Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Author: Jervis D. Swannack
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Archaeology
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Author: Joyce Marcus
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks
ISBN: 9780884020660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Joyce Marcus reconstructs Classic Maya political organization through the use of evidence derived from epigraphy, settlement pattern surveys, and locational analysis. This study describes the development of a four-tiered settlement hierarchy and its subsequent collapse.

Author: Vernon L. Scarborough
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816513604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife, war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological, sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental life and outlook of New World peoples.

Author: Payson D. Sheets
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477300333
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Scientists have long speculated on the impact of extreme natural catastrophes on human societies. Archeology and Volcanism in Central America provides dramatic evidence of the effects of several volcanic disasters on a major civilization of the Western Hemisphere, that of the Maya. During the past 2,000 years, four volcanic eruptions have taken place in the Zapotitán Valley of southern El Salvador. One, the devastating eruption of Ilopango around A.D. 300, forced a major migration, pushing the Mayan people north to the Yucatán Peninsula. Although later eruptions did not have long-range implications for cultural change, one of the subsequent eruptions preserved the Cerén site—a Mesoamerican Pompeii where the bodies of the villagers, the palm-thatched roofs of their houses, the pots of food in their pantries, even the corn plants in their fields were preserved with remarkable fidelity. Throughout 1978, a multidisciplinary team of anthropologists, archeologists, geologists, biologists, and others sponsored by the University of Colorado's Protoclassic Project researched and excavated the results of volcanism in the Zapotitan Valley—a key Mesoamerican site that contemporary political strife has since rendered inaccessible. The result is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the impact of volcanic eruptions on early Mayan civilization. These investigations clearly demonstrate that the Maya inhabited this volcanically hazardous valley in order to reap the short-term benefits that the volcanic ash produced—fertile soil, fine clays, and obsidian deposits.

Author: William J. Adams
Publisher: ASTM International
ISBN: 0803109784
Category : Environmental impact analysis
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Author: Elizabeth A. Newsome
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292755727
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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"Based on a thorough analysis of the imagery and inscriptions of seven stelae erected in the Great Plaza at Copan, Honduras, by the Classic Period ruler 18-Rabbit-God K, this study argues that stelae were erected not only to support a ruler's temporal claims to power but more importantly to express the fundamental connection in Maya worldview between rulership and the cosmology inherent in their vision of cyclical time. After an overview of the archaeology and history of Copan and the reign and monuments of 18-Rabbit-God K, Elizabeth Newsome interprets the iconography and inscriptions on the stelae, illustrating the way they fulfilled a coordinated vision of the king's ceremonial role in Copan's period-ending rites. She also links their imagery to key Maya concepts about the origin of the universe, expressed in the cosmologies and mythic lore of ancient and living Maya peoples." "Because previous scholarship has never assigned all seven monuments to a single period or the patronage of one ruler, the uniqueness of Newsome's study lies in the way it explicates the overall meaning and function of the stela series with respect to the long-term activities and agendas of one king."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: Robert James Sharer
Publisher: UPenn Museum of Archaeology
ISBN: 9780934718592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Final report of the 1970-1974 research conducted in the Salama Valley, Baja Verapaz, and adjacent areas of the highlands of Guatemala. The volume presents the results of the first comprehensive study of northern highland preclassic occupation and cultural development in light of the question of highland-lowland interaction and its role in the growth of Maya civilization.

Author: Joanne Pillsbury
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588397319
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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An introduction to the complex stories of Mesoamerican divinity through the carvings, ceramics, and metalwork of the Maya Classic period Lives of the Gods reveals how ancient Maya artists evoked a pantheon as rich and complex as the more familiar Greco-Roman, Hindu-Buddhist, and Egyptian deities. Focusing on the period between A.D. 250 and 900, the authors show how this powerful cosmology informed some of the greatest creative achievements of Maya civilization.