Pedagogy and State: An Archaeological Inquiry into Classic Maya Educational Practice

2018 
Education is notoriously difficult to identify archaeologically, but crucial for understanding the inner workings of any society. Strikingly, in Mesoamerican archaeology, more seems to be known about the transmission of crafting skills than about practices of statecraft. Elsewhere in the ancient world, much evidence speaks to various social and institutional contexts in which specialized knowledge of histories, literacies, civics, and sciences was generated and taught as vital to state-making projects. Yet these same contexts among the Classic Period Maya (ad 200–900) remain poorly understood and under-theorized. Pulling from comparative research alongside recent work at the site of Xultun, Guatemala, this article explores how educational systems may have worked in Classic-era Maya polities—assessing evidence for educational loci, the different forms that education might assume, and the varied curricula that likely existed across different cities and particular demographics. Through this discussion, I seek to shed some light on the actors, gendered exclusions and diverse arrangements of pedagogy in Maya society, and grant further insight into how specialized bodies of knowledge (transmitted within formal educational institutions) were built into the very fabric of the Classic Maya states of which they were part.
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