The Maya lived with their ancestors in a manner that departs radically from twentieth-century western mortuary practices. Rather than distancing themselves physically from the dead—sequestering the ancestors in cemeteries apart from living spaces—they maintained a proximity between the living and the dead. From 1000 B.C. to the early sixteenth century, this subgroup of the first Americans—Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemalan highlands (Figure 1.1)—interred their ancestors under the floors of their houses, in residential shrines, and within large funerary pyramids right in the center of their cities and villages. Through a complex series of rituals and sacralization of places, the dead were not forgotten; rather, active lines of communication were maintained between the living and the dead. The deathway of the Maya did not emphasize the termination of life as does the Christian deathway (Metcalf and Huntington 1991); instead, Maya celebrated the continued and pervasive influence of the ancestors in the lives of both rulers and farmers—the life that arises from death (Carlsen and Prechtel 1991: 26). Formerly referred to by the antiquated phrase “cult of the dead,” this social practice is anything but that. On the contrary, it is about living descendants and their strategies and struggles to chart a course for the future. In this book, I use what I hope is a more appropriate phrase to describe this practice: “living with the ancestors.”