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Chicle is a history in four acts, all of them focused on the sticky white substance that seeps from the sapodilla tree when its bark is cut. First, Jennifer Mathews recounts the story of chicle and its earliest-known adherents, the Maya and Aztecs. Second, with the assistance of botanist Gillian Schultz, Mathews examines the sapodilla tree itself, an extraordinarily hardy plant that is native only to Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. Third, Mathews presents the fascinating story of the chicle and chewing gum industry over the last hundred plus years, a tale (like so many twentieth-century tales) of greed, growth, and collapse. In closing, Mathews considers the plight of the chicleros, the "extractors" who often work by themselves tapping trees deep in the forests, and how they have emerged as icons of local pop culture -- portrayed as fearless, hard-drinking brawlers, people to be respected as well as feared. --publisher description.
L'éditeur indique : "This book explores how the Mayans gave value to commodities through the lens of anthropology and archaeology."
The Long Silence is a short series about architectural surveys in the Maya Puuc region. Two volumes are available: The Long Silence and The Long Silence (2). In The Long Silence Stephan Merk describes the outcome of his Chunhuaymil project, an architectural survey of standing Maya Puuc ruins in a mostly untouched 100 square kilometer sector in Northeastern Campeche, México. Nineteen ancient settlements were recorded, many of them for the first time. Their remaining architecture is presented here together with important hieroglyphic inscriptions from the sites. With additional contributions by Antonio Benavides Castillo, Daniel Graña-Behrens, Nikolai Grube, Carlos Pallan Gayol, and Julie Patrois.
In recent years the Cochuah region, the ancient breadbasket of the north-central Yucatecan lowlands, has been documented and analyzed by a number of archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. This book, the first major collection of data from those investigations, presents and analyzes findings on more than eighty sites and puts them in the context of the findings of other investigations from outside the area. It begins with archaeological investigations and continues with research on living peoples. Within the archaeological sections, historic and colonial chapters build upon those concerned with the Classic Maya, revealing the ebb and flow of settlement through time in the region as peoples entered, left, and modified their ways of life based upon external and internal events and forces. In addition to discussing the history of anthropological research in the area, the contributors address such issues as modern women’s reproductive choices, site boundary definition, caves as holy places, settlement shifts, and the reuse of spaces through time.
Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands explores what has been required of the Maya to survive both internal and external threats and other destabilizing forces. These include shifting power dynamics and sociocultural transformations, tumultuous political regimes, the precarity of newly formed nation states, migration in search of refuge, and newly globalizing economies in the Yucatecan lowlands in the Late Colonial to Early National periods—the times when formal Spanish colonial rule was giving way to Yucatecan and Mexican neocolonial settler systems. The work takes a hemispheric approach to the historical and material analysis of colonialism, bridging the often disparate literatures on colonial...
Mexico’s southern state of Quintana Roo is often perceived by archaeologists as a blank spot on the map of the Maya world, a region generally assumed to hold little of interest thanks to its relative isolation from the rest of Mexico. But salvage archaeology required by recent development along the “Maya Riviera,” along with a suite of other ongoing and recent research projects, have shown that the region was critical in connecting coastal and inland zones, and it is now viewed as an important area in its own right from Preclassic through post-contact times. The first volume devoted to the archaeology of Quintana Roo, this book reveals a long tradition of exploration and discovery in t...
While the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico may conjure up images of vacation getaways and cocktails by the sea, these easy stereotypes hide a story filled with sweat and toil. The story of sugarcane and rum production in the Caribbean has been told many times. But few know the bittersweet story of sugar and rum in the jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula during the nineteenth century. This is much more than a history of coveted commodities. The unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new history Sugarcane and Rum is told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum. Gust and Mathews weave t...
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 lowlandsÑone 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 h...
The Transnational Construction of Mayanness explores how US academics, travelers, officials, and capitalists contributed to the construction of the Maya as an area of academic knowledge and affected the lives of the Maya peoples who were the subject of generations of anthropological research from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Expanding discussions of the neocolonial relationship between the US and its southern neighbors and emphasizing little-studied texts virtually inaccessible to those in Mexico and Central America, this is the first and only set of comparative studies to bring in US-based documentary collections as an enriching source of evidence. Contributors tap documentary...
This volume presents recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research on the encampments, trails, and support structures of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. These sites illuminate the daily lives of soldiers, officers, and camp followers away from the more well-known military campaigns and battles. The research featured here includes previously unpublished findings from the winter encampments at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, as well as work from sites in Redding, Connecticut, and Morristown, New Jersey. Topics range from excavations of a special dining cabin constructed for General George Washington to ballistic analysis of a target range established by General von...