It was Arthur Demarest who referred to the irregular shapes of Mayan polity borders in his and Conrad's seminal Ideology suggesting there was a function to their shape (it should be read). Here is another view of Maya polity relations, in the genre of Edward Tufte's books, from Nikolai Grube and Simon Martin's Chronicle of the Maya Kings. Here we have a simplified chart of major polities arrayed to provide the user with a view of how complex the Maya civilization's exchange was. Smaller and distant polities are necessarily omitted.