Rosemary Joyce on the Illusory "Ancient Maya"

"The ancient Maya" is, fundamentally, an illusory subject that too often stands in the way of a real appreciation of the diversity that art historians and archaeologists are documenting through meticulous work.... [W]ith contemporary understandings of the complexity of identification and misidentification, and recognition long past in general anthropology and specific archaeology that language does not equal ethnicity, it is clearly time for specialists on the deep history of Yucatan, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras to be freed from the tyranny of a unitary, illusory subject that never existed outside of our texts."

Rosemary A. Joyce. 2005. What kind of subject of study is "The Ancient Maya"? Reviews in Anthropology 34:295-311.