaeology to science. Ultimately these studies facilitated the beginnings of population

reconstruction which has recently developed into the search for the ancient individual. A

closer review of the history of Maya skeletal research makes these trends obvious.

Although bioarchaeology as a discipline has been only recently discussed the

practice has its roots in the medical theory of the late nineteenth century. In 1892 Julius

Wolff stated that “the form of bone being given, the bone elements place or disperse

themselves in the direction of the functional pressure and increase or decrease their mass

to reflect the amount of functional pressure” (cited in Mays 1998:3; Larsen 1997:195).

Consequently, the methods of bioarchaeology are predicated on the fact that the body

remodels itself to suit the lifestyle of an individual. Since the aim of contemporary

bioarchaeology is to produce an osteobiography of an individual, the properties of bone

relative to lifestyle are highly relevant. More traditionally archaeologists have distanced

themselves from the tabooed corpse by treating the physical human remains as symbolic

of a person instead of actually constituting a person. Similarly bones are often spoken of

as objects because of their appearance as solid, inanimate objects. Simon Mays points out

that “this [treatment of the bones] is deceptive regarding the nature of living bone” (Mays

1998:3). This approach tends to confine human remains to a class of archaeological

material only slightly different from ceramics, for example, whereas a more

contemporary approach acknowledges that the phenomenon of skeletal remodeling


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allows us to interpret and recount an individual’s story from their corporal remains. The

mechanical demands of daily life include habitual postures and movements such as

squatting, grinding maize on a metate, hyperdorsiflexion of the toes while kneeling, or

bilateral asymmetry and hypertrophy of the humeral muscle attachment sites indicating

endurance canoe or kayak paddling, all of which become evident in the skeleton (Larsen

1997:94-95).

John L. Stephens introduced the world to the Maya civilization in 1843 as a

flourishing, Egypt-like civilization that had been devoured by the forest. The antiquarian

interests of the time led Stephens, an excavator-explorer/lawyer-diplomat, to develop one

of the earliest investigations of Maya interment through his excavation of sepulchers

(Buikstra 1997:222). While archaeology, exploration, and publication were acceptable

considering his background, consideration of human remains at the time was not an

aspect of this type of pursuit. Instead, Stephens submitted his skeletal finds to Dr. Samuel

George Morton, a physical anthropologist who described stature, cranial form, pathology,

chemical contribution, age, and sex. Though his findings in this regard may have been

sound, the contemporary critique of this paradigm is an excruciating lack of

contextualization: Stephens, though functioning in the role of archaeologist, provided no

preliminary field notes and no context for the human remains, presenting his skeletal

finds instead to a physician. The function of the medical profession is to diagnose,

however, and therefore no general conclusions were drawn, no trends were noted, and no

higher applications were made (Buikstra 1997:221). Even this approach was novel,

however: only occasionally were the skeletal remains of famous burials and impressive

tombs such as that of Pakal at Palenque examined at all (Webster 1997:3).


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In the 1860s “a shared commitment to an evolutionary approach promoted a close

alignment between prehistoric archaeology and ethnology in western Europe and the

United States” (Trigger 2006:166). An evolutionary approach characterizes the paradigm

of this time under which cultural variation is explained by biology, and that the ability to

‘progress’ culturally is therefore determined by race. This paradigm arose in the climate

of a “new conservatism [that] encouraged a romantic celebration of national and ethnic

differences” (Trigger 2006:167). The push to identify discrete racial categories

scientifically became one of the primary interests of anatomists at this time. This pressure

was evident archaeologically as well, as professionals strove not only to identify the

racial groups of their own time but to fit the groups (as they were perceived as static) they

were discovering in archaeological contexts into the same categories.

The forerunners of bioarchaeology, then, were often inflammatory individuals

with backgrounds in anatomy or medicine, not archaeology. Morton for example was best

known for his publication of the Crania Americana in 1839 which described the

physiological differences between what he considered were four species of mankind:

Caucasians, Native Americans, Africans, and Asians. His interest in the Maya focused

primarily on the craniometric observations that would justify his ranking scheme of

human races (Cook 2006:34). Jeffries Wyman, an anatomist and naturalist who worked in

the 1850s, also performed craniometric analyses in order to rank innate intelligence, but

also focused on establishing behaviors such as cannibalism among ancient groups in the

Americas (Buikstra 1997:18). Cemeteries at this time were “generally regarded as

resources to be mined for comparative collects. These collections were desperately

needed to document human variation and to test medically oriented theories (Ubelaker


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2006:80). The interest in ancient mortuary sites may be seen as goal-oriented but only to

the extent that medically-rooted bioarchaeology sought to obtain ‘normal’ samples for

broad comparative studies (Ubelaker 2006:80) but was not interested in what might be

called ‘peopling the past’ following the aims of contemporary bioarchaeology (Buikstra

1997:10-11).

Unlike the archaeological traditions of the classical and Egyptian worlds, the

Maya remained unknown on a popular level until relatively recently. In the first decades

of the twentieth century Channing Arnold and Frederick J. Tabor Frost published one of

the first accounts of the Maya area entitled The American Egypt: A Record of Travel in

Yucatan. Geared more toward the vicarious armchair traveler than toward systematic

archaeology, the volume focuses on the adventures of the authors with some reference to

the Maya ruins they encountered in the jungles of the Yucatan. They reference the efforts

of Edward Thompson to “wrest from this hole the full measure of its secrets,” which

ultimately produced the material remains of “countless human sacrifices” (Arnold and

Frost 1909:92). The two adventurers did not waste type describing this sample; instead

they documented an “examination of many of the skulls [which] satisfied us that they

were one and all those of young females between twelve and sixteen years of age.” They

further asserted that

From these facts only one deduction is possible, namely that sacrifices in thecenote did occur, and that such sacrifices were of young girls who were hurled by

the priests into the chasm, possibly after defilement by the high-priests in thesmall building at the pool’s edge, thus symbolizing the simultaneous surrender of

virginity and life to the Rain Deity. (Arnold and Frost 1909: 92-93).

Arnold and Frost’s agenda is quite clear and far from scientific. Their accounts of

adventure and intrigue were published to sell books, and accordingly their apparently


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objective ‘examination’ is entirely fabricated as Hooton would demonstrate later. As a

result, this introduction to Maya archaeology can only be considered relevant to

bioarchaeology in the sense that the human remains were considered important enough to

document and contribute to an ‘understanding’ of past behavior.

At the turn of the 20th

century the study of human prehistory as interpreted from

the human remains themselves was still largely confined to the work of medical doctors,

anatomists, and other scientists. The racist tendencies of the evolutionary approach had

coalesced into a culture-historical archaeology that identified ethnicity as the most

important factor shaping human history (Trigger 2006:211). Medically-driven skeletal

studies at that time were still searching desperately for evidence for human speciation

that was based on racial categories, and ancient skeletal samples were used as diagnostic

examples for cultural inferiority theories. Like the evolutionary approach, the culture-

historical approach attempted to distinguish separate cultures in the archaeological record

by utilizing these diagnostic features and therefore determining cultural continuity,

longevity, and ultimately spatial rights. Bioarchaeology is a very conservative discipline

because of corpse taboos, and relegating it to the realm of medicine was both comfortable

and appropriate. Because of this, its function was largely the same in terms of justifying

scientifically (in an anatomical sense) the racism of both paradigms.

The culture-historical archaeological approach was particularly popular in

German archaeology in general, where the identification of cultural homeland had

devastating consequences in the form of the World War II (Trigger 2006:240).

Immediately there was a reaction against these methods in which the theory changed to

reflect the fear of drawing conclusions that could be used to rank peoples. The search for


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discrete cultures in prehistory had devastating consequences and therefore a strong

reaction against the use of archaeology to perpetuate racist theories. Subsequent

archaeological and bioarchaeological methods shifted to avoid data interpretation

completely as a result.

In 1925 Oliver Garrison Ricketson published an overview of burials discovered to

date in the Maya area. Ricketson, an anthropologist trained in medicine at Harvard,

excavated at Baking Pot in what is now Belize and lamented the unevenness and paucity

of the skeletal research archaeologists had published previously (Ricketson 1925:381).

Contemporary bioarchaeologists would agree with this statement immediately but

Ricketson’s frustration is in fact indicative of the obsessive categorization that would

define the archaeological paradigm of the next several decades. This categorization is

another aspect of the culture-historical approach which sought to identify discrete

cultures based on archaeological materials. As far as he was concerned, previous work

had failed to document the metric information that he was interested in; he was not in fact

lamenting the lack of interpretation that frustrates archaeologists today. Ricketson

mentioned and criticized a specific but anonymous writer who wrote that

He had entered over one hundred chultuns (underground storage cisterns), ofwhich he found many that had been utilized as burial chambers or as ossuaries;

yet in his report only thirty-four chultuns are described, the article concludingwith the remark that to “enumerate or attempt to describe the subterranean

chambers which furnished no data would only serve to fill up the report withuseless matter.” It is to be regretted that a brief summary, giving exact numbers,

could not have been appended, for it would enable us to state definitely that agiven percent of chultuns were used as burial places in this case (Ricketson

1925:381).

Ricketson made it very clear that he regarded only certain specific objects as constituting

valuable archaeological material. He lists the mounds excavated at Baking Pot in order of


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frequency of burial mode – inhumation, cyst-burial, or cremation – but avoids drawing

any conclusions based on his numbers and percentages. In one tomb in particular he notes

the inclusion of “two skeletons, four incisors with circular jade inlays, twelve earthen

vessels, pottery whistles, shell ornaments, jade beads, bone needles…This is a rich find,

and rather overshadows finds in other tombs” (Ricketson 1925:391). Clearly the

‘richness’ is not related to either significance of skeletal information or to conclusions

that may be drawn concerning the individuals interred or the society that interred them;

anthropological archaeology had not yet come into vogue.

Ricketson’s research methods and interests reflect earlier paradigms and

foreshadow future approaches. Like Stephens, Arnold, and Frost who marketed the Maya

culture to Europe, and diagnosticians who identified skeletal anomalies, Ricketson was

particularly committed to mentioning curiosities. Large tombs lacking grave furniture or

elaborate art, bones painted red, teeth filed and inlaid with hematite, and the burial of

decapitated heads or the sacrifice of young women and children were all worthy of

notice: the placement, position, nature of grave goods, and physical peculiarities were

assiduously documented (Ricketson 1925:388-89), but seem to have been interesting only

as far as they were in fact peculiar. In this way Ricketson’s work reflects the search for

diagnostic features but also commits itself to a subsequent paradigm of almost

directionless accumulation and organization of physical data.

In the decade of the 1930s there was an increase in physical anthropological

publications. A full 33 papers were published concerning Maya physical data sets, equal

to the number in the entire previous century combined (Buikstra 1997:223). Human

remains were still largely disregarded, and even a publication entitled “A Note on Maya


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Cave Burials” by Mary Butler was entirely dedicated to the fact that the Maya used caves

for burials with no mention of the bones or the people they comprised (Butler 1934).

Studies that did include this information still focused on bone measurements with a push

for standardization in order to identify cranial types and ultimately racial categories. By

the 1940s in the field of Maya studies, Earnest Albert Hooton had redescribed the sample

of bone dredged from the Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá in terms of these racial

categories. Large sample sizes today lend themselves to comparison and trends, but

although Hooton was trained as a full-time physical anthropologist and not as a medical

doctor his emphasis remained on a few characteristics such as sex, stature, and dental

alteration (Hooton 1940; Webster 1997:3; Beck and Sievert 2005). Interestingly,

however, he observed that not only were the individuals described by Arnold and Frost

not uniformly women between the ages of 12 and 16, but some were infants, a few

showed clear evidence of pregnancy (refuting the ‘virgin sacrifice’ theory), and a

reasonable proportion were even men (Hooton 1940:273).

Large collections such as the Chichén Itzá sample were generally treated as

marginal data sets included in appendices but always separate from a more systematic

focus on architecture, stratigraphy, artifacts, art, and inscriptions (Webster 1997:3).

Hooton’s report on the Chichén Itzá skeletal material is therefore quite short because of

its limitations in scope: he considers only morphological markers in relation to cranial

‘deformation,’ their measurements, and how they compare to other standardized norms.

For example, “high nasal bridges are perhaps a little more common than in most

American Indian crania,” and in fact the “classical Mayas were not very different from

the White hybridized type which we call Armenoid” (Hooton 1940:274-280). Drawing


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further from his comparisons to these racial ‘standards,’ Hooton intimates that these data

might be used to hypothesize the geographical origins of the Maya, but does not go so far

as to discuss any such clear hypothesis.

Where skeletal remains were examined they were simply classified, consistent

with the mid twentieth century culture-historical paradigm. Ruben de la Borbolla in 1940

(de la Borbolla 1940) and Javier Romero Molina in 1951 (Molina and Fastlicht 1951)

both created elaborate taxonomies to categorize the observed patterns of dental

modification in ancient Maya samples. Borbolla’s scheme was based not on

contextualized finds but on collections that he found at the Department of Physical

Anthropology at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico. Appropriately, he

designated 24 types (based on physical measurements and characteristics) by the letters

A-X, ad then further grouped them into 7 basic types (A-G) divided into several variants

(Mandujano and Izazola 1987). The lack of contextualization and concluding remarks on

his data renders it apparently useless, but the fact that he focused only on collections

housed in museums demonstrates the lack of concern with those critical aspects of

contemporary practice.

In 1951 Ledyard Smith and Alfred Kidder published the site of Nebaj, Guatemala.

The title of the report succinctly delineates the relative importance of bioarchaeology in

the larger scheme of the investigation: Excavations at Nebaj with Notes on the Skeletal

Material. Smith began the report by contextualizing the site, then launching into a

documentation of the fieldwork itself, identifying and describing groups, mounds, tombs,

burials, and caches. Kidder then describes the artifacts present at the site and commits a

final section to the discussion of the research (Smith, Kidder, and Stewart 1951). The first


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appendix is a list of monuments; the second includes the notes on skeletal materials. T.D.

Stewart goes about these notes in a concise and highly organized manner, but there is a

stark lack of interpretation or conclusions that might be drawn under the influence of a

contemporary paradigm. Kidder in particular is well-known for his contribution to the

systematic study of culture history in the southwestern United States, and believed that

one could construct such a history by studying “the spatial distributions of combinations

of artifact types and…their chronological transformations” (Trigger 2006:281). As is

evident in the report on Nebaj, the contribution of skeletal information was simply not

regarded as relevant to this undertaking.

The 1960s saw a sustained increase in Maya bioarchaeological literature though

there were still few studies of burials or remains. Evan Vogt lamented “the paucity of

first-rate physical anthropological material, either skeletal or on living populations” for

the Maya area, referring to the often poor preservation in the humid tropics (Vogt 1964,

cited in Saul 1972:3). In the 1970s Altar de Sacrificios in the western Petén region of

Guatemala, one of the most famous Maya sites, was published by Frank P. Saul. Saul

himself notes that the “sherds of pottery and vestiges of decayed structures have been

extensively excavated, examined, and analyzed in the pursuit of information pertaining to

the above matters, but the actual remains, as represented by their skeletons, of the people

who made the pottery and built the structures have been largely ignored” (Saul 1972:3).

He cites the fact that Mayanists, discouraged by poor preservation and cultural cranial

and dental “deformity” have neglected to discuss the skeletal materials and instead

discard them as useless. Instead of limiting the Altar analysis to basic data such as age,


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sex, and cultural manipulations, Saul proposes a large-scale analysis of health status over

time, especially with regard to the apparent 10 th century decline (Saul 1972:4).

In contrast to earlier medically and diagnostically driven investigations, the work

that Saul performed at Altar de Sacrificios was in relation to a larger demographic

question. The skeletal collection comprised of 90 individuals of which 63 were adults and

27 were subadults. Sexing subadults is nearly impossible, but of the 63 adults Saul

identified 31 males, 21 females, and 11 were recorded as unknown (Saul 1972:4). The

escalating desire to reconcile archaeology with the now critically important empirical

sciences in order to establish credibility is evident in his research plan. This methodology

is congruent with the “New Archaeology” of the 1970s, championed by Lewis Binford

who assumed that “there was a high degree of regularity in human behavior and this was

reflected in material culture” (Trigger 2006:400). Saul outlined specific research goals

with respect to his analysis: his interests surpassed more simple determinants and

encompassed the demographic characteristics of age and sex, health status through

pathological observation, measurable physical characteristics to evaluate population

composition or social statuses, genetic origins and continuity, and the demographic

collapse (Saul 1972:8).

The bioarchaeological work at Altar de Sacrificios ostensibly evidences a

positivist, empirical frame of inquiry but upon closer inspection is riddled with

inconsistencies. 54 skeletons had in fact been discarded in the field before the 90 were

examined in the lab and were not described at all in the publication except to note that

they were unfit for examination. Between the conclusions drawn in the laboratory and the

field notes recorded at the time of excavation, sex assessments disagreed in 44% of the


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adults, and age diagnoses disagreed in 27% of the entire sample (Saul 1972:35). This

suggests that though the methods appeared scientific and the presentation was free of

apparent subjectivity, improvements such as standardization were necessary to publish

this approach as ‘scientific.’ In 1997 Stephen Whittington and David Reed reevaluated

the site report and skeletal notes, noting that “when osteological data were not ignored by

the participants, they were treated like site-report appendices” (Whittington and Reed

1997a:ix). These site-report appendices do demonstrate Saul’s attempt to take individuals

in context, however: instead of defining each solely by intriguing characteristics or only

recording percentages of characteristics, Saul ties together age, sex, and the presence of

deformation or lesion in a single diagram that records individual entities (Saul 1972:37).

This approach is in marked contrast to many others in which individuals are subsumed in

percentages of these characteristics only.

The data Saul recorded on Altar de Sacrificios remains valuable to modern

methods (unlike craniometrics, for example), and what is striking in his study is his

dedication to incorporating whatever means available to explain his anomalies. While

structure and artifacts were clearly the focus as befitted the status quo, Saul explores his

skeletal data with a clear commitment to a deeper understanding than numbers alone

would provide. For example, he documents that nearly every individual in one sample

showed evidence of having suffered from anemia, that excluding old adults, only two of

40 had dentition free of tooth loss or caries, and that 37 of 63 adults had lesions

indicating illness at the age of three or four (Saul 1974:59, cited in Marquez and Angel

1997; Saul 1972:66). Acknowledging that simply counting revealed little, he attempted to

explain the shocking percentages of endemic disease and poor nutrition that he was


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recording: according to the World Health Organization report of 1968, for example, Saul

noted that iron loss is intensified in the tropics due to excessive sweating, and intestinal

bleeding and chronic diarrhea associated with parasites (Scrimshaw, et al. 1968, cited in

Saul 1972:42). Following this and previous lines of research, he suggested that the daily

iron requirements for lactating and pregnant women in the tropics is reasonably twice that

of women in temperate zones, intimating that high rates of malnutrition, especially iron-

deficiency anemia, would have been almost inevitable (Lawson and Stewart 1967:22,

cited in Saul 1972). He began to reconstruct diet, which is a very contemporary

anthropological concern, and incorporated ethnographic research on the diets of modern

rural Yucatecans (G.D. Williams 1931:245, cited in Saul 1972:57).

Saul attempted to use the Altar de Sacrificios skeletal collection to ask the big

questions that have traditionally been posed to the Maya world, such as whether or not

syphilis is evident in ancient Old World populations and what caused the 10th

century

decline. Like previous diagnosticians he noted a ‘saber shin’ pathology which might be

indicative of syphilis or yaws (Saul 1972:47), and documented the frequency of dental

lesions indicative of hypoplasia and childhood illness (Saul 1972: 66-67), but he also

indicated an interest in chronological trends with respect to these pathologies (Saul

1972:75). Ultimately Saul remained baffled by the apparently terribly unhealthy

population that he was documenting, stating that “in fact, one might wonder, not why

they declined, but rather, how they managed to survive for so long (Saul 1972:67). His

methods were indicative however of significant changes in the focus of archaeology.

Saul’s work and importantly his interest in trends is evident of a break both from earlier

medical approaches and from pure classification as it demonstrates his regard for the


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population as a dynamic entity instead of a static body. Changes, or meaningful

chronological trends, remain one of the primary interests of an archaeologist

documenting a site history.

In 1994 Jane Buikstra and Douglas Ubelaker published Standards for Data

Collection from Human Skeletal Remains. Although there had been a need for decades to

standardize the practice of bioarchaeology, which had been experiencing pressure from

academia to pursue more empirical methods, guidelines had not yet been widely

accepted. As far as positivist science is concerned, a discipline could hardly consider

itself empirical when each researcher used different methods to determine the sex of a

skeleton, for example. The markedly different approach taken by Buikstra and Ubelaker

was a ranking scheme in which field researchers were to evaluate age and sex markers on

a scale of certainty, which allowed that these determinations were not necessarily exact

and involved a degree of subjectivity, but they were statistically probable (Buikstra and

Ubelaker 1994). The changing bioarchaeological paradigm supported the classification of

the early 20th century but emphasized incorporating these data in the attempt to answer

several ‘big questions’ that existed in archaeology. In the Maya world these questions

focused on the nature of status differentiation, the nutritional states and disease load of

populations, demographic structure, the nature of diet, the implications of skeletal trauma

(especially warfare), and the patterns of regional and chronological variation therein

(Webster 1997:11).

In 1997 Diane Chase published a comparative bioarchaeological report that

included the sites of Caracol, Santa Rita Corozal, and Tayasal, which are all Lowland

Maya sites. She states basic, empirical data from each of the three as a matter of course


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(she overviews the number of recorded interments, the number of formal tombs, and the

number of individuals represented by the skeletal materials (Chase 1997:15)), and she

critiques the practice of “reconstructions of prehistoric population being based on

excavation data, exclusive of skeletal or burial remains” (as in Ashmore 1981; Culbert

and Rice 1990, cited in Chase 1997:15). In the Maya area population counts are often

based on structures; Chase noted that at Santa Rita, for example, the “maximum

individual lifespan of 50 years is likely overestimated, and dwelling patterns and density

of structural habitation are largely subjective” (Chase 1997:16). This methodology is the

reaction to corpse taboos that have rendered bioarchaeology so fundamentally

conservative. The difference in Chase’s approach was her willingness to allow

bioarchaeology and ‘artifactual’ archaeology to be mutually informative. Chase focused

on the ability of the human remains to facilitate an analysis and comparison of the three

sites, but she also acknowledged that if the population counts based on structural

estimates are accepted as reasonable, then “the percentage of the population represented

in burials varies from a dismal .012% at Tayasal and .05% at Caracol to .26% at Santa

Rita during its fluorescence” (Chase 1997:19).

Chase’s comparative approach is the logical outgrowth of the increased interest in

chronological trends evidenced by archaeological sites. She tends not to draw any

sweeping conclusions based on the differences that she recorded, but she sets the stage

for these conclusions to be drawn in the future much like the classificatory schemes in the

early 20th

century set the stage for the New Archaeology of the 1950s. Her primary

interests are in the demographics and the physical burials and although she advocates for

the primacy of skeletal evidence in site investigations, she avoids discussing the human


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remains themselves. This is evident of the interesting archaeological and specifically

Western inclination to avoid treating the human corpse in research, which has been

traditionally tabooed. At Caracol Chase noted that “the quantity of multiple individual

burials that have been recovered at Caracol (ca. 39% of the total Late Classic sample;

Chase 1994) is striking in comparison to the paucity of these kinds of interments at other

lowland sites” (Chase 1997:21). At Tikal, for example, only 1.4% of the documented

burials contains multiple individuals or suggests secondary burial (Chase 1997:22). These

data present a very significant difference between the two sites that has been interpreted

as indicating a strong cultural identity at Caracol following a series of successful wars

against Tikal (A. Chase and D. Chase 1996, cited in Chase 1997:22). The recorded burial

data do not, however, make any mention of the bones of the peoples or the individuals

themselves who merited this emphatic symbolic distinction.

The aging and sexing data that Chase included is an instrumental component of

her comparison between the three sites and of her critique of demographic estimates.

There is no argument that the accuracy of these data is impervious to poor preservation or

to the precision of the methods used (age determination based on teeth is affected by

antemortem tooth loss and other unreliable degenerative changes, for example). She

affirms however that the majority of the Caracol sample died between 25-35 years of age,

in contrast to the assumption of 50 at Santa Rita (Chase 1997:23). Additionally she

records significant demographic differences between the Caracol and Tayasal

populations: infant skeletons represent 14.79% of the sample at Caracol but only 5.36%

at Tayasal; 11.24% of the sample at Caracol is over the age of 35 compared to 23.21% at

Tayasal (Chase 1997:23). In many ways this focus does not differ noticeably from


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Ricketson’s interest in burial data insofar as they are peculiar or anomalous. Chase is

highly unwilling to use or discuss her data, stating merely that “It is tempting to ascribe

such demographic differences to variations in population density and urban

environment,” while adding the caveat that they could also be due to poor sampling and a

nonrepresentative data set (Chase 1997:23). What is highly different is the theory: while

she recognized that science and math were not enough on their own to create a relevant

description she was confronted by a disconcerting leap in theory and a step backward in

methodology, which needed to be reformed.

In 2005 Patricia McAnany synthesized the contributions of several specialists and

colleagues to her research at a Preclassic site in Belize into a large volume entitled

K’axob: Ritual, Work, and Family in an Ancient Maya Village. Both the title and the site

of K’axob itself are indicative of a very contemporary focus in archaeology. The shifting

interests of Maya archaeology have moved from species to culture and then site to

family, and K’axob is not an illustrious Tikal or Palenque but a small village. Human

remains at this site are considered a “class of material remains (McAnany 2005:17) and

are neither disregarded nor are they the focus of the investigation. Instead the individuals

who inhabited this site are incorporated into a study of ritual expression, the built

environment, and the enviro-social dynamic (McAnany 2005; Harrison-Buck 2004;

Storey 2004). This is a marked departure from approaches characteristic of even a decade

earlier. What becomes evident is that as a culture we are no longer seeking curiosities or

captivating accounts of foreign lifestyles; rather, archaeology uses analogy and individual

focus to make the past relatable to the future. Arguably this is a consequence of

globalization – borders have opened and communication is easier than it has ever been,


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meaning that cultural differences and more importantly, cultural similarities simply no

longer shock or interest us.

The recent postprocessual critique has called the theoretical underpinnings of

objective knowledge into question and this new awareness has changed bioarchaeology

drastically. Archaeologists have been far more interested in the manner and repercussions

of the transition from material remains to interpretation and fact than in ‘facts’

themselves. Determinations of age and sex, for example had been dependent on

researchers’ ability to create “objective” fact from skeletal characteristics, but the fluidity

of these characteristics was first emphasized by Buikstra and Ubelaker (1994). The

Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains recommended sex

evaluation along an axis of certainty based on certain sex-determining skeletal traits,

particularly the sciatic notch (Buikstra and Ubelaker 1994:19-20). When the relevant

parts of the pelvis are not present, other indicators may be used. In the examination of the

Preclassic skeletal material from Cuello, Belize, Saul and Saul note the inexactitude of

aging and sexing in this sample due to poor preservation and the frequency of secondary,

disruptive burials (Saul and Saul 1997:29). Several years after the publication of Buikstra

and Ubelaker’s Standards, Saul and Saul make specific references in their work to the

age dependent and sexual dimorphic markers used to draw their conclusions. Intact

pelvises were rare and sciatic notch fragments only occasionally conclusive, so less

reliable sex markers such as the relative robusticity of the long bones, orbital rims,

supramastoid crests, mastoid processes, and the size and shape of teeth and mandibles

were used (Saul and Saul 1997:30). Determinations were therefore only probable,

according to the authors.


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Even more recently the practice of sex determination was criticized by Pamela

Geller who critiqued Buikstra and Ubelaker’s scale of certainty with respect to skeletal

sex and individual gender. This scoring system “would appear to supplant a strict binary

opposition of male and female with a continuum of sexual difference,” but “it is

important to underscore that sexual difference refers to an analyst’s degree of certainty

with respect to categorization and not to the presence of sexual variability or ambiguity”

(Geller 2006:598). The denial of gender as a culturally constructed category (as far as

processualism is concerned, these constructs are irrelevant if they cannot be tested) in

favor of sex as a biological binary demonstrates both ethnocentrism and scientism, and

queer and feminist archaeologists have attempted to incorporate this particular

metanarrative into interpretations of the past (Cannon 2005). In terms of postprocessual

archaeology, both ethnocentrism and scientism which assume the existence of a ‘better’

viewpoint are acknowledged but avoided. As modern research and theoretical inquiry

have pressured the dated binary of biological sex, the difficulty of divorcing oneself from

the present in order to understand the past becomes clearer. This realization of a

fundamental limit to our objective abilities may in fact be the peak of postprocessualism

before the paradigm shifts once again. Geller’s critique is the ultimate antithesis to the

classificatory schemes of the mid twentieth century as she emphasizes ambiguity and

fluidity and specifically advocates “a reevaluation of the feasibility of our binaries”

(Geller 2006:604).

The historic and contemporary practice of bioarchaeology is limited by the

inconsistencies and caprice of the archaeological record. J. Eric S. Thompson noted that

“one of the wildest hazards of history is that which dictates to posterity the particular


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feature by which it recalls a preceding age. Rome, by some accident, is almost all

aqueducts in our recollection, Egypt all funerals…such chance survivals cause the oddest

misconceptions, the most lopsided reconstructions of the past” (Thompsen 1954:39). The

Maya have been all pottery and temples in our understanding, but the growth of

bioarchaeology as a discipline has reintroduced humanism and individualism to the

prehistoric Maya past. The theoretical discourse that dominates the current archaeological

paradigm encourages the reevaluation of the underpinnings of taboo affecting

archaeological research. The earliest ‘bioarchaeologists’ logically were surgeons and

anatomists: unlike the laypeople who pursued archaeology at the time, they had been

trained to separate individual from body which allowed them to create an understanding

that did not challenge paradigmatic propriety.

Recently computerized and X-Ray tomography have allowed archaeologists to

entertain the safe difference between themselves and death that began with the first

diagnosticians and typologists. Postprocessual theory calls for the reconciliation of

skeletal analysis with the general acknowledgement that what bioarchaeologists are in

fact doing is interfering in the personally and culturally constructed space of individuals

in whom we can often see ourselves. The methods of bioarchaeology must then consider

an ethical dilemma, which is a very postprocessual approach to science. In other words,

one of the defining characteristics of contemporary theory is self-reflection, or

considering the ways in which archaeologists frame their research and questions based on

their own experience. Susan Anton critiques traditional bioarchaeology in this light by

noting that it may be unethical to describe human skeletal samples without first

discussing the way in which we approach our descriptions (Anton 2005:138). Forensic


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anthropology is an applied branch of bioarchaeology “whose scientists analyze skeletal

remains for both legal and humanitarian purposes” (Walsh-Haney and Lieberman

2005:121) and therefore is particularly ethically conscious. The current movements

toward legislating and social policy are discussed by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, an

anthropological ethicist. She instructs anthropologists (this is particularly applicable to

bioarchaeologists who have traditionally used the remains of humans for their own

purposes) to weigh the kinds, degrees, duration, and probability of good and bad

outcomes, and to avoid misrepresentation in all stages of analysis (Fluehr-Lobban

1998:190-91; Walsh-Haney and Lieberman 2005:121). Within this paradigm, then,

“matters of ethics are an ordinary, not extraordinary, part of anthropological practice”

(Fluehr-Lobban 1998:173).

The reason for ethical consideration of human remains is a moral construct;

however, in the Maya area specifically the crucial ethical issue is that the contemporary

Maya still inhabit this region and

many descendants of the people whose remains bioarchaeologists study viewancestral remains as objects of veneration that should be protected from what they

see as the indignity of examination by scientists whose motivations they considersuspect at best and immoral at worst. (Larsen and Walker 2005:111)

Maya cosmology specifically includes ancestor veneration (Duncan 2005). In the United

States the disconnect between the descendents and their culture and the scientists who

consider human remains full of research potential has been addressed by the passing of

the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act. Such legislation does not

exist in the countries comprising the Maya area, but for American bioarchaeologists this

act calls into question the reasons for studying human remains, considering the ethical


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concerns. According to Larsen and Walker human remains “are a unique source of

historical information on genetic relationships and human-environment interactions” and

“are thus critical to our understanding of the adaptive history of our species” (Larsen and

Walker 2005:113). Skeletal data remain critical to the evaluation of archaeological sites

and ancient lifeways.

Ethical discourse has forced bioarchaeologists to justify themselves on a broad

scale. The arguments for and against the disruption of ancient graves are compelling and

consequently a set of ethical responsibilities to the individuals is required. Larsen and

Walker suggest a concern for dignity and respect, preservation of the rights of

descendents with regard to their ancestors, and conservation of the remains themselves

when possible because of their importance in understanding a common past (Larsen and

Walker 2005:114). They acknowledge that there are many problems associated with this,

not least of which is that they are all dependent on culturally constructed values and

standards, but they also “believe that having the substantive information about what

happened in the past that human remains provide is essential as a defense against the

pernicious effect of historical revisionism” (Larsen and Walker 2005:116).

If ethics are a sensitive issue, the ability to refute racist theories and challenge

political figures that propagate them is a necessity for the preservation of human equality

and basic human rights. Unfortunately, as has been made abundantly clear in the course

of this paper, bioarchaeology as a discipline is a construct itself and therefore subject to

the theoretical vogue as is any other anthropological or social science. Postprocessual

thought encourages self criticism and evaluation in conjunction with the evaluation of

external data, but ethical considerations have been brought to the forefront of


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bioarchaeology only because of the reaction the field happened to take against the

previous paradigm. Ultimately, as becomes obvious through a chronological evaluation,

researchers see what they wish to see in the archaeological record. At one time there was

abundant and apparently scientific support for the inferiority of non-Caucasian ‘species,’

which is hardly different from the basic assumptions behind the usage of the term

‘mutilation’ instead of ‘modification’ when referring to tattooing, tooth filing, and cranial

manipulation (Lopez Olivares 1997; Havill, et al. 1997) It is also no different from

current, empirical determinations that declining health and environmental degradation are

in no way related to the decadence and demographic collapse of the ancient Maya

(Wright 1997; Wright and Chew 1999; White 1997; Whittington and Reed 1997; Brenton

and Paine 2000, Danforth 1994). At this point we see ourselves as individuals too clearly

in the osteobiographies of the ancient Maya and our reaction is to use the tools we have

accumulated to create comfortable data.

The contemporary practice of bioarchaeology is dependent upon the training of

the bioarchaeologist herself. While it has been helpful for anthropological archaeology to

embrace postprocessual thought in order to conceptualize and analogize ancient people

(the use of the singular here is significant), modern science vehemently rejects

subjectivism in methodology. For this reason bioarchaeology has not grown as a

discipline so much as it has splintered into subdisciplines and schools of thought.

Buikstra attributes the current prominence of physical anthropological data within

archaeological inquiry to a more “theoretical orientation of contemporary archaeologists”

(Buikstra 1997:223).


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When one speaks to the generation of contextually-bound questions within

archaeological inquiry s/he refers to the dependence on and reflection of contemporary

concerns in the practice archaeology. For example, following the Industrial Revolution

“when there was interest in establishing a complex set of social statuses appropriate to a

city, differences in burial disposal forms were identified,” meaning that archaeologists at

the time looked to the past to validate and describe current practices (e.g. Morley 1920,

cited in Buikstra 1997:223). Later, it became important to “bolster arguments for a

commoner-ruler status dichotomy,” and priestly and other elite interments were

emphasized (Thompson 1954, Buikstra 1997:223). Since the 1970s, the influence of

processual archaeology, systems theory, and human ecology brought community health

and the long-term impact of “changing environmental and cultural factors, including diet

and culturally mediated differential access to resources” to the forefront of

bioarchaeological inquiry (Wright and White 1996; Buikstra 1997:223). Though the ‘new

archaeology’ of the 1970s has been reevaluated, concerns for health and the environment

persist in bioarchaeology following contemporary concerns for a changing world and the

place of a scientific medical approach to human problems.

Basic to the understanding of anthropological archaeology and bioarchaeology

specifically is the acknowledgement of the fact that both are socially constructed

sciences. In other words, in order to generate questions one looks to the concerns and

interests of his or her own society and is confined by the scientific or cultural limitations

of that society. For example, the way in which the human corpse is physically treated in

American society “becomes a tangible symbol for fears about the body” (Emerick

2000:44). Regardless of religion or “philosophical manifestations of death, there is a


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normative feeling of disgust with the decay and mortality of the human body that is

physically and psychologically identified with the corpse” (Emerick 2000:34). Decades

have passed during which time it has been not only a worthless endeavor but a sensually

offensive enterprise to recover and manipulate the remains of human bodies.

Postprocessual and postmodernist thought have shifted the focus of bioarchaeology

inward and new concerns are being voiced, humanism is being reintroduced, and the past

is being modeled on the analogies of the present. The corpse taboo of Western society has

been deconstructed while the interest in the individual was being nurtured, and

bioarchaeology finds itself searching for Janaab’ Pakal instead of a Maya king, the Maya

elite class, or a typical and normative Maya skull (Arroyo 2006:xii). Humanism has

encouraged an ethical dialogue while methods continue to change under the careful

observation of a highly reflective new paradigm.


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slu samuel johnson bioarchaelology in the maya world

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