Pedagogy and State: An Archaeological Inquiry into Classic Maya Educational Practice

Abstract

Education is notoriously difficult to identify archaeologically, but crucial for understanding the inner workings of any society. Strikingly, in Mesoamerican archaeology, more seems to be known about the transmission of crafting skills than about practices of statecraft. Elsewhere in the ancient world, much evidence speaks to various social and institutional contexts in which specialized knowledge of histories, literacies, civics, and sciences was generated and taught as vital to state-making projects. Yet these same contexts among the Classic Period Maya (ad 200–900) remain poorly understood and under-theorized. Pulling from comparative research alongside recent work at the site of Xultun, Guatemala, this article explores how educational systems may have worked in Classic-era Maya polities—assessing evidence for educational loci, the different forms that education might assume, and the varied curricula that likely existed across different cities and particular demographics. Through this discussion, I seek to shed some light on the actors, gendered exclusions and diverse arrangements of pedagogy in Maya society, and grant further insight into how specialized bodies of knowledge (transmitted within formal educational institutions) were built into the very fabric of the Classic Maya states of which they were part.

Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World

“…Nevertheless, the full reading, and especially the preparation of written transcripts, required extensive training and likely was limited to a select few [36,94] . Although our knowledge of schooling and training is limited, Maya schools were seemingly class stratified [95,96] with high-status Maya segregated from others and instructed by specialists who conveyed special ritual knowledge. This seems to contrast with the more open Plaza of the Glyphs, which is thought to have been a context for pedagogy and is situated in the La Ventilla residential compound at Teotihuacan.…”

Hieroglyphic Texting: Ideologies and Practices of Classic Maya Written Evidence

“…More recently, new finds related to ancient Maya pedagogical spaces have added nuance to our understanding of Maya processes of textual learning and the production of specialized knowledge practices (e.g. Rossi 2017; Rossi et al 2015). These inquiries represent a move to see texts as socially embedded, to examine positionality in terms of textual evidence and to view texts not only as inscribed, but as consumed in specific ways.…”