Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41

www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa

Bodies and blood: critiquing social construction

in Maya archaeology
Stephen D. Houston* and Patricia A. McAnany
Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
Department of Archaeology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Received 11 June 2002; revision received 5 December 2002; accepted 6 January 2003

Abstract

As a 21st century expression of idealism, social constructionism tends to repudiate the physical reality of
the body and the biological duality of sexual differentiation. It has the earmarks of a totalizing discourse
that permits only limited perspectives on human existence. The relevance and utility of constructionism for
studying the past comes under review here. A pertinent concept, that of the individual, is discussed in light
of assertions that agency models stumble upon universal assumptions of individuation and intentionality.
The proposal by Gillespie (2001) that agency approaches in archaeology can only be improved by refer-
encing Marcel MaussÕ concept of ‘‘person’’ as a relational entity that bridges social collectivities and
personal motivation founders on the teleological, staged character of MaussÕ concept as well as factual
errors in interpreting the difficult epigraphic evidence from the Classic Maya. The constructionistsÕ prin-
ciple of sexual ambiguity (Joyce, 2000a) meets resistance from the available data on the Classic Maya, as
does their depersonalization of royal tombs in favor of collective concerns of a vaguely defined royal house
(Gillespie, 2001). Finally, the use of L
evi-StraussÕ model of ‘‘house societies’’ (soci
et
es 
a maisons)—a schema
that privileges co-residence and the physicality of the house over bloodlines—enjoys little substantive
support from royal Maya contexts.
Ó 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

Keywords: Social constructionism; Agency and personhood; House society; Maya archaeology; Mesoamerica

Pure versions of archaeological doctrines,
whether materialist or mentalist, have two ad-
vantages. They offer a comprehensive and self-
contained vision of how to think, and they supply
a capacious set of narrative frames or genres that
archaeologists use to explain their data. Most
such doctrines tend also to be ‘‘affirmative,’’ in
*
Corresponding author. Present address: 679, Garcia
St., Santa Fe, NM 87505, USA.
E-mail addresses: sdh@email.byu.edu (S.D. Hous-
ton), tricia@bu.edu (P.A. McAnany).
that they avoid the immoderate post-modern be-
lief that the universe is nearly ‘‘impossible to un-
derstand’’ and that it consists only of disorder,
fragmentation, and instability (Rosenau, 1992, p.
170). But the reductive tendency of such doctrines,
their ‘‘aspiration to. . . [be] total, relating not one
thought or idea, but a whole system of ideas, to an
underlying social reality’’ (Mannheim, 1952, p.
144), introduces a serious weakness. Our claim is
that, by occluding alternative views, totalizing
doctrines operate as epistemic discourses that
drive out ideas inconsistent with, or questioning
of, such ‘‘whole system[s] of ideas.’’

0278-4165/03/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0278-4165(03)00006-0
 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
The process of totalization is as much socio-
logical as intellectual. The use of certain code
words signals intellectual allegiances and estab-
lishes boundaries between those who belong and
those who do not; failure to use such code-words
or to employ canonical texts, whether Karl MarxÕs
(1953, Grundrisse) or Judith ButlerÕs (1993, Bodies
that matter) or Homi BhabhaÕs (1994, The location
of culture) points to outsider status. Such behav-
iors would be expected in any agonistic discipline,
of which archaeological theorizing is one (see
Latour and Woolgar, 1979, p. 237). The problem
is, if such doctrines rest on flawed or incompletely
formulated premises, then archaeologists diminish
their ability to explain the past. An added concern
is that totalizing frameworks, such as the Marxian
premise of exploitation and oppression or Butler
and othersÕ idealism, do not fit easily with other
views, either ignoring alternatives or denying their
validity.
Nowhere is this clearer than the current infat-
uation with ‘‘social construction,’’ which follows a
totalizing path when expressed in its stronger,
more committed forms. Selected archaeologists
now pursue this idealist philosophy and follow the
lead of its most visible flag waver, Judith Butler,
along with other cultural historians and specialists
in comparative literature (e.g., Conkey, 2001, p.
344; Joyce, 2000a; Voss and Schmidt, 2000). In its
more extravagant version, constructionism is un-
abashedly mentalist. It appears to question the
reality of any and all physical states, perceiving
them as indissolubly embedded within the ideas
and social setting—the ‘‘matrix’’—that labels and
creates them (Hacking, 1999, pp. 10–14). This
makes constructionism a strange bedfellow for
archaeology, an interpretive science that relies
methodologically on the ability to transform
physical remains into valid and fertile statements
about the past.
More worrisome is the evident assault on ar-
chaeology as a discipline that can ‘‘advance’’ and
‘‘progress’’ according to three productive as-
sumptions: (1) archaeology must move in direc-
tions determined by data; (2) ‘‘the world has an
inherent structure that we discover’’; and (3) once
made, advances tend to be stable (Hacking, 1999,
pp. 33, 68–92, emphases ours). These assumptions
correspond roughly to ‘‘realist’’ science as op-
posed to ‘‘nominalist’’ scrutiny, in which ‘‘[w]e
make our puny representations of this world, but
all the structure of which we can conceive lies
within our representations’’ (Hacking, 1999, p.
83). The fact that scholars mobilize networks and
27
signal group identity with code-words is tangen-
tial to such movement, structure, and stability.1
Let us be clear about our own position: ‘‘soft’’ or
‘‘historical’’ constructionism (see below) has an
important role to play in studies of antiquity, but
its more persuasive forms must fit within the re-
alist camp to succeed. The obligation of the ‘‘soft
constructionist’’ is to ground interpretations in
data, to move forward, to see structure, and to
establish the stable foundations of future knowl-
edge. To proceed, this enterprise must involve
what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call
an ‘‘embodied scientific realism,’’ which couples
concept and bodies within ‘‘an ongoing series of
interactions’’ that are consistent with present-day
cognitive science (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999,
p. 90).
Below, we decode social constructionism and
examine its premises in light of recent attempts to
apply idealism to Maya archaeology. This dis-
cussion leads to a re-examination of the notion of
social (as opposed to collective) identities and
particularly to Marcel MaussÕ concept of person-
hood. Fundamental to the concept of a person is
that of ‘‘body.’’ Here we propose that its physi-
cality be acknowledged rather than simply imag-
ined within cultural parameters. A related theme
is the archaeological identification of gendered
and sexual categories; we challenge the purported
ambivalence of sexual categories—as suggested by
social constructionists—in reference to Classic
Maya hieroglyphic texts and iconography. Mor-
tuary evidence is particularly relevant to forming
an understanding of non-western perceptions of
personhood. Accordingly, we review several re-
cent constructionist interpretations and offer an
alternative and factually grounded ‘‘reading’’ of
hieroglyphic and archaeological evidence. Finally,
we turn to the recent application of L
evi-StraussÕ
model of ‘‘house societies’’ (soci
et
es 
a maisons)—a
schema that privileges co-residence and the phys-
icality of the house over bloodlines and thus
provides a supporting example of social con-
structionism in action. The model has some merit
in application to Classic Maya society, but it
is too reductionistic and narrow in scope to
1
Latour and Woolgar dispute this by asserting that no
such knowledge can be totally stable, but their ques-
tioning of ‘‘facts’’ seems closer to Berkeley than Kant:
for them, a ‘‘fact’’ is the product of, and thus indivisible
from, its circumstances of observation and can never be
final for that very reason (Latour and Woolgar, 1979;
see also Latour, 1987, p. 5).
28 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
accurately characterize that segment of society to
which it has been applied—Classic Maya royal
courts. The larger purpose of this exercise is to
urge caution in the acceptance and application of
paradigmatic frameworks and reworked anthro-
pological schemata to any corpus of archaeolog-
ical evidence. Particular care should be taken in
evaluating whether or not philosophical bents—
fashionable in the early 21st century—have
archaeological utility, whether they provide a
credible ‘‘transcultural’’ framework for interpret-
ing past cultures, and whether such trends
are matched by resonance or resistance when
examined in light of archaeological evidence.
Constructionism
Social constructionists allege that all catego-
ries, even purported ‘‘natural categories,’’ are
human constructs shaped by historical contin-
gency and loosely organized meanings and dis-
positions that we call ‘‘culture.’’ Constructionism
patently descends from George Berkeley and, to a
lesser extent, Immanuel Kant. Berkeley (1996,
Part I, para. 23) could speak for present-day
constructionists: ‘‘When we do our utmost to
conceive the existence of external bodies, we are
all the while only contemplating our own ideas.’’
For Berkeley, agents were active beings that per-
ceived ideas. It is also important to remember that
Berkeley ended up as the Bishop of Cloyne: hu-
mans were the finite ‘‘spirits’’ or beings that ex-
perienced such ideas; both being and idea were
ultimately created by God, the infinite Spirit.
Kant was more subtle, seeing a world of external
objects that existed independently of our percep-
tions of them (Thomson, 2000, p. 21). Nonethe-
less, his view of transcendental idealism sketched a
world that could only be intuited by sense and had
to be organized according to formal principles of
understanding. Kant himself can be seen as en-
dorsing a strong view of this model—‘‘objects are
nothing but representations’’ (Thomson, 2000, p.
27, citing the first edition of KantÕs Critique of
pure reason)—or a mild one—the concurrent as-
sertion that objects do exist apart from our de-
tection of them but that there remains an
‘‘inescapable connection between self-knowledge
and knowledge of objects’’ (Guyer, 1992, p. 155).
Logically and emotionally, constructionism
contributes to an existential philosophy of per-
sonal choice that has been liberated from the ar-
bitrary conventions of culture and society
(Føllesdal, 1987, p. 392, on Jean-Paul Sartre;
Reddy, 1997, p. 326).2 This is why, in 1869, John
Stuart Mill criticized the ‘‘artificial’’ claims about
‘‘womenÕs nature,’’ devised, he argued, and with
good reason, to naturalize control over an ex-
ploited group (Mill, 1966, p. 451; also Nussbaum,
2000, pp. 6–7). Ian Hacking suggests that con-
structionist philosophy rests on the premise that
many features of the world are neither inevitable
nor ‘‘determined by the nature of things’’ (Hack-
ing, 1999, p. 6). In weaker form, this premise can
be described as a ‘‘soft’’ or ‘‘historical’’ perspec-
tive and might include Thomas LaqueurÕs finding
that, in occidental thought, ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’
were formerly regarded as hierarchical versions of
one sex and later, for epistemological and political
reasons, as incommensurable opposites (Laqueur,
1992, pp. 10–11). The recipe for such studies is
straight-forward: pick a body part (breast, phal-
lus), a practice (homosexuality), a sense (smell), a
condition (fatness) or an emotion (disgust),
monitor its semantic undulations through time
and place, and then write a book or article, which
shows that our current understandings are not the
same as they once were (Barasch, 2001; Boswell,
1980, 1995; Braziel and LeBesco, 2001; Classen
et al., 1994; Friedman, 2001; Miller, 1997; Yalom,
1997).
Beyond such historical understandings, which
are indispensable in understanding the past, are
not-so-hidden agenda about what the world
should be like. These escalate from a merely ironic
attitude towards regrettable things that cannot
easily be changed, to an ‘‘unmasking’’ that, as the
Quakers would say, speaks truth to power and
thus undermines the ‘‘practical effectiveness’’ of
oppressive systems; the final level would commit
to more tangible acts of rebellion and revolution
that rework the world into a better place (Hack-
ing, 1999, p. 20). All such deliberations are, to
some, ‘‘simultaneously moral, ethical, and politi-
cal debates about social and political equality and
the possibilities for change’’ (Fausto-Sterling,
2000, p. 255; see also Conkey, 2001, p. 355). This
is a heavy freight for archaeology, which is held
by most scholars, we trust, to address the past
2
But note SartreÕs retreat from his earlier, more
outlandish statements, freedom being, to the older,
wiser Sartre, not a God-like ability to dictate and decide,
but ‘‘the small movement which makes of a socially
conditioned social being someone who does not give
back completely that which his conditioning has given
him’’ (Føllesdal, 1987, p. 404).
 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
more than the present. Yet the determining im-
pulse behind strong forms of constructionism
seems to be, not the elucidation of humans over
time, but a joint embarkation to utopian or, at
least, improved states of existence. Many such
volumes issue from the confessional booth, Fau-
sto-Sterling (2000, pp. 232–235) going on at length
about her shifting orientations, as does Butler
(1999, pp. xvi–xix). Similarly, Elizabeth Abbott
enthuses about her personal commitment to celi-
bacy, the subject of her volume on this practice
(Abbott, 1999, pp. 22, 429–430), and Kathleen
LeBesco is ‘‘proud’’ to ‘‘fight for fat’’ (Braziel and
LeBesco, 2001, p. 2).
Two assumptions undergird acts of ‘‘unmask-
ing’’: (1) for much of history, human beings have
lived in a state of definitional enslavement, arbi-
trarily confined by the caprices of culture and
historical contingency; and (2) the intellectuals
who ‘‘unmask’’ bad practices and evil concepts
serve as the vanguard of self-emancipation; they
open new possibilities for individual choice. By
identifying and exposing the impositions of his-
tory and culture, they presumably negate the
tyranny of culture over themselves and others.
Some have even argued that this new form of in-
terpretive science should stress ‘‘faith, emotion,
and personal fulfillment. . . [along with] a focus on
difference in the absolute sense, the unique, and
the local’’; as for intellectuals, they would ‘‘speak
for those who have never been the subject (active,
human). . . [and] would include new voices and
new forms of local narrative but not in an attempt
to impose discipline or responsibility’’ (Rosenau,
1992, pp. 172–173).
There are two unresolvable paradoxes in such
arguments. The first is that constructionists rely
alternately on the notion of relative, evolving
concepts-in-this-world and, at the same time,
judgments based on an unspecified and unlocated
system of absolute and universal morality. But, if
all is constructed, from where do such judgments
come? From where the determination of moral
probity? The second is the fallacy that any person
can stand fully outside the world that shaped them
or that ‘‘unmasking’’ does not, in fact, involve the
deployment of other masks and postures. Erving
Goffman showed long ago that such games char-
acterize most human strategizing (Goffman,
1974).
A striking example of constructionist thinking,
although often allusive and difficult to pin down,
is the work of Judith Butler, for whom ‘‘sex’’ is no
longer a ‘‘bodily given’’ but a ‘‘cultural norm’’
29
imposed by a vaguely defined group of regulatory
disciplinarians (Butler, 1993, p. 3). A spry teacher
of rhetoric and an heroically obscurantist writer—
recently garlanded with top honors in Philosophy
and LiteratureÕs Bad Writing Contest—Butler
promptly admits the opposite too, that ‘‘sexually
differentiated parts. . . [and] hormonal and chro-
mosomal differences’’ do exist (Butler, 1993, p.
10). Butler has come to understand that such
word games might be regarded as ‘‘linguistic
monism, whereby everything is only and always
language,’’ or, as she asks plaintively, ‘‘If every-
thing is discourse, what about the body?’’ (Butler,
1993, p. 6). But, for Butler, at least in her Gender
Trouble, the ‘‘body’’ is ‘‘a variable boundary. . . a
signifying practice’’ (Butler, 1990, p. 177). For
her, it does not appear to be a sentient organism
resulting from multiple and minute interactions
between genotype and phenotype, a body that
needs to feed, breathe, reproduce, and live. Mar-
tha Nussbaum has expressed bewilderment at
ButlerÕs cocktail of antithetical sources, Freud
shaken but not stirred with Monique Wittig,
Jacques Lacan, John L. Austin, and Luce Iriga-
ray, but takes even greater exception to the po-
litical quietism implicit in ButlerÕs brand of
feminism, in which a ‘‘sly send-up of the status
quo is the only script for resistance that life offers’’
(Nussbaum, 2000, p. 16). In HackingÕs classifica-
tion, Nussbaum is a rebel or revolutionary to
ButlerÕs un-masker.
Our own disquiet results more from ButlerÕs
view of the material, the physical, not as bodies
and blood, so to speak, but as ‘‘a process of ma-
terialization that stabilizes over time to produce
the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call
matter’’ (Butler, 1993, p. 9, italics removed from
original). Read a certain way, this can only be an
endorsement of Lamarckian thought or the as-
sertion that bodies, like ideas, are infinitely plastic.
Concept and matter, sign and physical body, blur
unaccountably in ButlerÕs idealist vision, just as,
for someone like Latour, social networks in the
process of discovery seem to displace the relatively
stable knowledge that derives from the laborato-
ries he studies. Can it possible be that Latour does
not take aspirin or other drugs developed in just
such laboratories? Metaphors like ‘‘stabilize,’’
‘‘construct,’’ and ‘‘sedimented’’ enhance a feeling
of paradox and of indeterminate categories by
invoking the claim that physical boundaries and
classes are mere representations in the Kantian
sense. Strangely, this is accomplished by describ-
ing mental concepts as physical things to be built,
30 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
layered and then pried apart, just as, for sociolo-
gists, ‘‘societies’’ or ‘‘systems’’ are ‘‘reproduced’’
like so many biological offspring (e.g., Giddens,
1984, p. 27). Butler is not alone in this false
physicality, as Paul Connerton and others
(Connerton, 1989, p. 73; Joyce, 2000a,b, p. 9)
claim that practices can be ‘‘inscribed,’’ Conner-
ton going so far as to liken, confusingly, this ‘‘type
of action’’ to ‘‘modern devices for storing and re-
trieving information’’ (Connerton, 1989, p. 73,
our emphases; Latour and Woolgar also refer to
‘‘inscription,’’ but in an entirely different sense
that refers to scientistsÕ inordinate generation of
paperwork, Latour and Woolgar, 1979, p. 51). In
no existential idiom that we know are events
(‘‘action’’) the same as things (‘‘devices’’). But
they are and can be in the idealist world of the
constructionists—they are all figments of mind.
The ancient Maya and constructionism
In a recent archaeological application of social
constructionism to ancient Maya notions of per-
sonhood and afterlife, Gillespie (2001, p. 99) faults
archaeologists who interpret the past in terms of
‘‘essentialized, ahistorical, transcultural, even
natural categor[ies].’’ Particularly suspect are what
she labels ‘‘ethnopsychological perspectives’’ such
as those proposed by Stuart (1996) as well as
Houston and Stuart (1998, pp. 92–95), who base
their interpretations on a close reading of hiero-
glyphic texts and iconic representations of persons.
These interpretations, which derive from fresh
decipherments of Maya glyphs, are criticized, ra-
ther oddly given their nature, for inattention to
‘‘culturally specific social constructions’’ and for
blurring ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘person’’ (Gillespie, 2001, p.
102). In the end, the difference of opinion seems to
pivot on interpretive frameworks for understand-
ing ‘‘person’’ and ‘‘body.’’
Contrary to the doctrine of constructionists, a
body is not just good to think with; it remains an
enduring physical fact, a reproductive organism of
somatic potentials and capacities. We suggest that
acceptance of ‘‘the body’’ into anthropological
discussion requires that its physicality be ac-
knowledged as existing in a somewhat autono-
mous state. The degree of such autonomy
continues to be a matter of debate. Anne Fausto-
Sterling sees the body rather like a nested Russian
doll, with an inner, cellular layer encased within
those of the organism, psyche, person to person
relationships, culture, and history; as any one
layer changes, so do the others (Fausto-Sterling,
2000, pp. 22–29; see also Meskell, 1996, p. 10, who
quite correctly desires an ‘‘interface and resolution
between the biological, cultural and personal’’). In
much the same vein, Elizabeth Grosz visualizes
biological processes that exist before any meaning
is assigned to them, but understands that the body
and mind come into existence through tandem
development (Grosz, 1994, pp. 115–121). Many
such studies focus on the sparsely occupied mar-
gins of human categories, emphasizing intersexu-
ality, hermaphroditism or unusual conditions
such as androgen sensitivity (e.g., Chase, 1998;
also Fausto-Sterling, 2000, pp. 30–32; Kessler,
1998). But these carefully staked out positions are
anything but thorough-going idealism; they are
systemic models of mind and body, not displays of
totalizing systems. One of HackingÕs ‘‘rebels’’ and
‘‘revolutionaries,’’ Fausto-Sterling still addresses
the corpus callosum as much as ‘‘a more diverse
and equitable future,’’ whose contours she per-
ceives from a position of declared faith (Fausto-
Sterling, 2000, p. 114).
Agents, persons, and society: How do the pieces fit
together?
Of late, agency theorists have been ducking fire
from those who allege that agency theory, as
currently practiced, is androcentric, narcissistic or
simply a reflection of the emphasis on individuals
in western societies (Bender, 1993; Brumfiel, 2000;
Dobres and Robb, 2000, p. 13; Gero, 2000). At
the core of this critique is the recognition that
intentionality and individuation are not universal
states of being. In many sectors of traditional
societies, moreover, human agency may be situ-
ated within a social unit that is larger than the
individual. If we insist on methodological indi-
vidualism, then we do little more than recapitulate
a ‘‘great men in history’’ approach to the past. As
Dobres and Robb (2000, pp. 9–10) lament the
theoretical slipperiness of agency theory, others
have actively embraced the concept that ‘‘no
(wo)man is an island,’’ and sought to interpret the
past in terms of collective social action and to
redefine the problematic individual as one who
travels through stages of culturally prescribed
personhood.
One such attempt to bring clarity to these
murky waters can be found in Gillespie (2001),
who proposes to correct the wrongs of agency
theory. She stipulates that identity is at once in-
 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
dividual and corporate, relational and singular,
not a social monad but an entity perpetually in
relationship to others, living, dead, and inanimate.
These are assertions with which few would argue.
But in order to operationalize them Gillespie leans
heavily on concepts of personhood developed by
Marcel Mauss, an undoubted genius but also the
least practiced and traveled of ethnographers. As
Mauss makes clear in his ‘‘Une Cat
egorie de
l’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne, Celle de
Moi’’ (‘‘A category of the human mind: The no-
tion of person; the notion of self,’’ first issued in
1938 and one of his last published essays), this
influential piece was written as both a theoretical
and a topical statement. In it, Mauss exalts the
‘‘sacred character’’ of the personne, which soon
might be crushed, despite all efforts to ‘‘defend’’
such ‘‘great possessions’’ against unnamed threats
in that portentous time (Mauss, 1985, p. 22). Seen
in this light, MaussÕ essay is less a dispassionate,
anthropological inquiry about roles, persons, and
individuals than a contemplation of European
society in the late 1930s. The extremes he em-
phasizes are necessary to highlight the passion
play of progress and anti-progress. Mauss stresses
the moral choices before his compatriots on the
eve of the Holocaust and the emerging imposition
of fascist anonymities (Fournier, 1994, pp. 702–
707; see also Falasca-Zamponi, 1997, p. 187).
When this topical essay is pressed into the
service of supplying a theoretical framework for
understanding the past, as Gillespie (2001) does
under the flag of constructionism, she enters the
dangerous domain of teleology, the idea that
things tend toward some ultimate purpose or
natural design. This danger is particularly acute
with respect to GillespieÕs discussion of roles
(MaussÕ personnage, as distinct from the Roman
‘‘mask,’’ the personne, Mauss, 1985, p. 12) and
their relation to larger collectivities with whom
social interaction creates the situated person. It is
well to remember that MaussÕ terms come from
Latin and French and thus fit within a notion of
teleological progress that is peculiar to his intel-
lectual heritage. To use them as stages, which
Mauss and, apparently, Gillespie do, denies that
our 21st century identities also exist within col-
lectivities, or that a self-concept was possible for
ancient people. We cannot believe that this is a
direction in which Gillespie meant to move.
Second, nowhere in GillespieÕs use of the
‘‘transcultural’’ concept—the personnage—does
she define a ‘‘culturally specific’’ person who is
distinctive to her case material—Classic Maya
31
royal society. Instead of a highly textured char-
acterization of one or more culturally specific
Maya persons, we are treated to a general dis-
cussion of living people invoking the dead. The
latter could just as easily apply to Napoleon IIIÕs
erection of a mausoleum for Napoleon I; another
example might be the Abbey of Saint-DenisÕ ret-
rospective tomb effigies for royal patrons, some
not otherwise commemorated in that memorial to
French monarchy and Benedictine prerogative
(Binski, 1996, p. 75). By GillespieÕs calculation,
Maya ‘‘royals’’ had reached moi but not yet the
‘‘individual’’ although they had by that point al-
ready migrated to a felicitous state beyond the
personnage. A difficulty here is that, as anthro-
pologists, our need to generalize can become a
propensity to stereotype: ‘‘individuation’’ is also
discernable among traditional peoples (Stephen,
1996; also Kray, 1997, p. 32), just as those in our
own time and place, including 21st century aca-
demics, can be ‘‘holistic’’ in their self-definition
with respect to others (Shweder and Bourne,
1984). Even in current literature, the ‘‘self’’ re-
mains highly problematic, considered as both
purely subjective experience (Battaglia, 1995;
Mageo, 1995; Spiro, 1993) and as an intersection
of group relationships that extends beyond indi-
vidual bodies (Becker, 1995, p. 4). Apparently, the
body is good to think with, but so is the ‘‘self.’’
A further question is this, can we assume that
Maya royalty exhibited agency only in terms of
larger social collectives, that they could not have
behaved in an intentional and self-interested
manner? No one doubts that networks of political
relations and dependencies within and among
Classic Maya royal courts complicated decision
making, yet should Maya ‘‘royals’’ be conceived
as prisoners to their self-concept, as suggested by
MaussÕ teleological stages? Curiously, Gillespie
has chosen case material that provides great ‘‘re-
sistance’’ (Shanks, 2001, p. 292) to her interpretive
framework. Members of non-elite sectors of an-
cient Maya society were in all likelihood con-
strained by their role and station in society, yet
sacred rulers and other hyper-elites demonstrably
controlled abundant resources and wielded great
authority. Knowledge of the ancient Maya is not
advanced by reducing the tremendous variability
in roles, power, and self-perception that once ex-
isted in Maya society to one of MaussÕ teleological
stages.
Valuable insights into the tension and balance
between individuation and royal roles in Classic
Maya society comes from the under-developed
32 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
field of glyphic onomastics or hieroglyphically
attested naming practices. As Gillespie (2001, p.
85) notes, Maya dynasts often assumed elabo-
rately concocted and ancestrally linked identities.
Epigraphers have long known of highly variable,
non-repetitious pre-regnal names (replaced by the
u k’al huun k’ab’a’, as on Piedras Negras Stela 14,
A14–B14) along with generationally transcendent
regnal names. The former hint at individuation,
the latter at muted personal identities that merge
with those of antecedent rulers. The Maya them-
selves provided some kind of nominal classifica-
tion by means of atypical and only partly
understood spellings of u k’ab’a’, ‘‘his name,’’ in
royal texts of Naranjo, Guatemala (e.g., Stela 21,
A11). A rich inventory of noble but non-royal
names has been exposed by multi-spectral scan-
ning in the Bonampak murals of Chiapas, Mex-
ico. Often spelled syllabically, these otherwise
unprecedented nominals hints at the royal, non-
royal divisions mentioned before: that is, their
form differs from those attested for royals, and
include such unusual names as C/II-38/39 KAN-
na/to-lo/wa-xi/ba-to-ka or C/I-37 pu-ka-la/a-wa-
KAB? (letters and numbers indicate location in the
murals). Further study will doubtless recover
unplumbed details about onomastics and may
directly address the problem of naming and per-
sonhood in Classic Maya society (Colas, 2001).
Whats sex got to do with it?
The nascent field of gender archaeology has
entered the fray of constructionism, moving well
beyond its original linkage with issues of equity
and equality (Gilchrist, 1999, pp. 8–9). The pre-
mise that gender roles are culturally constructed
as opposed to a reflection of universal norms and
biological imperatives is widely accepted among
academics, liberals, and social activists, and it is a
position we favor as well, for personal and intel-
lectual reasons (Stein, 1992, pp. 340–350). Social
constructionists take this proposition one step
farther by proposing that ‘‘sex’’ is no longer a
biological given but is itself a representation that
is subject to cultural flux (Conkey, 2001, p. 344;
Gosden, 1999, pp. 146–150). That bogey of con-
structionists, ‘‘essentialism,’’ the idea that things
possess fixed natures, comes into play here, al-
though some scholars do maintain a useful dis-
tinction between ‘‘biological sex’’ and ‘‘sexuality,’’
the former being inherently physical, the second a
series of relations and practices (Voss and
Schmidt, 2000, p. 2). What is puzzling from a
scientific perspective is why essentialism should be
seen, not as a topic for inquiry, but as an ap-
proach that is thought to be empirically baseless
on prima facie grounds. Is this another moral
valuation that looms unremarked behind the
constructionists? Nonetheless, some recent re-
search on male and female behavior comes down
heavily in favor of effects from exposure to ‘‘var-
ious sex hormones early in life’’ and particular
configurations of the hypothalamus (Kimura,
2002, pp. 1 and 2; also Ellis and Ames, 1987).
Moreover, by decoupling sex from ‘‘natural’’
categories of male and female, social construc-
tionists impart a certain ambiguity to sexual (as
opposed to gender) roles. Even Fausto-Sterling,
who regards sexual dualism with grave suspicion,
barely discusses chromosomal differences in her
otherwise grounded volume and confesses that
‘‘intersexual babies,’’ those with various abnor-
malities relating to genotypic sex, total some 1.7%
of the total population, not a large number
(Fausto-Sterling, 2000, pp. 51–54; see also Dreger,
1998; Kessler, 1998). Fausto-SterlingÕs logic ap-
pears to be that, since a small number of people
do not conform to dyadic anatomical order, no
one fits that order; categories with fuzzy bound-
aries cannot be categories at all. This is rather like
saying that we are all potential albinos, regardless
of our specific chromosomal heritage.
Among the ranks of archaeologists, followers
of this movement generally search for validation
of this premise among material remains from an-
tiquity. An example of this modus operandi can be
found in the writings of Rosemary Joyce, who
states that ‘‘Maya scholars have assumed that
human beings belong to two natural sexes coin-
cident with two natural genders, and that these
non-overlapping categories will always be sepa-
rated clearly’’ (Joyce, 2000a, p. 64). Thus, to
Joyce, unthinking Mayanists equate the cultural
artifice of gender roles with the biological duality
of sex. Joyce (2000a, p. 64) then attempts to deny
this equation by referring to purported ambi-
guities in sex-markers from Classic Maya
hieroglyphic texts. To lay some introductory
groundwork, we should mention that Maya
scribes signaled ‘‘femaleness’’ by use of the
ix- adjective, a bound morpheme (a particle that
fuses obligatorily to the following morpheme) that
was represented by a female head with distinctive
markings on the cheek, loose strands of hair, and
a small bun or protuberance projecting from the
forehead. (Joyce uses an older reading of na-,
 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
‘‘lady,’’ for this sign; we now know that this value
is restricted to syllabic, non-logographic use of the
‘‘womanÕs-head’’ glyph and is never employed to
mean ‘‘female,’’ cf. Joyce, 2000a,b, pp. 64–65.) To
Joyce, ‘‘maleness’’ was indicated textually by the
use of another bound morpheme aj- or its later
variant a-, formerly thought to represent ‘‘he of.’’
Because persons described as aj- are sometimes
shown wearing the so-called net skirt (more on
this feature below), and because of later, colonial
data, Joyce (2000a, p. 64) suggests that Maya hi-
eroglyphic conventions are only ‘‘secondarily a
marker of gender.’’ In other words, the sexual
ambiguities stressed by social constructionists
were shared by Classic Maya royalty or by those
carving their monuments.
This interpretation stems in part from a mis-
reading of the ix- and aj- morphemes in Classic
texts. We can repair it by declaring two basic
premises: (1) there is a highly rigid and precise
rhetorical register in Classic Maya inscriptions;
the texts are not so much casual or random
glimpses of Maya society as they are highly se-
lective representations of hyper-elites; and (2),
contextual evidence from parentage statements
and accompanying imagery do indeed register
‘‘sex’’ in the biological sense. That is, an individ-
ual with breasts who is dressed in a huipil (female
garment) will, in 100% of all cases in which there
is an accompanying hieroglyphic text, be identi-
fied glyphically with ix- (or the unbound [stand-
alone], nominal morpheme ixik). If described as a
mother in a dyadic grouping with a father, then
that woman probably and plausibly is a female
rather than a cross-dresser. There is no evidence
to question, as Joyce does, that hieroglyphic
captions are unreliable indicators of sexual iden-
tity (cf. Joyce, 2000a, p. 63).
Perhaps for genealogical reasons, biological
sexual identities were in fact of supreme impor-
tance to Maya dynasts and tended, if anything, to
be over-specified. This is shown in a highly re-
petitive pattern that is detectable hieroglyphically.
Signification of a male was accomplished by
prefacing the phrase with a symbol that we rec-
ognize as a ‘‘zero’’ (Ø), signification of a female by
ix-; the expression aj- might be present in both
cases. Thus, a male could be described as
‘‘Ø + aj + b’ik’iil or k’uhuun (Piedras Negras Panel
1, positions pB3–pB4, the ‘‘p’’ indicates an un-
certain reading order), while a similar phrase sig-
nifying a female was written as ix- + aj- + b’ik’iil or
k’uhuun (Piedras Negras Burial 5 shell, position
J2, Denver Art Museum New Panel, position B9;
33
the exact translation of the final elements is still
under discussion as are details of vowel length).
As a result of these grammatical constructions, aj-
does not carry any precise notion of biological
sex. It is equally apparent that ix- does not occupy
the same functional slot as aj-. The forms are
entirely distinct; ix- is used as a marking device,
aj- is not. There is a statistical tendency for aj- to
refer to men, but the linkage can not be uniformly
assumed. Yet, there is conclusive evidence for a
contrast between use of the ‘‘zero’’ (Ø) marking
for males and the adjective ix- for females
(Houston et al., 2001): that is, these forms are not
functionally incommensurable but rather occupy
the same slot. From this it follows that the ab-
sence of ix- connotes and denotes the male sex by
default. Personal names, royal and non-royal also
behave in this way: ‘‘zero’’ (Ø) + NAME for men
and ix- + NAME for women. One of the most
exalted Maya titles, ajaw, operated in the same
way: ‘‘zero’’ (Ø) + PLACE NAME + ajaw (an
Early Classic pattern) contrasting with ix-
+ PLACE NAME + ajaw (Tikal Stela 31, position
I4; cf. Naranjo Stela 24, position D18); the only
exceptions are patterned ones in which the adjec-
tive ix- is displaced by another adjective, k’uhul,
‘‘holy,’’ and this only in cases of reigning queens,
a rare occurrence in Maya society (e.g., Naranjo
Stela 24, position A8). An heir-designate might be
titled as a ch’ok (meaning young or unripe) ‘‘zero’’
(Ø) + PLACE NAME + ajaw (Dos Pilas Panel 19,
position E2). One possible exception noted by
Joyce is misinterpreted (Joyce, 2000a, p. 64; see
also Closs, 1992): what she takes as the middle of
the text is in fact its beginning, with no direct
connection between a royal lady and a title pref-
aced by ‘‘zero’’ (Ø) + aj-.
Thus, a ‘‘sex’’-linkage between men and aj- is
hard to make stick by any reading of the Classic
Maya evidence as it appears in elite registers.
Quite simply, aj- is not in free variation—i.e.,
functionally substitutable—with ix-. The evidence
further indicates that Maya royalty were much
concerned with sexual identities, not simply con-
structed or fluid ones, and that sexual roles were
not—especially in the case of royal ladies—readily
subject to redefinition and resignification. Fou-
cault might say that the bodies of royal females
were regulated with special rigor (Foucault, 1995,
p. 138). In Classic Maya texts as well as Yucatec
Maya prose of the Colonial period, the untitled
‘‘person’’ was labeled winik, with prefixes to nar-
row and specify identity (Houston and Inomata,
n.d.). Such nomenclature provides a window into
34 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
the social chasm that separated Classic Maya
elites from the rest of society and begs caution in
generalizing the gender roles of royal females (as
well as males) to all of Pre-Columbian Maya so-
ciety (see McAnany and Plank, 2001, pp. 94–99).
Of the net-skirt costume sometimes worn by
men—a costume that for Joyce (2000a, pp. 64–65)
creates sexual ambiguity—there are two relevant
points to be made regarding deity impersonation
and visual allusions to aesthetic principles. For
Mesoamerican rulers, ritual performance con-
stituted one of the most visible and visibly docu-
mented aspects of their authority. On such
occasions, rulers donned costumes that trans-
formed them into deities (thus, the term ‘‘deity
impersonation,’’ Gruzinski, 1989; Hvidtfeldt,
1958). Many Classic Maya deity impersonation
costumes were recorded in minute detail in stone
and painted media which survive to this day. We
now recognize that Maya rulers performed rituals
while impersonating the maize deity, the rain de-
ity, and the fire deity among others (Grube, 2000;
Houston and Stuart, 1996, pp. 297–299). The
male maize deity (whether impersonated or ac-
tual) was emblematic of regeneration and often is
shown wearing the net skirt.
Although the symbolism of this costume is not
fully understood, there is, as scholars have poin-
ted out for years, more than a hint of sexual
ambiguity in the costume, thus leading Matthew
Looper to regard it as ‘‘the third gender’’ (Looper,
2002, p. 173) or Joyce to perceive a fluid, impor-
ous boundary between male and female (Joyce,
1996, p. 182). We believe these are misreadings of
the evidence. First, the Maize god is often shown
being dressed by females, and, in one death scene,
is being mourned by corn maidens (Karl Taube,
personal communication, 2002). The recent find
of a Late Preclassic mural from San Bartolo,
Guatemala, shows that those dressing the maize
god have pronounced breasts while he does not
(Karl Taube, personal communication, 2002;
OÕNeill, 2002, p. 74)—the maize god is thus a
sexual rather than a pre-sexual or transsexual
being. For this reason, it is likely that Classic
males impersonate the Maize god, Classic females
the corn maidens. Second, although some of the
androgyny may come from the bisexual nature of
the corn plant itself, the maize god relates above
all to a finely developed system of aesthetics that is
neglected thematically by Looper and Joyce: it is
likely that the deity embodies the pinnacle of
beauty, with smooth and supple limbs, fine hair
(corn silk), high, shiny brow and unlined face, and
willowy, graceful movement. The metaphors and
literal comparisons are rich and dense. His flesh is
succulent, to be consumed by deities; he is the first
human being, youthful and vigorous; as a free-
standing stelae, surrounded by spectators, he is
the finest plant in the maize field to which the
royal court is likened (Houston and Inomata,
n.d.). Making the ruler comely is a frequent
stratagem in complex political systems (Smith,
2000). The mistake in examining the Classic Maya
evidence has been to emphasize gender rather
than exemplifications of beauty.
Maya epigraphy and the performance of mortuary
ritual
Behind deity impersonation, another type of
ritual performance—that pertaining to mortuary
activities—is well represented hieroglyphically,
iconographically, and archaeologically. This
highly visible part of ancient Maya society may be
a result of the pervasiveness of ancestor venera-
tion in Maya society and the continued impor-
tance of the body of a deceased person of
authority to the continuation of dynastic privilege
as well as the rights and resources of families of
lesser ranking (McAnany, 1995). Regardless, this
wealth of information is a powerful magnet to
those wishing to study ancient death ways. The
abundance is offset, however, by the hazards of
working with hieroglyphic texts that are still un-
der decipherment and for which widespread
agreement regarding orthography, grammar, and
even the language in which the texts were origi-
nally composed is only just emerging (Houston
et al., 2000). ‘‘End-users’’ of the decipherment
who desire to incorporate hieroglyphic material
into their analysis must contend with such shifting
sands until the decipherment stabilizes.
Unfortunately, new breakthroughs can negate
the factual basis of older interpretations. For in-
stance, the first wave of the recent decipherment
of the 1980s emphasized Maya concerns with
blood offerings, and most ‘‘scattering’’ scenes were
interpreted as blood sacrifices (Schele and Miller,
1986; Stuart, 1988). These days, epigraphers
widely acknowledge that a hieroglyphic com-
pound for blood is not easily identifiable, sug-
gesting a more circumspect approach to blood
offerings supposedly mentioned in glyphic texts.
In fact, even death generally is described in highly
metaphorical and flowery prose. Similar inaccu-
racies of fact and interpretation occur in Gillespie
 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
(2001), who uses iconography and texts to suggest
that royal tombs speak not to biological death but
to a type of collective social death endured by a
royal house.3
In a nutshell, Gillespie aims to cast doubt on
the personal identity of bodies that were interred
within royal Maya tombs, suggesting that the
identity of the deceased may have been blurred
intentionally by the surviving collective group
who were more intent on maintaining the power
base and moral authority of the royal house (more
on houses below) than on the burial and com-
memoration of a specific person. Although it is
true that the connection between the identity of a
person placed within a royal tomb and the per-
son(s) named on nearby hieroglyphic texts is
rarely straight-forward (Houston, 1989, pp. 7–
10)—except in a few cases of which one is dis-
cussed below—it is not the case that practicing
Maya epigraphers blithely assign named identities
to royal corpses. For example, Burial 13 at Pie-
dras Negras (excavated in 1997 by H
ector Es-
cobedo and Tom
as Barrientos, Escobedo and
Houston, 1997, 1998) contains inscriptions, but
they do not specifically identify a certain Ruler 4
who most likely was the occupant of the tomb, a
judgment based on ancillary evidence, some tex-
tual and some archaeological. A ‘‘one-to-one
correspondence’’ between text and tomb occupant
is not so much ‘‘presumed,’’ at least by careful
epigraphers, as it is weighed on a case-by-case
basis (cf. Gillespie, 2001, p. 89). The occupant of a
royal tomb was seldom named unambiguously, a
practice different from our own use of tomb-
stones. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the
occupant failed to serve as the primary focus of
mortuary ritual.
Texts do contain references to burial places
and to subsequent rituals enacted at the interment
locales of important named ancestors (see data
from Copan, Bell et al., 2000, and Marc Zender,
from priestly urn burials at Comalcalco, Grube
3
Many of the royal names in GillespieÕs work reflect
older spellings (Martin and Grube, 2000, is now the
recommended text). Kan BÕahlam is a name that, in part,
is ‘‘written phonetically,’’ as it has two syllabic qualifiers,
ka and ma (cf. Gillespie, 2001, p. 87). There is no ruler
known as Yikom but rather a Yuknoom, whose regnal
name employs entirely different morphemes (cf. Gilles-
pie, 2001, p. 89). Muk is certainly read phonetically (cf.
Gillespie, 2001, p. 90), although in verbal contexts
identified long ago by Peter Mathews (published recently
in Mathews, 2001).
35
et al., 2002, pp. II-48, 51, 53–55). Most epigra-
phers now believe that muk (possessive form is
expressed as u-muk-il) is the common term for
‘‘burial’’ with only rare use of the term muknal.
Muknal may impart a very different sense, per-
haps of ‘‘cemetery’’ (an example occurs on Seibal
Hieroglyphic Stairway 1, position DD1). Known
instances of the muk expression coupled with
their widely ranging calendrical dates have been
compiled by Houston (and published in McAn-
any, 1998, Table 1); significantly, these references
are often part of a text that describes an el-naah
or ‘‘fire-house’’ event. From Piedras Negras
Burial 13, for example, we recognize that this
remarkable ritual included the reopening and
burning or incensing of a tomb which resulted
in the crushing and disturbance of mortuary
furniture. There is little evidence to support an
interpretation of this rite as commemorating a
‘‘social’’ as opposed to a ‘‘biological’’ death; ra-
ther, it is a social ritual commemorating the bi-
ological death of a key ancestor. Such events were
held at the place of final interment of the ances-
torÕs body, timed to coincide with an auspicious
anniversary date, and likely were orchestrated by
descendants of the blood line.4 As Stuart (1998,
pp. 402–409) and Grube (2000, pp. 104–105) have
suggested, ‘‘fire-house’’ rituals likely assuaged
concerns with ‘‘feeding’’ and maintaining the vi-
tality of deified ancestors and their containers.
Maya (royal and otherwise) continued to conduct
rituals around the bodies of ancestors well after
initial interment and, presumably, as long as the
dead maintained their status as social interlocu-
tors. Thus, a closer reading of textual and ar-
chaeological evidence offers some resistance to
GillespieÕs goal of depersonalizing royal Maya
tombs but does support her assertions that Maya
royalty maintained active connections with their
ancestors.
One tomb for which there is a uniquely close
correspondence between text and tomb occupant
is that of the famous ruler of Palenque, KÕinich
JanahbÕ Pakal I, who was buried beneath the
Temple of the Inscriptions. The discovery of his
tomb in 1954 by Alberto Ruz Lhuillier forever
changed our understanding of many Maya
4
For a compelling example of the continued potency
of anniversary dates in Maya mortuary ritual, see
SanfordÕs (2000) account of the reburial ceremonies
held in villages in Highland Guatemala for named and
identified victims of the genocidal atrocities of the 1980s.
36 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
pyramids. Ironically, an extensive text (617 glyph
blocks in length) carved on three panels placed
in the walls of the temple clearly identifies the
pyramid as the burial place of Pakal, although gi-
ven the rudimentary state of Maya epigraphy in
1954, the text could not be deciphered. Today, the
situation is much improved, and the final portion
of the West Tablet text can be read as fol-
lows (Robertson, 1983, Fig. 97): y-ak’-aw/juun-tan/
b’olon-yeht-naah/u-k’ab’a-u-muk-il/k’inich-janahb’
pakal-k’uhul-b’aakal-ajaw. This unusually explicit
text can be translated, ‘‘he [KÕinich Kan BÕahlam,
the son of Pakal] gives it, the 9 Companion (?)
House, [it is] its name, the burial of KÕinich JanahbÕ
Pakal, holy lord of b’aakal [the place name of
Palenque].’’ In short, one might say ‘‘the writing is
on the wall’’; the text appears to be transparent,
obviating the need for involved discussion. The
house, in this case, the temple sitting atop the pyr-
amid, was the ‘‘gift’’ of Kan BÕahlam who appears
to have fulfilled his filial duty to complete a me-
morial to his father. The building is described
explicitly as the ‘‘guarded’’ or ‘‘tended thing’’ (juun-
tan) of Kan BÕahlam, but the burial underlying it is
identified as that of Pakal.
Gillespie (2001) skirts the explicit content of
the text carved on the West Tablet and goes on to
question whether the Temple of the Inscriptions
really was a monument to Pakal and whether
Pakal himself actually was interred within the
sarcophagus. This line of questioning is bolstered
by reference to dated arguments regarding the
discrepancy between the age of Pakal as it was
established osteologically (40–50 years) as op-
posed to epigraphically (80 years). Osteology is
regarded by Gillespie and others as definite and
privileged knowledge, epigraphy is held to be in-
definite and loosely interpretative. This line of
questioning denies one of the most explicit link-
ages between text and tomb occupant in the Maya
region, along with objections by knowledgeable
anthropologists familiar with the difficulty of
aging human remains (Houston, 2001, p. 170;
Hammond and Molleson, 1994; Urcid, 1993; Vera
Tiesler, a physical anthropologist, has re-exam-
ined the bones and now come down in favor of the
older estimate for Pakal, personal communica-
tion, 2002). The relevance of this example to
GillespieÕs notion of collective (as opposed to in-
dividual) action can be further questioned because
the decipherment strongly suggests a case of filial
duty (and guardianship of the temple covering the
burial shrine) as opposed to a corporate activity of
a vaguely defined royal house.
The depersonalization of Maya tombs also
runs into resistance offered by the burial goods
placed within the chambers. Although some ob-
jects within tombs were ancestral heirlooms
(McAnany, 1998, pp. 281–284, among others),
royal Maya tombs are distinctive and somewhat
unique in the Americas in that they also routinely
contain objects on which a single personÕs name is
painted or carved. That name, moreover, often
matches that of the royal person who is thought to
have been interred at a particular locale. This
custom of ‘‘name-tagging’’ objects (Houston
et al., 1989) is limited to elite tombs and does not
occur in the mortuary deposits of non-elites where
hieroglyphic texts are rare to nonexistent. The
pattern suggests that there is a clear link between
persons of authority and the material possessions
that formed part of the necessary goods assembled
by survivors in order to prepare the deceased for a
journey to the afterlife. These objects are not
easily explained as representing the collective
valuables of a kin group (cf. Joyce, 2000b, pp.
202–210). Even heirlooms were labeled as objects
of specific ancestors (mam, Stuart et al., 1999, p.
II-63) and belonged, so the glyphs say, to certain
people, not to corporate entities.
We do not disclaim the social dimension of
mortuary ritual, namely, that burial pyramids
were constructed by large groups that were vari-
ously constituted. Nor do we dismiss the fact that
death ways and burial accouterments, in the end,
are determined by the survivors. Nevertheless, the
identity of royal tomb occupants appears—in the
examples discussed above—to have been main-
tained rather than blurred by surviving family
members. The tendency may have been hyper-
expressed among members of ruling families for
whom personal and charismatic power likely
constituted an important part of effective ruler-
ship with reverberations among the generations
that followed. On the other hand, the more lim-
ited power base of Classic-Maya non-elite,
household heads and constituent members seems
to have translated into a mortuary pattern in
which the identity of the occupant was sometimes
overshadowed by concerns for survival and
maintenance of the surviving household.
The ‘‘House’’ of constructionists: one size fits all
Recently, there has been a growing interest in
L
evi-StraussÕ concept of ‘‘house societies’’ and a
re-examination of its applicability to ethno-
 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
graphic and archaeological contexts unexplored
by L
evi-Strauss (e.g., Gillespie, 2000a,b,c). By
now, scholars understand the merits of this
model, particularly its ability to describe corpo-
rate entities that are heterogeneous in composi-
tion through use of the ‘‘house’’ trope, which
accommodates and labels groupings according to
something other than bloodlines and descent. We
have explored the model ourselves and found
rather rare glyphic evidence of it in hieroglyphic
inscriptions (Houston, 1998, p. 521). Nonetheless,
we become uncomfortable when it is freely ap-
plied to evidence that cannot be used to prove or
disprove its existence. Gillespie (2001, p. 98) as-
serts that only the aristocracy had ‘‘houses,’’ but
this narrowing cannot be shown for the Classic
Maya. If ‘‘houses’’ sensu L
evi-Strauss were so
abundant, why did the Maya not mention them
aside, perhaps, from one text, found by Houston,
at the site of Tamarindito, Guatemala? In this
inscription the mother and father of a local ruler
are said to come from different ‘‘structures’’ or
exogamous ‘‘houses,’’ naah (Houston, 1998, p.
521). In early Colonial texts, Highland Maya
readily mention nimja and Nahuatl speakers cal-
polli or teccalli, the last translates as ‘‘lord
houses’’ (Braswell, 2001, p. 317; Chance, 2000, p.
495; Lockhart, 1992, p. 16). In contrast, ‘‘houses’’
or naah of Classic Maya texts belong to deities
and, by mortuary references, to specific people,
never explicitly to corporate entities (Houston
and Stuart, 1996, p. 294). The situation is even
less corporate in reference to the term y-otoot,
which is a home or dwelling with an obligatory
pattern of pronominal possession; that is, a y-
otoot is always described as in the possession of
someone, as opposed to a co-residential group. In
our opinion, a socially salient entity should have
achieved more rhetorical prominence than this.
More to the point, it is unclear how the ‘‘house’’
concept can be disproved. Many of its general
attributes fit with archaeological evidence, but
that would also be true of other corporate enti-
ties. If only nobility had ‘‘houses,’’ how did they
coexist and interact with other corporate groups,
particularly the extended family compounds of
non-elites?
It is unwise to argue that any one view of Maya
social organization trumps others. The emphasis
within Maya hieroglyphic texts on royal persons
and their position within long genealogical se-
quences do not provide much support for a house
society model that prioritizes co-residential
groupings of limited time depth over bloodlines.
37
For the royal Maya component of Classic society,
a model of ‘‘court societies’’ provides a more rel-
evant construct. Such societies, focused on rulers
and their court establishments, offers as useful a
basis for comparison as L
evi-StraussÕ lumping of
noble houses in Europe with the Yurok pit-houses
of North America. For us, a court is the central
vortex of many traditional hierarchical societies,
including some that continued into the early
Modern era, with similar patterns of social coa-
lescence and faction, patronage and material
production, consumption and privilege, if not
with all the extreme features detected by Norbert
Elias in the court of Louis XIV (Adamson, 1999;
Asch and Birke, 1991; Burke, 1992; Duindam,
1994; Elias, 1983; Elliott and Brockliss, 1999;
Inomata and Houston, 2001a,b; Smuts, 1987).
The concept and its varying dispositions can be
shifted with little violence to other parts of the
world, particularly to the Maya area where highly
developed notions of sacred rulership afford a
hospitable milieu (Houston and Stuart, 1996, pp.
289–290).
As currently fashioned, the ‘‘house’’ concept
does not provide much space for the properties of
court societies or their crucial axes, the rulers and
their families, but rather emphasizes the coexis-
tence of similarly constituted heterarchical
groups. ChanceÕs distinction between Nahuatl
calpolli, ‘‘big house,’’ and the ‘‘shadowy institu-
tion’’ of teccalli ‘‘lord house’’ (Chance, 2000, p.
485; see also Lockhart, 1992, p. 62) provides a
more useful analogy to Classic Maya society,
particularly when the teccalli lord was also a king
(Chance, 2000, p. 488). To be effective, the ‘‘house
society’’ model would need to take account of
hierarchical networks among ‘‘houses.’’ The
‘‘house society’’ model sensu stricto may be more
appropriately applied to non-elite Maya society,
where mortuary patterns and stratigraphic se-
quences indicate a focus on the house as a long-
term durable container through which generations
of kin cycled (McAnany, 2003). The ‘‘house so-
ciety’’ model can be stretched to encompass all
sectors of Classic Maya society only through a
highly selective and decontextualized reading of
hieroglyphic texts and by ignoring salient ‘‘non-
houselike’’ characteristics of royal Maya court
society, such as the emphasis on bloodlines.
Hearkening back to excesses of Lewis Henry
Morgan, this type of reductionism flattens the
pronounced hierarchical structure of Classic
Maya society and, in our view, will yield only
meager transcultural insights.
38 S.D. Houston, P.A. McAnany / Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (2003) 26–41
Discussion and conclusions
Mauss, a good nephew to Durkheim, tended
along with his compeers to privilege the social
over the physical, although to be sure his studies
of the body led potentially into different directions
(Mauss, 1950). ‘‘Constructionism’’ descends wor-
thily from that tradition insofar as it questions
‘‘natural’’ categories, to the extent of risking the
disadvantages of a totalizing approach. Descent
by reckoning of blood ties and non-affinal kinship
are downplayed at the expense of cultural con-
structions. We will not replay old debates about
kinship terminology (Scheffler and Lounsbury,
1971; Schneider, 1968, with fresh ammunition
from Kuper, 1982, p. 92), but suffice it to say that
the physical must be recognized. For Scheffler and
Lounsbury, ‘‘genealogical connections’’ consist of
‘‘culturally posited forms of interpersonal con-
nectedness that are held to be direct consequences
of processes of engendering and bearing children’’
(Scheffler and Lounsbury, 1971, pp. 37–38). Bo-
dies and bloodlines matter, be it in a humble
household or a palace court (McAnany, 1995, pp.
22–26). Contrary to the tenets of idealism, we
assert that physical existence exists and that, in
their embodied gut, most archaeologists would
agree with us. ‘‘Essentialism’’ may be the bogey-
word of cultural studies and its archaeological
offshoots (Gosden, 1999, p. 198; Johnson, 1999,
pp. 85, 87), as well as the very antithesis of
Richard RortyÕs notion of an ‘‘edifying disci-
pline,’’ which eschews universal commensurability
and authoritative statements (Rorty, 1980). But
there is no denying that there are common—dare
we say essential—experiences to the human con-
dition that stem from the fact that we are a dyadic
biological species. One does not have to return to
a crude form of Cartesian dualism to acknowledge
the role of physicality in human life.
Researchers are right to question the wisdom
of using occidental concepts in agency models and
to move towards more culturally specific concepts
of person which situate and often constrain oneÕs
actions within a web of social obligations and
responsibilities. Yet efforts to recast royal Classic
Maya society as fundamentally concerned with
the collective identity of a royal house capsize
upon epigraphic and archaeological evidence
pointing to the hyper-visibility of royal Maya
persons, whatever their indigenous understanding.
Upon close scrutiny, the application of L
evi-
StraussÕ ‘‘house society’’ model to Classic Maya
society is found to be overly reductionistic and
without evidentiary support from royal courts.
Recent efforts to overlay the sexual ambiguity of
social constructionism on Maya texts and ico-
nography, likewise, collapse upon a closer reading
of texts and a fuller contextualization of the sig-
nificance of deity impersonation. There is value to
admitting that cultural categories emerge from
mental constructs, but we cannot accept the to-
talizing discourse of social constructionism to the
exclusion of bodies and blood.
Acknowledgments
We thank John Clark, Takeshi Inomata, Kevin
Johnston, Johan Normark, John Robertson,
Robert Sharer, Karl Taube, David Webster, and
Norman Yoffee for their useful comments on
earlier drafts. However, our theoretical orienta-
tion is not necessarily shared by all of these
readers.
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