Social Integration in the Ancient Maya Hinterlands

Social Integration in the Ancient Maya Hinterlands PDF Author: Lisa Joyce Lucero
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description

Social Integration in the Ancient Maya Hinterlands

Social Integration in the Ancient Maya Hinterlands PDF Author: Lisa Joyce Lucero
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Get Book

Book Description


Classic Maya Provincial Politics

Classic Maya Provincial Politics PDF Author: Lisa J. LeCount
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816528845
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Most treatments of large Classic Maya sites such as Caracol and Tikal regard Maya political organization as highly centralized. Because investigations have focused on civic buildings and elite palaces, however, a critical part of the picture of Classic Maya political organization has been missing. The contributors to this volume chart the rise and fall of the Classic Maya center of Xunantunich, paying special attention to its changing relationships with the communities that comprised its hinterlands. They examine how the changing relationships between Xunantunich and the larger kingdom of Naranjo affected the local population, the location of their farms and houses, and the range of economic and subsistence activities in which both elites and commoners engaged. They also examine the ways common people seized opportunities and met challenges offered by a changing political landscape. The rich archaeological data in this book show that incorporating subject communities and people—and keeping them incorporated—was an on-going challenge to ancient Maya rulers. Until now, archaeologists have lacked integrated regional data and a fine-grained chronology in which to document short-term shifts in site occupations, subsistence strategies, and other important practices of the daily life of the Maya. This book provides a revised picture of Maya politics—one of different ways of governing and alliance formation among dominant centers, provincial polities, and hinterland communities.

Ancient Households of the Americas

Ancient Households of the Americas PDF Author: Nancy Gonlin
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607321742
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
In Ancient Households of the Americas archaeologists investigate the fundamental role of household production in ancient, colonial, and contemporary households. Several different cultures-Iroquois, Coosa, Anasazi, Hohokam, San Agustín, Wankarani, Formative Gulf Coast Mexico, and Formative, Classic, Colonial, and contemporary Maya-are analyzed through the lens of household archaeology in concrete, data-driven case studies. The text is divided into three sections: Section I examines the spatial and social organization and context of household production; Section II looks at the role and results of households as primary producers; and Section III investigates the role of, and interplay among, households in their greater political and socioeconomic communities. In the past few decades, household archaeology has made substantial contributions to our understanding and explanation of the past through the documentation of the household as a social unit-whether small or large, rural or urban, commoner or elite. These case studies from a broad swath of the Americas make Ancient Households of the Americas extremely valuable for continuing the comparative interdisciplinary study of households.

Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands

Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands PDF Author: Damien B. Marken
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 160732413X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure in the southern lowlands, assessing, comparing, and interpreting the wide variation in Classic period Maya polity and city composition, development, and integration. Traditionally, discussions of Classic Maya political organization have been dominated by the debate over whether Maya polities were centralized or decentralized. With new, largely unpublished data from several recent archaeological projects, this book examines the premises, strengths, and weaknesses of these two perspectives before moving beyond this long-standing debate and into different territory. The volume examines the articulations of the various social and spatial components of Maya polity—the relationships, strategies, and practices that bound households, communities, institutions, and dynasties into enduring (or short-lived) political entities. By emphasizing the internal negotiation of polity, the contributions provide an important foundation for a more holistic understanding of how political organization functioned in the Classic period. Contributors include Francisco Estrada Belli, James L. Fitzsimmons, Sarah E. Jackson, Caleb Kestle, Brigitte Kovacevich, Allan Maca, Damien B. Marken, James Meierhoff, Timothy Murtha, Cynthia Robin, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Andrew Wyatt.

Agricultural Strategies

Agricultural Strategies PDF Author: Joyce Marcus
Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
ISBN: 193877034X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This volume brings together a diverse set of new studies--archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic--that focus on agricultural intensification and hydraulic systems around the world. Fifteen chapters--written by many of the world's leading experts--combine extensive regional overviews of agricultural histories with in-depth case studies. In this volume are chapters on agriculture in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, Oceania, Mesoamerica, and South America. A wide range of theoretical perspectives and approaches are used to provide a framework for agricultural land-use and water management in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. This book covers the co-evolutionary relationships among sociopolitical structure, agriculture, land-use, and water control. Agricultural Strategies is an invaluable resource for those engaged in ongoing debates about the role of intensification and agriculture in the past and present.

An Inconstant Landscape

An Inconstant Landscape PDF Author: Thomas G. Garrison
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607327643
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Presenting the results of six years of archaeological survey and excavation in and around the Maya kingdom of El Zotz, An Inconstant Landscape paints a complex picture of a dynamic landscape over the course of almost 2,000 years of occupation. El Zotz was a dynastic seat of the Classic period in Guatemala. Located between the renowned sites of Tikal and El Perú-Waka’, it existed as a small kingdom with powerful neighbors and serves today as a test-case of political debility and strength during the height of dynastic struggles among the Classic Maya. In this volume, contributors address the challenges faced by smaller polities on the peripheries of powerful kingdoms and ask how subordination was experienced and independent policy asserted. Leading experts provide cutting-edge analysis in varied topics and detailed discussion of the development of this major site and the region more broadly. The first half of the volume contains a historical narrative of the cultural sequence of El Zotz, tracing the changes in occupation and landscape use across time; the second half provides deep technical analyses of material evidence, including soils, ceramics, stone tools, and bone. The ever-changing, inconstant landscapes of peripheral kingdoms like El Zotz reveal much about their more dominant—and better known—neighbors. An Inconstant Landscape offers a comprehensive, multidisciplinary view of this important but under-studied site, an essential context for the study of the Classic Maya in Guatemala, and a premier reference on the subject of peripheral kingdoms at the height of Maya civilization. Contributors: Timothy Beach, Nicholas Carter, Ewa Czapiewska-Halliday, Alyce de Carteret, William Delgado, Colin Doyle, James Doyle, Laura Gámez, Jose Luis Garrido López, Yeny Myshell Gutiérrez Castillo, Zachary Hruby, Melanie Kingsley, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Cassandra Mesick Braun, Sarah Newman, Rony Piedrasanta, Edwin Román, and Andrew K. Scherer

Of Rocks and Water

Of Rocks and Water PDF Author: mŸr Harman?ah
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 178297671X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
People are drawn to places where geology performs its miracles: ice-cold spring waters gushing from the rock, mysterious caves which act as conduits for ancestors and divinities traveling back and forth to the underworld, sacred bodies of water where communities make libations and offer sacrifices. This volume presents a series of archaeological landscapes from the Iranian highlands to the Anatolian Plateau, and from the Mediterranean borderlands to Mesoamerica. Contributors all have a deep interest in the making and the long-term history of unorthodox places of human interaction with the mineral world, specifically the landscapes of rocks and water. Working with rock reliefs, sacred springs and lakes, caves, cairns, ruins and other meaningful places, they draw attention to the need for a rigorous field methodology and theoretical framework for working with such special places. At a time when network models, urban-centered and macro-scale perspectives dominate discussions of ancient landscapes, this unusual volume takes us to remote, unmappable places of cultural practice, social imagination and political appropriation. It offers not only a diverse set of case studies approaching small meaningful places in their special geological grounding, but also suggests new methodologies and interpretive approaches to understand places and the processes of place-making.

Traditional Mexican Agriculture

Traditional Mexican Agriculture PDF Author: Alba González Jácome
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000427269
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 742

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Book Description
This long-needed book highlights how traditional Mexican agriculture has changed according to environmental, climatic, geographical, social and cultural conditions. Grounded in archaeological-historical data from interrelated research of various scientific disciplines, the book also draws on studies made by anthropologists of varied small-scale agricultural groups. Traditional Mexican Agriculture is the result of a holistic study of Mexican agriculture. It offers the reader a perspective of traditional agriculture in Mexico from social, cultural and ecological Anthropology, Ethnology, regional and environmental History, and Agroecology, to help obtain sustainable agroecology where human societies obtain better ways of life and a healthy and nutritious food system. The book further aims to recover ideas, management, and components of local knowledge of small-scale farmers. Pitched at university students and academics, as well as researchers and developers of agricultural matters, this book will be ideal reading at agrarian universities and related institutions. It provides a basis for future studies in sustainable agricultural systems in this region.

Water and Ritual

Water and Ritual PDF Author: Lisa J. Lucero
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778236
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In the southern Maya lowlands, rainfall provided the primary and, in some areas, the only source of water for people and crops. Classic Maya kings sponsored elaborate public rituals that affirmed their close ties to the supernatural world and their ability to intercede with deities and ancestors to ensure an adequate amount of rain, which was then stored to provide water during the four-to-five-month dry season. As long as the rains came, Maya kings supplied their subjects with water and exacted tribute in labor and goods in return. But when the rains failed at the end of the Classic period (AD 850-950), the Maya rulers lost both their claim to supernatural power and their temporal authority. Maya commoners continued to supplicate gods and ancestors for rain in household rituals, but they stopped paying tribute to rulers whom the gods had forsaken. In this paradigm-shifting book, Lisa Lucero investigates 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 the Late Preclassic through the Terminal Classic periods to show how elites and rulers gained political power through the public replication and elaboration of household-level rituals. At the same time, Lucero demonstrates that political power rested equally on material conditions that the Maya rulers could only partially control. Offering a new, more nuanced understanding of these dual bases of power, Lucero makes a compelling case for spiritual and material factors intermingling in the development and demise of Maya political complexity.

Ancient Maya Settlement and the Alacranes Bajo

Ancient Maya Settlement and the Alacranes Bajo PDF Author: Gail A. Hammond
Publisher: BAR International Series
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This work represents the archaeological investigation of a distinctive zone of the Three Rivers Region of northwestern Belize. It contributes to the knowledge of land use by the ancient Maya using excavation, mapping and environmental data, and situates the area within the local, regional and inter-regional context.