Download or read book Sculpture in the Ancient Maya Plaza written by Flora S. Clancy and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The free-standing monuments which adorned the Early Classic plazas of the ancient Mayan cities were carved with exquisite relief sculpture. It is the latter which forms the main concern of this book. Drawing on detailed examination of the art pieces themselves, Clancy discusses their composition, carving techniques, imagery, text and attempts to reconstruct the decision-making process associated with their design, creation and unveiling. With many illustrations.
Download or read book Sculpture in the Ancient Maya Plaza written by Flora S. Clancy and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The free-standing monuments which adorned the Early Classic plazas of the ancient Mayan cities were carved with exquisite relief sculpture. It is the latter which forms the main concern of this book. Drawing on detailed examination of the art pieces themselves, Clancy discusses their composition, carving techniques, imagery, text and attempts to reconstruct the decision-making process associated with their design, creation and unveiling. With many illustrations.
Download or read book Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras Guatemala written by Megan E. O'Neil and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now shrouded in Guatemalan jungle, the ancient Maya city of Piedras Negras flourished between the sixth and ninth centuries, when its rulers erected monumental limestone sculptures carved with hieroglyphic texts and images of themselves and family members, advisers, and captives. In Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, Megan E. O’Neil offers new ways to understand these stelae, altars, and panels by exploring how ancient Maya people interacted with them. These monuments, considered sacred, were one of the community’s important forms of cultural and religious expression. Stelae may have held the essence of rulers they commemorated, and the objects remained loci for reverence of those rulers after they died. Using a variety of evidence,O’Neil examines how the forms, compositions, and contexts of the sculptures invited people to engage with them and the figures they embodied looks at these monuments not as inert bearers of images but as palpable presences that existed in real space at specific historical moments. Her analysis brings to the fore the material and affective force of these powerful objects that were seen, touched, and manipulated in the past. O’Neil investigates the monuments not only at the moment of their creation but also in later years and shows how they changed over time. She argues that the relationships among sculptures of different generations were performed in processions, through which ancient Maya people integrated historical dialogues and ancestral commemoration into the landscape. With the help of more than 160 illustrations, O’Neil reveals these sculptures’ continuing life histories, which in the past century have included their fragmentation and transformation into commodities sold on the international art market. Shedding light on modern-day transposition and display of these ancient monuments, O’Neil’s study contributes to ongoing discussions of cultural patrimony.
Download or read book The Monuments of Piedras Negras an Ancient Maya City written by Flora S. Clancy and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stunning imagery created at Piedras Negras was produced for cultural and ceremonial purposes, but Maya expert Clancy argues that its enduring artistic value cannot be ignored.
Download or read book Memory in Fragments written by Megan E. O'Neil and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how the ancient Maya engaged with their history by using, altering, and burying stone sculptures. For the ancient Maya, monumental stone sculptures were infused with agency. As they were used, reused, altered, and buried, such sculptures retained ceremonial meaning. In Memory in Fragments, Megan E. O'Neil explores how ancient Maya people engaged with history through these sculptures, as well as how they interacted with the stones themselves over the course of the sculptures’ long “lives.” Considering Maya religious practices, historiography, and conceptions of materials and things, O’Neil explores how Maya viewers perceived sculptures that were fragmented, scarred, burned, damaged by enemies, or set in unusual locations. In each case, she demonstrates how different human interactions, amid dynamic religious, political, and historical contexts, led to new episodes in the sculptures' lives. A rare example of cross-temporal and geographical work in this field, Memory in Fragments both compares sculptures within ancient Maya culture across Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize over hundreds of years and reveals how memory may accrue around and be evoked in material remains.
Download or read book Yaxchilan written by Carolyn E. Tate and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As archaeologists peel away the jungle covering that has both obscured and preserved the ancient Maya cities of Mexico and Central America, other scholars have only a limited time to study and understand the sites before the jungle, weather, and human encroachment efface them again, perhaps forever. This urgency underlies Yaxchilan: The Design of a Maya Ceremonial City, Carolyn Tate's comprehensive catalog and analysis of all the city's extant buildings and sculptures. During a year of field work, Tate fully documented the appearance of the site as of 1987. For each sculpture and building, she records its discovery, present location, condition, measurements, and astronomical orientation and reconstructs its Long Counts and Julian dates from Calendar Rounds. Line drawings and photographs provide a visual document of the art and architecture of Yaxchilan. More than mere documentation, however, the book explores the phenomenon of art within Maya society. Tate establishes a general framework of cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, and knowledge likely to have been shared by eighth-century Maya people. The process of making public art is considered in relation to other modes of aesthetic expression, such as oral tradition and ritual. This kind of analysis is new in Maya studies and offers fresh insight into the function of these magnificent cities and the powerful role public art and architecture play in establishing cultural norms, in education in a semiliterate society, and in developing the personal and community identities of individuals. Several chapters cover the specifics of art and iconography at Yaxchilan as a basis for examining the creation of the city in the Late Classic period. Individual sculptures are attributed to the hands of single artists and workshops, thus aiding in dating several of the monuments. The significance of headdresses, backracks, and other costume elements seen on monuments is tied to specific rituals and fashions, and influence from other sites is traced. These analyses lead to a history of the design of the city under the reigns of Shield Jaguar (A.D. 681-741) and Bird Jaguar IV (A.D. 752-772). In Tate's view, Yaxchilan and other Maya cities were designed as both a theater for ritual activities and a nexus of public art and social structures that were crucial in defining the self within Maya society.
Download or read book Lightning Warrior written by Matthew G. Looper and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Maya city of Quirigua occupied a crossroads between Copan in the southeastern Maya highlands and the major centers of the Peten heartland. Though always a relatively small city, Quirigua stands out because of its public monuments, which were some of the greatest achievements of Classic Maya civilization. Impressive not only for their colossal size, high sculptural quality, and eloquent hieroglyphic texts, the sculptures of Quirigua are also one of the few complete, in situ series of Maya monuments anywhere, which makes them a crucial source of information about ancient Maya spirituality and political practice within a specific historical context. Using epigraphic, iconographic, and stylistic analyses, this study explores the integrated political-religious meanings of Quirigua's monumental sculptures during the eighth-century A.D. reign of the city's most famous ruler, K'ak' Tiliw. In particular, Matthew Looper focuses on the role of stelae and other sculpture in representing the persona of the ruler not only as a political authority but also as a manifestation of various supernatural entities with whom he was associated through ritual performance. By tracing this sculptural program from its Early Classic beginnings through the reigns of K'ak' Tiliw and his successors, and also by linking it to practices at Copan, Looper offers important new insights into the politico-religious history of Quirigua and its ties to other Classic Maya centers, the role of kingship in Maya society, and the development of Maya art.
Download or read book Maya Imagery Architecture and Activity written by Maline D. Werness-Rude and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity privileges art historical perspectives in addressing the ways the ancient Maya organized, manipulated, created, interacted with, and conceived of the world around them. The Maya provide a particularly strong example of the ways in which the built and imaged environment are intentionally oriented relative to political, religious, economic, and other spatial constructs. In examining space, the contributors of this volume demonstrate the core interrelationships inherent in a wide variety of places and spaces, both concrete and abstract. They explore the links between spatial order and cosmic order and the possibility that such connections have sociopolitical consequences. This book will prove useful not just to Mayanists but to art historians in other fields and scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, geography, and landscape architecture.
Download or read book The Comit n Valley written by Caitlin C. Earley and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the understudied sculpture of the Maya frontier.
Download or read book Rubbings of Ancient Maya Sculpture by Joan W Patten written by Carl D. Callaway and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Maya Universe in Stone written by Stephen Houston and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study devoted to a single sculptor in ancient America, as understood through four unprovenanced masterworks traced to a small sector of Guatemala. In 1950, Dana Lamb, an explorer of some notoriety, stumbled on a Maya ruin in the tropical forests of northern Guatemala. Lamb failed to record the location of the site he called Laxtunich, turning his find into the mystery at the center of this book. The lintels he discovered there, long since looted, are probably of a set with two others that are among the masterworks of Maya sculpture from the Classic period. Using fieldwork, physical evidence, and Lamb’s expedition notes, the authors identify a small area with archaeological sites where the carvings were likely produced. Remarkably, the vividly colored lintels, replete with dynastic and cosmic information, can be assigned to a carver, Mayuy, who sculpted his name on two of them. To an extent nearly unique in ancient America, Mayuy can be studied over time as his style developed and his artistic ambition grew. An in-depth analysis of Laxtunich Lintel 1 examines how Mayuy grafted celestial, seasonal, and divine identities onto a local magnate and his overlord from the kingdom of Yaxchilan, Mexico. This volume contextualizes the lintels and points the way to their reprovenancing and, as an ultimate aim, repatriation to Guatemala.
Download or read book Space and Sculpture in the Classic Maya City written by Alexander Parmington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Alexander Parmington examines how images, texts and architectural form controlled and channelled movement of particular sets of people through various precincts in Classic Maya cities. Using Palenque as a case study, this book analyses specific building groups and corresponding sculptures to provide insight into the hierarchical distribution and use of ritual and administrative space in temple and palace architecture. Identifying which spaces were the most accessible and most public, and which spaces were segregated and highly private, Dr Parmington demonstrates how sculptural, iconographic and hieroglyphic content varies considerably when found in public/common or private/elite space. Drawing on specific examples from the Classic Maya and other early civilisations, he demonstrates that by examining the intent in the distribution of architecture and art, the variation and function of the artistic themes represented in sculpture and other monumental works of art can be better understood.
Download or read book Ancient Maya Relief Sculpture written by Merle Greene and published by Museum of Primitive Art & Culture. This book was released on 1967-09-10 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of rubbings taken by Merle Greene from outstanding Maya monuments, primarily of the classic period.
Download or read book The Art of Ancient Maya written by Detroit Institute of Arts and published by New York : T. Y. Crowell. This book was released on 1959 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survey of Mayan sculpture and painting in text and photographs.
Download or read book Exploring the Life Myth and Art of the Maya written by Timothy Laughton and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an introduction to Mayan civilization, discussing its history, politics, art, religion, literature, philosophy, military, gods, and heroes.
Download or read book Maya Figurines written by Christina T. Halperin and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than view the contours of Late Classic Maya social life solely from towering temple pyramids or elite sculptural forms, this book considers a suite of small anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and supernatural figurative remains excavated from household refuse deposits. Maya Figurines examines these often neglected objects and uses them to draw out relationships between the Maya state and its subjects. These figurines provide a unique perspective for understanding Maya social and political relations; Christina T. Halperin argues that state politics work on the microscale of everyday routines, localized rituals, and small-scale representations. Her comprehensive study brings together archeology, anthropology, and art history with theories of material culture, performance, political economy, ritual humor, and mimesis to make a fascinating case for the role politics plays in daily life. What she finds is that, by comparing small-scale figurines with state-sponsored, often large-scale iconography and elite material culture, one can understand how different social realms relate to and represent one another. In Maya Figurines, Halperin compares objects from diverse households, archeological sites, and regions, focusing especially on figurines from Petén, Guatemala, and comparing them to material culture from Belize, the northern highlands of Guatemala, the Usumacinta River, the Campeche coastal area, and Mesoamerican sites outside the Maya zone. Ultimately, she argues, ordinary objects are not simply passive backdrops for important social and political phenomena. Instead, they function as significant mechanisms through which power and social life are intertwined.
