Author : Samuel V. Connell
Publisher : Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 31,10 MB
Release : 2003-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1938770803
Settlement archaeology in the Maya area has focused much of its attention on the polar extremes of the settlement continuum. As a result of this urban/rural bias, a whole range of complex rural settlements remain under-explored. The chapters in this volume highlight the variable quality of these "middle level settlements".
Author : Brett A. Houk
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 497 pages
File Size : 25,34 MB
Release : 2019-12-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0813057345
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. Examples include a massive system of aqueducts and canals at the Kaminaljuyu site, a vast arena designed for public spectacle at Chan Chich, and even the complex realms of Maya cosmology as represented by the ritual cave at Las Cuevas. By including physical, conceptual, and symbolic ways monumentality pervaded ancient Maya culture, this volume broadens traditional understandings of how the Maya interacted with their environment and provides exciting analytical perspectives to guide future study. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase
Author : Travis W. Stanton
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 25,31 MB
Release : 2020-07-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1646420462
David Freidel and Linda Schele’s monumental work A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (1990) offered an innovative, rigorous, and controversial approach to studying the ancient Maya, unifying archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic data in a form accessible to both scholars and laypeople. Travis Stanton and Kathryn Brown’s A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship presents a collection of essays that critically engage with and build upon the lasting contributions A Forest of Kings made to Maya epigraphy, iconography, material culture, and history. These original papers present new, cutting-edge research focusing on the social changes leading up to the spread of divine kingship across the lowlands in the first part of the Early Classic. The contributors continue avenues of inquiry such as the timing of the Classic Maya collapse across the southern lowlands, the nature of Maya warfare, the notion of usurpation and “stranger-kings” in the Classic period, the social relationships between the ruler and elite of the Classic period Yaxchilán polity, and struggles for sociopolitical dominance among the later Classic period polities of Chichén Itzá, Cobá, and the Puuc kingdoms. Many of the interpretations and approaches in A Forest of Kings have withstood the test of time, while others have not; a complete understanding of the Classic Maya world is still developing. In A Forest of History recent discoveries are considered in the context of prior scholarship, illustrating both the progress the field has made in the past quarter century and the myriad questions that remain. The volume will be a significant contribution to the literature for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Mesoamerican and Maya archaeology. Contributors: Wendy Ashmore, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Wilberth Cruz Alvarado, Arthur A. Demarest, Keith Eppich, David A. Freidel, Charles W. Golden, Stanley P. Guenter, Annabeth Headrick, Aline Magnoni, Joyce Marcus, Marilyn A. Masson, Damaris Menéndez, Susan Milbrath, Olivia C. Navarro-Farr, José Osorio León, Carlos Peraza Lope, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, Griselda Pérez Robles, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, Michelle Rich, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Andrew K. Scherer, Karl A. Taube
Author : Anabel Ford
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 42,17 MB
Release : 2016-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1315417928
Using studies on contemporary Maya farming techniques and important new archaeological research, the authors show that the ancient Maya were able to support, sustainably, a vast population by farming the forest—thus refuting the common notion that Maya civilization devolved due to overpopulation and famine.
Author : Gyles Iannone
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 489 pages
File Size : 25,29 MB
Release : 2014-03-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1607322803
In The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, contributors reject the popularized link between societal collapse and drought in Maya civilization, arguing that a series of periodic “collapses,” including the infamous Terminal Classic collapse (AD 750–1050), were not caused solely by climate change–related droughts but by a combination of other social, political, and environmental factors. New and senior scholars of archaeology and environmental science explore the timing and intensity of droughts and provide a nuanced understanding of socio-ecological dynamics, with specific reference to what makes communities resilient or vulnerable when faced with environmental change.Contributors recognize the existence of four droughts that correlate with periods of demographic and political decline and identify a variety of concurrent political and social issues. They argue that these primary underlying factors were exacerbated by drought conditions and ultimately led to societal transitions that were by no means uniform across various sites and subregions. They also deconstruct the concept of “collapse” itself—although the line of Maya kings ended with the Terminal Classic collapse, the Maya people and their civilization survived. The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context offers new insights into the complicated series of events that impacted the decline of Maya civilization. This significant contribution to our increasingly comprehensive understanding of ancient Maya culture will be of interest to students and scholars of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.
Author : Monica L. Smith
Publisher : Smithsonian Institution
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 10,94 MB
Release : 2013-04-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1588343448
What made ancient cities successful? What are the similarities between modern cities and ancient ones? The Social Construction of Ancient Cities offers a fresh perspective on ancient cities and the social networks and relations that built and sustained them, marking a dramatic change in the way archaeologists approach them. Examining ancient cities from a “bottom up” perspective, the authors in this volume explore the ways in which cities were actually created by ordinary inhabitants. They track the development of urban space from the point of view of individuals and households, providing new insights into cities' roles as social centers as well as focal points of political and economic activities. Analyzing various urban communities from residences and neighborhoods to marketplaces and ceremonial plazas, the authors examine urban centers in Africa, Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, the Indian subcontinent, and China. Collectively they demonstrate how complex networks of social relations and structures gave rise to the formation of ancient cities, contributed to their cohesion, and sustained their growth, much as they do in modern urban centers. The authors' analyses draw from ancient texts as well as archaeological surveys and excavations of urban architecture and other material remains, including portable objects for daily use and comestibles. They show clearly how early urban dwellers consciously developed dense interdependent social networks to satisfy their needs for food, housing, and employment, forged their own urban identities, and generally managed to thrive in the crowded, bustling, and competitive environment that characterized ancient cities. Not least of all, they suggest how urban leaders and urban dwellers negotiated a consensus that enabled them to achieve both mundane and extraordinary goals, in the process establishing their unique ritual, legal, and social status.
Author : Jean T. Larmon
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 20,25 MB
Release : 2022-07-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1646422325
Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond investigates climate change and sustainability through time, exploring how political control of water sources, maintenance of sustainable systems, ideological relationships with water, and fluctuations in water availability have affected and been affected by social change. Contributors focus on and build upon earlier investigations of the global diversity of water management systems and the successes and failures of their employment, while applying a multitude of perspectives on sustainability. The volume focuses primarily on the Precolumbian Maya but offers several analogous case studies outside the ancient Maya world that illustrate the pervasiveness of water’s role in sustainability, including an ethnographic study of the sustainability of small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems in contemporary New Mexico and the environmental consequences of Angkor’s growth into the world’s most extensive preindustrial settlement. The archaeological record offers rich data on past politics of climate change, while epigraphic and ethnographic data show how integrated the ideological, political, and environmental worlds of the Maya were. While Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond stresses how lessons from the past offer invaluable insight into current approaches of adaptation, it also advances our understanding of those adaptations by making the inevitable discrepancies between past and present climate change less daunting and emphasizing the sustainable negotiations between humans and their surroundings that have been mediated by the changing climate for millennia. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in climate change, sustainability, and water management in the archaeological record. Contributors: Mary Jane Acuña, Wendy Ashmore, Timothy Beach, Jeffrey Brewer, Christopher Carr, Adrian S. Z. Chase, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Carlos R. Chiriboga, Jennifer Chmilar, Nicholas Dunning, Maurits W. Ertsen, Roland Fletcher, David Friedel, Robert Griffin, Joel D. Gunn, Armando Anaya Hernández, Christian Isendahl, David Lentz, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Dan Penny, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Michelle Rich, Cynthia Robin, Sylvia Rodríguez, William Saturno, Vernon Scarborough, Payson Sheets, Liwy Grazioso Sierra, Michael Smyth, Sander van der Leeuw, Andrew Wyatt
Author : Nicolaus Seefeld
Publisher : Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 18,66 MB
Release : 2018-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1784919306
This research seeks to close an essential research gap – the understanding of the water management strategies of the Maya in pre-Hispanic times. It focuses on the archaeological investigation of the hydraulic system of Uxul, a medium-sized Maya centre in the south of the state of Campeche, Mexico.
Author : Maxime Lamoureux-St-Hilaire
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 42,55 MB
Release : 2020-02-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 164642008X
Detachment from Place is the first comparative and interdisciplinary volume on the archaeology of settlement abandonment, with contributions focusing on materiality, ideology, the environment, and social construction of space. The volume sheds new light on an important but underexamined aspect of settlement abandonment wherein sedentary groups undergoing the process of abandonment leave behind many meaningful elements of their inhabited landscape. The process of detaching from place—which could last centuries—transformed inhabitants into migrants and transformed settled, constructed, and agricultural landscapes into imagined ones that continued to figure significantly in the identities of migrant groups. Drawing on case studies from the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the volume explores how relationships between ancient peoples and the places they lived were transformed as they migrated elsewhere. Contributors focus on social structure, ecology, and ideology to study how people and places both disentangled from each other and remained tied together during this process. From Huron-Wendat villages and Classic Maya palaces to historical villages in Togo and the great Southeast Asian Medieval capital of Bagan, specific cultural, historical, and environmental factors led ancient peoples to detach from their homes and embark on migrations that altered social memory and cultural identity—as evidenced in the archaeological record. Detachment from Place provides new insights into transfigurations of community identity, political organization, social and economic relations, religion, warfare, and agricultural practices and will be of interest to landscape archaeologists as well as researchers focused on collective memory, population movement, migratory patterns, and interaction. Contributors: Tomas Q. Barrientos, Jennifer Birch, Eduardo José Bustamante Luna, Catherine M. Cameron, Marcello A. Canuto, Jeffrey H. Cohen, Michael D. Danti, Phillip de Barros, Pete Demarte, Donna M. Glowacki, Gyles Iannone, Louis Lesage, Patricia A. McAnany, Asa R. Randall, Kenneth E. Sassaman
Author : Scott R. Hutson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 983 pages
File Size : 37,9 MB
Release : 2020-06-17
Category : Education
ISBN : 1351029568
The Maya World brings together over 60 authors, representing the fields of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, geography, and ethnography, who explore cutting-edge research on every major facet of the ancient Maya and all sub-regions within the Maya world. The Maya world, which covers Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, contains over a hundred ancient sites that are open to tourism, eight of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and many thousands more that have been dug or await investigation. In addition to captivating the lay public, the ancient Maya have attracted scores of major interdisciplinary research expeditions and hundreds of smaller projects going back to the 19th century, making them one of the best-known ancient cultures. The Maya World explores their renowned writing system, towering stone pyramids, exquisitely painted murals, and elaborate funerary tombs as well as their creative agricultural strategies, complex social, economic, and political relationships, widespread interactions with other societies, and remarkable cultural resilience in the face of historical ruptures. This is an invaluable reference volume for scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.
