The Dark Side of Ruins in Ancient Maya Living Landscapes

Abstract Ruination studies allow one to see the past not as a fixed “thing” but as living landscapes. Over the past two decades, Mesoamerican scholars have increasingly recognized that ruins were an integral part of ancient Mesoamerican peoples’ experiences in and with the world and not just a modern invention of cultural heritage. Any understanding of ancient Maya ruins must consider the Indigenous ontologies, cosmologies, and myths of peoples of that region. Indigenous approaches highlight the affective and dynamic nature of ruins, perspectives that can be put in conversation with metaphysical or posthumanist ideas more generally. One particularity of ruins in the Maya area is that they often were, and in many cases still are, entangled with forest beings that are both feared and revered. This article reviews some of the ways in which ancient Maya peoples lived with ruins, drawing a number of case examples from the Maya site of Ucanal in Petén, Guatemala, and then contextualizes these findings with the darker side of ruins. This darker side of ruins was part of the making of moral communities that were—and are—in a constant state of motion.