For several years, the Maya Working Group at SFI has brought together dozens of researchers from many disciplines to explore what it means to be Mayan, and what those insights say about modern culture. Those collaborations have yielded two books, and this November, the group will reconvene to start talking about a third. The working group will be organized by archaeologist David Freidel at Washington University in St. Louis and SFI Trustee Jerry Murdock, who co-founded Insight Partners.
Recent technologies have dramatically increased the volume of data available to the working group researchers, and others, who study resource utilization in Mesoamerica. Those tools include stable isotope analysis, which can be used to analyze diet and population patterns, and lidar, a remote sensing method that uses laser pulses to map an area — and can reveal structures hidden by dense jungle terrain.
“We’ve been able to analyze extremely precise data on resource utilization associated with Maya civilization and its collapse,” says Murdock. “There are lessons for the current world we learn by looking at the past, and how we manage resources for the planet.” The working group’s first book focused on public, ceremonial architectural structures called E Groups that help researchers gain insights into how the Mayans regarded time and the cosmos. The book was published in 2017. Murdock says the book has invigorated a multidisciplinary approach to understanding this ancient civilization. The second book, to be published later this year, will offer an incisive survey of how Mayans apprehended time. That research supports the idea that the Mayans regarded time as something alive and nurtured by human activity.
“Being Maya means first and foremost being aware that the visible world is only one dimension of the world in which we exist and function,” says Freidel. “They presume that the world they live in is as intelligent and sentient as they are.”
For the November 30–December 1 working group, about 20 researchers will convene in person at SFI to launch new conversations about how to translate the themes and concept of their research that have emerged in the last few years into the new, third volume. It will largely follow on the other two, says Freidel, and dive even deeper into what it means to be Maya and Mesoamerican.