Investigations at Piedras Negras, Guatemala: 1998 Field Season

Between Mountains and Sea: Investigations at Piedras Negras, Guatemala
Stephen D. Houston, Héctor Escobedo, Perry Hardin, Richard Terry, David Webster, Mark Child, Charles Golden, Kitty Emery, and David Stuart

Introduction

"Old places exist on sine waves of time and space that bend in some logarithmic motion [we are] beginning to ride"     Frances Mayes

Piedras Negras is one of the largest cities in the western Maya Lowlands, with an enviable record of research but many remaining problems of interpretation: How did Piedras Negras grow and collapse, and under what conditions and economic or political inducements? How big was the city, and what was its internal makeup? What activities were performed in the city, and how were these expressed in architecture? What was its polity like? How large was the population, and how did most people make a living? In 1998 the Brigham Young/Universidad del Valle project undertook its second season of research into these questions, under the co-direction of Houston and Escobedo. The Project built on prior work by, among others, the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (e.g., Satterthwaite, 1943; see also Maler, 1901; and Proskouriakoff, 1960) and extended previous research by our own team (Houston et al., 1998). Objectives in the 1998 field season included new initiatives along with extensions of work conducted in the preceding season. This year brought confirmation of prior results and, not surprisingly, unexpected patterns that led to yet other questions.

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