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The Give and Take of Sustainability
In this book, ethnographical and archaeological perspectives on tradeoffs help the reader to think about hard choices, and how to make better decisions today and tomorrow.
Ancient Maya Commoners
Much of what we currently know about the ancient Maya concerns the activities of the elites who ruled the societies and left records of their deeds carved on the monumental buildings and sculptures that remain as silent testimony to their power and status. But what do we know of the common folk who labored to build the temple complexes and palaces and grew the food that fed all of Maya society? This pathfinding book marshals a wide array of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence to offer the fullest understanding to date of the lifeways of ancient Maya commoners. Senior and emerging scholars contribute case studies that examine such aspects of commoner life as settlement patterns, household organization, and subsistence practices. Their reports cover most of the Maya area and the entire time span from Preclassic to Postclassic. This broad range of data helps resolve Maya commoners from a faceless mass into individual actors who successfully adapted to their social environment and who also held primary responsibility for producing the food and many other goods on which the whole Maya society depended.
The Maya and Climate Change
"The Classic Maya civilization thrived between 200-950 CE in the tropical forests of eastern Mesoamerica before undergoing a period of breakdown and transformation known colloquially as the Classic Maya Collapse. This book draws on archaeological, environmental, and historical datasets to provide a comprehensive overview of Classic Maya human-environment relationships, including how communities addressed challenges wrought by climate change. Researchers today understand that the breakdown of Classic Maya society was the result of many long-term processes. Yet the story that continues to grip the public imagination is that Maya civilization mysteriously "collapsed." This book shifts the focus...
Seeking a Richer Harvest
Subsistence intensification, innovation and change have long figured prominently in explanations for the development of social complexity among foragers and horticulturalists. This set of global case studies re-examines the ‘subsistence question’ in light of recent research. It contrasts traditional approaches with recent archaeological research that presents human driven strategies for power, prestige, and status as causes of subsistence intensification.
Climate Change and the Health of Nations
When we think "climate change," we think of man-made global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions. But natural climate change has occurred throughout human history, and populations have had to adapt to its vicissitudes. Tony McMichael, a renowned epidemiologist and a pioneer in the field of how human health relates to climate change, is the ideal guide to this phenomenon, and in his magisterial Climate Change and the Health of Nations, he presents a sweeping and authoritative analysis of how human societies have been shaped by climate events.
Rooting in a Useless Land
In Rooting in a Useless Land, Chelsea Fisher examines the deep histories of environmental-justice conflicts in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. She draws on her innovative archaeological research in Yaxunah, an Indigenous Maya farming community dealing with land dispossession, but with a surprising twist: Yaxunah happens to be entangled with prestigious sustainable-development projects initiated by some of the most famous chefs in the world. Fisher contends that these sustainable-development initiatives inadvertently bolster the useless-land narrative—a colonial belief that Maya forests are empty wastelands—which has been driving Indigenous land dispossession and environmental injustice for centuries. Rooting in a Useless Land explores how archaeology, practiced within communities, can restore history and strengthen relationships built on contested ground.
The Long Silence
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.
Ancient Maya Life in the Far West Bajo
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...
Memory Traces
"In Memory Traces, art historians and archaeologists come together to examine the nature of sacred space in Mesoamerica. Through five well-known and important centers of political power and artistic invention in Mesoamerica—Tetitla at Teotihuacan, Tula Grande, the Mound of the Building Columns at El Tajín, the House of the Phalli at Chichén Itzá, and Tonina—contributors explore the process of recognizing and defining sacred space, how sacred spaces were viewed and used both physically and symbolically, and what theoretical approaches are most useful for art historians and archaeologists seeking to understand these places.Memory Traces acknowledges that the creation, use, abandonment, and reuse of sacred space has a strongly recursive relation to collective memory and meanings linked to the places in question, and reconciles issues of continuity and discontinuity of memory in ancient Mesoamerican sacred spaces. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Mesoamerican studies and material culture, art historians, architectural historians, and cultural anthropologists."
Ancient Maya
Ancient Maya comes to life in this new holistic and theoretical study.
