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The flood of archaeological work in Maya lands has revolutionized our understanding of gender in ancient Maya society. The dozen contributors to this volume use a wide range of methodological strategies--archaeology, bioarchaeology, iconography, ethnohistory, epigraphy, ethnography--to tease out the details of the lives, actions, and identities of women of Mesoamerica. The chapters, most based upon recent fieldwork in Central America, examine the role of women in Maya society, their place in the political hierarchy and lineage structures, the gendered division of labor, and the discrepancy between idealized Mayan womanhood and the daily reality, among other topics. In each case, the complexities and nuances of gender relations is highlighted and the limitations of our knowledge acknowledged. These pieces represent an important advance in the understanding of Maya socioeconomic, political, and cultural life--and the archaeology of gender--and will be of great interest to scholars and students.
The book is not just multidisciplinary but interdisciplinary, linking, for example, the architecture of monuments with epigraphy, language concepts, and human events.
This volume brings together a range of contributors with different and hybrid academic backgrounds to explore, through bioarchaeology, the past human experience in the territories that span Mesoamerica. This handbook provides systematic bioarchaeological coverage of skeletal research in the ancient Mesoamericas. It offers an integrated collection of engrained, bioculturally embedded explorations of relevant and timely topics, such as population shifts, lifestyles, body concepts, beauty, gender, health, foodways, social inequality, and violence. The additional treatment of new methodologies, local cultural settings, and theoretic frames rounds out the scope of this handbook. The selection of 36 chapter contributions invites readers to engage with the human condition in ancient and not-so-ancient Mesoamerica and beyond. The Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology is addressed to an audience of Mesoamericanists, students, and researchers in bioarchaeology and related fields. It serves as a comprehensive reference for courses on Mesoamerica, bioarchaeology, and Native American studies.
Archaeological ideas and practices have experienced transformative change since the Society for American Archaeology’s fiftieth Anniversary. Authors in this volume from the SAA press consider critically some of today’s most noteworthy issues. Their voices—like their views—are as diverse as the discipline. Nonetheless, they repeatedly recognize deep articulation between archaeology and social, economic, and political milieus, from local to global scales. And they share conviction that much is to be done in the years ahead. This volume aims to rouse more voices to join the lively ongoing conversation.
This volume focuses on how powerful people of the ancient, historical, and contemporary periods in the Maya world used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power--and how the powerless pushed back.
With new readings of ancient texts, Ancient Maya Politics unlocks the long-enigmatic political system of the Classic Maya.
Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica links Precolumbian animal imagery with scientific data related to animal morphology and behavior, providing in-depth studies of the symbolic importance of animals and birds in Postclassic period Mesoamerica. Representations of animal deities in Mesoamerica can be traced back at least to Middle Preclassic Olmec murals, stone carvings, and portable art such as lapidary work and ceramics. Throughout the history of Mesoamerica real animals were merged with fantastical creatures, creating zoological oddities not unlike medieval European bestiaries. According to Spanish chroniclers, the Aztec emperor was known to keep exotic animals in royal aviaries and zoo...
From the tombs of the elite to the graves of commoners, mortuary remains offer rich insights into Classic Maya society. In Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul, the anthropological archaeologist and bioarchaeologist Andrew K. Scherer explores the broad range of burial practices among the Maya of the Classic period (AD 250–900), integrating information gleaned from his own fieldwork with insights from the fields of iconography, epigraphy, and ethnography to illuminate this society’s rich funerary traditions. Scherer’s study of burials along the Usumacinta River at the Mexican-Guatemalan border and in the Central Petén region of Guatemala—areas that includ...
Excavations of Maya burial vaults at Palenque, Mexico, half a century ago revealed what was then the most extraordinary tomb finding of the pre-Columbian world; its discovery has been crucial to an understanding of the dynastic history and ideology of the ancient Maya. This volume communicates the broad scope of applied interdisciplinary research conducted on the Pakal remains to provide answers to old disputes over the accuracy of both skeletal and epigraphic studies, along with new questions in the field of Maya dynastic research. A benchmark in biological anthropology that presents an updated study of a well-known personage, the volume also offers innovative approaches to the biocultural and interdisciplinary re-creation of Maya dynastic history.
The Mexican Revolution was a tumultuous struggle for social and political reform that ousted an autocrat and paved the way for a new national constitution. The conflict, however, came late to Yucatán, where a network of elite families with largely European roots held the reins of government. This privileged group reaped spectacular wealth from haciendas, cash-crop plantations tended by debt-ridden servants of Maya descent. When a revolutionary army from central Mexico finally gained a foothold in Yucatán in 1915, the local custom of agrarian servitude met its demise. Drawing on a dozen years of archaeological and historical investigation, Allan Meyers breaks new ground in the study of Yuca...