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Current Anthropology, Vol. 47, No. 5 (October 2006), pp. 805-842

The present paper was submitted 21 IX 04 and accepted 14 II 06. How did large societies of the past achieve a certain degree of cohesion underscored by collectively held cultural and moral values? Anderson (1991, 6) has argued that all communities larger than primordial villages of facetoface contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined in the sense that individuals never know most of their fellow members or meet them but nevertheless bear the image of their communion (see Canuto and Yaeger 2000). There is, however, a vast gap between primordial villages and the modern nationstates for which Anderson developed his concept. Whereas he has emphasized the role of the written media in the creation of imagined communities, many large communities in the past emerged without much benefit of writing. While avoiding nave concepts of a true or natural community, we need to recognize that human sociality and identity are rooted in our sensory perceptions of the presence and actions of others. Many communities in antiquity were probably not totally imagined but groups based to some degree on direct interactions between individuals. In addition, no organization can exist without symbols that give concrete, sensible forms to group identities (Kertzer 1988, 15). The values, traditions, and identities of a community are not timeless, transcendent entities but anchored in the tangible images and acts that each individual can directly sense. The relation between the tangible and the imagined aspects of society is particularly important when we examine political entities in the premodern world. The way ancient people experienced the presence of such political organization was not always the same as ours. Whereas today the notion of the state is internalized in the political consciousness of numerous individuals, many early states may not have had resources and mechanisms to assert their constant presence in the minds and daily lives of their subject populations. Foucault (1977[1975], 187) noted that, in premodern Europe before the technologies of discipline were developed, state power was what was seen. Likewise, before the rise of modern nationalism, individuals identities as members of states may often have been weaker than their identities as members of smaller social groups such as kin groups and local communities (Anderson 1991). In certain historical contexts, then, subject populations perception and experience of authorities and national unity were highly uneven, accentuated in the specific temporal and spatial contexts of statesponsored events such as ceremonies and construction projects but diluted or even nonexistent in the routines of daily lives. In those cases, what many individuals consciously recognized and thought about may have been the tangible images of the rulers body, state buildings, and collective acts but probably not the abstract notion of a state. These considerations call attention to the political implications and consequences of theatrical performances in public events in which many individuals sense and witness the bodily existence and participation of other members and the cultural and moral values of the community are objectified and embodied. In particular, I argue that the development of large centralized polities would have been impossible in any historical context without heavy reliance on public events. Classic Maya society (AD 250900), in which rulers and elites actively sponsored and participated in public rituals and festivals, provides fertile ground for an exploration of the intersection of theatrical performances and politics (fig. 1). By analyzing the spatial contexts of public performances at Maya centers, I examine how public events facilitated and conditioned the integration and identity formation of a community and set the stage for the imposition and negotiation of asymmetrical power relations.

Theater, Community, and Power

Jump To Section... Theory of Performance Recent developments in performance theory, theater studies, and dramaturgic analysis provide a theoretical basis for this study. The concepts ofperformance used by social scientists have a wide range of meanings. On one end of this continuum is a prescribed act in modern theater. Schechner (1977, 75; 1988, 616; 1994) distinguishes theater from other types of performances such as rituals, sports, and games by noting that it requires the physical presence of an audience that observes and evaluates it with an emphasis on entertainment. Beeman (1993, 379) stresses the symbolic reality of theater, in which the performers represent themselves in roles detached from their lives outside the performance. On the other end of the continuum is a broad definition of performance as an enactment of what it refers to (Pearson and Shanks 2001). In this view, the emphasis is on what human beings do as opposed to thoughts and abstract structures. An explicit theoretical formulation of this perspective is found in the concept of the performative utterance in speechact theory. Certain utterances do not simply describe social relations but effect them (Austin 1962). Goffman (1959, 22; 1967) has also proposed a broad definition of performance: all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some effect on the observers. He has emphasized the theatricality that is present even in everyday activities and has examined their communicative and expressive qualities, through which people project different identities and images under different circumstances. The present study builds on these diverse theoretical views. Nonetheless, the purpose of my research requires a definition of performance that is tighter than those of Austin and Goffman yet broad enough to include various activities which take place outside of formal theaters (see MacAloon1984a, 6). Following Hymes (1975, 1319), I define performance as creative, realized, achieved acts which are interpretable, reportable, and repeatable within a domain of cultural intelligibility. What distinguishes it is the qualities that are consciously recognized by performers and an audience. I am particularly concerned with its theatricality, that is, the quality of communicative acts that requires the presence of an audience acting as observers and evaluators (Beeman 1993, 38384). Theatricality is defined in terms of the emotional including both positive and negativeresponses that the performance produces in participants and its symbolic reality, with a semiotic system distinct from that of unconscious, routine acts (FischerLichte 1992, 13940; 1995; Pavis 1998[1980], 395). In addition, theatricality involves the use of material images in dynamic motion as media of expression and communication in which the human body takes a central role (Grimes 1987; Read 1993, 10). In this sense, theatricality is present in many contexts outside of the modern formal theater. Although many of

the events that I discuss may be called rituals, I often use the term theatrical performance to make my theoretical approach explicit (see Moore and Myerhoff 1977). The significance of these theoretical developments concerning performance can be situated in a broader trend in archaeology and other social sciences which, inspired by practice theory and agency theory, calls attention to what people do (Bourdieu 1977[1972]; Giddens 1984). This view is accompanied by a conceptualization of political processes as indissolubly tied to the socalled cultural domain of society. By demonstrating that even tastes for certain types of art are closely associated with asymmetrical power relations, Bourdieu (1984[1979]) has criticized narrow conceptualizations of cultural practices as nonpolitical acts operating in closed systems of aesthetics (see also Inomata 2001b). He has also broken away from the other theoretical extreme, the treatment of art, theater, and other cultural domains strictly in terms of the expression or imposition of dominant ideologies. He has emphasized these domains relations to cultural capital, or valued cultural knowledge, which can be converted into symbolic capital and political power. Likewise, Gramscis concept of hegemony has urged social scientists and humanists to examine allencompassing political processes. Building on Gramscis ideas, Williams (1977) has noted that hegemony is a process of dominance and subordination in which political, social, and cultural forces are interlocked. Thus, the concept of hegemony as a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living, is broader than that of ideology. Such theoretical developments provide critical inspiration for the archaeological study of performance, which crosscuts the political, social, and cultural domains. The archaeological study of performance has the potential of going beyond approaches inspired by practice theory. A central issue in this regard is how we grasp the immediacy of material presence and physical action. As important as the influence of practice theory has been, it does not sufficiently elaborate how the materiality of space in which peoples practices are situated empowers and constrains agents (Munn 1992; Smith2003, 15; see also Hall 1966). Likewise, it does not fully address the bodily presence of audiences that perceive and affect the practices of actors. The study of performance urges us to examine specific details and processes of embodied acts, material and spatial contexts, and interactions between actors and observers (Inomata and Coben 2006). Increased attention to the materiality of space and body also provides an encouraging avenue for archaeological engagement in political thinking. At the critical intersection of culture and politics are the generation, negotiation, and contestation of meaning. The focus on performance provides a perspective different from the one that views the archaeological record as text (see Hodder 1986). The textbased notion of meaning assumes the priority and preexistence of generative rules, thoughts, and ideas over bodily actions, sensual perceptions, and lived experience (see Geertz 1973; LviStrauss 1963). This assumption is not unrelated to the nature of academic practice centered on intellectual reflections that are detached from the practical concerns of the world (Bourdieu 2000[1997], 51; Stahl 2002, 29). The study of performance explores the dualityrather than the dichotomyof thought and action without privileging either (see Meskell and Joyce 2003). In other words, a performance does not simply transmit preexisting meaning but also creates new meaning and transforms the existing one. It acts upon the world as it is experienced by participants and produces social changes (Bell 1992; 1997, 7283; 1998; Schechner 1994, 62632; Tambiah 1979). The performance shapes the identities of participants and defines their social relations (Palmer and Jankowiak 1996; Turner 1957, 1972). It follows that performance creates and communicates meaning differently from text. Although a performance usually has a conventional meaning shared by the majority of a society, such acts are multivocal at a deeper level, representing different meanings for different people and in different situations (Turner 1967, 50). The ambiguity and diversity of meanings in performance, however, do not necessarily imply ineffective communication. Seeing is believing. Bodily performance may sometimes have more persuasive power than verbal communication (Rappaport 1999; Robbins 2001). We need to explore the persuasive, creative, and transformative power of performance while recognizing the fluidity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy of its meaning. These considerations have important methodological implications for archaeologists. Because of the inherent multivocality of performance, an overly optimistic view about the possibility of recovering meaning in the past may result in the imposition of the researchers own internal narratives. Wuthnow (1987, 33244) has suggested that what he calls the dramaturgic approach in social sciences, with its focus on the observable dimensions of actions, utterance, and interactions in human lives, shifts researchers attention from the pursuit of subjective or semantic meaning to a more productive inquiry into the conditions under which symbolic acts are meaningful. This observation is particularly true for archaeology (see Barrett 1994). Instead of presupposing preexisting fixed meanings, archaeologists need to place more emphasis on examining dynamic processes in which meanings are created and contested through embodied performance. Spectacles of Unity and Division Performances may take place on diverse scales, ranging from a solitary act of one individual with deities, ancestors, or natural beings serving as a perceived audience to a mass spectacle involving thousands of people. Theatrical events of different sizes all have important political implications. Even daily practices on a small scale can be highly political, reflecting and recreating the power relations of the society at large (Bourdieu1977[1972]). Therefore we need to explore diverse operations and functions of theatrical events on different scales without falling into mechanistic categorization. At the same time, the implications of different scales should not be underestimated. In the interest of tight argument, this paper focuses on largescale performances involving a substantial number of participants, such as public ceremonies, festivals, and courtly interactions. MacAloon (1984b, 24346) and Handelman (1990) call them spectacles and public events, respectively. Public events physically bring together numerous individuals and allow them to sense the presence of others and to share an experience. In other words, the large public performance grounds the constitution of a community that exceeds the range of daily facetoface interaction in the physical reality made up of its members (Da Matta 1984; Handelman 1990, 11635; Singer 1959, 1972; Turner 1986, 24). It presents moments of a real community. In addition, performers in public events typically dramatize the moral and aesthetic values of a community (Singer 1959). Theatrical performance is not simply a reenactment of timeless community traditions but objectifies and embodies otherwise abstract notions (Bailey 1996, 13; Connerton 1989; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Rockefeller 1999, 123). This means that spectacles provided premodern communities, which may have lacked print media and other communication technologies, with opportunities to create shared identities and common values among their members. Theatrical events thus have real and direct political effects. They create and recreate a community, sometimes even transcending ethnic and linguistic boundaries (Futrell 1997; Handelman 1990).

The central role of theatrical performance in the constitution of a political community implies that it is a critical arena for the negotiation of meaning and power (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Dietler 2001). One aspect of this process is the use of theatrical performance for and by the dominants as a means of conveying their worldviews, history, cultural ideals, value systems, and social order (Baines and Yoffee 1998, 235; Demarest 1992; De Marrais, Castillo, and Earle 1996; Lucero 2003). Another important aspect is the effect of public performance that defines political reality. Bloch (1974, 5960) has suggested that the formalized discourse of ritual does not allow deviation, leaving only the alternatives of participating in it and following the protocol faithfully or rejecting it altogether. The implications of serious confrontation or punishment in the latter choice force most individuals to opt for the former. Whether or not the participants quietly resent such events, participation defines certain aspects of the social relations among the parties involved. Theatrical performance thus is not empty ritual behind which the real mechanism of power works; it is the real process of politics (Bell 1992, 197223; Kertzer 1988, 77101). Theatrical events are however, rarely unambiguous. The inherent multivocality of theatrical signs makes the propagation of dominant ideologies difficult if not impossible. Theatrical performance does not homogenize the emotion and identity of participants (Evans Pritchard 1974, 2078). The ambiguity of meaning and the uncertainty of effects are indeed critical aspects of ritual and other public events (Fernandez 1972; Kertzer 1988, 5776; MacAloon 1984a, 9). As Bell (1992, 22122) points out, ritual and other theatrical events tolerate a fair degree of internal resistance and lack of interest among the participants while requiring their consent in the form of their participation. Public events become effective because they ground and display a sense of community without overriding the autonomy of individuals. Thus, the solidarity of a community is produced by people acting together, not by people thinking together (Durkheim 1965[1915]; Kertzer 1988, 76). Scott (1990, 219, 6790) particularly emphasizes schisms hidden behind superficial conformity. He contends that, whereas the public transcript enacted on public stages is the representation of elites as they want themselves to be seen, both elites and nonelites have their own hidden transcripts, played out offstage, which diverge from and contradict the public one. In addition, theatrical events may be dangerous times in which the established order can be challenged and subverted (Van Gennep 1960). In particular, carnivals and similar public events may provide occasions on which the populace openly expresses dissent from and resentment of the powerful (Bakhtin 1968[1965]; Kertzer 1988, 14450; Scott 1990, 7275). The system of cultural and aesthetic values of such events may also constrain the dominant, limiting their power (Bloch 1986; Inomata and Houston 2001a). The paradox of theatrical performances is that even those designed to serve the dominant simultaneously empower those who are intended to be subjugated through emotional elevation, affirmation of social identities, and renewed affinity to a community (Fernandez 1972). Geertz (1980, 12335) goes farther to claim that public performance in the theater state of historical Bali was the states primary purpose. In this view, the elaborate dramatization of cultural themes through royal ceremonies was not a tool for the states political purpose; rather, the state served for the realization of this cultural drama. This claim appears rather farfetched, and Geertzs interpretations have been criticized by Balinese specialists (e.g., Lansing 1991). Theoretically, his view, which is at odds with the central proposition of my own, gives primacy to cultural meaning that dictates peoples actions. Still, his call for a poetics or aesthetics of power as opposed to the Weberian notion of the mechanics of power provides an important perspective (see Smith 2000; ReeseTaylor and Koontz 2001). Although we should probably avoid Geertzs extreme argument, it is helpful to explore the historical conditions of theatrical events that stimulated political centralization and stratification. Small egalitarian societies, as well as large hierarchical ones, actively engage in public events. The preparation of a spectacle, along with the construction of theatrical space, may have promoted the development of hierarchical organization by requiring dramaturgical and logistical organizers. Clark (2004; Hill and Clark 2001) presents fascinating data indicating that in Formative Mesoamerica extensive plazas were constructed at critical junctures of social transformation from small villages to larger, more centralized communities. Largescale spectacles with associated architectural spaces, instead of being created after and as a result of the establishment of hierarchical political authorities, may have preceded and facilitated these political changes (Barrett 1994, 2732; Bradley 1984, 7374). Moreover, public events may have created a condition in which the emergence of central figures in the form of dramatic protagonists was tolerated or even desired and demanded by an audience. Such individuals may have had the potential to become political leaders. In this regard, rulers in many ancient polities appear to have shared certain qualities with ritual specialists in nonhierarchical societies and with actors or musicians today (see Schechner 1994, 623). The archaeological study of the development of large centralized polities should direct its attention not only to the political maneuvering of a small number of aggrandizers but to the motivation and roles of an audience or the masses (Pauketat 2000). These diverse views of theatrical performance are not incompatible. In any society, the potential of performance for ideological unification and imposition coexists with the persistence of multivocality and a possibility for the subversion of power through theatrical acts, as does the use of theater by the state with popular demands for large pageants that facilitate the emergence of a state. We need to examine the intersections of these diverse forces and the political dynamics they create. The Creation of the Extraordinary The study of these extraordinary events does not necessarily run counter to the recent emphasis on domestic lives and daily routines in archaeological studies; instead, they complement each other. On the one hand, public performance is embedded in social relations, experiences, and economic activities of everyday lives. On the other hand, the memory of past events and the anticipation of future ones shape the perceptions and experiences of daily life. In addition, mass spectacles affect daytoday routines economically and physically as well because they require a long period of dramaturgical and logistical preparation, including rehearsal, construction of theatrical stages, and acquisition of foods and gifts to be consumed and distributed during the events. For example, colonial documents tell us that the Maya put substantial work into growing turkeys over the year to consume them on rare festive occasions (Cogolludo 1971[1654], 243, 295), and their Classicperiod ancestors certainly spent many days of the year in the preparation of public events. In this regard, there is a certain analogy between perceptions of space and perceptions of time in many societies. As Eliade (1957) noted, in premodern societies the spatial aspect of the world was not experienced as uniformly neutral but marked with monuments and sacred places charged with unique, condensed meaning. The same is true for the temporal aspect. The passage of time was viewed not as monotonous or homogeneous but as punctuated by heightened emotional experiences of extraordinary events. Even in modern societies, both rites of passage associated with individuals such as weddings and funerals and calendrical events such as New Years Day and Christmas structure peoples

perceptions of time and life. Thus, just as we cannot grasp unique public events without addressing their basis in daily life, we cannot adequately understand the ordinary without considering its dialectic relation with the extraordinary. This consideration of the ordinary and the extraordinary leads to the relation between what are generally called the public and private spheres. It should be clear that by focusing on largescale events I do not intend to privilege the public and the extraordinary over the private and the ordinary. Moreover, an increasing number of archaeologists and anthropologists question the uncritical distinction between the public and the private (Inomata et al. 2002; Robin 2003). This does not mean, however, that we should abandon the concept of the public. The work of Habermas (1991) remains significant in this regard. He demonstrates that what we call the public sphere was developed and transformed under the specific social conditions of the modern Western world. Instead of abandoning the concept of the public or presupposing its universality, we need to analyze how the public sphere is constituted in each historical context. For this purpose, the public sphere should be defined in a loose, heuristic manner as a social field of interaction which potentially involves a substantial number of individuals and shapes political processes on a large scale. At the same time, we need to pay attention to the common criticism of Habermas that his notions of the public sphere in different periods are highly idealized and their categorical distinctions overemphasized (Calhoun 1992). Habermas argues that, in the feudal society of medieval Europe, the rulers power was merely represented before the people, constituting the publicness of representation, but the public sphere as a social realm of political debate did not exist. Performance theory, however, indicates that such public representations are not onedirectional acts. Instead, they involve political negotiations between the central authority and those who view and perceive them, though their negotiations may not take explicit discursive forms. These processes, then, are not totally unlike those of the modern public sphere that Habermas describes. I should add that the public nature of political negotiation through performance is not limited to large centralized polities in the premodern world. Small communities, in which daily facetoface interactions are possible, engage in collective theatrical events that create important political arenas. Even in modern societies public performances such as inaugurations and the speeches of presidents continue to have political significance. The importance of mass spectacles in premodern polities is rooted in the political significance of performance in general, which can take place on diverse scales in diverse social contexts. We need to explore public processes of political negotiation in various historical moments to expose their commonality and variation.

Theatrical Spaces in Classic Maya Centers

Jump To Section... Public Performances in Plazas Classic Maya society was made up of numerous autonomous or semiautonomous polities, each centered on a divine ruler. The importance of theatrical performance is evident in stone monuments and other artistic media. These often depict rulers and other elites engaging in performances, indicating that the dominants were not only sponsors of theatrical events but also protagonists. Many stelae show rulers in elaborate attire, such as feather headdresses, masks, jade pectorals, and shell belts, often in the guise of Maize God or some other deity (fig. 2) (Houston and Stuart 1996). Some of the accompanying texts note that they are performing ritual dances (Grube 1992). Tokovinine (2003) identifies the word chanil, which may be literally translated as something being watched, in monuments depicting dance scenes. The meaning and use of this term suggest to him that events such as royal dances were indeed public performances conducted in front of an audience. Other monuments depict elites playing the ballgame, which was a ritual as well as an athletic event tied to human sacrifice and the creation myth. Many public events probably involved numerous performers, including musicians and dancers, as indicated by the murals of Bonampak (Miller 1986). Although such iconographic depictions provide valuable information, they deal exclusively with performers and remain virtually silent about the role of an audience and the spatial settings of the events. In addition, such pictorial renderings should be viewed as idealized notions of performance and as representations of how performance was remembered rather than as the unbiased record of past events (Bergmann 1999; Joyce 1992). Figure 2. Stela H from Copn, depicting the ruler Waxaklajuun Ubaah Kawiil in elaborate ceremonial attire. Behind it is the stairway that defines the eastern edge of the Great Plaza. Theatrical performances in Classic Maya society most likely took place in various spatial contexts, including small residential complexes and sacred locations outside of centers such as caves. Yet many of the mass spectacles involving a large audience were probably held in plazas large open spaces surrounded by temples and other symbolically charged buildings that marked the core of every Maya city. The use of plazas for this purpose and the participation of numerous spectators among the colonialperiod Maya are welldocumented in historical accounts (Barrera Vsques 1965; Ciudad Real 1976, 31471; Estrada Monroy 1979, 16874; Tozzer 1941, 94, 152, 15859; see Inomata 2006; Low 2000, 1089). Comparable activities in plazas during the Classic period have been suggested by many Mayanists (e.g., Andrews 1975, 37; Fash 1998; Jones 1969; Looper 2001; Lucero 2003; Ringle and Bey 2001). A more significant line of evidence is the presence of numerous stelae there. It is probable that monuments commemorating public ceremonies were erected in the same spaces where the events took place to help people to remember and reexperience their grandeur and excitement (Grube1992). To develop this argument I must address competing hypotheses, particularly the one presented by BassieSweet (1991) that many stone monuments represent rituals held in the more exclusive settings of caves. The elaborate headdresses and backracks and heavy jade ornaments shown on stelae, however, appear extremely cumbersome for entering caves, which often requires climbing down cliffs and crawling through narrow, muddy passages. Most paintings found in caves in fact depict figures with simple clothing (Stone 1995, 3154). Although BassieSweet correctly points out that some stelae present symbols of caves and mountains, it is equally possible that performances were conducted on or in front of pyramids and temples facing plazas that symbolically represented sacred mountains and caves (Schele and Mathews 1998, 43; Stone 1995, 241).

Courtly events held in palace rooms and depicted in ceramic paintings include rulers and other elites wearing relatively simple attire with small headdresses or hats (ReentsBudet 2001). In other words, the attire shown on stelae, with enormous headdresses and backracks made of brilliantly colored feathers, is far more extravagant than that used in exclusive architectural settings and appears to have been designed specifically for high visibility in mass spectacles. More direct evidence is found at Chichn Itz, Uxmal, and other northern centers, where small, low platforms were placed in large plazas. Noting the association of thrones with these platforms, Ringle and Bey (2001, 277) argue that rulers occupied these structures to address large audiences that filled the plazas (see also Kowalski 1987). The Bonampak murals lend further support to this view. They depict scenes of captive presentations and elaborate dances held on a wide stairway, which Miller (1986, 115; Schele and Miller 1986, 218) has convincingly identified as the one flanking the plaza of this center. This spatial setting presents an effective theatrical stage, heightening the visibility of performers. Although the murals do not show audiences, the plaza was most likely filled with a large number of spectators. Also suggestive is the use of large palanquins to carry rulers and other elites, as depicted on lintels at Tikal and in some graffiti (fig. 3) (Chase and Chase 2001b, fig. 4.12; Harrison 1999, 133, 153, figs. 77, 94; Trik and Kampen 1983, figs. 71, 72, 73). Ciudad Real (1976, 327) recorded similar litters used by the colonialperiod Maya in public events. Some of the Classicperiod palanquins were decorated with enormous statues of deities and jaguars towering behind the rulers. Such ostentatious presentations make sense only in terms of their use in mass spectacles in open spaces. Figure 3. A graffito found at Tikal, depicting a ruler being carried on a large litter with a statue (Trik and Kampen 1983, fig. 72, reprinted by permission). Given these lines of evidence, it is highly likely that a substantial portion of stelae depict public performances held in plazas and other open spaces in the presence of a large audience, although I do not deny the possibility that some of them show rituals that took place in more exclusive settings. In this regard, we should note that some of the lintels at Yaxchilan and panels at Palenque appear to represent acts performed in semiclosed architectural settings, although others refer to public events comparable to those shown on stelae. In other words, there is a loose correlation between the spatial settings in which various types of art were viewed and those of the acts shown in these art pieces. Stelae set in open plazas and viewed by many visitors depicted public performances involving a large audience and in many cases held in the same spaces, whereas lintels and panels that adorned elite buildings and could be seen by a limited number of highstatus individuals often dealt with rituals attended mainly by court members and held in exclusive settings (see Sanchez 1997). Ceramic paintings were viewed by only a few individuals at a time, typically in elite residences or administrative buildings. Many of them depicted courtly interactions that took place in similar architectural settings, although there are ceramic paintings depicting public events as well. Though these correlations are far from exclusive, there is a general tendency for stelae and other artistic media to prompt viewers to remember, reexperience, and reimagine the depicted acts in spatial settings that were the same as or comparable to those of the original events. These observations, however, do not mean that plazas were used only for public theatrical events. Various authors have proposed that some plazas were used as marketplaces (Becker 2003, 26566; Jones 1996, 8687; Smith 1982, 107). Although direct evidence for marketplaces is difficult to obtain, such use of plazas is not incompatible with their primary function as theatrical spaces. Even in public ceremonies, plazas may have been used in various ways. Such events appear to have involved the erection of scaffolds and other temporary structures and the use of banners, movable thrones, and palanquins, all of which affected the movements of participants and their perceptions of theatrical spaces (Houston 1998, 339; Suhler and Freidel 2000; Taube 1988). Likewise, the erection of stelae in plazas probably narrowed the potential range of human bodies physical flow and of the places meanings by emphasizing memories of specific events. The Maya in some cases reset old stelae, attempting to alter or reconstitute the effects of monuments in the physical and perceptual construction of theatrical spaces. The Capacities of Plazas The analysis of plazas as theatrical spaces provides an effective step for the study of public events by archaeologists, who cannot directly observe ancient performances. One way to test the notion of the use of plazas as theatrical spaces is to analyze their potential capacities. Moore (1996, 147) cites the estimated space available to individual participants, ranging from 0.46 to 21.6 m2/person. The lower figure would imply a tightly packed area with little space for movement, whereas the higher would leave ample space around each person or a large open stage for dynamicperformance. The figure of 21.6 m2/person, taken from data on Yanomam villages, is probably too large, however, for the more urban situations of the Maya lowlands. Everywhere in the world, city dwellers have to endure smaller spaces than those who live in rural settings. In this article I therefore employ the figures of 0.46, 1, and 3.6 m2/person. Moore did not find a consistent correlation between plaza sizes and the estimated populations of the settlements in his analysis of Andean data, and he suspects that this is because there were widely different ways of using plazas for theatrical performances. Thus, these densities should be viewed only as tentative values for heuristic purposes. I examine the plaza spaces of three centers of different sizes as examples: Tikal, one of the largest Maya centers (fig. 4), Copn, a center of medium size in the southeastern periphery of the Maya area (fig. 5), and the relatively small center of Aguateca (fig. 6). Tikal has a history of occupation and monumental constructions that began in the Preclassic period and boasts numerous plazas connected by wide causeways. Culbert et al. (1990, 16) estimate the Late Classic population of the 120km2 area defined by seasonal wetlands and earthworks at 62,000. Along with the West Plaza and the East Plaza, the Great Plaza probably formed the central ceremonial core of Tikal (fig. 7). Plazas associated with Temple IV, Temple VI, and twin pyramid complexes also had the capacity to accommodate a substantial number of people. Figure 7. The Great Plaza of Tikal viewed from Structure 5D71 of the Central Acropolis. Early occupations at Copn also date to the Preclassic period, but substantial constructions at the ceremonial core started during the Early Classic. According to Webster and Freter (1990, 52), the Late Classic population of Copn was around 22,000. The public theatrical space of primary importance consisted of the large continuous flat spaces of the Great Plaza, the Middle Plaza, the East Plaza, and the Plaza of the Hieroglyphic Stairway (fig. 8). Freidel, Schele, and Parker (1993, 463) point out that stone sculptures depicting the Maize God dancing were recovered from a large platform east of the Great Plaza and suggest that the platform was possibly a place for the preparation, practice, or execution of dances.

Figure 8. The Middle Plaza and the Great Plaza of Copn viewed from the ball court. Most ceremonial constructions at Aguateca date to the Late Classic period, prior to an enemy attack that resulted in the burning and rapid abandonment of the central elite residential area. Although the analysis of settlement data from peripheral areas of Aguateca is still in progress, 8,000 would probably be a generous estimate of its Late Classic population. Most monuments depicting rulers performances are found in the large Main Plaza. A short causeway connected this highly public space with a more restricted compound of the Palace Group, a probable royal palace (Inomata 1997). Table 1 indicates that these plazas had substantial capacities. In addition, their layouts show easy access from outside, implying an emphasis on the inclusion of a large number of participants. In particular, assuming 1 m2/person the Main Plaza of Aguateca was large enough to accommodate more than the entire population of its settlement. Using this figure for space available per person, the combined ceremonial plaza of Copn could also have held more than the entire population, but it did not make an effective theatrical space because buildings obstructed sightlines between its various parts. The Great Plaza and the Middle Plaza constituted a better theatrical space, but a gathering of the entire population in these areas would have required considerable crowding. At Tikal, if participants were packed tightly, the entire population might have been accommodated in either the central complex, the area in front of Temple IV, or the area in front of Temple VI. Realistically, however, most theatrical events probably required ample stages for performers, which would have made gatherings of the entire population in these spaces less likely. These observations indicate that, whereas the main plazas of smaller centers may have been able to hold the entire population (see also Houston et al. 2003, 234; Looper 2001, 128), public events with the simultaneous presence of the entire community became increasingly difficult as the size of a center grew. This tendency may be reflected in the layouts of centers of various sizes. Small centers such as Aguateca tend to have one large plaza, where most of the stone monuments are found, as a focus of community rituals. The mediumsized center of Copn still maintains this focus on one continuous plaza area. Large centers such as Tikal tend to have multiple large plazas and their stone monuments are more dispersed. Table 1. Sizes and Estimated Capacities of Plazas of Tikal, Copn, and Aguateca In addition to mass spectacles, the Classic Maya conducted more exclusive performances. Smaller spaces of the East Court of Copn and the Palace Group of Aguateca were most likely places for theatrical events. Along with their arrangements surrounding flat open spaces, their function as theatrical complexes is hinted at by Structure 10L25 of Copn and Structure M733 of Aguateca. These low structures appear to have served as open stages without roofs or walls and were probably used for ritual dance (Fash et al. 1992; Inomata et al. 2001). The estimated capacities of these plazas (based on the figure of 3.6 m2/person) range from 5.6 to 11.4 percent of the total populations, which may correspond roughly with the elite sectors of society. In addition, architecture and excavated objects suggest that the Palace Group of Aguateca was the primary residential complex of the royal family of this center. Yet we should note that performances in the Palace Group of Aguateca were probably visible not only for an audience occupying the plaza of the complex but also for spectators on the causeway (Inomata 2001a). Theatrical events in restricted spaces appear to have retained a certain level of inclusiveness. Theatrical Spaces and City Planning Sequences of construction projects at these centers shed light on strategies of designing community ritual spaces at Maya centers. At Tikal, the final layout of the city resulted from its growth over centuries. During the Preclassic and Early Classic periods, the Great Plaza, along with the adjacent East and West Plazas, was probably the primary focus of communitywide spectacles at Tikal, although the Mundo Perdido complex also appears to have provided an important theatrical space. The Great Plaza was located between the North Acropolis, the most important funerary place for rulers from Preclassic times on, and the Central Acropolis, the main residential complex for the royal family (Coe 1990; Harrison 1970). Clearly, this plaza was a symbolically charged place with direct connections to the dynastic past and present. During both the Early Classic and the Late Classic period, stelae were placed in lines in front of the North Acropolis facing south, leaving ample space in the southern portion of the area. This pattern may imply that the use of the plaza as a theatrical space remained relatively consistent, with performers often occupying the northern part and audiences mainly the southern. Structure 5D119, an elevated room built on the roof of Structure 5D120 (Harrison 1970, 27), was equipped with a throne facing Temple I and the Great Plaza (fig. 9). It is probable that the ruler or other elites occupied this vantage point to view theatrical events (see Valds 2001 for a comparable throne at Uaxactun). Figure 9. The throne of Structure 5D119 of the Central Acropolis, which faces the Great Plaza. The first formal floor of the Great Plaza, along with those of the West and East Plazas, was laid during the Late Preclassic period. Although evidence suggests that some buildings stood on Preclassic floors, the exact layout and extent of the early plazas are not clear (Coe 1990, 167; Jones 1996, 79). Coe (1990, 173, 195) suspects that during the Late Preclassic period the Great Plaza boasted a floor area larger than the later versions. During the Early Classic period, the Preclassic buildings in the Great Plaza were demolished and buried under a new floor. Structures 5D12nd and 5D22nd were erected at the eastern and western ends of the plaza, disrupting the connections with the East and West Plazas. In addition, the construction of Structures 5D29, 30, 31, 32, 33, and 34 encroached on the terrace of the North Acropolis (Coe 1990, 587617, 83238). During the Late Classic period, the ruler, Jasaw Chan Kawiil, ordered the erection of Temples I and II over the demolished remains of Structures 5D12nd and 5D22nd, which further reduced access and visibility between the Great Plaza and the adjacent plazas (Coe 1990; Harrison 1999, 142). The Great Plaza was now transformed into a more exclusive theatrical space. In addition, the population of Tikal was growing rapidly during this period (Culbert et al. 1990, 108). As the central complex became less adequate for community events, the next ruler, Yikin Chan Kawiil, commissioned the construction of Temples IV and VI, along with associated open spaces substantially larger than the Great Plaza (Harrison 1999, 15362; Martin and Grube 2000, 49). Temple IV measured 64 m in height, and the ruler who stood on the stair of this building must have been visible from a wide area. This trend of increasing theatrical space can also be seen in twin pyramid complexes. During the Late Classic period, the Tikal dynasty built a ceremonial complex with a pair of pyramids at the end of each katun (20yearperiod). For the Maya who enthusiastically held various calendrical rituals, katunending ceremonies that occurred only a few times in the life of an individual were particularly important. Many

stelae from various Maya centers commemorated these events. At Tikal, a newly constructed twin pyramid complex was most likely the main stage of a katunending ceremony in which residents throughout the community participated (Jones 1969). Each time, an ever larger twin pyramid complex was built, reaching the apex in Twin Pyramid Complexes Q and R, commissioned by Yax Nuun Ayiin II during the late eighth century (Harrison 1999, 16773). Despite these efforts, Tikal appears to have been reaching the point where congregation of the entire population in one space was physically difficult. The problem may have been mitigated by the use of causeways as additional theatrical stages. Harrison (1999, 158, 160) suspects that Yikin Chan Kawiil was responsible for the construction of the Maler, Maudslay, and Mendez Causeways that connected Temples IV and VI with other areas, whereas Jones (1996, 83) suggests that the first versions of the Maler and Mendez Causeways were built a century or so earlier. The Mendez Causeway measured 5080 m in width, the Tozzer Causeway 5080 m, the Maler Causeway 20 m, and the Maudslay Causeway 3050 m. Segments of these causeways were as large as the plazas of small centers, and their width exceeded the practical needs of daily transport (cf. Chase and Chase 2001a). These wide streets were probably stages for processions by elites, which may have been viewed by a large audience occupying spaces along their edges (see ReeseTaylor 2002; Ringle 1999). The lintels of Temples I and IV depict rulers seated on elaborate litters, suggesting that rulers were carried along causeways before they reached the main stages in front of the temples. The use of causeways as stages for mass spectacles is comparable to the carnivals and festive parades in the large cities of modern societies. At Copn, the Great Plaza and Middle Plaza were constructed at the beginning of the fifth century, which may correspond with the establishment of a dynasty by Kinich Yax Kuk Mo (Traxler 2004). A substantial amount of fill was placed to create a plaza, which suggests to Cheek (1983b, 344) that its construction involved a significant part of the community. From the beginning, the plaza appears to have had dimensions and a layout comparable to those of the later stage, with its northern end marked by Structure 10L2 and its southern portion occupied by a ball court. A notable difference is that the area south of the ball court was originally a patio surrounded by platforms, and Cheek (1983b, 34245) proposes that this area was for residential and private use whereas the northern sections were for public and communal activities. In the later part of the Early Classic, the Copanecos gradually raised the plaza floors, covering some platforms and creating an open space that would become the Court of the Hieroglyphic Stairway. At the beginning of the Late Classic they laid out the floor of the East Plaza (Cheek 1983a). This sequence may reflect an effort to expand the plaza space as the population of Copn grew. Although over the centuries the Copanecos constructed ever higher pyramids on the southern side, they appear to have consciously preserved plaza spaces. The configuration of the Great Plaza of Copn as a theatrical space may have been altered during the eighth century by the thirteenth ruler, Waxaklajuun Ubaah Kawiil, who erected a series of stelae in the central section (fig. 2). This arrangement of monuments may imply a somewhat different use of space from that of the Tikal Great Plaza. Fash (1998, 240) suggests that the stairs surrounding the Great Plaza of Copn may have provided seating areas for audiences. If so, in many public events performers may have occupied the central part of the plaza while spectators sat or stood along its edges. Structure 10L4, located in the center of the open space, probably served as a focal point of such performances. At Aguateca, the Main Plaza was built at the time of the centers foundation around AD 700. Whereas the stelae of the early rulers were placed mainly in front of Structure L85 on the eastern edge of the plaza, the last ruler, Tahn Te Kinich, erected his monuments in front of Structures L86 and L87, located in the southeastern corner, as well as in the middle of the plaza. This may reflect a shift in main theatrical stages with the construction or renovation of these buildings. Prior to the final abandonment, Tahn Te Kinich was in the process of constructing a large temple on the western edge (Inomata et al. 2004). Thus, having sufficient plaza space, the ruler of Aguateca did not have to expand it, but the use of this space apparently changed over time. These analyses show that the configuration of theatrical spaces in terms of movements and placements of performers and spectators varied from one center to another. In some cases, even the use of the same plaza changed over time with the construction of associated buildings and monuments. This observation points to the inherent flexibility of plazas as theatrical spaces. Yet the most important implication of these histories of plazas is that securing sufficient spaces for public events was a primary concern in the design of Maya cities. This means that plazas were meant to accommodate a large number of individuals and such gatherings were extremely important for Maya polities. Plazas and causeways were not secondary spaces defined after the placement of temple pyramids but social spaces of extreme importance in their own right (Ringle and Bey 2001, 278).

Acknowledgments
Jump To Section... I thank Lawrence Coben, Stephen Houston, Michael Smith, and Daniela Triadan for stimulating discussion on this subject. Marshall Becker, Patricia McAnany, and Julia Sanchez, as well as anonymous reviewers, provided thoughtful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Kazuo Aoyama Faculty of Humanities, Ibaraki University, Bunkyo 211, Mito, Ibaraki 3108512, Japan (aoyama@mx.ibaraki.ac.jp). 7 IV 06 This most welcome case study on the physical qualities and historical contexts of theatrical spaces centered in public plazas explores one important aspect of Classic Maya political processesthe intersection between theatrical performance and politics. I find it significant and enlightening concerning the longdebated relations between Classic Maya politics and ritual and the mode and degree of integration of Maya centers of different sizes. Inomata cogently examines critical issues in such research, including royal ritual as theatrical performance and the complex nature of its political effects. I present additional archaeological evidence to support his argument for the two sites he mentions. The study of obsidian and chert artifacts from Cache 4 of Structure L85, located on the eastern edge of the Main Plaza of Aguateca, allows us to document finely flaked eccentrics and other artifacts deposited by Ruler 3 and his followers in the temple dedication ritual during the Late

Classic period (Aoyama 2006a). Extensive excavation during the Aguateca Restoration Project Second Phase located Cache 4 beneath the stucco floor in the southern area of the temple in 2003. Cache 3 (obsidian and chert eccentrics) had been found in the northern part of the same temple during the first phase of these investigations. Thus, Ruler 3 and his followers appear to have deposited the caches along the northsouth axis of Structure L85. A total of 57 pieces of chipped stone artifacts was recovered from Cache 449 made of obsidian and 8 of chert. The obsidian artifacts include a single complete blade, 11 nearly complete blades, 16 prismatic blade segments, 19 eccentrics, and 2 large flake scrapers. It is worth noting that 5 of the 19 eccentrics (3 notched, 1 incised, and 1 a reptile) were made from macroblades. Moreover, two large flakes were unifacially retouched into scrapers. Interestingly, their dimensions and weights are almost the same, suggesting that a knapper deliberately manufactured a pair of identical scrapers for the temple dedication. In other words, thick, wide percussion blades and flakes were removed to regularize the surfaces of newly imported blade cores used for manufacturing these eccentrics. It should be noted that there were no eccentrics and only a single macroblade among the 2,169 obsidian artifacts collected by the Aguateca Archaeological Project First Phase from 1996 to 1999 (Aoyama 2006b). Moreover, Cache 4 of Structure L85 contained more complete or nearly complete blades (N=12) than any of the eight other extensively excavated structures in the center of Aguateca (mean=2.1, s.d.=2.2). The above data suggest that the Aguateca ruler controlled the main access to obsidian in the city and that the royal court may have administered the procurement and allocation of El Chayal obsidian blade cores. A total of 13 notched pressure blades appear to symbolize 13 serpents. For the ancient Maya, the Waterlily Serpent, symbolizing the surface of the water, was a supernatural patron of the number 13. Some Classic Maya rulers used the head of the Waterlily Serpent as a crown (Miller and Taube 1993, 184). Accordingly, the 13 serpents symbolized by the 13 pieces of notched pressure blades in Cache 4 were loaded with ideological meaning. Moreover, 3 notched macroblades and a notched small percussion blade may have represented large serpents and a mediumsized serpent, respectively. Eight chert eccentrics from Cache 4 appear to have been manufactured from local raw materials and include 2 scorpions, a standing human, a trident crescent, a crescent, a reptile, a serrated bifacial point, and an unclassified fragment. It is important to note that chert eccentrics were associated with the royal palace and temples but not with residences. This strongly suggests that eccentrics were considered royal ritual objects. Meanwhile, taking advantage of Copns unusual location near the highquality obsidian source of Ixtepeque (80 km), either its twelfth or its thirteenth ruler deposited a cache of 700 unusually large macroblades (as long as 30 cm) and macroflakes reduced directly from macrocores of Ixtepeque obsidian in the middle of the Great Plaza during the Late Classic period (Aoyama 1999, 2001). Such large quantities of very large macroblades and macroflakes have not been discovered either outside the Principal Group in the Copn Valley or in any other part of the Maya lowlands, suggesting that they were considered royal ritual objects. The theatrical performance and dedication ritual involved in the deposition of royal lithic artifacts in theatrical spaces at Aguateca and Copn must have reinforced the rulers political and economic power. Marshall Joseph Becker Department of Anthropology, West Chester University, 19 W. Barnard St., West Chester, PA 19382, U.S.A. (mbecker@wcupa.edu). 22 III 06 Inomata has undertaken a discussion of an interesting feature that appears to be central to all lowland Maya cities and towns of the Classic Periodthe tendency for their site cores to include one or more open zones of varying size that are commonly identified as plazas. Inomata argues that these spaces were purposely built and used for public performances. While this use has often been implied, Inomata seeks to understand it in a larger cultural context. Although his inferences regarding public events are speculative, they may be generally accepted in the absence of other convincing theories. In effect this study endeavors to take Luceros (2003) study of the politics of ritual to another level. While doing so requires considerable speculation, Inomata provides an outstanding position paper with a lucid review of the literature that relates performance to various cultural contexts or physical spaces. Inomata infers that theatrical performances or what I would call group and/or public rituals took place in plazaslarge open spaces that marked the core of every Maya city. He recognizes that some open spaces may have served as markets, but he does not develop these possible variations (cf. Becker 2003). Not clearly stated is the common use by some Mayanists of the basic term plaza to refer to an open space of any size that is bounded by buildings. Also problematic is Inomatas concern with the capacities of such open spaces, supposedly for what might be seen as a standingroomonly throng. Regardless of the total population of the Tikal polity, for example, we do not know how many people might attend public performances and whether there was differential attendance by gender or age. Thus the supposed capacity of the multiple plaza zones at any site may be irrelevant. Quite possibly the amount of open space at a site varies with the wealth of its polity and is unrelated and irrelevant to population size. Inomata speaks of variations among Maya communities of different sizes. Where the most complex of these social groups, such as Tikal, fit into a continuum of statelevel societies is unclear. I believe that at best the largest of these polities were lowlevel states. In this I agree with Lucero and others who have suggested that leaders among the Maya provided only the most basic services to their communitiescentralized authority for domestic integration or religious leadership and direction for competition with foreigners, which took the form of trade as well as military activities. Inomatas use of the term divine ruler for the leader of each of the several Maya polities assumes a singularity or unity of command that I have challenged for the past 30 years (Becker 1975, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990). In presenting his evidence he also refers to images of supreme political leaders but neglects to note that these people, regardless of rank, are also the social leaders who serve as the embodiment of social integration within the community. In examining the roles of these leaders Inomata suggests that some threshold existed that Maya society never completely crossed. This threshold surely relates to a developmental level of state societies but remains unclear in this context. The spectacles provided in the public sphere within each polity (see Habermas 1991) are the concerns of this essay. No consideration is given to possible changes in function for these areas over time. Inomatas lack of temporal controls as well as his generalizations regarding degrees of complexity are subject to the same criticisms leveled by Calhoun (1992) in reviewing the work of Habermas. He provides an interesting and useful framework for discussion of imagined processes of theatricality among the Maya and inferences regarding the use of what are generally agreed to be public spaces, but the results remain speculative. No suggestions are made regarding how one might go about testing them. Examination of the way any large, open space evolved at a site or was created through time might provide some interesting information on the changing uses of such features of the cultural landscape. At Tikal much of the space in what became the Great Plaza had once been the location of a number of temples. During the period when these structures were standing, the area must have had a very different character and function. The point when this area of Tikal was cleared and what replaced these small ritual structures would offer important clues to processes of social

change there. Whether open areas at other sites had similar evolutionary histories is not known. We need to conduct extensive tests across such open spaces to determine what kinds of structures may have once stood in them and whether small buildings and platforms continued to occupy areas that now appear to have been entirely unencumbered. Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos Museo Popol Vuh, Universidad Francisco Marroqun, 6 Calle Final Zona 10, Guatemala 01010, Guatemala (ofchinch@ufm.edu.gt). 4 V 06 The architectural layout of Maya sites, with wide open exterior spaces, has repeatedly suggested the practice of public performances attended by wide audiences ever since Diego Garca de Palacio (1927[1576], 91) compared the ruined stairways around the plaza at Copan to the Roman Coliseum. Various early testimonies offer eyewitness accounts from the early colonial period (Landa 1982, 11314; De la Garza et al. 1983, 324), while ethnographic testimony highlights the importance of public gatherings involving long and elaborate dances and performances in the social life of Mesoamerican communities. The argument that such performances were crucial for the integration of ancient Maya polities has the virtue of incorporating one of the most salient features of Mesoamerican public life into the discussion of ancient political practice. However, it should be noted that early sources mention a wide variety of representations that probably had equally diverse social functions. For instance, Acua (1978, 19) distinguished three main classes: okot, mostly penitential and propitiatory dances, including war dances, baldzamil, humorous, vulgar performances, and ez yah, related to magic spells and charms. (Colonialperiod spellings for Maya words, as used by Acua, are respected in this comment.) Clearly, not all performances carried out in ancient Maya cities had equally strong political implications, and yet Inomata is right in stressing that they allowed the inhabitants of dispersed settlements the opportunity for personal contact and intense participation in community life that may have strengthened their allegiance to particular cities and rulers. Classic Maya art and associated inscriptions are explicit about the participation of rulers in dances and other performances. The interpretation of fully dressed rulers represented on stelae as commemorating actual performances held in the plazas where they stand is an elegant explanation for such representations and their architectural settings. I believe it is important to add that in many cases public performance by rulers was related to warfare. As noted by Inomata, the Bonampak murals and other monuments dealing with the presentation of captives typically emphasize their public setting by showing participants placed on widestepped platforms, most probably facing plazas. Carved stairwaysa monumental format that was usually accessible from large plazasare largely associated with warfare and captive sacrifice and probably served as settings for such performances (Miller and Houston 1987). Likewise, rulers appearances on large palanquins at Tikal and elsewhere are recognized as commemorating the capture of such palanquins from rival kings (Martin 1996). Numerous stelae show kings with elaborate dancing costumes standing on debased captives. While the main subject may be a public performance by the king, the presence of the captives hints at warrelated connotations of his performance. This may have implications for understanding the role of public performance in the creation and recreation of Classic Maya polities. By itself, warfare may be a powerful force in bringing about sentiments of common identity and allegiance to rulers. Opposition to outside enemies, the shared vicissitudes of military campaigns, the common concerns of defense, and loyalty to successful leaders are likely to create shared identities and may also provide occasions for visual contact with rulers and their retinues. Ritual celebrations of war campaigns through public performances of warfarerelated rituals enacted by the kings exemplify the need to create the extraordinary, in Inomatas words, dramatizing social relations that are also created in warfare itself. Such performances may also have served to display and distribute war spoilsan activity that likely stimulated allegiance to rulers and war leaders even though it is largely deemphasized in public art. The perspective advanced in this paper opens a rich avenue for research, laying out the basic theoretical framework for further discussion. Potential problems that need to be raised include temporal and regional variations in the size and layout of plazas and the presence or absence of monuments commemorating public performances by kings. Andrs Ciudad Ruiz and Jess Adnez Pavn Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain (andresci@ghis.ucm.es). 2 V 06 The Classic Maya city was a complex universe composed of plazas with stelae, altars, sanctuaries, acropolis, palaces, ball courts, and other specialized buildings, many of them decorated with carved and painted imagesa universe surrounded by myriad domestic units and often integrated by systems of causeways. Its planning was not random; each space, building, and monument had its own significance and was placed in the landscape according to that significance. The Maya architectural landscape was a living entity that was periodically activated through rituals performed by the rulers and other actors. The novel analysis developed by Inomata opens promising new directions for archaeological research on the functional and symbolic understanding of that universe and of ancient Maya culture in general. The interpretation of Maya rituals in the framework of performance theory gives them a principal role in the reproduction of political structures by introducing spectators along with actors into the representation and presenting this as an arena in which political revalidation, rather than simply the prescribed function of the institution, is the objective of the ritual process. This view is linked to the archaeological record through attention to the spatial contexts of public spectacles and the identification of the plazas of Maya centers as the settings for such spectacles. As Inomata shows, all this permits an approach to Maya urban design and its transformations in terms of the type of ritual activity anticipated, especially the number of spectators and the degree of accessibility and visibility of the auditoriums and stages. Inomatas article focuses on an analysis and discussion that follow one of the many interpretative directions potentially opened by his approach: the cohesion of a society with centrifugal tendencies that imagines itself as a community through the experience of a real community on ritual occasions or, in material terms, the capacity of the plazas of centers such as Tikal, Copn, and Aguateca to contain the dependent population. With respect to this, we have two observations.

On the one hand, the analysis links the presence of stelae with the largest plazas, but this link cannot be asserted categorically. For example, at Machaquila (Graham 1967; Chocn and Laporte 2002; Ciudad et al. 2004) Plaza A contains most of the sites stelae although it is not the largest of the eight plazas of the central area or the most accessible and visible. The two causeways detected lead to Plaza D and to Plaza C, which are the largest ones but have only three and one stelae respectively. This evidence suggests a close relationship between the social and dynastic memory recorded on these monuments and the buildings that delimit Plaza A, in which the majority of the citys rulers were supposedly buried. At the same time, it suggests that rituals related to this whole ideological complex may have been restricted to a smaller audience. However, we see the Machaquila example not as challenging Inomatas suggestion but as complementing it. From the consideration of the foregoing case it follows that there may have been a degree of variation over space and time in the guidelines of the design and the public versus more exclusive character of the rituals. If so, we need to determine the diverse associations between the spatial features of plazas and monuments or buildings. The similarities and differences identified between Maya centers will be related to the various modes of political revalidation of the rulers. In our view, this variation could be fruitfully explored and interpreted by considering both the size and the degree of accessibility and visibility of plazas in terms of the concepts that Inomata associates with them. Flora S. Clancy Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, U.S.A. (flora@unm.edu). 4 V 06 Inomata convincingly argues that the ancient Maya plaza is a theatrical space for the forming and maintenance of community. I appreciate and applaud his nonreductive approach to the analysis of plaza spaces and his attention to the material forms of plaza as guides for estimating possible functions. My concerns have to do with the functions and artistry of stelae, what is meant by performance and performance theory, and, finally, what we, as scholars of the ancient Maya, do and how we do it. Inomata argues that stelae set in plazas depict the public performances held in those plazas and that their images served as mnemonic devices to prompt visitors to the plaza to remember and reimagine those performances. In the Maya region, plazas were part of cityscapes long before stelae were placed there. Preclassic plazas were places where great stucco works depicting deities were created (Freidel and Schele 1988b). The Early Classic addition to plaza spaces of stelae representing honored human beings signals a change in the political and ceremonial intentions for public gatherings. A persons, or a crowds, interaction with stelae placed at the side of or in the plaza itself is very different from an involvement with massive, isotropic images carved in stucco defining the platforms surrounding the plaza. Stelae are focal points while the elaborate stuccos are ambient backdrops. Stelae take the viewers attention away from the ambience of the plaza. They are potent public monuments and need no imagery in order to be erected. Tikal has yielded many plain stelae, especially in the Late Classic Twin Pyramid Complexes and in the Great Plaza in front of Temples I and II. How would these monuments contribute to the theatrical space? They could be stage sets, screens, or frames for live actors, but they are not reminders of past performances. Carved stelae, works of artistry and homage, express and accrue their own histories as long as they remain standing. Over time they become independent of the current plaza and its functions, vestiges of regnal philosophies and histories. I am not concerned that Inomata has applied performance theory to his analysis of plaza spaces; I think he does so quite judiciously. I am no expert in performance theory, so my question is a general one. Is there a defining difference between performance and normal behavior? My qualified answer is that performance is intentional much as the making of art is intentionalthat is, that there is an element of the irrational in anyperformance. Inomata states that seeing is believing. I think I understand what he is trying to say; what one sees with ones own eyes and hears with ones own ears (a performance) is more convincing and believable than what one is only told to believe. This may be true, but nevertheless imagesdo deceive; they are created and intended to be illusions. The way performance distinguishes itself from normal behavior is in its creation of illusionsin its marvelous, believable irrationality. Ancient Maya plazas were surely places for performances choreographed by royal intentions, but performance is a hazardous tool for crafting civil communities. Something else is involved; I think it is place (see Basso 1996) as much as it isperformance. I am both fascinated and concerned about how we tread the distances between our scholarship and our subjects. Certain pathways can reflect a scholars presentday concerns. J. Eric S. Thompson is an example. His vision of the peaceful, philosophical, ahistorical Maya has been properly questioned and abandoned, but ever since he died he has been a negative target for Maya iconographers and epigraphers. And yet, I think of his life: deeply religious, he suffered through two devastating world wars and the terrible depression of the thirties. The ancient Maya must have been a relief to him, a hope that history could be stilled, that peace could exist somewhere, and that religious, thoughtful men could temper the politics of power. About 30 years ago, Western popular culture began to make human and natural disasters the stuff of romance, and about 25 years ago scholars began to realize how bloody and bellicose the ancient Maya had actually been. Is this coincidence? In reading Inomatas firstrate scholarship on plazas and performance and their roles in the construction and maintenance of community, I was excited by his questions about how ancient Maya polities contrived to come together as identifiable entities. He writes of ancient centrifugal forces counteracting the formation of community; people could walk away from situations that became intolerable for them. Such a strategy is no longer possible today; the whole world has become the communitys stage (pace Shakespeare), and we have nowhere to go to escape the intolerable. Community, its formation and its maintenance, is therefore a paramount issue for today and an effort to understand how the ancient Maya communities worked is definitely timely. Nikolai Grube Institut fr Altamerikanistik und Ethnologie, Universitt Bonn, Rmerstr. 164, 53117 Bonn, Germany (ups402@unibonn.de). 16 V 06 I strongly concur with Inomatas conclusions. Could early states ever have existed without the display of power and its divine legitimation in grand arenas? Wherever large audiences had to be addressed in preindustrial societies, performance was the principal medium and public

plazas for mass gatherings were the locations in societies where writing was only marginally important. As Inomata shows us, the experience of the bodily existence of others was necessary to experience the idea of a community. Most colleagues will agree with Inomata that the principal function of large plazas amongst the Classic Maya was to secure spaces for mass spectacles and public performance. Although some might stress the possibility that plazas also served as locations for markets, I find this highly unlikely given the presence of public monuments such as stelae and altars in most of the plazas. Performance in plazas, as Inomata points out, served the Maya rulers and elites to visualize asymmetrical power relations, social hierarchies, and the moral values of the community. In this regard, the Maya were not different from most other premodern societies. We can look at Uruk and Enkidu, which were located in the vicinity of centers of power and ritual activity on widely visible hilltops (Oates and Oates 1976, 22), the enormous plazas in Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, or the plazas of ancient China (Jackes and Gao 2004). Large plazas constituted the central spaces of communities in the late preceramic period in the central Andes during the transformation from small villages to more centralized communities (Grieder et al. 1988; Moseley 1975). The importance of public performance for the advancement of political agendas makes the complete absence of plazas in some regions of the Maya world even more remarkable. The lack of plazas and with it any recognizable urban plan in the Ro Bec region of Campeche has led scholars to interpret Ro Bec as a group of settlements without any central administration (Bueno Cano 1999; Nonddo et al. 2003, 101). Similarly, large central plazas and urban cores are absent from sites in the western Puuc region such as Xcalumkin and from various Postclassic sites such as Santa Rita Corozal (Chase and Chase 1988, 8798). These settlements also lack other symbolic markers of power, such as ball courts, pyramid temples, multiroom palaces, and stelae. It would be of great importance to investigate the morphological link between these features and plazas for a more profound understanding of their function with regard to the theatrical events in which they were involved. The present article also addresses a very fundamental question with regard to the sources of power that were available to Maya rulers. Writers who highlight the ideological nature of Maya states often characterize them as fragile units with weak control over people and territory, based as they are on the rule of charismatic kings who use kinship and marriage rather then the bureaucratic institutions of a state to administer their authority. Such weak states would indeed be virtual communities, and the state would be absent for most of the population in everyday life. Inomata wisely avoids distinguishing between performance and other sources of power, but he implies that Maya states interfered very little in the life of common people when he speaks about a state that could not be experienced by the community other than through public events. However, ethnohistorical sources from Central Mexico and the Maya Highlands prove that hegemonic states in Mesoamerica had the control of exchange networks, trade routes, and especially the acquisition of tribute as their primary ambition (Grube and Martin 1998, 13438). Mesoamerican elites to some extent had control over the production and allocation of prestige goods and some critical utilitarian items, suggesting that the state probably was much more present and real than is suggested by the idea of an imagined community. A particularly important aspect of the power of rulers must have been the control and management of water, the most vital and yet limited resource in many parts of the Maya lowlands, especially in cities requiring central reservoirs such as Tikal and Calakmul (Lucero 2006). In all of these aspects the state must have been present much more than only symbolically. The manipulation of ideological factorsthe public performance of ritual in grand arenasrather then an end in itself was complementary to other strategies for the allocation of power. I would argue here that theater contributed to the cognitivesymbolic base of Maya states but that the basis of their authority cannot be broken up into ideological and objective (material) components. Maya kings possessed considerable power from their position as heads of an administrative hierarchy and its institutions of enforcement, including coercive power. Moral authority was necessary to support the authority of rulers, but rather than serving only as an instrument backing their power also helped to motivate and mobilize their subjects. Christian Isendahl African and Comparative Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Box 626, SE751 26 Uppsala, Sweden (christian.isendahl@arkeologi.uu.se). 29 IV 06 I agree with the essence of Inomatas argument on the centrality of largescale public events as a key mechanism in the integration and identity formation of Maya communities and in legitimizing elite authority, a theme that recently has been explored from supplementary perspectives by Schortman, Urban, and Ausec (2001) and Halperin (2005), among others. I am also in total accord with the supposition that ensuring spaces for such ceremonies was of major concern in Maya urban site planning and that plazas formed an important category in this scheme. While I find the course of argument generally sound, I am not entirely convinced by some of its central tenets and assumptions. My chief hesitation concerns whether the concept of theatricality is the best heuristic tool when applied in contexts far removed from the modern formal theater. Although the theater metaphor is certainly not novel in anthropological inquiry into political systems in which large scale public ceremonies formed fundamental instruments of integration and control, it burdens rather than enhances the current argument. Following Schechner (1994), in contrast to ritual performance theatrical performance accentuates pretending and entertainment. It is concerned with the moment and is a display of individual creativity rather than collective performance. The audience consumes for its entertainment rather than participating, and spectators are usually free to criticize the performance. Although there are shared features, theatricality is simply not the most appropriate analogy for characterizing the sociopolitical mechanisms of largescale public Classic Maya events. Agency and performance theory have proved very useful, for instance, in stressing multivocality and human creativity in social change, but the importance that Inomatas use of theatricality attributes to spectators as evaluators is misleading. Theatrical performance emphasizes the singular event (thus to some extent ignoring history) at the expense of conceptualizing such ceremonies as forming part of more durable and encompassing ideologically, symbolically, economically, and physically enforced systems for maintaining community identity and asymmetrical power relations. While largescale political ceremonies formed a series of isolated events, the sociopolitical orderwhich would often be the principal message of the elite organizerswas not manifested on these occasions only. Plazas and other ceremonial spaces serving similar functions constituted a complex political or ceremonial mosaic landscape that maintained meaning beyond the isolated event. Since largescale public events in plazas were such important aspects of political life in constructing and maintaining community identity and elite authority in Maya polities, they need to be understood in relation to other political and economic processes rather than singled out as the paramount mechanism as they are here.

In Classic Maya communities, authority and political order regularly permeated the physical as well as the constructed dimensions of reality; to varying degrees they were present in the perception of landscape, cosmology, the calendar, the built environment, landuse rights, and identity, history, and memory. In a sense, then, largescale public events served to strengthen sociopolitical order rather than being its outstanding manifestation. I am highly skeptical of the assumption of a centrifugal tendency in Classic Maya populations that is fundamental to Inomatas argument. The characteristically dispersed settlement patterns of most urban communities in the Maya Lowlands are probably better understood as conditioned by a considerable reliance on settlement agriculture than as evidence of a centrifugal tendency owing to weak systems of political control and authority (Isendahl 2002). I do agree very strongly with the idea of sociopolitical orders being conditional and the subject of social negotiation but would rather argue that authoritythough in fluxwas perceptible in the daytoday life of most Classic Maya commoners. From this perspective, theatricality both underestimates the power of Classic Maya elite ideology to manipulate, in which the organization of recurrent largescale ceremonies formed an essential strategy, and overestimates commoner reflexivity. In sum, Inomatas contribution is a soundly structured, relevantly referenced, engagingly written, and generally wellargued paper that would have been more convincing had he focused on performance theory rather than bringing his argument over the edge with theatricality. He has produced a thoughtprovoking and stimulating paper on the mechanisms of political agency in Classic Maya communities. Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, Circuito Exterior S/N, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510 Mxico, D.F., Mexico (liendo@avantel.net). 6 V 06 Inomata breaks new ground in the field of Maya studies by exploring the intersection of performance with politics, structure, and action. He also raises several key issues related not only to the nature of ancient Maya political statecraft but also to the way archaeology should approach the problem of human agency in ancient societies. His suggestion that theatrical spaces (an everpresent feature in ancient Maya city planning) were used to counteract the centrifugal tendencies of elite factions and nonelite populations alike is a fresh and appealing line of inquiry that ought to be explored, expanded, and discussed. This need is all the more pressing in an academic environment that sees preHispanic Maya political organization as the product of the circumstances advanced by active, powerful, and aristocratic individuals acting individually rather than forming part of a specialized bureaucratic structure (Webster 2001, 141; Restall 1997, 24; Inomata and Houston 2001b). In this way, the agency of at least a few individuals is being recognized. The issue of centralization of political power in Maya society has traditionally been approached from two points of view, one focused on the analysis of the places and architectural features where power concentrates and the other relating to the individuals subject to such power. Archaeologists have chosen to pay more attention to the former than to the latter (de Montmollin 1995, 117). The point made by Inomata in relation to the way the archaeology of performance might be relevant to the study of how the materiality of space serves to empower and constrain agents is highly significant for the construction of theoretical bridges that eventually might join these two seemingly incompatible theoretical paths. Inomata, by stressing the idea of performance as public display, spectacle, and theatricality, connects neatly with the growing appreciation in anthropology in general of the role of the individual and collective action in the maintenance, transformation, and negotiation of social relations (Carrasco 1991; Carl 2000, 32829; Low 2003, 16; Gillespie 2000, 135; Moore 2005). Coming to understand how this process unfolds in particular contexts (constrained or shaped by previous political events and economic and social structure) is a challenging and productive enterprise both theoretically and methodologically. The focus on performance might require, for example, experimentation with unconventional archaeological techniques (space proxemics, perspectives, acoustics, and a plethora of other techniques routinely used in performance theory) within a rigorous research design anchored in an explicit methodology in a way rather similar to what Moore (2005, 215) suggests about the combination of pragmatism and a theory based on three main componentsa solid knowledge of the ethnography and ethnohistory bearing on culturespecific sets of beliefs and meanings, the use of social theory of space, place, architecture, and landscape, and, finally, the testing of falsifiable hypotheses about the possible relationships between archaeological remains and meaning. This may be the part of Inomatas work that I admire mosthis commitment to the development of an explicit methodology that pays attention to the specifiicities of Maya ancient civilization without losing sight of theoretical problems that concern the field of anthropology at large. In this regard, his proposal, albeit focusing on just one aspect of the complex phenomenon of performance in ancient Maya society, shifts the stress from an analysis of the built environment of ancient Maya cities (Houston 1998b) to the study of the actions that took place within it. Matthew Looper Department of Anthropology, California State University, Chico, CA 959290720, U.S.A. (mlooper@csuchico.edu). 19 IV 06 As an art historian, I am impressed that this article draws upon humanistic approaches to address the anthropological and archaeological problem of characterizing the sociopolitical functions of ancient Maya architecture, particularly plazas. Most studies that are relevant to this project are analyses of ancient Maya literature (epigraphy), architectural history, or the iconography and iconology of monumental art. While some of these studies were conducted by anthropologists or archaeologists fluent in humanistic methods (e.g., Sanchez 1997), a great many were conducted by art historians (see Newsome 2001). While the integration of arts and sciences that is evident from this study can be partly attributed to a general tendency toward interdisciplinary collaboration in the field of Maya studies, it is also symptomatic of the emphasis on performance as a mode of inquiry, which, as Fabian (1990, 10) notes, provides a way of humanizing anthropology. Despite this humanistic tendency, the application of certain theatrical metaphors and models risks secularizing ancient Maya performance. Several fundamental theoretical models cited in this article (e.g., Schechner 1988, Turner 1986) present theater as an essentially secular activity for the purpose of entertainment and thus separate from the more religiously oriented ritual. Whereas it could be said that such an approach serves to demystify these performances, the rhetoric of texts and images constantly refers to the prototypical actions of supernatural beings who conduct sacrifices and dedicate stone monuments just as historical rulers do. Maya kings were frequently entitled divine lords, testimony to

their role as both political and religious leaders. It could therefore be argued that the application of theatrical models may distort the focus of ancient Maya public performances, which were saturated with religious content. On another level, the interpretation of social life based on a theatrical model (particularly as conceived by Goffman [1959, 1967]) may be problematic because of its basis in conventional Western notions of dramatic representation (Schieffelin 1998). Such performances are predicated on a division between audience and performer in which the fictive personae assumed by the performers create a third, onstage world. This symbolic reality is treated like a sign which is in turn deciphered by the audience through distanced contemplation. In fact, the historical origins of the concept of ideologyinvoked frequently in this essaycan be traced to an iconoclastic interpretation of theater as the expressive and intentional manipulation of audience by performers (Summers 2003). In my view, theatrical models of society imply a culturally specific mode of communication which cannot be assumed in the case of Maya performance (Looper n.d.). Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the communication of cognitive meanings constitutes a relatively minor component of performance. In addition to their rhetorical content, the performances are structured in such a way as to engage the participants senses in the recognition and production of forms and configurations known as aesthetic tropes (Tambiah 1985). These tropes do not represent a social reality that is separate from them but are actualities themselves in that they are the emotionally loaded patterns through which social memory is perceived, organized, and manipulated. Because it enlists the intersubjective practices that are integral to social life, performance actualizes symbolic reality in social terms rather than merely as a cognitive argument or proposition (Schieffelin 1985). This is not to say that ancient Maya public performance was not theatrical in the sense of being highly visualindeed, the overwhelming abundance of visual imagery that survives from this society attests to the desire to enhance the visibility of certain performances, as do the plaza spaces discussed in this essay. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that public performances sponsored by ancient Maya rulers were fundamentally cosmological (or, dare I say, magical) rites designed to invoke divine blessings and protection and to promote fertility and fecundity. In contrast to Western theater, the performances did not represent a symbolic reality and therefore did not require a rational human audience to decipher them. What was important was that the performance be done in the proper way so that divine beings were invoked as coparticipants. This orientation is demonstrated by numerous images in which deities and ancestors peer down upon scenes of royal ritual. Analogously, it is possible that plazas were designed not only with human audiences in mind but also to address divine agents in the form of deity images housed in surrounding temples, deified astronomical phenomena, and/or numinous figures embodied in the landscape. In short, the interpretation of ancient Mayaperformance would be well served by taking into account culturally specific epistemologies rather than assuming an audienceperformer relationshipand the consequent communicative functionsderivative of the Western dramaturgical model. Lisa J. Lucero Department of Anthropology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, U.S.A. (lislucer@nmsu.edu). 8 V 06 Inomata has contributed a thoughtprovoking piece that will be useful not only to Mayanists but also to anthropologists who study complex societies, and I do not think that anyone would disagree with his claim that political leaders rely on public events for integrative purposes. A completely material basis for political power is not palatable. This is because it is important to take into account varied practices, agencies, and beliefs. Theater takes into account these different factors; performers and witnesses all have roles that are attuned to specific events, typically with political overtones, but also perceive events in ways that best suit their needs or belief systems. Performers are judged by an audience; success benefited rulers in the form of social and material support (surplus labor and goods). Inomata clearly demonstrates how important political theater is; how and why this is the case are less fully addressed. For example, Roscoe (1993) details the importance and challenges of not only the need to reach people but the logistics of doing so. The more people successfully integrated, the more political capital and the greater challenge for rulers to interact on a facetoface basis with their supporters, Again, Inomata notes that different centers have different audience capacities; why is this the case? Performers can be judged successful only if people can participate in theperformance to begin with. Why did farmers, many of whom lived dispersed throughout the hinterlands, come to centers at all? Because rulers also fulfilled material needsspecifically, water during the annual drought. Thus, audience size was influenced by how much water royals had at their disposal in the massive artificial reservoirs located next to temples and plazas (Scarborough 2003) and the amount of agricultural land in the vicinity and beyond (Lucero 2006). Moreover, evaluating royal performances had much to do with seasonal conditionsnot enough water, too much water, and so on. Thus, people judged as poor performances those conducted without immediate results in times of trouble and uncertainty (e.g., succession). The performances were likely ones that had been performed numerous times before. Social, political, and economic conditions, not just the audience, determined their success. As Inomata mentions, with farmers living dispersed between centers, there was likely an element of choice to attendance at royal performances in any given year. Too many poor performances would have caused farmers to look to other royals for what they needed. Further, in some cases they could look elsewhere within the same center (Lucero n.d.). Every Maya center had several temples and plazas, and while in some instances additional plazas were built to accommodate growing numbers of supporters, as Inomata suggests, different groupslesser royals, elites, priesthoods, community groups, or other specialinterest groupscould also have been building their own ceremonial stages and arenas. I suggest, then, that a poor performance may have resulted first in peoples trying another temple in the same center. Only when the conditions that resulted in the change of venue did not improve would they have chosen another center altogether. This idea goes a long way toward explaining the ornate Maya civicceremonial centers. Performers were always competing for audiences against others within and without. We can begin assessing whether different groups built temples within centers by comparing their construction attributes, ritual deposits, and, when present, iconography and inscriptions (Lucero n.d.). These few comments aside, Inomata has provided us a foundation from which to explore further how and why Maya kings became some of the ancient worlds best performers. Elizabeth A. Newsome

Department of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 920930084, U.S.A. (enewsome@ucsd.edu). 29 IV 06 This important article directs muchneeded attention to the dynamic role that spectacle and public assembly may have played in Classic Maya political life. It offers researchers a new appreciation for the scale and lasting importance of settings designed for ritual gatherings in Maya urban design and a promising empirical approach to aspects of social experience that, however intangible, were influential in the constitution of power. Most of us who have studied Maya architecture and monumental art have an intuitive understanding of the theatrical sensibilities implied in the construction of plazas, causeways, and the freestanding monuments that occupy them, but we have lacked a fully articulated, explicit methodology for discussing them in objective terms. What is so rewarding in Inomatas study is his deductive method for observing, comparing, and modeling the development of these performative aspects of social discourse through their tangible indicators in the built environment. His use of the concept of imagined communities to situate this focus on performance within the debate over sociopolitical process establishes yet another satisfying convergence between postprocessual archaeology and the growing cognitive, phenomenological, and aesthetic humanism in studies of Mesoamerican art and writing. As an art historian, I especially value the opportunities his approach provides for interdisciplinary understandings of the way performance, visuality, and perceptual experience can sustain and generate cultural knowledge. The article is groundbreaking in the extent to which the author utilizes performance theory, a body of scholarship which has been applied in a very limited fashion to archaeological cultures. The reason, of course, is that mental experience can be approached only indirectly through the archaeological record. Exploring how transactions of understanding, consensus, and political authority were enacted through spectatorship andperformance may inform the examination of agency and the flow of power in Maya communities. Agency and power have, however, been engaged in relation to the built environment in ways that Inomata does not address but may be crucial to furthering his method. I would be interested in his perspectives on the way vision interfaced with Maya spatial order, considering the interplays Foucault (1979[1975]; Bentham 1977) observed between environment and gaze that promoted royal visibility as an idiom of power. Questions concerned with the historical reciprocity between Maya architecture and political order may be beyond the scope of this article but are not beyond the scope of Inomatas method. Similarly, the implications of his study for gauging the value of spectatorship in social process require considering the subject from a more encompassing point of view. His emphasis on performance as a tool for enhancing power relations adds a new dimension to what Classic Maya inscriptions have already told us about the political contexts of viewership. Epigraphers are familiar with a verbal compound that uses the eye hieroglyph with extended sight lines to record the act of witnessing ceremonial events. This phrase, based on the root il, to see, occurs in statements of monument dedications, sacrifices, and period endings to record that individuals of key political importance were present to behold those events (Houston and Taube 2000, 28487; see also Houston and Stuart 1998). Stela 10 at Seibal follows this expression with emblem glyph titles naming the lords of three distant sites. In this and similar monuments, the iconographic depiction of royal performance and display is joined with an inscription emphasizing the reciprocal act of viewership by these lords. As Foucaults observations indicate, vision articulates power relations between the beholder and the object of the gaze (see, e.g., Bryson 1983). Exploring spectatorship in the Americas may generate possibilities for interpreting PreColumbian performance that conventional Western understandings of the topic fail to provide. For example, Rhonda Taube has learned that connotations of the Kiche term for seeing or watching imply liking, expressing a kind of social approbation for the form and content of the performance (Taube 2006, n.d.). Her studies of the styles and moods of spectatorship associated with contemporary and traditional dances suggest affinities with the collective discourses of affiliation and resistance that Inomata envisions. Productive analogies may also be discovered in the highly theatrical dance dramas of the Northwest Coast, where spectatorship, gift giving, and feasting were critical to validating systems of rank and status. Houston and Taube (2000, 287) suggest that, for the Maya, sight may have similarly discharged a witnessing or authorizing function in ritual contexts. The viewership involved in the potlatch is not passive spectatorship in the Western sense but more akin to what Jill Sweet (1985) called active listening. The state of mind and imagination that Sweet describes obliterates distance between audience and performers and, by ascribing an active agency to the viewers involvement, fosters collective belonging, harmony, and balance with universal forces. Such comparative models may expand our perspectives on the social dynamics Inomata suggests for Classic Maya performance and inform our sense of their political impact. Miguel Rivera Dorado Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain (mrivera@ghis.ucm.es). 22 III 06 Is the individual identity of a member of an ancient state simply the product of actions and ceremonies sponsored by the authorities? Inomata seems to believe that it is, but there are historical cases in which there is consensus that abstract elements are the raw materialsin Egypt involving funerary customs, the pharaoh, and the gifts of the Nile, in Greece involving myths, sanctuaries, war, and writers and philosophers, and in Rome involving the idea of the republic and the civilizing mission. He says that the development of large centralized states would have been impossible without grandiose public events. While these events are important in societies with strong centrifugal tendencies, very primitive technologies, problems of transport and communication, and a hostile environment such as the ancient Maya and still relevant in many states whose territory is very extensive and includes different ethnic groups or peoples in different cultural conditions, they are much less so in states with developed administration, in which integrating factors such as militarism and religious fundamentalism play a role. I am talking about identity here; public state actions of course always reaffirm and consolidate group spirit and are a notable mechanism of cohesion and integration. I am not entirely convinced that theatrical events evolve ambiguously. If this were true, the polyvalence of theatrical signs would make the propagation of dominant ideologies difficult or impossible. I believe, in contrast, in the political usefulness of theatrical performances, which transmit at least the basic principles of the dominant system of values. Here I use political in the Greek sense because the affairs of the city call for moral and, if possible, ethical consensus. The conflicts generated are another story. I cannot say that the religious ceremonies in the temple of Jerusalem or the games in the Coliseum were ambiguous in this sense. They were performances arising from particular cultural orientations and designed to transmit shared and politically correct values.

I am, however, convinced about the theatrical character of the public events in Maya cities and their role in enhancing the cohesion of Classic society, the effectiveness of divine monarchies, and even the survival of the civilization in such a hostile environment (see Rivera 1982, 2001). It is necessary, however, to distinguish performances such as the pw of Burma, an outgrowth of the development of social interactions like those that occur in popular celebrations around the world and are supported by political power, from institutional theater in the hands of more or less free professionals, often performing for gain. Political or religious performance is not, strictly speaking, one or the other but has the character of an extraordinary traditional spectacle with specific, eminently social ends. Inomata says that a plaza is a space in the center of the city surrounded by temples and other buildings with a strong symbolic charge, but these are features typical of other spaces that are usually called courtyards. Plazas are often simply open spaces that separate groups of buildings transitional areas, in the terminology of architects and urbanists, that could be classified as nomanslands, if we assigned those groups to kinship or corporate units, or perhaps as everyones land. Their large dimensions and very irregular and open design may distinguish plazas from courtyards, but in any case these are relative and rather vague categories. I agree with Inomata with regard to the ostentatious vestments that the rulers displayed in public ceremonies, but I do not share his view of the role of litters and palanquins; although they were adorned with figures or other motifs, this does not mean that they were used in public events before a large audience. These modes of transport, always luxuriously decorated to express the status of their occupants, were not usually used as seats or simply for display in fiestas and celebrations. Platforms and staircases seem more logical ways of raising certain personages above the mass of humanity, although these personages were of course able to arrive by palanquin at the exact location of the event. I share Inomatas view that the main purpose of the plazas of Maya cities was to accommodate wellattended ceremonies and fiestas, but it is important to keep in mind the need for space in which to contemplate certain buildings from an appropriate perspective. Like the plazas in front of medieval cathedrals, these plazas are not only places for meetings, theatrical performances, and markets but also provide the distance and vantage points that permit the appreciation of the buildings ornaments and symbolic motifs. Like the great facades of Christian churches, those of Maya buildings were, for the illiterate people who made up the majority of the population, immense books in which they could see and understand sacred histories and political doctrines. Moreover, their size, their style, their craftsmanship, their decoration, and the perspectives afforded by their plazas contributed to something equally substantialemotion. Julia L. J. Sanchez Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, A210 Fowler, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 900951510, U.S.A. (sanchez@ucla.edu). 8 V 06 Inomata discusses political performances among the Classic Maya, concentrating on largescale events held in public plazas. What the article contributes is not descriptions of the events themselves, which have been discussed at great length already, but the perspective from which the events are viewed. In other words, Inomata asks, What if we looked at these data differently? Previously, the public rituals of Maya rulers have been viewed from the perspective of maintenance of political power, economic strength, and religious ritual. Artistic representations of the rituals have been viewed from various art historical, iconographic, and epigraphic perspectives. All of these approaches are valid and provide complementary insights into ancient Maya life. Inomata adds another perspective: looking at the political events as performances in front of an audience. This perspective offers intriguing possibilities for the analysis of ritual in general and Maya ritual in particular. Inomata offers interesting ideas and experiments with a novel approach. Many opportunities exist for expanding on these ideas: Theater and performance studies have examined the role and perspective of the audience. Inomata introduces the concept, and it could be explored in much greater detail. Inomata briefly mentions the change of sites over time. Maya sites often grow more restricted over time, with buildings added in or around the plazas. The architectural changes are doubtless related to changes in the use of space, and it would be interesting to explore the performanceconcepts associated with these changes. Detailed ethnohistoric accounts describe various activities at Maya sites. Although the ethnohistories have been mined for hundreds, perhaps thousands of articles, new ideas may yet be developed from this work. Causeways and roads are another oftstudied aspect of Maya sites. Ideas of performance, procession, and audience continue to be explored in various ways (Keller 1996). It is rare now in archaeology to see something completely new. As my good friend Jim Sackett is fond of saying, people like to claim that they have said something new when it actually has been said before (Sackett 2006, 16). Much more often, contributions come in the form of interesting ideas that allow us to continue our discussions and explore new directions. Inomata has added several ideas that will stimulate further discussion and exploration, and I believe that this means that he has accomplished his goal admirably. Alexandre Tokovinine Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. (tokovin@fas.harvard.edu). 26 IV 06

Inomatas article offers an important contribution to studies of Classic Maya royal courts as settings in which the political and moral orders of imagined communities were reiterated through acts of theatrical performance. The author suggests that public performances offer moments of real community, of extraordinary experiences that shape the perceptions and experiences of daily life. He argues that performances are not unidirectional and involve implicit evaluation and negotiation of power and authority between performers and viewers. Nevertheless, the discussion of theatrical performances and their settings in Classic Maya polities seems rather unconvincing. I cannot agree with one of the main arguments of the article, namely, that public events are represented primarily on public monuments and objects of art. The very distinction between public and restricted settings implies that we know the intended recipients of the messages carried by the objects, but this is not the case. The famed Bonampak murals adorn three small dark rooms. The arguably public scenes of Tikal kings carried in the captured palanquins of their enemies appear on temple lintels, the least public setting one can possibly imagine. There are more depictions of dances, processions, presentations of tribute, and captives on painted or carved vessels than on carved monuments. The relationship between the location of a monument and the events depicted or described on it needs to be clarified. According to Houston and Stuart (1998), sculptured or painted images are extensions of the selves of the depicted actors. These images engage with human participants as if they were living actors themselves. Consequently, a panel depicting a dancing lord ensures the everlasting presence of a certain manifestation of that person in the act of dancing in that place. It does not imply that the original act performed by the fleshandblood character took place or used to take place at the location of the monument. Therefore, the monuments are not, strictly speaking, commemorative but populate the landscape with everacting manifestations of gods, kings, queens, and nobles. When it comes to determining the prototypical location of an act depicted or described on a monument, there are usually few if any clues. Most events take place in the land/city soandso (Stuart and Houston 1994). There are no deciphered terms for plaza or dancing platform. I am aware of only two related references to an architectural setting of dances. The inscription on Dumbarton Oaks Panel 1 (Mayer 1980, 6870, pl. 75) states that the protagonist danced in a specific house at Piedras Negras. The inscription on Stela 8 at Piedras Negras (Stuart and Graham 2005) refers to a dancing event in the same house some 35 years later. The term house (naaj) might designate a group of halls with an adjacent courtyard (Plank 2004). It must have been a fairly restricted setting. Given the complexities involved in the analysis of Classic Maya monuments and inscriptions, it might be productive to consider other sources of information on the nature of theatrical events and their spatial settings. For instance, Houston (1998a) suggests using graffiti in determining which areas of sites were open or closed to human traffic. He notes, among other things, that there are almost no depictions of humans on the stairs of the temples. This makes these structures essentially nonpublic as far as the presence of living humans is concerned. The volumetric assessment of potentially public spaces at Classic Maya sites seemingly offers a robust source of data for determining the degree of exclusivity of statesponsored theatrical events. Inomata follows the method suggested in earlier publications; for example, Fash (1998, 23942) makes similar observations with respect to the role of plazas at Copn, Pechal, and Tikal as settings for public performances of variable exclusivity. However, as in the case of earlier works on the subject, it remains unclear to what extent the volumetric assessment of public spaces as opposed to population estimates for only three sites is statistically significant and to what extent the observations based on such limited data can be applied to hundreds of other Maya sites. The most important question that remains unanswered is what kinds of public theatrical performancesin terms of content, not formwere essential to the maintenance of the imagined communities of Classic Maya polities. Was a community imagined through celebrations of political and military power of its lords, through periodic reestablishments of space and time, or through the acts of asking for rain and placating local gods, the guardians, the owners of the land? Of course, the available data are very limited, but these questions are crucial for understanding the role of theatrical performances in the creation and maintenance of shared identities in Classic Maya kingdoms and merit further investigation. Takeshi Inomata I am grateful that so many scholars wrote thoughtful comments on my article. I focus my reply on three issues salient in their discussions: (1) theories of performance and theater and their application to Maya society, (2) performance and its relation to Maya polities, identity, and power, and (3) various types of evidence on public events in Maya society and the methodology of examining them. As I write this reply in the Guatemalan lowlands, I am unable to consult additional literature, but our ongoing fieldwork at a Maya site gives me a renewed conviction of the importance of these issues. Theater, performance, and ritual. Isendahl and Looper suggest that the concept of theater is based on a modern Western view and its application to Maya rituals is inappropriate. This point concerns a critical problem in the study of performance, and I appreciate this opportunity for further discussion. Their criticism appears to derive from their dichotomized view of theater and ritual. My intention, in contrast, was to explore the common features of the two. Thus, my emphasis on theatricality was not meant to replace the concept of ritual, nor did it privilege individual creativity over collective performance or entertainment over participation. Theaters, even modern Western ones, are not detached from history, moral values, and conventional beliefs, and rituals can involve heightened emotional effects, the reactions of participants, and the use of symbols. The theories of theater and performance help us to focus explicitly on interplays of such factors. Isendahls and Loopers tendency toward dichotomization can also be seen in their categorical division of the secular from the religious. In many societies, including the Classic Maya, religious notions permeate numerous aspects of daily life, and what some consider secular, such as the theatrical effect, is present in religious ceremonies. Instead of categorically labeling Maya public events as religious or cosmological, we should examine complex interplays of various elements. Similarly, the symbolic reality of theater is not a unique entity detached from daily lives. As many anthropologists have argued, culture is a system of symbols, and human life is saturated with them. In our daily routines we constantly create, use, and manipulate symbols and interpret and misinterpret them. I therefore defined theatricality not categorically but in terms of modes and degrees of the use of certain signs.

Performance theory presents an even more fundamental criticism on the dichotomization of thought and action that gives primacy to the former. When Looper suggests that the Maya needed to conduct performances properly in order to invoke the divine beings, he is arguing for the preexistence of ideas or understandings of the world that generate and define peoples actions. We need to ask, however, how such ideas and perceptions came to exist in the first place and how they were maintained, shared, and transformed. For this purpose, we have to examine not only the way ideas defined actions but also the processes by which peoples actions and experiences shaped their perceptions of the world. Loopers comment gives the impression that beliefs in supernatural beings transcended all other meanings and actions. To me, the importance of divine beings and the necessity to conduct rituals properly were parts of the meanings that were created, reproduced, and negotiated through performance. Conducting these rituals expressed such meanings whether this was intended or not, and participation in the events signaled compliance with these meanings, whether superficial or wholehearted. It is important to recognize that physical acts define certain aspects of social relations. As Newsome points out, modes of physical interaction, including visibility and invisibility, are closely intertwined with the culturally shaped nature of power. The performance perspective highlights such recursive relations between the materiality of bodies, actions, objects, and spaces, on one hand, and the intangible issues of emotions, perceptions, morality, and power, on the other. Loopers comments, as well as Riveras, imply the assumption of homogeneity and coherence in peoples beliefs and perceptions at the expense of internal tension and fluidity. Although Isendahl recognizes agency and multivocality, his emphasis on durable and encompassing systems seems to hint that he shares a certain aspect of this view. The traditional concept of homogeneous culture and the overemphasis on abstract structure have come under serious challenge in recent years (AbuLughod 1991; Dirks et al. 1994; Inomata and Triadan 2004; Wade 1999). The harmonious appearance of culture and its continuity require conscious effort by certain members of society to maintain them and involve contestation and negotiation. We need to examine how and under what conditions culture may be shared and when and how it may exhibit rupture and change. The theories of theater and performance examine public events as critical moments in which certain views are imposed, shared, resisted, and negotiated. In other words, theatrical events are multivocal. Meanings expressed and interpreted through performance are not fixed or singular. In this sense, I am in agreement with Loopers caution about overemphasizing the communication of meanings, although this suggestion appears to contradict his own insistence on the primacy of religious beliefs in determining action. Clancys argument that images deceive relates to this issue. She appears to have in mind the ambiguous correlations among physical representations, their messages, and individualized perceptions discussed above. In this regard, her view and mine are probably not so different. What I intended, however, was a balanced consideration of the communicative potential of performance as well. Performance and viewing have substantial persuasive power with regard to peoples actions and their physical states. In addition, we should not assume the existence of the absolute reality hidden behind screens of illusion. What people do and see makes up the reality of the world as they experience it. Isendahl, Looper, and I are probably in a close agreement on the need to examine specific historical and social contexts. We are also well aware of the challenge of studying societies so distant from our own. As Clancy points out, our views are embedded in our own historical circumstances. Isendahls and Loopers position, however, appear to diverge from mine as to how we develop historically sensitive inquiries. My concern is that the concepts of homogeneous culture and abstract structure are more inventions of researchers shaped by their own historical backgrounds than features of past societies. The criticism of the overarching notion of culture has led researchers to pay closer attention to the more concrete, observable events and actions that make up social processes (Appadurai 1996, 12; Barth 1994, 358; Friedman 1994, 207). Emphasis on events and actions does not mean disregard of history. To the degree that participants understand or think that they understand what happened before and contemplate the outcomes of their actions, events are tied to the past and the future. Just as history shapes events, it is implicated in events. In this regard, I appreciate Newsomes comments on culturally constituted notions of performance and vision that provide a bridge between the physicality of action and its embedded nature. Isendahl also criticizes the notion of spectators as evaluators. However, once we recognize the problem of uncritically assuming the homogeneity of culture and note the prevalence of multivocality, the importance of an audience as evaluators should be clear. While many studies inspired by practice theory tend to focus on the practices of actors, the emphasis on spectators as evaluators directs our attention more to interaction in specific social and spatial settings. This view does not necessarily presume a strict division between actors and an audience. The participants can be at once performers and spectators. Nor does it assume explicit evaluations by highly conscious critics. Most viewers reactions to Maya rituals were probably far more subtle and less conscious. Multivocality does not necessarily mean outright rejection of religious beliefs but may entail varying degrees of commitment to such beliefs, indifferent conformity, covert dissent, and individualized ways of internalizing religious notions. It follows that commoners participation in rituals does not always reflect fervent commitment to religious notions as Looper appears to imply. Varying attitudes may lead to more explicit forms on other occasions. The humorous performances that Chinchilla mentions may have functioned as such social commentaries (see Taube 1989). One of the most negative expressions may have been simple nonparticipation. As Lucero notes, many Maya commoners probably had the option of not attending ceremonies or of attending rituals sponsored by different elites, although I would conceptualize this process less as a winorlose game. Chinchilla and Tokovinine comment on the contents of performances as opposed to their forms. The study of the contents of performances is certainly important, and in particular I strongly agree with Chinchilla as to the importance of warrelated performance for developing communal identities (Inomata and Triadan 2004). I should reiterate, however, that we need to recognize the indissoluble connection of the two instead of dichotomizing them and privileging one at the expense of the other. In this article I intentionally highlighted the forms and physical dimensions of performances because I felt that many previous studies of Maya rituals and those of other societies had disproportionately privileged the contents and meanings of these events. I hoped that the perspective I proposed would lead to new insights and enrich our understanding of Maya society by complementing other kinds of work. In this sense, I appreciate Loopers and Newsomes favorable comments about the spirit of this approach and those of Liendo, Sanchez, and others who appear to see the potential for theoretical and methodological advance. Political process. Becker notes that my use of the term divine ruler assumes a singularity or unity of command, but he seems to miss my point. I follow many anthropological studies of divine kingship that stress its symbolic aspect. By emphasizing the public performances of rulers instead of their managerial functions, I tried to examine how they served as embodiments of community identities. A rulers institutionalized position as the highest political authority does not imply a singular command in the operation of the polity. In this regard, Rivera appears to have misunderstood my argument about community identities. I do not think that individual identity was simply the product of ceremonies sponsored by the elite. Although I argued that experiences of public events contributed to certain aspects of commoners

identity, I said that we do not know how important the ties to a specific dynasty were for the identities of individual farmers. Identities were probably shaped in substantial part by other factors, including their affiliations with kin groups and smaller local groups. Becker says that I do not clarify where Maya polities lie on the continuum of statelevel societies. I find such a onedimensional view of social evolution problematic. Social changes have multiple dimensions, among them administrative systems, economic organization, and the symbolism associated with rulers, which are not transformed simultaneously. This does not, however, mean that we should abandon cross cultural studies and try to understand individual societies in the closed contexts of their historical particularities. The development of bureaucratic administrative systems that I discussed is one of the dimensions that can be examined through comparative studies, but we should not assume that changes in this aspect were always correlated with transformations in other dimensions of society. Aoyama, Grube, Isendahl, and Lucero suggest elite control of certain material goods and the daily lives of nonelites in Classic Maya society. This was not a central issue of my paper, but I should clarify my position. I believe that it is misleading to classify states as weak or strong and that there is not much point in categorically distinguishing ideologically based states from bureaucratic ones. Even in modern states with developed bureaucracies, including the Nazi regime, with its heavy reliance on coercion, ideology is a critical component of state power. Equally problematic is the polarization of centralized control of commoners and the economy and the absence of such control. Instead, we need to examine under what conditions and in what ways they had influence or control. In this regard, Grubes and my views are probably not substantially different. We should also avoid an overly rigid and standardized model of the state that disregards historical particularities. The study of states is inevitably affected by our own experience of living in modern society, in which the state penetrates into various aspects of daily life through its taxation system, police force, legal system, city plans, standardized measurements, omnipresent symbols, and deeply internalized senses of national identities. We need to consider the possibility that experiences of living in ancient states may have been quite different from modern ones. My suggestion of limited state interference in the daily lives of nonelites in Classic Maya society was made in such comparative terms. I proposed that mass spectacle was probably one of the occasions on which Maya commoners felt their ties with the ruler most strongly, but I did not mean that the state could not be experienced in other circumstances. Moreover, the notion of an imagined community does not necessarily indicate the weak presence of the state in daily life. On the contrary, the original formulation of the concept by Anderson implies that an imagined community can reflect a profound penetration of the state into the identity of individuals. My main argument was that the heavy emphasis on public events in Classic Maya society created moments of real community that coexisted with imagined ones. In contrast, modern society, with a large population precluding facetoface contact, is more of an imagined community sustained partly by a more developed bureaucracy and communication technologies. Likewise, in suggesting a centrifugal tendency in Maya polities I did not mean the absence of centralized control over certain aspects of commoners lives. The foregoing discussion should make it clear that I do not think that the centrifugal tendency derived onedirectionally from weak systems of political control. Although I agree with Isendahl that the dispersed settlement patterns in the Maya lowlands were conditioned by agricultural practices, we interpret the political implications of these patterns differently. In my view, the dispersed settlement pattern was a critical contributor to the centrifugal tendency. Dispersed populations are far more difficult to control than nucleated ones, as can be seen in the Spanish strategy of congregacin in the Colonialperiod Maya area. To unite a dispersed population effectively, the state needs certain administrative apparatus, transportation and communication technologies, and a strong sense of affiliation to the central authority on the part of nonelites. I feel that evidence for such features is weak in Classic Maya society, and I suggested that mass spectacle sponsored by the central authority was important in counteracting the centrifugal tendency. I agree with Aoyama, Grube, Isendahl, and Lucero that the relation between public performance and other political and economic processes is a critical issue, although a thorough treatment of this question was beyond the scope of this paper. I should stress that in focusing on publicperformance I did not intend to privilege it as the paramount mechanism over others. It is obvious that no polity can exist without its economic basis, certain administrative mechanisms, and ideological constructs. Similarly, its development would be impossible without public performances. In this regard, I concur with Grubes view that these diverse elements are inseparably intertwined. The material control by elites was rooted in the sense of a community and its moral values, which were constructed partially through public events and shared to a certain degree by the masses. Community identities and the social relations of members mean little without material settings and physical actions. Furthermore, political processes take many forms and occur in diverse settings. For example, I have elsewhere discussed the political interactions that unfolded in households and other smaller settings (Inomata 2001b; Inomata et al. 2002). Mass spectacles become effective only through their connection and contrast with more intimate but equally political actions, including food production, craft production, gift exchange, and smallscale meetings. Lucero points out that theatrical events require logistical and organizational bases. In a sense, ever larger spectacles became possible with the development of centralized polities, with their material supplies and administrative structures. The reverse may be true, too; we should examine how demands for public events might have driven developments in logistical and organizational systems. I am sympathetic with Luceros comment that the social effects of public performance are conditioned by political and economic settings, but I would stress that these factors are not external to the participants. Social consequences are shaped by agents who assess and react to political and material conditions. In other words, political and economic settings affect the outcomes of performances through the participants. This also means that these settings do not determine their success in a mechanistic manner. Evidence of public events. As Newsome notes, past performance is not directly accessible to us. Most evidence is circumstantial. The difficulty in addressing theatrical events in the past should not, however, deter us from exploring this vital issue. My argument was that, although individual pieces of evidence may be rather ambiguous, we can develop sound interpretations by combining various lines of inquiry. A particularly important source of information is the ethnohistoric record mentioned by Chinchilla, which tells us about mass spectacles held in plazas during the Colonial period (Inomata 2006). It is very likely that similar events took place in Classicperiod plazas. An important objective of our study, however, should be to examine how public performance articulated with polf coritical conditions in specific historical contexts. Obviously, this relationship changed from the Classic period to Colonial times, and this forces us to consider other lines of evidence.

Tokovinine points out that public events are not necessarily depicted on monuments placed in plazas. As I said, the correlation between art media and types of performance is loose and far from exclusive. The important point of my discussion on the use of plazas was that a significant proportion of the stelae erected in those open spaces depicted public performances. The reverse correlationpublic events being depicted primarily on stelaeon which Tokovinine focuses his comment is less clear. I have noted that various lintels and ceramic paintings also show public scenes. Tokovinines criticism involving these examples misses the point of my argument. Contrary to Tokovinines suggestion, an important clue to the relations between art media and types of performance is probably the intended viewers of the images. Stelae erected in open plazas tended to depict public performances in which elites and nonelites possibly took part and were probably meant to be seen by both elites and nonelites. Lintels and ceramic paintings that show more exclusive scenes, as well as public events, were most likely viewed mainly by elites, and individuals of the same social groups participated in the events depicted. I agree with Tokovinine that stelae as extensions of the selves of the individuals depicted populated the ritual landscape. I also concur with Clancys comment that monuments accrue their own histories. These meanings and histories, however, cannot be understood apart from the memories or imaginations of performances by fleshandblood actors. The accompanying texts typically narrate specific historical events attended by the individuals depicted, in some cases with explicit references to their dances and other performances (Grube 1992). In other words, these carvings were not general representations of individuals but anchored to real historical acts. After their erection, the monuments invited subsequent performances, including viewing, placement of offerings, and recitals of inscriptions. Even the plain stelae that Clancy mentions may have been associated with such performances, though in less direct and less explicit ways than the carved ones, and it is possible that some of them were originally painted. Such histories mean that these monuments mediated between memories of past performances and future acts. This process was embedded in specific spatial settings with social agents who occupied these spaces because, as discussed above, no performance can transcend its specific context. It follows, contrary to Clancys comment, that stelae never became independent of the plazas in which they stood. Becker and Tokovinine consider my data on plaza capacities irrelevant or problematic. These numbers were not meant to be direct indicators of the sizes of past events. They are, at best, circumstantial evidence loosely pointing to the number of people who could have been involved in events held in the spaces. This ambiguity, however, does not mean that we should disregard these data. They have significant implications when combined with other lines of evidence, including ethnohistorical documents on Colonialperiod spectacles, depictions in art, and histories of urban development. Space is in some cases shaped with specific theatrical effects in mind and in others with a heavier emphasis on symbolic meanings and cultural conventions. Even spaces in the latter case, with their unyielding physicality, have effects on visibility, audibility, and movements of bodies that may not always be consciously expected by their designers and builders. For example, as Rivera notes, some configurations may have been meant in part to provide appropriate perspectives for viewing buildings. Yet we can still examine the theatrical consequences of the resulting forms. Likewise, the pyramidal shape of Maya temples may have primarily represented sacred mountains, but an effect of this form was the high visibility of kings and other elites who climbed their stairs and the near impossibility of their hiding from the masses. The primary function of palanquins, on which Rivera comments, was obviously the transport of the privileged, but they presented significant theatrical effects with the visibility of their occupants and their elaborate decorations. The transport of rulers was a spectacle and could have had commemorative qualities, as Chinchilla notes. Such physical properties of space, including the capacities of plazas, provide a starting point for analysis. The archaeological study of performance is in an incipient stage, and we need substantial work to develop effective methods of inquiry. One important approach is the analysis of histories of plazas that Becker and Sanchez mention. One reason that I chose Tikal as an example was that it was one of the beststudied Maya sites, but our understanding of the early histories of its plazas seems to be quite tenuous. Although Becker suggests that many buildings were standing in the Great Plaza before the Late Classic period, the Tikal Report (Coe 1990, 58788) describes only two early structures (Str. 5Dsub 20 and 5Dsub 25) other than those found under Temples I and II and the North Acropolis. The early configuration of the Great Plaza is unclear. Our limited understanding of plaza histories is partly due to archaeologists traditional focus on buildings rather than open spaces. We need to develop research specifically designed for the study of plaza configurations, their histories, and meanings. Caches and burials in plazas and surrounding buildings, discussed by Aoyama, also provide significant clues to the performances that took place there (Lucero 2003). The study of these features should include the analysis not only of their contents but also of the spatial contexts in which performances took place. Ciudad and Adnez, Chinchilla, Clancy, Grube, and Tokovinine comment on temporal and regional variations in plaza configurations and uses. Although my objective was not to provide an exhaustive review of numerous sites, I certainly recognize the importance of this issue. Our goal, however, should not be to pursue the statistical significance that Tokovinine notes; we need to consider specific historical contexts. For this reason I think that overly restrictive a priori definitions of plazas are counterproductive. Ciudad and Adnez present an important example of plazas at Machaquil that appear to indicate certain forms of performance shaped by a specific dynastic history. I also appreciate Grubes comment on the unique patterns in the Ro Bec and western Puuc regions, which may reflect distinctive political organizations. These data at the same time highlight the challenge of studying past performances through the archaeological record. They require not only data on physical configurations of plazas and population estimates but also detailed data on sequences of plaza modification and local political histories. At most sites, our grasp of such information is far from ideal. We should not, however, be too pessimistic. The key is the explicit focus on peoples actions embedded in material and historical settings and their relations with thoughts, values, and power. It provides an avenue of effective inquiry into past societies and suggests that archaeologists should be able to make significant contributions to the study of performance.

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As Murdock said, It has long been recognized that the form, size, and fixity of human settlements bear a definite relationship to the modes of exploiting the natural environment to provide subsistence (1969, 129; see also Osborn 1977; Yesner 1980). The dietary importance of marine resources is one of the factors most frequently cited as conditioning spatial organization among huntergatherers. In this paper we consider the variability in home ranges in relation to the intensity of consumption of these foods by evaluating two independent bodies of data: worldwide ethnographic information and Patagonian archaeological data. The archaeological research lines that we emphasize are the spatial distribution of transported marine elements such as molluscs and sea mammal bones, the distribution of human remains with stable isotopic values that indicate the consumption of marine resources, and archaeofaunal analyses of coastal and interior sites. An archaeological case study from Late Holocene southern Patagonia forms the basis of our discussion. Interregional comparisons centered on both archaeological and ethnographic data have great potential as long as we critically consider the differences in temporal scale they involve. Theoretical schemes devised for the comprehension of the archaeological record must be structured on a temporal scale coherent with that of the archaeological deposits. This entails a loss of precision in the reconstruction of specific behaviours and directs attention to longterm processes (Binford 1983). The perspective that guides our work can be defined as exploratory in the sense that it seeks to generate new questions on the basis of information which is not intended to be exhaustive.

Ethnographic Information
One of the first extensive treatments of the relationship between subsistence activities and spatial organization is Murdocks (1969). Regarding mobility, he employs four categories: nomadism, seminomadism, semisedentarism, and sedentarism. He suggests that fishing societies move less than other huntergatherer societies but more than most agricultural groups. Indeed, he suggests that fishing is the only relatively simple mode of subsistence that appears conducive to a settled way of life, and it is highly probable that prior to the first appearance of agriculture about 10,000 years ago the only sedentary populations for many millennia were groups of fishermen (p. 144). Later, on the basis of the concepts of logistical and residential mobility proposed by Binford (1983), Kelly (1983, 1995) developed a set of variables that is a useful measure of mobility in ethnographic societies. These variables are the number of residential moves made per year by a group, the average distance involved in those movements, the total distance covered each year, the total area occupied over the course of the

year, and the average length of a logistical foray. Regarding the analysis of homerange dimensions, the number of residential moves per year and the distances annually travelled might be used as defensible proxies whereas the area annually occupied is a direct measure. These concepts have already been applied to the evaluation of ethnographic data (Kelly 1995; Binford 2001), and the following statement is representative of the general view that emerges from these analyses: Dependence on aquatic resources is almost always associated with low residential mobility (Kelly 1995, 125). Using some of the variables proposed by Kelly and adding a number of new ones, Binford (2001) has recently published the most comprehensive treatment of huntergatherer mobility so far. He presents information on the number of residential movements per year, total distance annually travelled, amplitude of annually occupied areas, and intensity of consumption of different classes of resources (employing an aquatic class that does not discriminate between marine and freshwater species). His thorough analysis of ethnographic mobility and territoriality is closely related to the concept of intensification, which is defined as a change in the biotic community exploited for subsistence. Intensification is caused by a diminution in the size of the area available for use. He remarks that groups with an emphasis on the consumption of terrestrial animals show the least degree of intensification, therefore occupying the largest annual areas (pp. 20910, 276). The exploitation of aquatic and vegetal resources appears to be associated with a reduction in mobility and population increase (p. 226). These propositions follow some of the generalizations made by Yesner (1980), who suggests that coastal huntergatherers are characterized by centralplace foraging, which implies at least semisedentary communities (p. 730) and that the limited ethnographic record of maritime huntergatherers indicates that these dense, semisedentary populations exhibit a significantly greater degree of territoriality than do other huntingandgathering peoples (p. 731). The outstanding image arising from the pool of existing variation is one of relatively settled groups with home ranges that are small in comparison with those of other huntergatherer societies. The emergent pattern is one of a negative correlation between intensity of consumption of marine resources and homerange size. While it is not our intention to provide an exhaustive account of the pertinent ethnographic data, we suggest that the propositions here reviewed are broadly representative of the predominant position on this subject from an ethnographic standpoint and constitute a good starting point for an examination of the evidence from specific archaeological cases. We are aware, however, that the variability behind this proposition is considerable and that characterizing this range of variability will be important for understanding some of the causal conditions for it. In particular, the historical context of contact with European populations in which most of this ethnographic information was gathered may have conditioned natives decisions in terms of location and permanence of settlements.

Archaeological Lines of Analysis

The methodological tools used in the comparison of the ethnographically observed and the archaeological record included the following:

Stable isotope analysis of human remains. Stable isotopes of carbon ( ) and nitrogen ( ) have been used to evaluate the intensity of human consumption of different classes of resources (see, e.g., Richards and Hedges 1999). The analysis of the spatial distribution of human samples showing different diets can be used as a biogeographic indicator of the intensity with which particular environments were occupied. The distances from the coast at which samples showing regular use of marine resources are found can be used as a proxy for individual homerange sizes. Spatial distribution of marine items. Artifacts and ecofacts made of shellfish, sea mammal bones, etc., may inform us about the home ranges of populations that were in contact with coastal environments, although their distribution could also be the result of trade or exchange activities. Theanalysis of falloff curves of the marine items can be used to evaluate these alternative situations. Archaeofaunal remains. Faunistic information on subsistence can be compared with isotopic data from the same localities. These lines of evidence present important differences in terms of units of analysis and chronological resolution. Therefore, this comparison has the potential to point to differences in the data related to behavioural and formational dimensions (Bailey and Milner 2002; Barberena and Borrero2005). The unit related to stable isotope values is the individual, whereas faunal assemblages are usually related to a group or populational level. In any case, the appropriate level for archaeological inferences is populational. There are also temporal differences implied in the formation of the signatures that we interpret in terms of subsistence, since isotopic values imprinted on bone relate to the last years of life of the individual (Ambrose 1993) whereas faunal assemblages, which may range temporally from an isolated occupation event to averaged records of thousands of years, must be considered on a casebycase basis. The spatial distribution of artefacts manufactured on rock types with known coastal provenience is another way to evaluate human circulation and home ranges (Politis, Bonomo, and Prates 2003). This line has begun to be evaluated (Franco 2005) but will not be developed here.

Southern Patagonia: An Archaeological Case

Southern Patagonia is a large territory located approximately between 46 and 53 S (fig. 1). The Andean mountain chain dominates the topography on the west coast of the continent, whereas dissected plateaux that give way to low steppe plains make up the eastern part (McCulloch et al. 1997). During the Middle Holocene, ca. 6,000 years BP, the sea began to stabilize near its present level (Isla 1989). Given that the spatial distribution of different archaeological items in relation to marine coastlines is central to our discussions, it is important to point out that both coastlines had reached their present level at ca. 5,000 years BP (Isla 1989). Since the archaeological remains studied here belong to the Late Holocene, it can be inferred that their past position in relation to the coastline has not changed significantly, an inference substantiated by geomorphological studies (Uribe and Zamora 1981; Gonzlez Bonorino et al. 1999). These and other geomorphological differences, together with variations in wind intensity, determined the establishment of distinctive patterns of oceanic upwelling. These, in turn, have conditioned variable sea productivity. In comparison with the Atlantic side, the rugged and abrupt Pacific coastal morphology sustains a

much higher biomass. As underlined by Yesner, the eastern coasts of the Americas have relatively restricted upwelling zones (Yesner 1996, 70), which is the case in our study area. Furthermore, the closest estuary is located some 70 km north, at the mouth of the Gallegos River. Thus the marine environment cannot be characterized as highly productive. Terrestrial resources are not plentiful either, but they are not below the productivity levels of the Patagonian interior (fig. 2). Figure 1. Southern Patagonia: Spatial locations of human samples with stable isotope values (see table 2). Sample 10 includes four samples from Lago Sofia 1; sample 31 includes 16 samples from Lago Salitroso (not included in table 2) (Goi, Barrientos, and Cassiodoro 2000 2002 ; Tessone et al. 2005). Figure 2. Location of interior sites with marine remains (see table 4). Samples 16 includes sample 17. The shorelines of the Strait of Magellan also have considerable biological productivity (Magazzu, Panella, and Decembini 1996; Gibbons, Gazita, and Venegas 2000) and predictable drinking water. The atmospheric circulation patterns (characterized by westerly storm tracks) in conjunction with the powerful influence of the Andean topographic wall have determined very different climatic regimes with characteristic vegetational communities. In order to interpret the isotopic results in palaeodietary terms, it is important to bear in mind that all the vegetal species represent the C3 photosynthetic pathway. The terrestrial animal species present in the western forests and the eastern steppes include guanacos, rodents, cervids, pumas, foxes, and birds, including the flightless choique. Marine species include birds (cormorant, penguin), mammals (southern whales, southern sea lions), and several species of mussels. Guanacos (Lama guanicoe) are abundant almost everywhere in the interior and, since they are territorial (Franklin 1982), easy to predict in time and space. In contrast, marine resources are available only at certain places and times (Schiavini, Crespo, and Szapkievich 2004; Castro et al. 2005). Not surprisingly, guanaco is the main prey for Patagonian huntergatherers, but the coast is attractive because it offers access to fats and oils. We consider first the isotopic information on human remains and the regional isotopic ecology that is used for palaeodietary reconstruction. Most of these samples are dated by 14C within the past 1,000 radiocarbon years or were found associated with late contexts (all radiocarbon dates are uncalibrated). Detailed isotopic information on both human values and isotopic ecology will be published elsewhere (Borrero et al. n.d.; see also Borrero et al. 2001; Barberena 2002). Here we present only the general trends that emerge from that information. Given the size of the region we are dealing with, our isotopic sample is small. This underscores the exploratory nature of the suggestions we make. We are now building a stronger isotopic study, including further cases from different regions and chronological periods (Borrero et al. n.d.; Tykot et al. n.d.). When interpreted on the basis of an adequate knowledge of the local isotopic ecology, isotopic values on human remains can be used to reconstruct the intensity of their consumption. The database available for southern Patagonia (Borrero et al. 2001, n.d.) constitutes a solid baseline for the estimation of the importance of marine resources in human diets. Given that there is a wide spacing between the mean values for terrestrial and marine resources (table 1) and that there are no plants showing the C4 photosynthetic pathway, the discrimination between those resources is relatively straightforward (Richards and Hedges 1999; Tomczak 2003). In all cases, the inferred proportion of marine resources in human diets is considered as a minimum estimate (see Hedges 2004). Table 1. Average Isotopic Values for Terrestrial and Marine Resources We have proposed three dietary classes for human samples: terrestrial, mixed (in which the marine resources account for 20% to 70% of the total protein consumed), and marine (Barberena 2002). Although there is only a difference of degree between these classes, the predominance of any one of them in a given region can be used as a proxy for the intensity of human use of marine resources.1 By measuring the minimum distances from the coast at which the samples assigned to the different dietary classes appear, we can gain an understanding of the relation between marine resources in human subsistence and homerange dimensions (table 2). This methodological tool can be productively used to discuss the level and extent to which human mobility integrated coastal and interior environments, although it is not sensitive to mobility along the coast. Alternative lines of evidence should be used in considering this possibility. After briefly reviewing the patterns seen in southern Patagonia, we will focus on the Atlantic coast and the northern side of the Strait of Magellan, the area for which we have the most information. Table 2. Human Samples with Isotopic Data The descriptive statistics for the isotopic values of human remains are shown in table 3. Table 3. Descriptive Statistics of Isotopic Values of Human Remains All of the six samples coming from the Pacific indicate marinebased subsistence and come from sites right on the coast or even on adjacent islands; the maximum recorded distance from the nearest coast is a few hundred meters. The Strait of Magellan and Atlantic coastlines show a more variable situation, marked by the predominance of mixed diets. Intensity of consumption of marine resources ranges from 0 to 80% of the diet. There is also greater variability in the spatial distribution of samples. The maximum distance from the nearest coast at which a sample showing consumption of marine resources appears is 90 km. This sample comes from the Fortaleza site and indicates that at least 20% of the diet was provided by marine resources. A similar situation occurs at a distance of 56 km at the Palermo Aike site, also on the Atlantic coast (Cruz et al.2000). Beyond 90 km all the samples show terrestrial diets ( ; see Fernndez and Panarello 1994; Goi, Barrientos, and Cassiodoro20002002; Barberena 2002; Tessone et al. 2005). This distributional evidence might be used to support the ethnographic generalizations previously mentioned, since the samples that show the more intense dependence on marine resources systematically appear right on the coast or on adjacent islands, basically on the Pacific side. At the same time, some of the mixed diet samples appear farther from the coast. This pattern has already been discussed (Barberena 2002) and will

not be treated further here. From now on we will focus on the samples from the Atlantic and Strait of Magellan coastlines, since we believe that they provide a good opportunity to learn about human mobility. Marine resources appear to be less intensively consumed in the central and eastern areas of southern Patagonia, but they clearly played an important dietary role. With the exception of sample 2, which shows a completely terrestrial diet, the other five samples show use of marine resources ranging from 25% to 60% of the total protein consumed with a mean of 40%. Finally, and contrary to classic ethnohistoric accounts that depicted human populations routinely focused on the consumption of guanaco (e.g., Casamiquela 1991), we suggest that marine resources figured prominently in human subsistence. Accordingly, some human activities were carried out in coastal environments. In spatial terms, therefore, a relatively continuous use of a coastal strip of land of variable width is suggested by the isotopic data. The isotopic information can be compared with the spatial distribution of anthropically transported marine elements. This independent line of evidence may help to evaluate the extent to which correlations between marine and interior environments existed in the past. The available information on the presence of marine items at archaeological sites in the interior of southeastern Patagonia is presented in table 4. We chose a minimum distance of 10 km from the present coastline as the lower limit for the inclusion of samples. In order to draw behavioural inferences, it is necessary to take into account taphonomic processes or agents that may deposit these remains (Borrero 2005). All the cases included in table 4have contextual information that suggests their anthropic deposition. Therefore, they constitute evidence of human interaction with coastal environments. Table 4. Marine Archaeological Items Located in the Interior There are very few interior sites containing marine elements, and most of the cases consist of isolated finds. Overall, the density of these remains is very low, pointing to the infrequent and discontinuous nature of human transport or exchange of these items. The only exception so far is the Orejas de Burro Cave, located 17 km from the nearest coast on the Pali Aike Volcanic Field (5202 S, 6934 W), where a small shell midden was found. At this site, currently under excavation, there is clear evidence of repeated transport and, we believe, consumption of marine shellfish. The record contrasts with the relatively continuous use of coastal environments suggested by isotopic information for the northern coast of the Strait of Magellan. Given that relatively intense consumption of marine resources has been isotopically recorded for human samples, the ethnographic pattern would suggest the prevalence of relatively small home ranges and a tendency toward a linear costal settlement pattern. This would in turn imply higher densities of artefactual and faunal remains on the coast, producing a record like that seen in southern Tierra del Fuego (Orquera and Piana 1999) and at certain places on the islands eastern coast (e.g., Punta Mara [Borrero 1985]). Investigating the extent to which these predictions are met by the southern Patagonian archaeological record is a way of gaining a deeper understanding of the signature that processes of this kind may have had in the long term. Archaeofaunal evidence will be used in two ways: as an independent line of analysis that can be correlated with isotopic data to produce a more complex subsistence reconstruction and as the basis for a qualitative measure of the intensity of human use of particular environments and their resources. Given that the existence of marineoriented huntergatherer groups has been associated with a predominantly linear axis in the structure of settlement patterns (Osborn 1977; Yesner 1980), the presence of a coastal strip of land with higher densities of remains in relation to interior areas is expected. Given the availability of appropriate samples, we limit the archaeofaunal discussion of the coastal record to the southeastern section of the area. Detailed archaeofaunal studies are available for sites on the northern coast of the Strait of Magellan (Massone1979, 1984) and for the southern Atlantic coast (Borrero and Franco 2000; LHeureux and Franco 2002). On the basis of radiocarbon dating and geomorphological location, we selected the faunal samples belonging to the Late Holocene. Faunistic evidence from sites in Cabo Vrgenes shows the predominance of marine mammals and birdsOtaria flavescens, Phalacrocorax atriceps, and Spheniscus magellanicus (Borrero and Franco 2000; LHeureux and Franco 2002). With the exception of Punta Dungeness 2 (Massone 1979), which presents a high frequency of guanaco remains, marine resources provide, on average, 80% of the bones recovered. The local scarcity of terrestrial mammal remains, basically guanaco, is remarkable given that they predominate at most sites in interior Patagonia. Since isotopic analyses show a systematic consumption of both marine and terrestrial resources, this is an interesting difference. Patterns of subsistence and mobility, sampling strategies, and taphonomic biases are the most likely causes behind this difference.2 Taphonomic investigations carried out at Cabo Vrgenes and at the regional level suggest that differential preservation of terrestrial versus marine animal bones does not explain this pattern (LHeureux and Borrero 2002; Borrero 2005). At the same time, since the regional sampling strategies covered all the geomorphic units homogeneously, sampling bias cannot be postulated as the main explanation. We suggest that this evidence supports the existence of home ranges that connected the Atlantic coast with interior areas at variable distances,3 where terrestrial mammals may have been more regularly consumed and their remains deposited. On the basis of the ethnographic patterns, the dietary importance of marine resources should be associated with reduced mobility. In turn, this should condition heterogeneity in the archaeological record in terms of density of remains. A coastal strip of land of variable width should present a comparatively higher density of remains. Nevertheless, low density is one of the main properties of the archaeological record of the southern Atlantic coast (tables 5 and 6 [Barberena, LHeureux, and Borrero 2005]). A more intense human use of coastal areas in comparison with the adjacent interior cannot be suggested (Massone 1979; Borrero and Franco 2000; LHeureux and Franco 2002). The northern coast of the central Strait of Magellan presents some differences in comparison with the Atlantic, since some of the sites are more spatially continuous (Massone1979, 1984). Nevertheless, the sites are generally shallow, implying localized and perhaps redundant but not intensive occupation. Table 5. Faunal Information from Coastal Sites Table 6. Radiocarbon Chronology for Coastal Sites

To explain this, we suggest that population nodes were located in the interior because guanacos, the most predictable resource yearround, were more abundant there (table 7). As isotopic information suggests, marine resources were systematically consumed and had an important role in subsistence, but they were part of a predominantly terrestrial subsistence base. Work that is being conducted in the interior, particularly in the Pali Aike Volcanic Field, is beginning to show traces of intensive and localized human occupation (Martin, Barberena, and Borrero 2005). Table 7. Faunal Information from Sites in the Interior A comparison of the coastal and interior archaeological records of different parts of the world may inform us about the modal geographic location of residential or demographic nodes of people consuming marine resources. In order to avoid misinterpretations, the obtrusiveness of some coastal resourcese.g., shellfishhas to be taken into account (Bailey 1999; Stein, Deo, and Phillips 2003). Furthermore, the linear structure of the coastal record may amplify the impression of intensive occupation. Taking these factors into account, some coastal places on other continents still appear as nodes in a distributional sense. In relation to the Late Holocene record of the Australian continent, for example, Mulvaney and Kamminga (1999, 275) suggests that along coasts where marine and littoral resources were accessible and abundant, human population density was commonly three to four times greater than it was immediately inland. The cases of the Cape York Peninsula in the northeast Cape Otway in southern Victoria, Arnhem Land, and southeastern Queensland can be mentioned (Lourandos 1997; Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999; Keen 2003). What is interesting here is that the importance of marine resources may have been variable for subsistence, but nevertheless coastal locations were more attractive for human occupation than the interior. In southeastern Queensland both the ethnographic and archaeological records show marineoriented societies. Moreover, populations of the coast and islands appear to have been relatively sedentary and local communities had constructed huts strategically at intervals of between five to six km along the coast (Lourandos 1997, 57). This evidence notwithstanding, the available isotopic information from the Broadbeach cemetery shows that terrestrial resources were as important as marine resources (Hobson and Collier 1984; Collier and Hobson1987). These isotopic results are similar to those for southern Patagonia, the contrast being that the demographic nodes are located on the coast during the Late Holocene (ca. the past 2,000 years [Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999, 281]). Southern Africa presents similar situations. On the Tsitsikama coast, at places like Klasies River and Cape Saint Francis, and on the southern Cape, contacts with the interior were important, with exploitation of marine resources starting after 6,000 years BP, with increasingly smaller, more stationary home ranges (Mitchell 2002a, 175; Sealy and Pfeiffer 2000) and culminating in yearround residence on the coast. Settlement data strongly suggest that western Cape populations were oriented toward the coast (Mitchell 2002a, 182; 2002b). Stable isotope data indicate the existence of many [burials] from the coast with signatures implying close on 100 per cent marine diets, as well as a few inland burials with strongly terrestrial signatures (Mitchell 2002a, 182). Therefore, for regions of Australia and Southern Africa there is substantial evidence pointing to coastal areas as demographic nodes from which use of the larger surrounding landscape was articulated. We suggest that the southern Patagonian case shows a different picture, in which, notwithstanding the relevance of marine remains for subsistence, organizational nodes were located in the interior. Although these nodes do not suggest the existence of less mobile systems, this may help to explain the absence of traces of intense coastal occupation and mobility reduction in the light of isotopic and faunistic data that show the importance of marine resources in subsistence. 2006 by The WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved

Reports The Issues in New Zealand Katharine Cox, Nancy G. Tayles, and Hallie R. Buckley Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology, Otago School of Medical Sciences, University of Otago, P.O. Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand (katharine.cox@anatomy.otago.ac.nz). 25 V 06 The identification of the race of human remains by forensic anthropologists in New Zealand provides Maori with a service that is both helpful and contentious. In estimating race anthropologists acknowledge the Maori view that physical remains are important because they retain the spirit of the deceased after death. Doing so is ethically paradoxical because the estimation of race implies that races exist, a concept that has been questioned and rejected by most anthropologists. Despite this, to meet the needs of Maori and to treat human remains with the respect that is traditionally accorded them, forensic anthropologists have a responsibility to attempt to estimate race. In the identification of human remains, forensic anthropologists are expected to include an estimation of race along with sex, age at death, and stature. The estimation of race is controversial, as one school of thought is that the continued identification of people along racial lines perpetuates the myth of human races, misleading the public and encouraging racist notions (Goodman 1997, 25). It has even been suggested that forensic anthropologists who continue to identify individuals by race, while meaning no harm in doing so, may be nothing more than kind racists simply by helping to legitimize the race concept (Goodman 1997, 25). From this it might be concluded that forensic anthropologists have an ethical obligation to decline to identify the race of physical remains, thereby educating the general public about the myth of the existence of races (Goodman 1997). This, however, is just one side to this issue in the forensic context. Another is provided by the universal reality that people identify and describe one another not only by gender, age, and size but also by appearance, with the latter very frequently expressed in terms of a perception of a racial stereotype. Equally important in this situation are the feelings and reactions of indigenous groups in a community to death and human physical remains. In New Zealand, the determination of whether physical remains may be Maori (indigenous New Zealander) is important because Maori have strong spiritual links with their ancestors. This paper shows how the wishes and rights of Maori and the consequent need to identify whether remains are those of Maori lead to the need to identify them by race,

We do not imply that discrete races exist. Ancestry is a biological fact but has no universal use in forensics. We use the term race because, whether we like it or not, that is the one that is used in the forensic context. New Zealand has a small population and low crime rates, with few forensic cases requiring identification of human remains. At the same time, it has an extensive, actively eroding coastline, and since prehistoric occupation tended to be coastal, prehistoric burials are frequently exposed by erosion. These skeletal remains are taken to forensic anthropologists for identification. There is therefore a real need for the development of a set of reliable standards for identifying whether remains are or may be Maori. Contemporary New Zealand presents a paradox to forensic anthropologists, the police, and the public. Given the persistent public belief in races, the identification of race aids police in the identification of missing individuals. Given the scientific recognition that races do not exist, forensic anthropologists seem dutybound to decline to estimate race. However, because skeletal remains retain spiritual importance for Maori despite having been separated from them, in some cases, for hundreds of years, forensic anthropologists who refuse to identify race could be seen to be placing their own beliefs over those of an indigenous group. Identification of the race and therefore the ancestry of human physical remains by forensic anthropologists could be seen as an ethical responsibility. One in seven (526,281/3.7 million) people in New Zealand declared themselves to be of Maori ethnicity in the 2001 census (Statistics New Zealand 2001). Maori have, however, been extremely active in advocating indigenous rights in relation to their history and prehistory, both in New Zealand and worldwide (Bulmer 1991). As a result there have been significant changes in recent years in the way that anthropologists and archaeologists (along with healthcare professionals) function in New Zealand in relation to the body, body parts, and physical remains. Maori are trying to get these groups to provide culturally sensitive services that acknowledge their different worldview (Te Puni Kokiri 1999a, b). This goal is supported by service providers through the adoption of codes protecting the right of Maori to have their beliefs treated with respect (Te Puni Kokiri1999a, 28). In relation to prehistoric human burials, this has been achieved through the adoption of a code of ethics that acknowledges the special importance of human remains to Maori (New Zealand Archaeological Association 1993, 183). One Maori iwi (tribe), Ngai Tahu, has developed a policy in relation to human physical remains (Ngai Tahu 1993). This is an important development because the tribes rohe (territory) covers the whole of the South Island. The changes in policy that have occurred in these fields illustrate important developments in crosscultural understanding in New Zealand. Every Maori belongs to one or more iwi, which descend from the first migrants to arrive in New Zealand. Iwi are subdivided into hapu (extended families descended from a common ancestor) and further again into whanau (extended families). Maori trace their whakapapa (genealogy) through generations back to the founding settlers. The importance to Maori of whakapapa has been explained as follows (Barlow 1994, 174): It is through genealogy that kinship and economic ties are cemented and that the mana or power of a chief is inherited. Whakapapa is one of the most prized forms of knowledge and great efforts are made to preserve it. All the people in a community are expected to know who their immediate ancestors are, and to pass this information on to their children so that they too may develop pride and sense of belonging through understanding the roots of their heritage. Human remains are thought of as the physical manifestation of whakapapa (Ngai Tahu 1993, 3), and it is common for families to be buried together in an ancestral graveyard so that the ties of whakapapa remain intact. This means that physical remains retain a connection to the person and his or her tribe long after death. The concept of whakapapa has added importance when viewed from a forensic anthropological perspective, as tracing ones whakapapa can provide knowledge that is unavailable to those who rely on Western science. As outlined recently by Elliott and Brodwin 2002, 1970), genetic ancestry testing can tell only part of the story of the genetic history of an individual because it will reveal only two genetic lines on a family tree in which branches double with each preceding generation: Y genetic testing will connect a man to his father but not his mother, and it will connect him to only one of his four grandparents: his paternal grandfather. In the same way, it will connect him to one of his eight great grandparents and one of his 16 great great grandparents. Continue back in this manner for 14 generations and the man will still be connected to only one ancestor in that generation. The test will not connect him to any of the other 16,383 ancestors in that generation to whom he is also related in equal measure. While no one is suggesting that modern Maori could trace these 16,383 ancestors either, it appears that science cannot trace ancestry more accurately than oral history. Ability to trace ones whakapapa has been validated by the New Zealand government as an acceptable way of showing Maori ancestry, as is apparent in recent economic and symbolic settlements between iwi and the Crown for grievances relating to the colonization of New Zealand. These are claims of iwi and hapu, and individuals have to demonstrate their right to participate in the claims through whakapapa. Thus Maori have shown that their spiritual beliefs have validity that is accepted in New Zealand courts.

Key Concepts of Maori Culture

The events surrounding death and dying are extremely important and sacred parts of Maori life, steeped as they are in concepts of tapu (sanctity) and kawa (ceremony) (Te Puni Kokiri 1999b, 13). Our understanding of these concepts and the rites surrounding the tangi (funeral) is of necessity taken from works written by both Maori and nonMaori. Because Maori culture is primarily orally based, many Maori feel that the written word is not an appropriate means of transmitting ideas such as these, and it has been argued that it is almost impossible for nonMaori to understand them (Salmond 1983; see also Tan 2001). We stress, therefore, that this is not by any means intended to be a definitive explanation of these concepts.

Tapu is fundamental to the tikanga (customary practices) that Maori carry out in a wide range of activities (Te Puni Kokiri 1999a, 9) because it acts as a means of social control (Tauroa and Tauroa 1987, 127). Tapu is inherent in everything and may be ascribed to people, places (for example,urupa [graveyards]), or parts of the body (for example, the head is more tapu than the feet). A person who handles physical remains or enters a graveyard becomes tapu, but this may be overcome by cleansing the hands and sprinkling water over the head. Most important in this context is that physical remains, whether skeletonized or not, are tapu and are treated with great respect. The importance of physical remains to Maori is further illustrated by the feeling of connection that Maori have with their ancestors (tupuna) over hundreds or even thousands of years. The Maori concept of time differs significantly from that of the Western world. While Westerners see time as stretching from the past behind to the future in front, Maori see the past in front of them and the future, which cannot be known, as stretching behind them. This subtle difference means that Maori regard the past as intertwined with the present and feel a spiritual link to their ancestors which is often seriously misunderstood by those from Western cultures (Jones and Harris 1998, 256). It is an intertwining of these aspects of their culture and belief that leads to the importance of human physical remains to Maori and forms the basis of their distress with their collection and storage by museums and study by physical anthropologists. The connection to whakapapa is fundamental and is undoubtedly strengthened by the different view of time, and the concept of tapu then cements and enforces the sacred nature of remains. Given the belief that an ancestors spirit resides in physical remains and that the connection to the ancestor is not lessened by time, it is understandable that Maori feel strongly about the need for identification of the ancestry of physical remains. Knowing that physical remains are Maori means that they must be treated with the traditional respect. This reverence for physical remains may be responsible for the paucity of Maori physical anthropologists being trained in New Zealand universities. The importance for Maori of the body, physical remains, and correct adherence to protocol is apparent in the funeral, which has been called the heartbeat of Maori culture (King 2001, 55). When someone of Maori ancestry dies, the tupapaku (body) should be taken home to lie in state on an ancestral marae (traditional meeting place) and be buried (Metge 1995, 111), Generally, the tangi will take place from the individuals ancestralmarae, but when a person has ties with two marae through marriage there may be heated debate about where he or she is to be buried. While the conflict may be genuine, it is also seen as a sign of respect for the dead (Salmond 1983, 185). At the tangi, families and friends gather from all over the country. It is customary for the deceased to be accompanied at all times until the burial, and people may gather to remove the remains from the undertakers premises (Tauroa and Tauroa 1987, 111).The remains are often placed in an open casket to lie in state for an indefinite period, and during this time people will talk directly to the body (Tauroa and Tauroa 1987, 112, 114; Dansey 1992, 116). This is believed to facilitate the process of mourning (Te Puni Kokiri 1999a, 20). Legislation in New Zealand prevents the destruction of known urupa, but any burial place is tapu for Maori, whether or not its location is known. Ngai Tahu have indicated that they wish remains to be left buried where they are if possible or relocated to an appropriate burial place if circumstances preclude this (Ngai Tahu 1993, 3). Problems arise when remains are disturbed accidentally in a location that was not known to be a burial area. In a recent investigation of skeletal remains found in a reserve in Hawkes Bay, in the eastern North Island, for example, the individuals were buried in a Christian manner in wooden coffins with European artefacts and not in the vicinity of a known urupa (Pishief 2002, 59). The removal of the individuals from the area was of some urgency, as the sand dune in which they were buried was eroding extremely quickly. Despite their having clearly been buried in the historic period, it was decided after analysis of cranial, dental, and postcranial features that these were the remains of six individuals of Polynesian/Maori descent. On the basis of tooth wear it was estimated that they dated from the early contact period, 184060 (MatisooSmith n.d., cited in Pishief 2002, 60). Although the local iwi had no prior knowledge of the burials and documentary evidence suggests that the interments were not of their ancestors, it took responsibility for the remains and had them reburied in a Maori cemetery as though they were related (Pishief 2002, 6165). Examples such as this illustrate the importance of developing standards by which remains may be identified as Maori/Polynesian, as reliance on artefactual evidence might have led to the conclusion that the burials were of Europeans. While this article is focused on recent finds, the activities of European scientists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in large collections of Maori physical remains in both New Zealand and foreign museums. The continued possession of human remains by museums has been described as the most contentious issue in the relationship between Maori and museums (Gillies and ORegan 1994, 30) and as abhorrent and culturally insensitive in the extreme (Ngai Tahu 1993, 3). As a result of the policy developed by Ngai Tahu on the treatment and use of human remains, museums are beginning to accept and support the Maori worldview. For example, the Southland Museum has developed its own policy (Gillies and O'Regan 1994) recognizing that the possession of and scientific research on physical remains should be under the control of the localiwi, that no further Maori remains will be accessioned to the collection, and that the reference collection will be checked to eliminate remains no longer required for research (the criteria for this judgment are not spelled out). Both the museum policy and Article 3.1 of the Ngai Tahu policy recognize that understanding the lives of their ancestors will require study of Maori remains and that researchers must be accountable to a community group (Gillies and ORegan 1994, 31). Further, Ngai Tahu whanui recognises the need of the New Zealand Police to use koiwi tangata [human remains] as reference collections for the purposes of forensic inquiry (Ngai Tahu 1993, 7). Besides the identification of the origin of prehistoric and historic burials, there is clearly a need for identification of remains in recent forensic cases because of its particular importance to Maori in addition to any needs of the police where foul play is involved. A set of standards by which forensic anthropologists may identify Maori remains could even remove the need to maintain reference collections. Publications written for both Maori and service providers in the health sector about the removal and retention of body parts emphasize the sanctity of the Maori body and in particular the importance of the time surrounding death for the spiritual wellbeing of Maori (Te Puni Kokiri 1999a, b). They emphasize the importance of sensitivity on the part of health care professionals to Maori customary practices (Te Puni Kokiri 1999b). Similarly, at a conference on the use of human genetic material, Maori expressed the unanimous decision that tissue and other body material taken from Maori remains belongs to Maori and that culturally unsafe scientific intrusion precludes acknowledgement of the Maori world view, alienating Maori in yet another process of colonisation (Baird et al. 1995, 3).

Changing the Way Forensic Anthropologists Do Business

Central to all the above examples is a desire that Maori spiritual practices be recognized as having the same validity as the mores of Western science. Above all, respect for Maori wishes is considered pivotal to the development of a working relationship between scientists and indigenous groups. Forensic anthropologists have a positive role to play in this relationship, which has grown strained in recent years. Internationally, there has been prolonged debate, for example, about the ownership and control of physical remains used for research (see, e.g., Meighan 1990; Goldstein and Kintigh 1990; Trask 1993; Gough 1996; Rose, Green, and Green 1996; Jones and Harris 1998; Zimmerman 1999; Goldstein 2000; Hubert and Fforde 2002). The race concept has been convincingly rejected by many researchers (Marks 1996; Goodman 1997; Lieberman 2001), but it has also been convincingly argued that there is a pragmatic need for the continued use of the concept by forensic anthropologists (Sauer 1992; Kennedy 1995). It is true that there is a paradox inherent in the continued use of race in the medicolegal setting while other groups reject the concept as biologically invalid (Kennedy 1995, 798; White and Folkens 2000, 374). While anthropologists and biologists alike have largely (but not universally; see, e.g., Mayr 2002; Crow 2002) rejected the term and concept of race, the continued belief of the wider (Western) public is that races are real and that forensic anthropologists, like anyone else, can assign individuals into one of a few racial categories (Kennedy 1995, 797). The belief in races persists because people assume that the visible differences between people mark natural divisions between them (Kennedy 1995, 798). It is therefore probable that a missingperson report given to the police will include a description of the person that includes the racial or ancestral group to which he or she belongs. In searching for a missing person, the police will search for someone who fits the public perception of Polynesian, Caucasian, or Asian, for example. Sauer (1992, 109) maintains that in ascribing race to a skeleton the biological anthropologist is actually translating information about biological traits to a culturally constructed labelling system that was likely to have been applied to a missing person. Therefore, because forensic anthropologists communicate with law enforcement personnel and the general public (St. Hoyme and Iscan 1989, 56), they must present information that is considered important to these groups, including not only an estimation of sex, age, and stature but also of race. It is through the prediction of race or ancestry that the likelihood of correct identification is improved. As long as society classifies itself along racial lines and forensic anthropologists have to present the results of their work within this framework, the identification of ancestry will remain an important part of forensic anthropology (Gill 1998, 294; Sauer 1992, 107; 1998, 5). The significant point is that the communication is with the public, not with biological scientists. The general public believes that the race concept is a biological fact rather than a cultural construct (Sauer 1998, 6). To argue against the existence of races is to argue against the perception of the characteristics that allow discrimination among individuals. However scientifically flawed this reasoning, it is inappropriate to enter into the debate with police and family during a forensic investigation. Forensic anthropologists need to help reeducate the public, but this ignores two important facts: at present people identify by race or ancestry not only other people but alsothemselves. An indigenous group such as Maori has the right to identify itself as distinctive not only culturally but also biologically and genetically and to expect that its beliefs will be acknowledged and respected by others. The refusal to identify race ignores the fact that in some cases it is a reflection of the spiritual importance of human skeletal remains to a group. By refusing to estimate race or ancestry forensic anthropologists (who in modern New Zealand will be nonMaori) are imposing their own belief system on Maori. In a situation where an indigenous group wants to know if physical remains are indigenous or not, can the forensic anthropologist ethically refuse to estimate ancestry? Connection with the spiritual or ancestral is not always easily appreciated by Western scholarship (Butts 1990). Many articles have been written on the changing relationship between physical anthropologists and indigenous groups (see, e.g., Goldstein and Kintigh 1990). While some dismiss indigenous groups as nonscholars (Meighan 1992), others choose to respect their worldview (Goldstein and Kintigh 1990; Goldstein 2000; Durie2004). While nonindigenous scholars or forensic anthropologists may not implicitly understand this worldview, they must recognize that there is more than one way of understanding, coping with, and reacting to death and the importance of physical remains. The forensic anthropologist who accepts and acknowledges the importance of physical remains to indigenous groups has an ethical obligation to determine the ancestry of the remains of a skeleton. If this cannot be accomplished from artefactual evidence, then human remains are the primary source. Aspects of forensic anthropology that have not been politicized as has the race concept are under constant revision, scrutiny, and correction. Forensic anthropologists do not avoid estimating sex and age because it cannot be done with 100% certainty or refuse to revise the standards for such estimations because past research had errors. Without revision and final acceptance or abandonment of racial estimation, the decision to estimate race will remain a personal one.

Conclusions
Maori, along with other Polynesians, are recognized as having distinctive physical characteristics (Houghton 1996). Houghton describes these as being homogeneous across the whole of Polynesia, making these people, ironically, an example of a race. Although Houghtons argument is not universally accepted, this relative homogeneity within Polynesians is not only morphological but also biochemical and physiological (Serjeantson1989; Houghton 1996; Penny, MurrayMcIntosh, and Harrison 2002). This homogeneity creates a further complication in forensic cases because of New Zealands significant population of Polynesians from other Pacific Islands, which raises the issue of how to differentiate Maori skeletal remains from those of other Polynesians. This is not a problem with prehistoric remains; once the skeletal material is identified as prehistoric, the age of the remains and the context in which they were found make the identification as Maori certain. In modern forensic cases it remains a conundrum. A further complication is the issue of morphological versus cultural Maoriness. The most individualized element of the body, both in living individuals and in physical remains (whether skeletonized or not), is the head. Heads are sufficiently distinctive in Polynesians to offer the possibility of distinguishing a Maori skeleton from a nonMaori one. This is straightforward with prehistoric remains, but in modern forensic cases many who are identified both by themselves and others culturally as Maori will have some nonMaori ancestry. These individuals may not have the distinctive Maori physical characteristics that would allow their ancestral identification from skeletal morphology. Determining biological (and therefore cultural) ancestry may, depending on the circumstances, require DNA testing. Furthermore, the skull contains many

elements that are sensitive to taphonomic processes and, in the forensic situation, violent crime. Obviously, we need a set of standards that will allow identification from either the skull or, if damaged, other skeletal elements. There are currently no standards to aid in the identification of individuals as either Maori, European, or any other of the races that exist in modern New Zealand, either from the skull or from other skeletal elements. Thus a second paradox arises: to create such a set of standards, prolonged study of Maori remains is required, and this, as we have indicated, is distressing to Maori. However, one iwi has recognized that a set of standards for forensic identification would be an important resource for the New Zealand police to possess. The determination of the ancestry of an individual in modern New Zealand may be controversial and difficult, but through analysis of human remains it can be attempted. The forensic anthropologist clearly has an ethical and moral responsibility to make the attempt, because to do otherwise ignores the wishes of Maori to be recognized as culturally distinct. We recognize that what we are describing here is the orthodox Maori position and that many Maori may not subscribe to it. There is surely, however, a universal wish, regardless of spirituality, to have remains identified. (This situation is not, of course, unique to New Zealand.) Estimating race does not perpetuate racism any more than estimating sex perpetuates sexism. Racism exists because of the flawed reasoning that the biological variation so visible in humans translates into differences in abilities or behaviour. It is thisconcept that anthropologists must challenge. The reality in New Zealand is that many Maori and other Polynesians have distinctive characteristics that would permit identification of their ancestry from their skeletal remains. There is no justification for forensic anthropologists refusing to attempt the identification of ancestry because of the abuse of human biological variation in the form of cultural racism. While not all Maori can be identified as such from their remains, because of the homogeneity of Maori and the distinctive morphology of many of them New Zealand may provide an opportunity for forensic anthropologists to meet the spiritual needs of the indigenous people without compromising their scientific principles.

Acknowledgments
Funding was provided by the Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology, University of Otago. We are grateful to Gareth Jones and Helen Leach for comments on drafts.

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Baird, Deborah, Lloyd Geering, Kay SavilleSmith, Linda Thompson, and Tose Tuhipa. 1995. Whose genes are they anyway? Report of the HRC conference on human genetic information. Wellington: Health Research Council of New Zealand. Barlow, Cleve. 1994. Tikanga Whakaaro: Key concepts in Maori culture. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Archaeology and indigenous rights: The World Archaeological Congresses code of ethics from an archaeologists point of view Bulmer, Susan. Archaeology in New Zealand Vol. 34 (1991) (pp. 54-58)

Nga Tukemata: Nga Taonga o Ngati Kahungunu (The awakening: The treasures of Ngati Kahungunu). In The politics of the past, ed Butts, David. P. Gathercole and D. Lowenthal (1990) (pp. 107-117)

Unequal by nature: A geneticist's perspective on human differences Crow, James. Daedalus Vol. 131 (2002) (pp. 81-88)

A view of death. In Te Ao Hurihuri: Aspects of Maoritanga, ed Dansey, Harry. M. King (1992) (pp. 106-116)

Understanding health and illness: Research at the interface between science and indigenous knowledge Durie, Mason. International Epidemiological Association Vol. 33 (2004) (pp. 138-143)

Identity and genetic ancestry tracing Elliott, Carl , and Paul Brodwin. British Medical Journal Vol. 325 (2002) (pp. 1469-1471)

Craniofacial criteria in the skeletal attribution of race. In Forensic osteology, ed Gill, George. K. Reichs (1998) (pp. 293-315)

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The potential for future relationships between archaeologists and Native Americans. In Ethics in American archaeology, 2nd edition, ed Goldstein, Lynne. M. Lynott and A. Wylie (2000) (pp. 118-125)

Ethics and the reburial controversy Goldstein, Lynne , and Keith Kintigh. American Antiquity Vol. 55 (1990) (pp. 585-591)

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The new official religion and the retreat of Western science Gough, Austin. Archaeology in New Zealand Vol. 39 (1996) (pp. 131-138)

Houghton, Philip. 1996. People of the great ocean: Aspects of human biology of the early Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Introduction: The reburial issue in the twenty-first century. In The dead and their possessions: Repatriation in principle, policy, and practice, ed. C. Fforde, J. Hubert, and P Hubert, Jane , and Cressida Fforde. Turnbull (2002) (pp. 1-17)

Archaeological human remains: Scientific, cultural, and ethical considerations Jones, D. Gareth , and Robyn Harris. Current Anthropology Vol. 39 (1998) (pp. 253-264)

But Professor, why teach race identification if races dont exist Kennedy, Kenneth. Journal of Forensic Sciences Vol. 40 (1995) (pp. 797-800)

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Science and race Marks, Jon. American Behavioral Scientist Vol. 40 (1996) (pp. 123-133)

The biology of race and the concept of equality Mayr, Ernst. Daedalus Vol. 131 (2002) (pp. 89-94)

Some scholars views on repatriation Meighan, Clement. American Antiquity Vol. 57 (1992) (pp. 704-710)

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2006 by The WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved

Books Reviewed work(s): Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. By Alexei Yurchak. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Harriet Murav Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 3080 Foreign Language Building, MC170, 707 S. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A. (hlmurav@uiuc.edu). 4 V 06 Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is an important book, and not only for scholars whose research concerns the former Soviet Union or its republics. Yurchak offers a new paradigm for the analysis of Soviet culture from the death of Stalin to the collapse in 1991. His work goes beyond political and economic interpretation to focus on language, discourse, and forms of knowledge integral to the lives people actually lead in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, and more impressively, it goes beyond the binarisms that have long dominated scholarly and journalistic writing on this question, including, for example, freedom and oppression, public and private, the state and the people. Using a sophisticated theoretical framework, it explains both how the Soviet system kept on reproducing itself and, paradoxically, how it kept on producing new opportunities for its own destruction. This is a model that could well be applied beyond the boundaries of the former Soviet Union. Yurchaks theoretical framework has several key points of departure, including Claude Lefort, John Austin, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Lefort showed that in order to function successfully, ideology must claim the status of truth, and that in order to do so it requires a master outside the system who allegedly possesses the objective knowledge of that truth. As Yurchak argues, in the Soviet context, the figure who played the role of master, to whom all ideological questions could be referred, was Stalin, and it was Stalins death that made possible both the continuation of the system and its undermining. To show how this dual process worked, Yurchak relies on an expanded notion of John Austins two functions of language. In the constative function, statements say something about reality, but in the performative, statements do something (e.g., I now pronounce you husband and wife). The performative function is of particular interest to Yurchak because of its open ended and unpredictable capacity to produce new meanings and new relations between people. When Stalin died there was no one to turn to provide socalled objective knowledge of reality, and authoritative language (Bakhtins term) became increasingly rigidified to the point where individual words lost their meaning and prefabricated blocks of language became the norm in every official communication. This shift toward what Yurchak calls hypernormalization meant that the constative function of authoritative language decreased (that is, its perceived capacity to relate to reality declined) but its performative function increased, giving rise to new formations of group identity, new modes of knowledge, new relations, and new interactions. Yurchak traces these other forms of community, knowledge, discourse, and artistic production in specific contexts, beginning with those most closely associated with the Soviet system and concluding with those least associated with it. Chapter 3 focuses on the Soviet youth organization, or Komsomol. After showing how Komsomol leaders learned the block language of authoritative discourse, he explores the means by which they made their work actually meaningful and, in so doing, used language to perform new roles and forms of social relatedness amongst themselves and with their clients, Soviet young people. A key term found in this community was svoi, which means our type of people, normal people. In contrast to other scholars who define svoi in terms of the opposition between the state and the people, Yurchak convincingly argues that svoi meant the kind of people who shared the same tolerant attitude toward the government without aspiring to join the Central Committee and who saw the Komsomol as a potentially meaningful site for social, cultural, and other activities. These Komsomol

leaders carried out a deterritorialized (i.e., transformed) version of Soviet life not controlled by the top tier of the system but one which nonetheless was made possible by the system itself. Yurchaks combination of indigenous language and current critical terms is one of the most successful aspects of his study, since it precludes the complaint voiced by some scholars that Western critical theory does not apply to Russia. The critical apparatus in Everything Was Forever is in key instances native to the informants. Chapter 4, Living Vnye: Deterritorialized Milieus, discusses the concept of being within and without (vnye) or beside, a state of extralocatedness. This term appears in Bakhtins early work as vnyenakhodimost, somewhat inaccurately translated as outside. While he is right to criticize this translation, Yurchak does not take full advantage of the excellent commentary in the 1990translation of Bakhtins essay Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, which offers the alternatives I have given above. This demarcation of a space beside was used by Yurchaks informants to describe literary clubs, archeological circles, cafes such as the wellknown Saigon in St. Petersburg, and other forms of socialityincluding conversation itself which enabled their participants to find themselves elsewhere, not oriented to Soviet life as such. For example, people who lived vnye eagerly sought jobs in boiler rooms to have time to pursue interests in such fields as medieval history, law, and rock music. These other milieus, both real and imaginary, were, according to Yurchak, not oppositional or resistant to the Soviet regime but rather prime instantiations of the flourishing of the Soviet system. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 address forms of cultural production oriented elsewhere, encompassing fashion and rock music, as well as more extreme versions of what can be called performance art (the Mitki). The ambiguity of official Soviet judgments about bad cosmopolitanism versus good internationalism opened up considerable space for what Yurchak calls the imaginary West in late Soviet culture. This was a version of the West created on Soviet soil, including, for example, Western jeans, shortwave radio, and homemade phonograph records from old X rays on which rock music could be enjoyedrequired extensive networks of knowledge, distribution, and the creation of new technology. Yurchaks discussion of a 1985 list of banned Western rock groups, including, for example, Black Sabbath, which was blacklisted for violence and religious obscurantism, typifies his approach (pp. 21415). The governments attempt to restrict rock music by circulating this list among Komsomol leaders also created the possibility of expanding the list of what was acceptable and created a space for debate and discussion that Yurchak traces concretely in the correspondence between two Komsomol activists. The performance art activities of the Mitki, the fascination with dead bodies (the necrorealists) and the corrosive irony of their aesthetic, with its parodies of socialist realism, were, of course, at a far greater degree of extralocality (living vnye) from the Soviet system than the Komsomol activists who debated the meaning of various rock groups, but both, according to Yurchak, were located on the same spectrum and both were actively deterritorializing Soviet life into new forms of expression. One can see the influence of Bakhtin on the work as a whole: quotation, as in the citation of the block form of authoritative discourse on the part of the Komsomol leaders, which he discusses in chapter 2, and parody, which Yurchak discusses in chapter 7, are both forms of what Bakhtin calls doublevoiced discourse, speech that is oriented towards and relies on anothers words. The late Soviet system, in Yurchaks view, looks less like the Kremlinocentric stereotype of a single dictatorial voice or a closed circle of voices endlessly repeating the same words (about the triumph of communism) against an apocalyptic backdrop of the ultimate confrontation with the real, not the imaginary West. Instead, it looks more like a novel, with multiple, shifting centers and voices (authors and heroes at one and the same time) that expand and reinvent each others words in a framework that could last forever, as the title suggests. The work is much more about the production, productivity, and creativity of late Soviet culture than it is about its collapse. The discussion of the events and shifts precipitating the collapse and the nature of postSoviet entrepreneurship comes at the very end of the study and is far less well developed than the work as a whole. The postSoviet cultural phenomenon that carries on some of the features of what Yurchak describes may very well be found on the current Russian Internet and not among postSoviet entrepreneurs as he suggests. Scholars interested in the geopolitical, economic, and ethnonational causes for the decline of the Soviet Union should look elsewhere. Everything Was Forever provides fresh paradigms that pack a hefty explanatory punch both with regard to its immediate subject matter and beyond. Its publication means that discussions of Soviet life, culture, and literature that rely on the old, rigid binarisms are going to seem instantly dated. For anyone interested in Soviet culture broadly defined, including literature, language, discourse, music, and art, as well as those interested in the interface between the study of anthropology, ideology, subjectivity, and governmentality both in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, this study is a mustread.

Reference Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. 1990. Author and hero in aesthetic activity. In Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liaponov; trans. Vadim Liaponov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Permission to reprint items in this section may be obtained only from their authors.

Books Reviewed work(s): The Cultural Defense. By Alison Dundes Renteln. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Justin B. Richland Department of Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine, 2361 Social Ecology, Irvine, CA 926977080, U.S.A. (jbrich@uci.edu). 17 V 06

Are anthropologists shocked by culture anymore? Were we ever? Certainly our Urmyths of ethnographic fieldwork are organized around the intellectual and empirical insights gained when we induce in ourselves carefully calculated moments of culture shock. But in anthropologys current theoretical climate, where notions of hybridity, deconstruction, globalization, and other modes of transgression carry the analytic day, have we so foregrounded the ambiguities between us and them that nothing about culture seems so different as to surprise anthropologists any more? Or perhaps today we find the jolt of difference in those locales where cultural practices seem familiar on their surface but on more sustained inquiry reveal their incommensurability. This was my experience in reading The Cultural Defense, which investigates how the U.S. legal system adjudicates cases in which ethnic minorities raise culture as a defense to criminal and civil charges brought against them. The book offers a detailed compendium of the kinds of cases in which cultural defenses are proffered and how they are accommodated, and in bringing these cases together in one volume it performs a service. Given that there is no legal doctrine or statutory provision concerning the cultural defense, Renteln rightly points out that it is a tremendous challenge simply to identify the cases in which a cultural issue was central (p. 7). By my count, Rentelns bibliography lists over 350 case opinions from across state, federal, and administrative jurisdictions of U.S. law. In what constitutes the bulk of the book, she groups these cases and their analyses under seven subjectmatter headings (homicide, children, drugs, animals, marriage, attire, the dead). In so doing, she is able to recognize and address the fact that the use of the cultural defense in homicide (e.g., socalled honor killings) and other highly charged cases (female genital mutilation, child rearing, animal sacrifice, and others) has come to set the terms of political debate with regard to a phenomenon that is in much wider and often more mundane legal circulation. Thus she describes certain sensational cases, such as People v. Kimura (1985), in which a Japanese woman was charged with murder after she killed her children while attempting ayakoshinju (parentchild suicide) in response to her husbands infidelity. Kimura relied on a mix of psychological and cultural defense arguments to secure a plea bargain for a reduced conviction of manslaughter with a year in prison. But this and other cases of honor killing, questions of child endangerment and abuse, etc., are treated in kind with less dramatic issues such as questions of attire. In Cheema v. Thompson (1994, 1995), for example, three Sikh boys were prevented from going to school when the school district passed a no weapons policy that was applied to the kirpans (ceremonial daggers) they carried in their turbans. The district court judge upheld the school policy but was later reversed by the Ninth Circuit, which found a compromise by recognizing the fundamental right of the Sikh children to wear religious paraphernalia to school but also arguing that the school district could reasonably expect the kirpans to be blunted or otherwise made inaccessible. What Renteln concludes in this more expansive view of the cultural defense is that, given the lack of explicit legal doctrine on its use, the admission of cultural evidence and cultural defense arguments is subject to arbitrary judicial determinations of relevance and most often excluded as irrelevant when argued by ethnic minorities. The publics legal consciousness of cultural defenses as operating predominantly in sensational cases contributes to the more particularized reticence that U.S. judges express when such defenses are raised at trial. Moreover, judges expectations that immigrants should be assimilating to the dominant U.S. culture mix with fears that admitting cultural evidence opens the door to hardtoauthenticate factual claims about minority cultures. Add to these fears the fact that, under U.S. law, juries are asked to evaluate supposed criminal activity against objective standards of reasonableness, and the acceptance of cultural defenses is, for many judges, tantamount to making legal exceptions for specific groups in ways that violate equalprotection requirements. In response, Renteln argues that a doctrine of cultural defense should be articulated in U.S. law, one which assumes the admissibility of cultural arguments as relevant to most legal proceedings against ethnic minorities but which recognizes their role largely for mitigating rather than eliminating their criminal responsibility. Only in cases of cultural practices that result in irreparable harm (e.g., honor killings, female genital mutilation, ritual scarification), she suggests, should ethnic minorities expect to be entirely inadmissible as defenses. While I find The Cultural Defense valuable in the breadth of case law that it gathers, in other areas I am less sanguine. As both a lawyer and an anthropologist whose work focuses on the ways in which legal actors adjudicate discourses of culture in courtroom proceedings, I was keenly interested in seeing how Renteln would address the sticky theoretical questions raised by treating culture as a source and subject of legal action. Investigating the ways in which legal actors orient themselves to questions of culture in their everyday praxis both requires and affords anthropologists an opportunity to consider some of their most basic assumptions about culture and the ways our discipline theorizes them. Renteln pursues none of these more theoretical issues. Indeed, it was more in reading the apparatus she employs for defining culture than in the case materials that I experienced any kind of culture shock. For her definition she relies on almost anachronistic notions of enculturation, assimilation, and acculturation, while simultaneously dismissing more recent deconstructivist views of cultural practices as ignoring reality (p. 1). Her rather unreflexive notion of culture is, on its face, jarring in both its familiarity and its foreignness. Anthropologists just dont talk about culture in this way any more. Indeed, Rentelns argument for limiting her study to cultural defenses employed by ethnic minorities rather than other U.S. minorities (e.g. gays and lesbians, women, urban and rural poor)that because the subcultural defense has more to do with class differences than with cultural differences (p. 208)seems brutish in its overgeneralization and reliance on false dichotomies. Statements of this kind made it initially hard for me to retain the value of the rest of this otherwise significant contribution. Renteln is not an anthropologist, and she is not writing for anthropologists. Though the concept of culture in The Cultural Defense seems at first glance to be familiar, it is not. Renteln is not asking about the role of the cultural defense in order to pursue new insights into what culture is. Her project is instead one that comes from within her own disciplines of law and political science, and that effort involves exploring the role that culture plays in law as it relates to the takenforgranted justice goals of legal systems in U.S. liberal democracy and then making policy recommendations to improve the legal treatment of the cultural defense in light of those goals. When the project is understood this way, anthropologists will at once see the disciplinary limits of their own concept of culture but perhaps also the value of the concept as figured by Renteln. As with any moment of culture shock, the one that will be experienced by anthropologists reading The Cultural Defense should be acknowledged and then, upon further reflection, mined for the intellectual and empirical insights it stands to offer us.

Books Reviewed work(s): Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture. By Carel van Schaik. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. Shuichi Matsumura McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3ER, UK. 5 V 06 It has long been believed that culture is one of the critical characters which divide human from other animals, but decades of animal research have revealed that cultural differences maintained by social transmission are found in many nonhuman primates and in other animals. In particular, it is now welldocumented that wild chimpanzees show cultural variations between local communities in many behavioural traits such as tool use, grooming, and courtship signals (Whiten et al 1999). In captivity, orangutans seem as intelligent as chimpanzees. They are excellent tool users and specialists in escaping from a cage. In contrast to the hyperactive chimpanzees, they are curious and patient enough to open a door if they happen to have substitutes for the key or a bar. However, few toolusing behaviours had been reported from wild orangutan populations. Carel van Schaik and colleagues have made a breakthrough discovery in this area. Van Schaik has been studying wild orangutans at Ketambe, North Sumatra, Indonesia, since 1976, but the story of this book begins with the discovery in 1993 of a population in a coastal swamp forest at Suaq Balimbing with one of the highest population densities of orangutans in the world. Their density is due in part to the inaccessibility of the swamp forest to humans and in part to the abundance of food in the forest. These orangutans are also more social (i.e., interact with other orangutans more frequently) than others; the stereotypical images of orangutans as solitary philosophers in the forest do not apply well to them. Finally, they are excellent tool users. Why do the orangutans at Suaq differ so much from others? In his attempt to answer this question van Schaik provides an excellent introduction to the latest primate socioecological theories. Socioecology deals with the relationship between social characteristics of species or populations and ecological conditions such as the distribution and abundance of food or predators. In plain words, van Schaik shows how the availability of food might affect the orangutans social characteristics, why orangutans grow and breed in slow motion, and how infanticide risk influences females' social behaviour. On the basis of his findings van Schaik advances a new hypothesis about the evolution of intelligence and emergence of cultures (van Schaik and Pradhan 2003). He argues that the combination of individual learning (innovation) and social learning capabilities can be achieved through natural selection and that a tolerant or egalitarian nature towards group members, or sociability, plays an important role in the evolution of a high level of intelligence. His social learning hypothesis for the evolution of intelligence is different from the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis (Byrne and Whiten 1988; Whiten and Byrne 1997), which regards the requirements of everyday social life as the most important factor: intelligence has evolved to cope with cooperative and/or competitive relationships with group members. These two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive and appear to operate at different stages of evolution. Finally, van Schaik attempts to draw some inferences about human nature from his findings. It is inevitable at this stage that this final chapter contains considerable speculation, but now we have good working hypotheses and can move on to a better understanding. In 199798, the most severe El Nio events of the century caused largescale forest fires in Indonesia. Several million hectares of potential habitat for orangutans disappeared. At the same time, economic crisis hit the Southeast Asian countries, and Indonesia suffered the most severe damage from it. This caused political instability in both central and local governments and conflict among local peoples. Illegal logging, further forest fires, and poaching did immeasurable damage to wildlife. Van Schaiks narrative never becomes emotional and accuses no one, but his deep sorrow is palpable. He is concerned about local extinctions and a possible loss of cultural diversity among orangutans. I strongly hope that this unique creature and its cultures will survive these difficult years.

References Cited

Byrne, Richard W., and Andrew Whiten. 1988. Machiavellian intelligence: Social expertise and the evolution of intellect in monkeys, apes, and humans. Oxford: Clarendon Press. A model for tool-use traditions in primates: Implications for the evolution of culture and cognitions Carel P., and Gauri R. Pradhan. Journal of Human Evolution Vol. 44 (2003) (pp. 645-664)

Whiten, Andrew, and Richard W. Byrne. 1997. Machiavellian intelligence 2: Extensions and evaluations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cultures in chimpanzess Jane Goodall, William C. McGrew, Toshisada Nishida, Vernon Reynolds, Yukimaru Sugiyama, Caroline E. G. Tutin, Richard W. Wrangham, and Christophe Boesch. Nature Vol. 399 (1999) (pp. 682-685)

Books Reviewed work(s): Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination. Edited by Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. 317 pp. Jens Kreinath Institute for Religious Studies, University of Heidelberg, Akademiestrasse 48, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany (jens.kreinath@urz.uni heidelberg.de). 17 V 06 In assembling 14 essays written by scholars of religion, Holy Tears aims to venture into a new field of research: the comparative study of weeping in the religious imagination. The editors goal is twofold: (1) to examine in social and historical context the role played by tears, weeping, and lamentation in the life of religion and (2) to chart theoretical grounds for approaching the category of weeping in the comparative and historical study of religion (p. 4). They summarize the thematic issues of this volume as follows: Weeping: Spontaneous vs. Scripted; Private vs. Public, Ritual Weeping as Social or Existential Protest, The Genders of Weeping, Absence and Presence, Weeping as Generation of Water, Weeping vs. Crying, and The Weeping of God. Although some of these issues are addressed in the subsequent essays, others, such as the weeping of god and whether weeping can be considered a coded language serving communicative purposes, receive little or no attention. In addition, the thematic issues are not conceptually related, and, as a consequence, the articles seem to follow an arbitrary order. This would be excusable if the aim of the volume were not so ambitious, but abstract schematics are not suitable for establishing or organizing a field of research in an analytically responsible or heuristically useful way. The loose order and unexplained selection of essays indicate a conviction that historically grounded, comparatively motivated, and theologically inspired essays will all fit well within a diffuse field of religious studies. In The Poetics and Politics of Ritualized Weeping in Early and Medieval Japan (pp. 2551), Gary L. Ebersole uses historical analyses of three textual examples to raise questions about the use of the comparative method in the study of tears. He takes ritualized weeping as a culturally choreographed act, stylized, not spontaneous, expression of emotion (p. 25) and argues that we must pay attention to both the weeper and the intended audience for these affective displays (p. 26) In Productive Tears: Weeping Speech, Water, and the Underworld in the Mexica Tradition (pp. 5266), Kay A. Read shows how tears can be seen as generating a carefully formed, nonverbal, but nevertheless noisy language that was intended to both express emotion and create or recreate morally good order on a number of cosmic and human levels (p. 59). In Why Do Your Eyes Not Run Like a River? Ritual Tears in Ancient and Modern Greek Funerary Traditions (pp. 6782), Gay O. Lynch addresses the contribution of tears to the cultivation and dissemination of aesthetic form and creativity. In Sealing the Book with Tears: Divine Weeping on Mount Nebo and in the Warsaw Ghetto (pp. 8393), Nehemia Polen introduces the motive of the weeping god and shows how this motive was seen shortly before the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. In The Gops Tears (pp. 94111), John S. Hawley postulates that religious tears are enacted, communicated, gendered, and frequently about death and concludes from the Hindu poetic material under consideration that tears are first and foremost markers of transcendence (p. 110). In Hsantsangs Encounter with the Buddha: A Cloud of Philosophy in a Drop of Tears (pp. 11231), Malcolm D. Eckel argues that it was the landscape that shaped the pilgrims understanding of Buddha and that his tears are to be seen as the deepest emotional response of a bodhisattvas encounter with the vision of the reality represented by the Buddha (p. 127). In Weeping in Classical Sufism (pp. 13244), William C. Chittick argues that the Qurn conceives weeping as the natural response to the human awareness of distance from the Creator (p. 138). Amy Bard, in No Power of Speech Remains: Tears and Transformation in South Asian Majlis Poetry (pp. 14564) explores ritual weeping as a transformative process in a Sh` mourning assembly and addresses the question how crying can concretize feelings and align multiple perspectives and complex emotional claims (p. 145) In Ekun Iyawo: Bridal Tears in Marriage Rites of Passage among the Oyo Yoruba of Nigeria (pp. 16577), Jakob K. Olupona and Sola Ajibade argue that performance of the ekun iyawo ritual provides the bride an avenue for expressing her deep emotions at the time of marriage (p. 165) and at the same time enables the playing out of the cultural and social issues surrounding her new role and reflection on her preparation for it (p. 173). In A Love for All Seasons: Weeping in Jewish Sources (pp. 178200), Herbert W. Basser explores the tension between tears as a ritual expression of remorse and loss that is culturally regulated and tears as personal grief (p. 180). In Pray with Tears and Your Request Will Find a Hearing: On the Iconology of the Magdalenes Tears (pp. 20128), Diane ApostolosCappadona argues that an analysis of the iconography of Mary Magdalene as weeper through the religious gaze may bring one closer to the believed reality of earlier Christian understandings. In Tears and Screaming: Weeping in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe (pp. 22941), Santha Bhattacharji looks at the medieval Western tradition of compassionate religious weeping through the figure of a fifteenthcentury English mystic and argues that it is, paradoxically, not the absence of the physical Christ through his human death that provokes her mourning and weeping but fleeting glimpses of his presence, mediated to her by other physical means: crucifixes, peoples, animals, events (p. 237). An Obscure Matter: The Mystery of

Tears in Orthodox Spirituality (pp. 24254) by Kallistos Ware is about the mystery of weeping in Eastern Christian sources and functions as an introduction to the concluding essay, Howl, Weep and Moan, and Bring It Back to God: Holy Tears in Eastern Christianity (pp. 255 73), by Kimberley C. Patton. Patton mainly compares the Orthodox Christian with the Jewish religious tradition and argues that tears are far less a symbol of a condition than they are an efficacious vehicle for the farreaching change of that condition. What they mean in the religious imagination is in the end far less important what they do (p. 264). The question of the weeping of God, occasioned by the events of September 11, 2001, seems to be of ultimate concern for the editors (pp. 1921). Their religious commitment becomes most explicit in their interview with Betsee Parker, entitled Send Thou Me: Gods Weeping and the Sanctification of Ground Zero (pp. 27499). The volume closes with a poem by Kimberley C. Patton, Epilogue: Tikkun haolam (pp. 3012). In the end, the scholarly attempt to set up a new field of research is eclipsed by the display of deeprooted religious commitments. Therefore, one is tempted to conceive at least some of the more theologically committed contributions to this volume as documenting the contemporary religious imagination. After September 11, it is not just a matter of religious imagination to believe that one canmerely on the basis of the theological construct of Gods weepingdraw another (heavily valueladen) demarcation line between Judaism and (Orthodox) Christianity, on the one side, and Islam, on the other, a line that this volume has put on the agenda again. This, however, does not do justice to the contributions of this volume that are committed to serious scholarship and critical scrutiny but, intentionally or not, seem to support this overall view. In any case, the theological twists within this volume subvert its serious attempt to establish the religious practice and imagination of weeping as a field of research on solid scholarly ground and allow further critique and refinement.

Coverage: 1959-2011 (Vols. 1-52) Fixed Wall: Vol. 40 Iss. 4 ISSN: 00113204 E-ISSN: 15375382

Journal Description
Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.

Coverage: 1959-2011 (Vols. 1-52) Fixed Wall: Vol. 40 Iss. 4 ISSN: 00113204 E-ISSN: 15375382

Journal Description
Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics. Readability An Arc90 Laboratory Experiment

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