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Scholars -especially historians, archaeologists, and social anthropologists, the authors of these chapters -are strange animals. Historians spend lots of time toiling in dusty archives, and archaeologists excavate in the ground to discover clues to what happened in the past. Sociocultural anthropologists often live among peoples whose languages, food, houses, clothes, and beliefs are very different from our own. Wouldn't it be easier and much more lucrative to become a doctor or lawyer?Although we are not psychologists, it seems that one reason why we dedicate ourselves to figuring out how societies got along in the past, or how such a rich diversity of peoples continues to exist today despite the homogenizing forces of globalization, is that we like to tell stories. We also like puzzles, how one finds pieces of information (data) and from the pieces constructs a picture (in prose) that will convince other puzzle players that our story has "hit the nail on the head." This is an ancient and distinctly human desire, to tell a story and to tell it well. As scholars, we also want our stories to make a larger point about how our fellow humans lived in the past and about the variety of human experiences in reference to environmental interaction. We believe optimistically that an examination of the lives of others may lead to better understanding of how we might live today.But along the way we face the fact that our stories are not easy to construct and even harder to narrate to a public that is interested in what we do. Information collected may even (and often does)

For archaeologists, stratification is an important character of archaeological deposits. Through it, layering is discerned and cultural and evolutionary interpretations are proposed. Archaeologists possess much implicit knowledge about the social practices that produce stratigraphic sequence and the specific, contextualized manner in which layers were built upon or cut into previous deposits. The aim of this paper is to gather together and formalize this knowledge so as to codify conceptual ‘tools to think by’ when recording and interpreting stratigraphy. Relevant literature is widely dispersed and here can only be sampled; authors consider stratigraphy in terms of (1) techniques of terraforming, (2) processes enacted and (3) meaning and interpretation. Techniques and processes are discussed within larger social interpretations such as memory, history-building, forgetting, renewing, cleansing and destroying. Examples are drawn from the Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük and the ancestral Maya site of K'axob in Belize, Central America, to illustrate the applicability of an approach that here is called ‘social stratigraphy’. A practice-based history of stratigraphy – the recording and interpretation of strata – within archaeology is problematized in reference to codependence with geology, the deployment of labour and centralized authority within the emergent 19th- to early 20th-century field of archaeology. The contributions of and conflicts between British and American stratigraphic schools are considered in light of a potential rapprochement. Contested issues of cultural heritage – such as preservation of selected strata – suggest that thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms is more than an academic exercise.

Mortuary interments from Formative and Early Classic deposits of the Maya site of K'axob, northern Belize, show significant variation in four aspects: burial position, number of interments within a burial facility, incidence of secondary interments, and types of associated burial accoutrements. Burial data for more than 100 individuals of both sexes and all age grades indicate that these changes over time are significant. The implications of these patterns for heightening our understanding of mortuary ritual are explored in depth. Evidence suggests that tightly wrapped seated and flexed burials represent the Late Formative onset of more protracted rituals involving prolonged displays of ancestors. Terminal Formative mortuary deposits featuring collections of curated ancestor remains indicate the “gathering of ancestors,” generally at a locale at which a monumental structure was later built. Sex and age distributions within multiple interments (both primary and secondary) reflect the familial character of burial locales, particularly at the centrally located Operation I. Burial accoutrements demonstrate the connectivity of K'axob to general cosmological armatures of Maya society. Increasingly individualized artifacts indicate the socially diacritical role of burial offerings.

The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs has enabled scholars to better understand Classic society, but many aspects of this civilization remain shrouded in mystery, particularly its economies and social structures. How did farmers, artisans, and rulers make a living in a tropical forest environment? In this study, Patricia McAnany tackles this question and presents the first comprehensive view of ancestral Maya economic practice. Bringing an archaeological approach to the topic, she demonstrates the vital role of ritual practice in indigenous ecologies, gendered labour, and the construction of colossal architecture. Examining Maya royalty as a kind of social speciation, McAnany also shows the fundamentality of social difference as well as the pervasiveness of artisan production and marketplaces in ancestral Maya societies. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book situates Maya economies within contemporary social, political, and economic theories of social practice, gender, actor-networks, inalienable goods, materiality, social difference, indigenous ecologies, and strategies of state finance.