You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
“A prodigious work of unmatched interdisciplinary scholarship” on Maya astronomy and religion (Journal of Interdisciplinary History). Observations of the sun, moon, planets, and stars played a central role in ancient Maya lifeways, as they do today among contemporary Maya who maintain the traditional ways. This pathfinding book reconstructs ancient Maya astronomy and cosmology through the astronomical information encoded in Pre-Columbian Maya art and confirmed by the current practices of living Maya peoples. Susan Milbrath opens the book with a discussion of modern Maya beliefs about astronomy, along with essential information on naked-eye observation. She devotes subsequent chapters to ...
The Codex Borgia, a masterpiece that predates the Spanish conquest of central Mexico, records almanacs used in divination and astronomy. Within its beautifully painted screenfold pages is a section (pages 29-46) that shows a sequence of enigmatic pictures that have been the subject of debate for more than a century. Bringing insights from ethnohistory, anthropology, art history, and archaeoastronomy to bear on this passage, Susan Milbrath presents a convincing new interpretation of Borgia 29-46 as a narrative of noteworthy astronomical events that occurred over the course of the year AD 1495-1496, set in the context of the central Mexican festival calendar. In contrast to scholars who have i...
Archaeoastronomy and the Maya illustrates archaeoastronomical approaches to ancient Mayan cultural production. The book is contextualized through a history of archaeoastronomical investigations into Mayan sites, originating in the 19th century discovery of astronomical tables within hieroglyphic books. Early 20th century archaeological excavations revealed inscriptions carved into stone that also preserved astronomical records, along with architecture that was built to reflect astronomical orientations. These materials provided the basis of a growing professionalized archaeoastronomy, blossoming in the 1970s and expanding into recent years. The chapters here exemplify the advances made in th...
This book introduces an innovative and verified pattern of Maya history that follows the origin of the Olmec culture in Tabasco through its melding into and becoming the Chontal Maya/Itza of the Yucatan. The Yucatan has been the focal point and geographical crossroad of profound cultural, ethnological, and sociological change and development in Mesoamerica from ancient times to the present. This far-reaching and historically significant acculturation was brought about by two widely separated epic migrations and military conquests by foreign peoples bringing radically new, innovative, and advanced culture to the area. The first of these was the migration and military conquest by the Olmec/Cho...
This long-awaited resource complements its companion volume on Classic Period monumental inscriptions. Authors Martha J. Macri and Gabrielle Vail provide a comprehensive listing of graphemes found in the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices, 40 percent of which are unique to these painted manuscripts, and discuss current and past interpretations of these graphemes. The New Catalog uses an original coding system developed for the Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project. The new three-digit codes group the graphemes according to their visual, rather than functional, characteristics to allow readers to see distinctions between similar signs. Each entry contains the grapheme’s New Catalog code, an im...
This accessible, state-of-the-art review of Mayan hieroglyphics and cosmology also serves as a tribute to one of the field's most noted pioneers. The core of this book focuses on the current study of Mayan hieroglyphics as inspired by the recently deceased Mayanist Linda Schele. As author or coauthor of more than 200 books or articles on the Maya, Schele served as the chief disseminator of knowledge to the general public about this ancient Mesoamerican culture, similar to the way in which Margaret Mead introduced anthropology and the people of Borneo to the English-speaking world. Twenty-five contributors offer scholarly writings on subjects ranging from the ritual function of public space a...
First published in 1996. In recent years there has been a general increase of scholarly and popular interest in the study of ancient civilizations. Yet, because archaeologists and other scholars tend to approach their study of ancient peoples and places almost exclusively from their own disciplinary perspectives, there has long been a lack of general bibliographic and other research resources available for the non-specialist. This series is intended to fill that need.
This is an important accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud of Central Americafor archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike.
"Brings novel, synthetic insight to understanding a region that was a hub of waterborne trade and an important locus of production for some of the Maya’s most valued crops."--Cynthia Robin, author of Everyday Life Matters: Maya Farmers at Chan "This one of a kind volume shows us how important this region was to the ancient Maya with detailed and vivid descriptions of sociopolitical and economic organization and their relation to the unique landscape and geography of Chetumal Bay."--Laura J. Kosakowsky, author of Preclassic Maya Pottery at Cuello, Belize Chetumal Bay is central to discussions of ancient Maya politics, warfare, economy, exchange and communication because of its unique locati...
The ancient Maya produced a broad range of ceramics that has attracted concerted scholarly attention for over a century. Pottery sherds--the most abundant artifacts recovered from sites--reveal much about artistic expression, religious ritual, economic systems, cooking traditions, and cultural exchange in Maya society. Today, nearly every Maya archaeologist uses the type-variety classificatory framework for studying sherd collections. This impressive volume brings together many of the archaeologists signally involved in the analysis and interpretation of ancient Maya ceramics and represents new findings and state-of-the-art thinking. The result is a book that serves both as a valuable resource for archaeologists involved in pottery classification, analysis, and interpretation and as an illuminating exploration of ancient Mayan culture.