Maya Political Science Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos

"Just when you thought you had heard every possible model of Maya political organization, along comes Rice's book. Unsatisfied by foreign models (Mediterranean city-states, African segmentary states, Aegean peer-polities, Thai galactic polities, and Bali theater states), Rice draws on ethnohistoric, epigraphic, and archaeological data to develop a native Maya model in which the rotation of political seats of power conformed to calendar cycles of 256 years. This ambitious book is sure to provoke comments from the notoriously contentious field of Maya scholars." Joyce Marcus, Elman R. Service Professor of Cultural Evolution, University of Michigan