Mesoamerican Anthropology

The programs of the Department of Anthropology are particularly strong in Mesoamerican studies, and this strength is sustained by the research and publications programs of the Middle American Research Institute http://www.tulane.edu/~mari/ and the collections of the Latin American Library http://lal.tulane.edu, one of the best research libraries in the world on Mesoamerica. Current faculty members of the Department have done or are doing research in Mesoamerica in archaeology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, epigraphy, ethnohistory, and archaeoastronomy. The anthropology curriculum reflects the Department's strength in this area.

Of particular curricular interest are anthropology courses that offer instruction in the reading of the Maya hieroglyphs of Mesoamerica's Precolumbian past and in indigenous languages spoken in Mesoamerica at the present day. Courses in Yucatec Maya and Nahuatl are offered as part of the regular curriculum of the Department. Intensive courses in Kaqchikel Language and Culture are offered each summer in Guatemala as part of a program co-sponsored by Tulane and the University of Texas.

Intramural grants for graduate students working in Mesoamerica are available from several sources. Anthropology graduate students may compete for dissertation feasibility funding from the Stone Center for Latin American Studies http://stonecenter.tulane.edu and the Anthropology Graduate Student Fund in the Department. In addition, the Department's Mesoamerican Ethnohistory Fund is a source of support for feasibility studies, travel to meetings, and supplies and equipment needed by students specializing in this field, and the Middle American Research Institute provides financial support for archaeology students and others working in Mesoamerica and Latin America. Competitive intramural awards for participating in conferences are available from the Graduate Student Support Fund of the Graduate School, the Mesoamerican Ethnohistory Fund, and from the Department of Anthropology.

The Center for Latin American Studies sponsors the Tulane Maya Symposium, which takes place at the end of October each year http://stonecenter.tulane.edu. It provides Anthropology graduate students with an opportunity to learn about recent research in Maya archaeology, epigraphy, and literature in the Yucatan peninsula and to meet the people who are responsible for those discoveries.

The faculty of Tulane's Department of Anthropology focusing on Mesoamerica work in archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.

Professor E. Wyllys Andrews is a Mesoamerican archaeologist whose fieldwork has focused on the southern and northernmost portions of the Maya area. He has worked at Seibal in Guatemala; at the site of Quelepa in eastern El Salvador, near the southern boundary of Mesoamerica; at the Classic-period site of Dzibilchaltun and at Preclassic Komchen in Yucatan, Mexico; and most recently at Copan, in Honduras. His studies include the origin, spread, and diversification of Formative settlement in eastern Mesoamerica, with emphasis on early ceramics, and relationships between the Maya and Olmec during the Middle Formative. In the 1990s he excavated an extensive residential group in the royal compound at Copan. These investigations have permitted a new and detailed understanding of the growth, spatial integration, function, and architectural variety of royal and non-royal elite residential and religious constructions at the center of a Maya city. Many Tulane students have participated in the research in Yucatan and at Copan. Professor Andrews is currently preparing the results of the Copan excavations for publication.

Professor Harvey M. Bricker, Emeritus has been a member of the Tulane faculty since 1969. He is a former Chairman of the Department of Anthropology and a former Director of the Tulane University Center for Archaeology. He received his A.B. in history from Hamilton College (1962) and his M.A. (1963) and Ph.D. (1973) in anthropology from Harvard University. His early research was in French Palaeolithic archaeology. He was associated for many years with the excavation and analysis of the Abri Pataud site, and he directed the excavation of the site of Les Tambourets. He is the co-author of Excavation of the Abri Pataud, Les Eyzies (Dordogne), the Périgordian VI (Level 3) Assemblage (1984), a co-editor of Hunting and Animal Exploitation in the Later Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of Eurasia (1993), and the editor of Le Paléolithique supérieur de l'abri Pataud (Dordogne): les fouilles de H. L. Movius Jr. (1995). Since the early 1980s he has been collaborating with Victoria R. Bricker in an ongoing program of research on Maya archaeoastronomy, a program that has resulted in numerous articles and book chapters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985 "for contributions to paleoarchaeology in France and to the archaeoastronomy of the Maya," and in 1987 he was named "Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques" by the government of France "pour services rendus à la culture française."

Professor Victoria R. Bricker, Emerita is a cultural anthropologist who has carried out research among the Maya of southern Mexico. Her first interest was in the humor of three Maya communities in highland Chiapas. She subsequently became interested in revitalization movements that have taken place in the Maya area since the Spanish Conquest, which involved her in ethnohistorical research, using both Maya and Spanish documents, and the study of oral traditions. Among the courses she has taught during her years at Tulane is Spoken Yucatecan Maya, which served as the springboard for research on the grammar of this language and the grammar of the Precolumbian Maya hieroglyphs. More recently, she and several of her students have developed a specialty in the Maya codices and Maya archaeoastronomy. This research has resulted in two edited volumes on the Madrid Codex, containing articles by her and her present and former students. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Professor Dan M. Healan is an archaeologist who has worked in Central and Western Mexico. He has conducted archaeological excavations at the site of Tula, Hidalgo, and the obsidian sources of Zinapecuaro and Ucareo, Michoacan. His research interests include complex societies, lithic technology, and quantitative analytical methods.

Professor Robert M. Hill is a cultural anthropologist, whose interests include the ethnohistory of highland Guatemala. At the most general level, his research attempts to refine our understanding of how the ancient Maya became the modern Maya, particularly in the face of so many Spanish and later, national institutions designed to change them into some other people. He uses both Spanish colonial and indigenous documents to learn about the late preconquest and colonial periods and has also followed up archaeological leads derived from the documents in the form of surveys in the Departments of El Quiche and Guatemala. He is currently collaborating with Professor Judith Maxwell on translations of the major Cakchiquel chronicles, written down in Spanish characters early in the colonial period.

Professor Judith Maxwell is a linguist who works on discourse primarily within Mayan languages, particularly those of the K'iche'an and Q'anjob'alan families. Within discourse, she is interested in canons for artistry, encoding of cultural constructs, mechanisms of coherence, coreference and tracking, knowledge and belief states, presuppositions, creating and indexing societal relationships, alignments, animacy hierarchies in relationship to syntactic and pragmatic structures, and masking. She also works with contemporary language issues, including the processes of standardization, language maintenance and shift, bilingual/multicultural education, and issues of language, gender, identity, and authenticity. In addition, she works with colonial indigenous manuscripts, primarily in Kaqchikel and Nahuatl, exploring issues in language change, borrowing, and restructuring in conditions of contact, and lexical embellishment and shift.

Recent dissertations (since 2000) by Tulane anthropology graduate students working in Mesoamerica are as follows: