Maya Cultural Heritage: How Archaeologists and Indigenous Communities Engage the Past [Hardcover]

Situated at the intersection of cultural heritage and local community, this book enlarges our understanding of the Indigenous peoples of southern M?xico and northern Central America who became detached from the ancient Maya through colonialism, government actions, and early twentieth-century anthropological and archaeological research. Through grass-roots heritage programs, local communities are reconnecting with a much valorized but distant past.

Maya Cultural Heritage explores how community programs conceived and implemented in a collaborative style are changing the relationship among, archaeological practice, the objects of archaeological study, and contemporary ethnolinguistic Mayan communities. Rather than simply describing Maya sites, McAnany concentrates on the dialogue nurtured by these participatory heritage programs, the new heritage-scapes they foster, and how the diverse Maya communities of today relate to those of the past.

A prominent scholar of the ancient Maya, McAnany, author of Living with the Ancestors, turns her attention to finding ways to improve dialogue and collaboration between archaeologists and local, often Indigenous, communities. Archaeologist McAnany has founded two cultural heritage programs at US universities whose mandate is to work with local communities to develop and test educational programs for sharing archaeological findings, heighten local appreciation for Indigenous histories, and involve local peoples in the preservation and exploration of their own cultural landscapes. The first half of this novel book describes how important archaeological sites were alienated from the control of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America, and how local populations became estranged from thló-