Archaeologists have long identified quarries as a ubiquitous part of the landscape in which precolonial Maya populations built their world. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have begun to move away from viewing these quarries simply as places where stones were extracted to recognizing them as important nodes in the social, political, and cultural fabric of the Maya Lowlands. The four articles in this Special Section discuss some of the most recent insights into the lives of those who intimately worked with limestone, inhabited the cratered landscapes created by its extraction, and crafted their worlds through the relationships forged and maintained in the practices of quarrying, processing, and utilizing this material. In this introductory paper, we set the scene by reviewing previous research and outlining the main approaches involved in the documentation, analysis, and interpretation of Maya limestone quarries and production loci. We continue with a discussion of the relevance of quarry investigations for the general study of precolonial Maya societies. We conclude with a brief overview of current methodological trends, followed by a look ahead to the ways in which researchers could take such investigations forward and integrate them into future research agendas.