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A timely synthesis of the latest research and perspectives on ancient Maya economics, this volume illuminates the sophistication and intricacy of economic systems in the Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic periods. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines move beyond paradigms of elite control and centralized exchange to focus on individual agency, highlighting production and exchange that took place at all levels of society. Case studies draw on new archaeological evidence from rural households and urban marketplaces to reconstruct the trade networks for tools, ceramics, obsidian, salt, and agricultural goods throughout the empire. They also describe the ways household production inte...
"This book critically re-examines Mesoamerican archaeological approaches to estimating populations associated with ancient cities, settlement systems, and regions. Archaeological data and lidar are both employed to demonstrate how complex ancient Mesoamerican societies were and how they changed over time"--
This volume brings together a wide spectrum of new approaches to ancient Maya studies in an innovative exploration of how the Preclassic and Classic Maya shaped their world. Moving beyond the towering temples and palaces typically associated with the Maya civilization, contributors present unconventional examples of monumental Maya landscapes. Featuring studies from across the central Maya lowlands, Belize, and the northern and central Maya highlands and spanning over 10,000 years of human occupation in the region, these chapters show how the word “monumental” can be used to describe natural and constructed landscapes, political and economic landscapes, and ritual and sacred landscapes. ...
For the ancient and modern Maya, the landscape is ruled by powerful entities in the form of geographic features like caves, mountains, springs, and abandoned cities—spirits who must be entreated, through visits and rituals, for permission to plant, harvest, build, or travel their territories. Consequently, such places have served as points of domination and resistance over the millennia—and nowhere is this truer than in Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip, the subject of Brent K. S. Woodfill’s War in the Land of True Peace. This strategic region with its wealth of resources—fertile soil, petroleum, and the only noncoastal salt in the Maya lowlands—is the site of some of the mo...
The ancient Maya created one of the most studied and best-known civilizations of the Americas. Nevertheless, Maya civilization is often considered either within a vacuum, by sub-region and according to modern political borders, or with reference to the most important urban civilizations of central Mexico. Seldom if ever are the Maya and their Central American neighbors of El Salvador and Honduras considered together, despite the fact that they engaged in mutually beneficial trade, intermarried, and sometimes made war on each other. The Maya and Their Central American Neighbors seeks to fill this lacuna by presenting original research on the archaeology of the whole of the Maya area (from Yuc...
During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs—and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities—amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage. In this insightful work, Tripp Evans explores why nineteenth-century Americans felt entitled to appropriate Mexico's cultural heritage as the United States' own. He focuses in particular on five well-known figures—Ameri...
"Here in the US, we're having difficult discussions about who we should monumentalize, the political implications of our statues, or what to do with monuments that no longer reflect our ideals. In a way, this book looks at how the Maya dealt with these and related issues. The author explores how the ancient Maya engaged with their history by using, reusing, altering, and burying stone sculptures. O'Neil shows, for example, how the ancient Maya repurposed stelae that were damaged by their enemies. In some cases, they would break the stelae to signify a change in their status, and bury them with others so that the buried monuments connected with those still standing in specific sacred sites. Infused with agency, the sculptures retained ceremonial meaning. O'Neil explores how those breakages and other, different human interactions, amidst unstable religious, political, and historical contexts, changed the sculptures' "lives.""--
Maya kings who failed to ensure the prosperity of their kingdoms were subject to various forms of termination, including the ritual defacing and destruction of monuments and even violent death. This is the first comprehensive volume to focus on the varied responses to the failure of Classic period dynasties in the southern lowlands. The contributors offer new insights into the Maya "collapse," evaluating the trope of the scapegoat king and the demise of the traditional institution of kingship in the early ninth century AD--a time of intense environmental, economic, social, political, and even ideological change. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase
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.
Households are, without question, the most important social units in human society. They are interactive social units whose primary concern is the day-to-day well being of their kith and kin. Households reproduce themselves and provide their members with the economic, psychological, and social resources necessary to live their lives. Although households vary enormously in size and organization, they are the fundamental social settings in which families are defined and cultural values are transmitted through a range of domestic activities and rituals. Despite their many functions, it is the range and productivity of their economic activities that determine the success, survival and well being of their members. Households are the primary production and consumption units in society and provide the vehicle through which resources are pooled, stored, and distributed to their members. Survival and reproduction is their business and the work they do determines their success.