In this study of settlement and politics in a Classic Maya polity I have set out to discuss and exemplify some elements of an anthropological approach to the archaeology of ancient complex polities. To begin, I want to sketch out briefly and rather informally the basic motivations for the work, saving the more detailed formal rationales for later. I see an anthropological approach to archaeology as something more than a simple mining of ethnographic lore in order to fill out archaeological interpretation. I also see it as something other than the uncritical adoption of a single paradigm from social or cultural anthropology (e.g., cultural ecology, structuralism, or post-structuralism). Rather, to my mind, an effective anthropological approach to the archaeology of complex polities requires the adoption of some of the more appealing intellectual traits that characterize the social and cultural anthropology of complex societies. Very broadly, these traits include sustained scepticism about received conceptual tools, respect for the diversity of behaviors and institutions in the record, a sensitivity to issues of social scale, and a sensitivity to the tension between approaches that use abstract formal models as opposed to approaches that use more particularistic substantivist models (the contrast between general comparative and particularizing approaches).

From my chosen anthropological-archaeological perspective, it seems that over the last few years many archaeologists have reached a kind of impasse in their studies of complex polities. Conclusions have been and continue to be drawn about such great issues as state formation or the rise of civilization. But in a more sceptical (and post-heroic) intellectual climate, it seems increasingly difficult to continue discussion exclusively along this track without falling into conceptual routinization.