An archaeologist, she has researched and written extensively on Mesoamerica, political power and ritual. In her first book, she discusses the central role of water and ritual in the rise, dominance, and fall of Classic Maya rulers. She documents commoner, elite, and royal ritual histories in the southern Maya lowlands from approximately 300 BCE to 900 CE to show how elites and rulers gained political power through the public replication and elaboration of household-level rituals. Demonstrating that political power rested equally on material conditions that the Maya rulers could only partially control, Lucero makes a compelling case for spiritual and material factors intermingling in the development and demise of Maya political complexity.