Caitlin C. Earley’s The Comitán Valley is a slim and agile volume that lays important groundwork for a deeply underserved area in both art history and Mesoamerican studies. The size of the volume belies its contribution; Earley both deftly considers the Comitán Valley on its own terms and questions long-held assumptions about Maya art and culture. Earley’s overall thesis is simple; she argues that the Comitán region was home to a sophisticated and inventive visual culture wherein artists fused influences and actively constructed monuments to craft a sense of site histories and local civic identities. While the valley has received attention from archaeologists, art historians have largely ignored its sites due to their position on the Maya cultural sphere’s western frontier, in the southeast of the Mexican state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border. In the Late Classic period (c. 600–900 CE), the Comitán Valley was heavily populated, ethnically and...

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