Drawing of Stela 11

For generations, archaeologists have tried to determine just when ancient Maya civilization emerged and what that period of emergence meant to the later, fully developed Classic period (250–900). Early in this century, archaeologists did not expect to find buildings that predated the presence of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions on stone, and, perhaps as a result of their intellectual expectations, they found few clues to the rise of civilization and the formation of an ethnic and cultural identity.

Pre-Columbian studies have so far produced three different interpretive models or paradigms of the cultures that existed in ancient West Mexico before the rise of the Tarascan state in the Postclassic period. These models, which might be handily tagged “Daily Life in Marginal Villages,” “Shamanism,” and “Complex Society,” were developed successively, although the latter two models were more shifts of emphasis in research than explicit efforts to progress from a critique of an earlier model. …