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Under and behind the splendours of Maya ceremonial buildings are the craft skills of the artisans who put them up. A first find of a lime-plaster kiln, from Copan in Honduras, illuminates one of those technologies, the burning of lime in a closed oven rather than on an open-air pyre.

The degree of development of specialist positions associated with large-scale construction at the Maya site of Copan, Honduras, is evaluated. The methodology used involves the quantification of energy, in human labor, which was expended in the construction of Str. 10L-22, a major palace in the Main Center of Copan. The results suggest that few specialists were required, and that the vast majority of construction personnel were unspecialized conscripts. Moreover, the absolute energetic investment was low, suggesting that energetic expenditures in largescale architecture could not have been a major source of stress on the Late Classic Maya socioeconomic system.

A tremendous amount of research on Hopewellian societies in the Northern Woodlands of the United States has been conducted within the last decade. This article summarizes the main themes and directions of that current research and presents a general model of Hopewellian societies. Local communities appear to have been small in size and relatively sedentary; sets of these communities shared a greater sense of cultural identity within a lineage and possibly clan organization, with each riverine drainage system occupied by a mosaic of lineages. Each in turn was spatially centered on specific clusters of religious, nonresidential public architecture. Alliances were based on a number of historically shifting variables, including religion, kinship, politics, and economics. It is suggested that future research continue existing methodologies and analyses and consider new ecological, genetic, and ideological research as a means of adding greater local historic nuance to this general model of Hopewellian societies.

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