of adjustment to, rather than control of, the natural environment, Kintz writes, "In time, I would meet all of the families . . . , and each would provide me with a deeper understanding of Maya lifeways" (4). Another five-year period of fieldwork reveals "how closely the lives of the Maya depended on their knowledge of the natural world" (14).
In addition, as stated earlier, Kintz wants to demonstrate how the sociocultural patterns of the Maya are connected to the same desire for adjustment and harmony, and her fieldwork reveals the accuracy of this hypothesis: "Social success, economic success, and/or political success were promoted or prohibited by the kin ties, actual or fictive, and by ties between friends" (14).
Kintz finally, through that same fieldwork, accomplishes "one of the major goals of ethnographic fieldwork"---"to obtain a holistic view of culture" (18). This holistic view allows her to comprehend the intimate relationship of the political, the social, the spiritual, the cultural, the economic, and the environmental in the lives of the Maya.
Kintz is effective, clear, and comprehensive in making her points through the presentation and analysis of the evidence she accumulates through her extensive and repeated fieldwork. Her years of intimate association with, observation of, and participation in every category of the lives of the Maya has revealed to
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