The Cotsen Institute's Director of Publications is archaeologist Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett, herself a specialist on the production and distribution of archaeological ceramics in Mesoamerica and Central America and a scholar of complex society economic organization. Her colleague and the co-editor of this volume, Ellen Hardy, is a Research Associate at The Cotsen Institute and an expert on mortuary customs of the Nicoya region. Theodore (Ted) Gutman (1909-1997) was a longtime supporter of the Institute at UCLA worked on a number of translation projects, several of which are presented here. He was the translator of Karl Sapper's Verapaz im 16. und 17. jahrhundert, which appeared as The Verapaz in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Contribution to the Historical Geography and Ethnography of Northeastern Guatemala (Los Angeles, University of California, Institute of Archae­ology, Occasional Paper 13, 1985). The contributors to the volume's narrative include, in addtion to Beaudry-Corbett and Hardy, nine other anthropologists who are recognized experts on the region and subject matter.