| Summary: | Claiming a post-1960 "revolution" in Maya studies, Mayanists have seemingly relegated
the era between 1924 and 1960 (the culture-historical period in Americanist archaeology) to the
methodological past, arguing that with the advent of the "New Archaeology" and substantial
decipherment of the ancient Maya writing system, the misconceptions and misunderstandings of
pre-1960's Mayanists have now been corrected.
In reconsidering representations of the Maya produced between 1924 and 1960,1
investigate the origins and development of an objectivist model of the ancient Maya, the so-called
"Morley-Thompson" model, that still persists despite both contradictory evidence in the
archaeological record, and Mayanists'claims that the model has been abandoned. This study
investigates the consequences of the intense and intimate interactions between Mayanists and Maya
working together in the field. This interdependence of Mayanists and the Maya embodied the
canonical model's inequitable distributions of power, and mirrored another layer of hierarchic
power. I contend that Mayanists' interventions in pan-American identity formation explored the
fears and desires of a U.S. middle class whose government sought to establish, then consolidate
its economic and political hegemony in the hemisphere. I suggest that Mayanists' often ambiguous
and even paradoxical representations, ostensibly of the ancient Maya, reflected ambivalence toward
an indigenous group that appeared both extraordinarily like, and disturbingly unlike, popular
conceptions of a U.S. national "character." I argue that Maya studies, beginning in 1924,
developed a powerful trajectory based in ambiguous feelings of recognition, desire and fear of the
American indigenous Other that was processed and articulated through Mayanists' representations.
I argue, moreover, that the conditions that contributed to Mayanists' canonical claim for an
ancient Maya class hierarchy also remain in force, embedded in Mayanists' motivations for the
relationships they cultivate with the contemporary Maya when they undertake the work of
representing the ancient Maya.
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