Mary Ellen Miller’s Maya Art and Architecture is the first textbook in English on Maya art written by a major scholar of the Maya. It is, therefore, a milestone in the dissemination of knowledge about Maya art, particularly in a classroom setting, where this book will be most useful. That a book published in 1999 deserves this honor may come as a surprise since the study of Maya art is one of the more established in ancient New World art history. As Miller points out in her introduction, although systematic treatments of Maya art, such as Herbert Spinden’s A Study of Maya Art (1913) and Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture (1950), have a long track record, no textbook appeared until the very end of the century. Why? It wasn’t until the 1980s that university courses in Maya art proliferated, when students of the handful of senior scholars who taught it assumed academic posts across the country. Still, in that decade no one stepped forward to undertake the challenge. Being the first to write such a book is exceptionally difficult since it demands a codification of the field and the creation of a haute ligne of major works...