Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes

Archaeology and Maya writing

Recent decipherments underscore the relevance of Maya writing to archaeology. Textual references assist in dating archaeological features and help identify rulers that commissioned architecture. Maya script also touches on matters as diverse as Classic Maya folk classification, the average life spans of the elite, and the attribution of provenance to looted monuments. More generally, decipherments reveal the composition and spatial organization of Classic Maya polities, now shown to be smaller than previously supposed

Cueva del Lazo: Child Sacrifice or Special Funerary Treatment? Discussion of a Late Classic Context from the Zoque Region of Western Chiapas (Mexico)

The text discusses the archaeological remains from Cueva del Lazo (Chiapas, Mexico), a ritual precinct that yielded a group of 11 Late-Terminal Classic children’s partially mummified remains. Uncommon and rich contextual information, mainly derived from the exceptional preservation of perishable materials due to the dry climate of the cave, suggests that the interments could be interpreted as postsacrificial deposits or, alternatively, as funerary contexts whose special character could be linked to the specific sociocultural identity of the buried individuals, all of whom are under six years of age. In order to discuss these possibilities, we describe the archaeological context of the cave as well as review the available archaeological and ethnohistorical information on child sacrifices in Mesoamerica, in order to sketch a meaningful framework useful for interpreting the excavated burials