Maya Kingship: Rupture and Transformation from Classic to Postclassic Times (Maya Studies)

Examining changes to the institution of divine kingship from 750 to 950 CE in the Maya lowland cities, Maya Kingship presents a new way of studying the collapse of that civilization and the transformation of political systems between the Terminal Classic and Postclassic Periods.

Leading experts in Maya studies offer insights into the breakdown of kingship regimes, as well as the gradual urban collapse and settlement relocations that followed. The volume illuminates historical factors and actions that led to the end of the institution across kingdoms and the mechanisms that enabled societies to eventually recover with new political structures. Contributors provide archaeological, iconographic, epigraphic, and ethnohistorical perspectives, exploring datasets in the spheres of warfare, social dynamics, economics, and architecture.

Unfolding with precision the chains of processes and events that occurred during the ninth and tenth centuries in the southern lowlands, and slightly later in the north, this volume displays an original and ambitious historical approach central to understanding one of the most radical political shifts to occur in the pre-Columbian Americas.

Tsubasa Okoshi is professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies and director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Japan. He is the coeditor of Recorriendo el lindero, trazando la frontera: Estudios interdisciplinarios sobre el espacio y las fronteras en las sociedades indígenas.

Arlen F. Chase, visiting professor of anthropology at Pomona College, California, is coeditor of Maya E Groups: Calendars, Astronomy, and Urbanism in the Early Lowlands.

Philippe Nondédéo is researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Laboratoire Archéologie des Amériques, France).

M. Charlotte Arnauld, emeritus research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Laboratoire Archéologie des Amériques, France), is coeditor of The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial Unit in Mesoamerican Cities.