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Pilgrimage to ritually significant places is a part of daily life in the Maya world. These journeys involve important social and practical concerns, such as the maintenance of food sources and world order. Frequent pilgrimages to ceremonial hills to pay offerings to spiritual forces for good harvests, for instance, are just as necessary for farming as planting fields. Why has Maya pilgrimage to ritual landscapes prevailed from the distant past and why are journeys to ritual landscapes important in Maya religion? How can archaeologists recognize Maya pilgrimage, and how does it compare to similar behavior at ritual landscapes around the world? The author addresses these questions and others through cross-cultural comparisons, archaeological data, and ethnographic insights.
This book offers a new account of human interaction and culture change for Mesoamerica that connects the present to the past. Social histories that assess the cultural upheavals between the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica and the ethnographic present overlook the archaeological record, with its unique capacity to link local practices to global processes. To fill this gap, the authors weigh the material manifestations of the colonial and postcolonial trajectory in light of local, regional, and global historical processes that have unfolded over the last five hundred years. Research on a suite of issues—economic history, production of commodities, agrarian change, resistance, religious shifts, and sociocultural identity—demonstrates that the often shocking patterns observed today are historically contingent and culturally mediated, and therefore explainable. This book belongs to a new wave of scholarship that renders the past immediately relevant to the present, which Alexander and Kepecs see as one of archaeology’s most crucial goals.
From the ancient traditions of the Lacandón Maya comes an Indigenous model for a sustainable future Having lived for centuries isolated within Mexico’s largest remaining tropical rainforest, the Indigenous Lacandón Maya now live at the nexus of two worlds—ancient and modern. While previous research has focused on documenting Lacandón oral traditions and religious practices in order to preserve them, this book tells the story of how Lacandón families have adapted to the contemporary world while applying their ancestral knowledge to create an ecologically sustainable future. Drawing on his 49 years of studying and learning from the Lacandón Maya, James Nations discusses how in the mid...
Although romanticized as the last of the ancient Maya living isolated in the forest, several generations of the Lacandon Maya have had their lives shaped by the international oil economy, tourism, and political unrest. Watching Lacandon Maya Lives is an examination of dramatic cultural changes in a Maya rainforest farming community over the last forty years, including changes to their families, industries, religion, health and healing practices, and gender roles. The book contains several discussions of anthropological theory in accessible, jargon-free language, including how the use of different theoretical perspectives impacts an ethnographer’s fieldwork experience. While relating his ow...
With elements of catalogue, guidebook, and historical summary, this richly illustrated book offers a comprehensive source of information for art historians, folk art enthusiasts, museum curators, and the casual traveller to Chiapas. The Mexican state of Chiapas and its historical connections to Guatemala during the colonial period, offers travellers an experience different from most states in Mexico. Here they see Indians and Ladinos living side by side following centuries-old traditions, each with their own interpretation of Catholicism, and a symbolic language that distinguishes their culture and customs. blessings as collected by the late Frans Blom, now located at Na Bolom, the Museum an...
Este libro hace énfasis en las contribuciones metodológicas de Charlton, habiendo pocas publicaciones en castellano referentes a la arqueología histórica de Mesoamérica, esta obra será de gran utilidad para quienes realicen estudios científicos que se centren en esta clase de arqueología principalmente el trabajo interdisciplinario, el uso de fuentes documentales primarias, la analogía, el concepto de unidades de intrusión de sitios y su asociación con la aculturación, así como en temas específicos que formaron parte de sus intereses de investigación.
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