From Chapter 1: Pyramid-Mountains and Plaza-Seas Maya scholars have participated in a revolution. The past four decades have seen the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic writing system and the reading of the history of one of the great civilizations of the world. This decipherment has recovered the names of kings, their families, members of their courts, and artists, artisans, and builders who served them. Growing understanding of Maya imagery has combined with increasingly subtle decipherments of the glyphs to give us new insights into court life, religious ideas, and the politics of the time, as well as the economies and social mechanisms that allowed Maya civilization to flourish. Excavations conducted by archaeologists not only have tested the "truth" of these histories in the ground, but also have sought to understand better the lifeways of the ancient Maya people, from the most exalted to the lowliest members of society.As epigraphers who have participated in this revolution, we find that our personal relationship to Maya cities has changed forever. We can't now walk among the buildings without thinking about who built them and why. We now consider them not just as objects of beauty, but also as political and religious statements aimed at an audience of nobles and commoners.

Maya buildings were instruments of state that registered Maya identity, religion, and history.How different it is to walk through a ruined city when it has become a historical place -- to "read" a building and to know who looks out from a sculpted portrait. The ruins cease to be anonymous places admired only for their beauty and mystery. Instead, they become the works of people who had names and motivations that we can understand, even from our distant points of view. And the buildings and images created by these once-living people become their voices, telling us something about the agendas that guided their decisions, the larger political framework that conditioned those agendas, and the understanding of the world that gave meaning to both.We have shared our vision of Maya cities as historical places with people who have toured with us over the years and in public lectures. When we were thinking about what to do in this book, we realized that many more people who visit Maya places and who love Maya art and archaeology might be interested in seeing their architecture through the lens of history. We wanted to show people how to "read" Maya political and religious art and architecture.

In designing this book, we deliberately picked some of the most famous buildings in Maya archaeology, partially because, famous though they are, they remain virtually anonymous to the people who visit them. Three are in Mexico, three in Guatemala, and one in Honduras, and we selected seven different kinds of buildings to serve as archetypes. These seven are a palace and family shrine center, a pyramid-temple and tomb, a plaza with stelae (upright, carved monuments), a building designed to celebrate the end of an important Maya cycle of time, a court for playing ball, a conjuring house and war monument, and, finally, a conquest period capital from the Guatemala highlands. Although there are other types of Maya buildings, these seven constitute the elements that the ancient Maya considered necessary to charge a city with religious and political meaning. Most cities had all these types of buildings, although their styles varied widely from place to place.We have used the nuances of these buildings to explore the way Maya architecture worked and how the Maya generated sacred space within their cities through the use of buildings and the symbolic information contained in them. We have designed the book to operate on multiple levels. On one level, it serves as a guided tour through the buildings.

Much of the information necessary to understand the layout and basic contents of each building can be gleaned from the maps and illustr.