‘Stoan Branches Unner a Stoan Sky’

Sarah Jackson, Joshua Wright, and Linda Brown’s efforts to ‘countermap the past’ by incorporating ancient Maya perspectives into modern modes of recording and visualizing archaeological excavations are challenging and thought-provoking. Their explorations raise a difficult but fundamental question for any practising archaeologist: How can we use available archaeological methods – from artefact typologies to spatial analyses – and current archaeological evidence – a shifting category in its own right (Wylie 2008) – to generate more expansive and inclusive archaeological interpretations than those currently available? That is, can archaeology be done reflexively, aware of its own biases and blindspots, and recursively, using its own practices to strengthen itself (against, for example, Haber 2012, Gnecco and Hernández 2008, for whom the discipline’s basic subject matter andmethod are inherently colonial)? The general use of Maya property qualifiers in the recording system of Say Kah’s excavation database and the spatial comparisons of their distribution using GIS prompt a reconsideration of themost basic elements of archaeological research. This is both stimulating and necessary. As the authors note, they hope that their work is ‘useful to archaeologists working in other times and places’ and that their ideas ‘are translatable to settings that may not have the same types of ancient textual and iconographic evidence’. Here I draw attention to epistemological and philosophical questions raised by this paper, namely the difficulties of translation (particularly via script rather than speaker) and the challenges of approaching systems of classification that are historically and culturally contingent.