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The Classic Maya Western Region
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Book Synopsis The Classic Maya Western Region by : Peter Biro
Download or read book The Classic Maya Western Region written by Peter Biro and published by BAR International Series. This book was released on 2011 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decade there has been substantial progress in understanding Maya hieroglyphic writing. This development led to the reconstruction of Classic Maya (AD 300-900) political history. Epigraphers suggested a major influence of Teotihuacan during the Early Classic Period (AD 300-600), and some even argued for a direct Teotihuacan conquest of the Maya lowlands. The Late Classic Period (AD 600-900) was interpreted as a constant hegemonic struggle between Tikal and Calakmul, which in different ways influenced Classic Maya political relations. These reconstructions of political history were directly tied to the interpretations of political organisation, ranging from peer polity interaction models to more bureaucratic polities. In this work the author examines and analyses inscriptions from the Western Maya Region, which are especially rich in information concerning interaction of polities and interpolity organisation. The author reconstructs the historical development of the region, examining the influence of Teotihuacan and that of the hegemonic states Tikal and Calakmul.
Book Synopsis Ancient Maya Politics by : Simon Martin
Download or read book Ancient Maya Politics written by Simon Martin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With new readings of ancient texts, Ancient Maya Politics unlocks the long-enigmatic political system of the Classic Maya.
Book Synopsis The Maya and Their Central American Neighbors by : Geoffrey E Braswell
Download or read book The Maya and Their Central American Neighbors written by Geoffrey E Braswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Maya created one of the most studied and best-known civilizations of the Americas. Nevertheless, Maya civilization is often considered either within a vacuum, by sub-region and according to modern political borders, or with reference to the most important urban civilizations of central Mexico. Seldom if ever are the Maya and their Central American neighbors of El Salvador and Honduras considered together, despite the fact that they engaged in mutually beneficial trade, intermarried, and sometimes made war on each other. The Maya and Their Central American Neighbors seeks to fill this lacuna by presenting original research on the archaeology of the whole of the Maya area (from Yucatan to the Maya highlands of Guatemala), western Honduras, and El Salvador. With a focus on settlement pattern analyses, architectural studies, and ceramic analyses, this ground breaking book provides a broad view of this important relationship allowing readers to understand ancient perceptions about the natural and built environment, the role of power, the construction of historical narrative, trade and exchange, multiethnic interaction in pluralistic frontier zones, the origins of settled agricultural life, and the nature of systemic collapse.
Book Synopsis Classic Maya (AD 300-900) Political History and Political Organisation in the Western Maya Region by : Péter Biró
Download or read book Classic Maya (AD 300-900) Political History and Political Organisation in the Western Maya Region written by Péter Biró and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Southeast Classic Maya Zone by : Elizabeth Hill Boone
Download or read book The Southeast Classic Maya Zone written by Elizabeth Hill Boone and published by Dumbarton Oaks. This book was released on 1988 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Ancient Maya Life in the Far West Bajo by : Julie L. Kunen
Download or read book Ancient Maya Life in the Far West Bajo written by Julie L. Kunen and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human activity during centuries of occupation significantly altered the landscape inhabited by the ancient Maya of northwestern Belize. In response, the Maya developed new techniques to harvest the natural resources of their surroundings, investing increased labor and raw materials into maintaining and even improving their ways of life. In this lively story of life in the wetlands on the outskirts of the major site of La Milpa, Julie Kunen documents a hitherto unrecognized form of intensive agriculture in the Maya lowlands—one that relied on the construction of terraces and berms to trap soil and moisture around the margins of low-lying depressions called bajos. She traces the intertwined histories of residential settlements on nearby hills and ridges and agricultural terraces and other farming-related features around the margins of the bajo as they developed from the Late Preclassic perios (400 BC-AD 250) until the area's abandonment in the Terminal Classic period (about AD 850). Kunen examines the organization of three bajo communities with respect to the use and management of resources critical to agricultural production. She argues that differences in access to spatially variable natural resources resulted in highly patterned settlement remains and that community founders and their descendents who had acquired the best quality and most diverse set of resources maintained an elevated status in the society. The thorough integration of three lines of evidence—the settlement system, the agricultural system, and the ancient environment—breaks new ground in landscape research and in the study of Maya non-elite domestic organization. Kunen reports on the history of settlement and farming in a small corner of the Maya world but demonstrates that for any study of human-environment interactions, landscape history consists equally of ecological and cultural strands of influence.
Book Synopsis The World of the Ancient Maya by : John S. Henderson
Download or read book The World of the Ancient Maya written by John S. Henderson and published by Ithaca N.Y. : Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since it was first published in 1981, The World of the Ancient Maya has established itself as an extraordinarily accomplished -- comprehensive, elegantly written, and concise -- introduction to the rich Maya culture. In this edition, John S. Henderson has thoroughly revised the text and added a wealth of new photographs and drawings.
Book Synopsis The Origins of Maya States by : Loa P. Traxler
Download or read book The Origins of Maya States written by Loa P. Traxler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proceedings of the conference "The Origins of Maya States," held in Philadelphia, April 10-13, 2007.
Book Synopsis Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya by : Victoria Schlesinger
Download or read book Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya written by Victoria Schlesinger and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A growing interest in all things Maya brings an increasing number of visitors to prehistoric Maya ruins and contemporary Maya communities in Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the southern areas of Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. For these visitors and indeed everyone with an interest in the Maya, this field guide highlights nearly 100 species of plants and animals that were significant to the ancient Maya and that continue to inhabit the Maya region today. Drawing from the disciplines of biology, ecology, and anthropology, Victoria Schlesinger describes each plant or animal's habitat and natural history, identifying characteristics (also shown in a black-and-white drawing), and cultural significance to the ancient and contemporary Maya. An introductory section explains how to use the book and offers a concise overview of the history, lifeways, and cosmology of the ancient Maya. The concluding section describes the collapse of ancient Maya society and briefly traces the history of the Maya region from colonial times to the present.
Book Synopsis The Maya and Teotihuacan by : Geoffrey E. Braswell
Download or read book The Maya and Teotihuacan written by Geoffrey E. Braswell and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-07-21 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume present extensive new evidence from archaeology, iconography, and epigraphy to offer a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between the Early Classic Maya and Teotihuacan. Winner, Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 2005 Since the 1930s, archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of interaction between the Early Classic Maya and the great empire of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico. Yet the exact nature of the relationship between these two ancient Mesoamerican civilizations remains to be fully deciphered. Many scholars have assumed that Teotihuacan colonized the Maya region and dominated the political or economic systems of certain key centers—perhaps even giving rise to state-level political organizations. Others argue that Early Classic rulers merely traded with Teotihuacan and skillfully manipulated its imported exotic goods and symbol sets to increase their prestige. Moving beyond these traditional assumptions, the contributors to this volume present extensive new evidence from archaeology, iconography, and epigraphy to offer a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between the Early Classic Maya and Teotihuacan. Investigating a range of Maya sites, including Kaminaljuyu, Copán, Tikal, Altun Ha, and Oxkintok, they demonstrate that the influence of Teotihuacan on the Maya varied in nature and duration from site to site, requiring a range of models to explain the patterns of interaction. Moreover, they show that the interaction was bidirectional and discuss how the Maya in turn influenced Teotihuacan.
Book Synopsis The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context by : Gyles Iannone
Download or read book The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context written by Gyles Iannone and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, contributors reject the popularized link between societal collapse and drought in Maya civilization, arguing that a series of periodic “collapses,” including the infamous Terminal Classic collapse (AD 750–1050), were not caused solely by climate change–related droughts but by a combination of other social, political, and environmental factors. New and senior scholars of archaeology and environmental science explore the timing and intensity of droughts and provide a nuanced understanding of socio-ecological dynamics, with specific reference to what makes communities resilient or vulnerable when faced with environmental change.Contributors recognize the existence of four droughts that correlate with periods of demographic and political decline and identify a variety of concurrent political and social issues. They argue that these primary underlying factors were exacerbated by drought conditions and ultimately led to societal transitions that were by no means uniform across various sites and subregions. They also deconstruct the concept of “collapse” itself—although the line of Maya kings ended with the Terminal Classic collapse, the Maya people and their civilization survived. The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context offers new insights into the complicated series of events that impacted the decline of Maya civilization. This significant contribution to our increasingly comprehensive understanding of ancient Maya culture will be of interest to students and scholars of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.
Book Synopsis The Ancient Maya Marketplace by : Eleanor M. King
Download or read book The Ancient Maya Marketplace written by Eleanor M. King and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trading was the favorite occupation of the Maya, according to early Spanish observers such as Fray Diego de Landa (1566). Yet scholars of the Maya have long dismissed trade—specifically, market exchange—as unimportant. They argue that the Maya subsisted primarily on agriculture, with long-distance trade playing a minor role in a largely non-commercialized economy. The Ancient Maya Marketplace reviews the debate on Maya markets and offers compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces in the Maya Lowlands. Its authors rethink the prevailing views about Maya economic organization and offer new perspectives. They attribute the dearth of Maya market research to two factors: persistent assumptions that Maya society and its rainforest environment lacked complexity, and an absence of physical evidence for marketplaces—a problem that plagues market research around the world. Many Mayanists now agree that no site was self-sufficient, and that from the earliest times robust local and regional exchange existed alongside long-distance trade. Contributors to this volume suggest that marketplaces, the physical spaces signifying the presence of a market economy, did not exist for purely economic reasons but served to exchange information and create social ties as well. The Ancient Maya Marketplace offers concrete links between Maya archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary cultures. Its in-depth review of current research will help future investigators to recognize and document marketplaces as a long-standing Maya cultural practice. The volume also provides detailed comparative data for premodern societies elsewhere in the world.
Book Synopsis Understanding Collapse by : Guy D. Middleton
Download or read book Understanding Collapse written by Guy D. Middleton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.
Book Synopsis The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands by : Arthur Andrew Demarest
Download or read book The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands written by Arthur Andrew Demarest and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands revisits one of the great problems in Mayan archaeology - the apparent collapse of Classic Maya civilization from roughly A.D. 830 to 950. During this period the Maya abandoned their power centers in the southern lowlands and rather abruptly ceased the distinctive cultural practices that marked their apogee in the Classic period. Archaeological fieldwork during the past three decades, however, has uncovered enormous regional variability in the ways the Maya experienced the shift from Classic to Postclassic society, revealing a period of cultural change more complex than acknowledged by traditional models. Featuring an impressive roster of scholars, The Terminal Classic presents the most recent data and interpretations pertaining to this perplexing period of cultural transformation in the Maya lowlands. Although the research reveals clear interregional patterns, the contributors resist a single overarching explanation. Rather, this volume's diverse and nuanced interpretations provide a new, more properly grounded beginning for continued debate on the nature of lowland Terminal Classic Maya civilization.
Book Synopsis The Ch'ol Maya of Chiapas by : Karen Bassie-Sweet
Download or read book The Ch'ol Maya of Chiapas written by Karen Bassie-Sweet and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-04-08 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ch’ol Maya who live in the western Mexican state of Chiapas are direct descendants of the Maya of the Classic period. Exploring their history and culture, volume editor Karen Bassie-Sweet and the other authors assembled here uncover clear continuity between contemporary Maya rituals and beliefs and their ancient counterparts. With evocative and thoughtful essays by leading scholars of Maya culture, The Ch’ol Maya of Chiapas, the first collection to focus fully on the Ch’ol Maya, takes readers deep into ancient caves and reveals new dimensions of Ch’ol cosmology. In contemporary Ch’ol culture the contributors find a wealth of historical material that they then interweave with archaeological data to yield surprising and illuminating insights. The colonial and twentieth-century descendants of the Postclassic period Ch’ol and Lacandon Ch’ol, for instance, provide a window on the history and conquest of the early Maya. Several authors examine Early Classic paintings in the Ch’ol ritual cave known as Jolja that document ancient cave ceremonies not unlike Ch’ol rituals performed today, such as petitioning a cave-dwelling mountain spirit for health, rain, and abundant harvests. Other essays investigate deities identified with caves, mountains, lightning, and meteors to trace the continuity of ancient Maya beliefs through the centuries, in particular the ancient origin of contemporary rituals centering on the Ch’ol mountain deity Don Juan. An appendix containing three Ch’ol folktales and their English translations rounds out the volume. Charting paths literal and figurative to earlier trade routes, pre-Columbian sites, and ancient rituals and beliefs, The Ch’ol Maya of Chiapas opens a fresh, richly informed perspective on Maya culture as it has evolved and endured over the ages.
Book Synopsis The Comitán Valley by : Caitlin C. Earley
Download or read book The Comitán Valley written by Caitlin C. Earley and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thousand years ago, the Comitán Valley, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, was the western edge of the Maya world. Far from the famous power centers of the Classic period, the valley has been neglected even by specialists. Here, Caitlin C. Earley offers the first comprehensive study of sculpture excavated from the area, showcasing the sophistication and cultural vigor of a region that has largely been ignored. Supported by the rulers of the valley’s cities, local artists created inventive works that served to construct civic identities. In their depictions of warrior kings, ballgames, rituals, and ancestors, the artists of Comitán made choices that reflected political and religious goals and distinguished the artistic production of the Comitán Valley from that of other Maya locales. After the Maya abandoned their powerful lowland centers, those in Comitán were maintained, a distinction from which Earley draws new insights concerning the Maya collapse. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs of sculptures unearthed from key archaeological sites, The Comitán Valley is an illuminating work of art historical recovery and interpretation.
Book Synopsis The Comitán Valley by : Caitlin C. Earley
Download or read book The Comitán Valley written by Caitlin C. Earley and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thousand years ago, the Comitán Valley, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, was the western edge of the Maya world. Far from the famous power centers of the Classic period, the valley has been neglected even by specialists. Here, Caitlin C. Earley offers the first comprehensive study of sculpture excavated from the area, showcasing the sophistication and cultural vigor of a region that has largely been ignored. Supported by the rulers of the valley’s cities, local artists created inventive works that served to construct civic identities. In their depictions of warrior kings, ballgames, rituals, and ancestors, the artists of Comitán made choices that reflected political and religious goals and distinguished the artistic production of the Comitán Valley from that of other Maya locales. After the Maya abandoned their powerful lowland centers, those in Comitán were maintained, a distinction from which Earley draws new insights concerning the Maya collapse. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs of sculptures unearthed from key archaeological sites, The Comitán Valley is an illuminating work of art historical recovery and interpretation.
