Download or read book The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands written by Arthur Andrew Demarest and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands revisits one of the great problems in Mayan archaeology - the apparent collapse of Classic Maya civilization from roughly A.D. 830 to 950. During this period the Maya abandoned their power centers in the southern lowlands and rather abruptly ceased the distinctive cultural practices that marked their apogee in the Classic period. Archaeological fieldwork during the past three decades, however, has uncovered enormous regional variability in the ways the Maya experienced the shift from Classic to Postclassic society, revealing a period of cultural change more complex than acknowledged by traditional models. Featuring an impressive roster of scholars, The Terminal Classic presents the most recent data and interpretations pertaining to this perplexing period of cultural transformation in the Maya lowlands. Although the research reveals clear interregional patterns, the contributors resist a single overarching explanation. Rather, this volume's diverse and nuanced interpretations provide a new, more properly grounded beginning for continued debate on the nature of lowland Terminal Classic Maya civilization.

Download or read book A Consideration of the Terminal Classic Period in the Southern Maya Lowlands written by Gregory A. Wolff and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Geographies of Power written by Sandra L. López Varela and published by BAR International Series. This book was released on 2005 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve contributors present the contents of the Terminal Classic (the Mayan Lowlands, Central America) ceramic complexes in their area of study, and discuss them against the complexity and diversity of social processes illuminated by recent investigations. Contents: An Introduction to Geographies of Power (Sandra L. Lopez Varela and Antonia E. Foias); A Survey of Terminal Classic Ceramic Complexes and Their Socioeconomic Implications (Donald W. Forsyth); Fine Paste Wares and the Terminal Classic in the Petexbatun and Pasion Regions, Peten, Guatemala (Antonia E. Foias and Ronald L. Bishop); Dynamics of Engagement in the Usumacinta River Valley and the Coastal Plains of Tabasco: traversing Terminal Classic Hypotheses (Sandra L. Lopez Varela); The communities of the Holmul river drainage at the periphery of Tikal during the terminal classic and the identification of a distinctive micaceous paste component (Vilma Fialko); Contextualizing the Collapse Hegemony and Terminal Classic Ceramics from Caracol, Belize (Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase); Continuity and Change in the Ceramic Complex of Xunantunich during the Late and Terminal Classic Periods (Lisa J. LeCount); Terminal Classic Pottery Production in the Ulua Valley, Honduras (Jeanne L. Lopiparo, Rosemary A. Joyce, and Julia A. Hendon); Pushing the Limits: Late to Terminal Classic Settlement and Economies on the Northern Belize Coast (Shirley Boteler Mock); Western Puuc Sociopolitical and Community Organization as Viewed through Terminal Classic Ceramics (Lorraine A. Williams-Beck); Late and Terminal Classic Puuc Ceramics as seen from Xkipche (Michael Vallo); Future Directions in the Study of Terminal Classic Ceramics: some brief Comments (Jeremy A. Sabloff).

Download or read book Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands written by Traci Ardren and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using new archaeological data from four major cities of the Classic Maya world, this book explores how gender, age, familial and community memories, and the experience of living in an urban setting interacted to form social identities. Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands plumbs the archaeological record for what it can reveal about the creation of personal and communal identities in the Maya world. Using new primary data from her excavations at the sites of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Xuenkal, and new analysis of data from Dzibilchaltun in Yucatan, Mexico, Traci Ardren presents a series of case studies in how social identities were created, shared, and manipulated among the lowland Maya. Ardren argues that the interacting factors of gender, age, familial and community memories, and the experience of living in an urban setting were some of the key aspects of Maya identities. She demonstrates that domestic and civic spaces were shaped by gender-specific behaviors to communicate and reinforce gendered ideals. Ardren discusses how child burials disclose a sustained pattern of reverence for the potential of childhood and the power of certain children to mediate ancestral power. She shows how small shrines built a century after Yaxuna was largely abandoned indicate that its remaining residents used memory to reenvision their city during a time of cultural reinvention. And Ardren explains how Chunchucmil’s physical layout of houses, plazas, and surrounding environment denotes that its occupants shared an urban identity centered in the movement of trade goods and economic exchange. Viewing this evidence through the lens of the social imaginary and other recent social theory, Ardren demonstrates that material culture and its circulations are an integral part of the discourse about social identity and group membership.

Download or read book Ritual Violence and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings written by Gyles Iannone and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Ancient Maya written by Arthur Demarest and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-09 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Maya comes to life in this new holistic and theoretical study.

Download or read book Ancient Maya Commerce written by Scott R. Hutson and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Maya Commerce presents nearly two decades of multidisciplinary research at Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico—a thriving Classic period Maya center organized around commercial exchange rather than agriculture. An urban center without a king and unable to sustain agrarian independence, Chunchucmil is a rare example of a Maya city in which economics, not political rituals, served as the engine of growth. Trade was the raison d’être of the city itself. Using a variety of evidence—archaeological, botanical, geomorphological, and soil-based—contributors show how the city was a major center for both short- and long-distance trade, integrating the Guatemalan highlands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the interior of the northern Maya lowlands. By placing Chunchucmil into the broader context of emerging research at other Maya cities, the book reorients the understanding of ancient Maya economies. The book is accompanied by a highly detailed digital map that reveals the dense population of the city and the hundreds of streets its inhabitants constructed to make the city navigable, shifting the knowledge of urbanism among the ancient Maya. Ancient Maya Commerce is a pioneering, thoroughly documented case study of a premodern market center and makes a strong case for the importance of early market economies in the Maya region. It will be a valuable addition to the literature for Mayanists, Mesoamericanists, economic anthropologists, and environmental archaeologists. Contributors: Anthony P. Andrews, Traci Ardren, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Timothy Beach, Chelsea Blackmore, Tara Bond-Freeman, Bruce H. Dahlin, Patrice Farrell, David Hixson, Socorro Jimenez, Justin Lowry, Aline Magnoni, Eugenia Mansell, Daniel E. Mazeau, Travis Stanton, Ryan V. Sweetwood, Richard E. Terry

Download or read book The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context written by Gyles Iannone and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Ancient Maya of Mexico written by Geoffrey E Braswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The archaeological sites of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula are among the most visited ancient cities of the Americas. Archaeologists have recently made great advances in our understanding of the social and political milieu of the northern Maya lowlands. However, such advances have been under-represented in both scholarly and popular literature until now. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' presents the results of new and important archaeological, epigraphic, and art historical research in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. Ranging across the Middle Preclassic to the Modern periods, the volume explores how new archaeological data has transformed our understanding of Maya history. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' will be invaluable to students and scholars of archaeology and anthropology, and all those interested in the society, rituals and economic organisation of the Maya region.

Download or read book Ancient Maya Life in the Far West Bajo written by Julie L. Kunen and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 lowlands—one 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 histories of residential settlements on nearby hills and ridges and agricultural terraces and other farming-related features around the margins of the bajo as they developed from the Late Preclassic perios (400 BC-AD 250) until the area's abandonment in the Terminal Classic period (about AD 850). Kunen examines the organization of three bajo communities with respect to the use and management of resources critical to agricultural production. She argues that differences in access to spatially variable natural resources resulted in highly patterned settlement remains and that community founders and their descendents who had acquired the best quality and most diverse set of resources maintained an elevated status in the society. The thorough integration of three lines of evidence—the settlement system, the agricultural system, and the ancient environment—breaks new ground in landscape research and in the study of Maya non-elite domestic organization. Kunen reports on the history of settlement and farming in a small corner of the Maya world but demonstrates that for any study of human-environment interactions, landscape history consists equally of ecological and cultural strands of influence.

Download or read book 3 000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands written by Geoffrey E. Braswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands presents the cutting-edge research of 25 authors in the fields of archaeology, biological anthropology, art history, ethnohistory, and epigraphy. Together, they explore issues central to ancient Maya identity, political history, and warfare. The Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and southeast Mexico have witnessed human occupation for at least 11,000 years, and settled life reliant on agriculture began some 3,100 years ago. From the earliest times, Maya communities expressed their shifting identities through pottery, architecture, stone tools, and other items of material culture. Although it is tempting to think of the Maya as a single unified culture, they were anything but homogeneous, and differences in identity could be expressed through violence. 3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands explores the formation of identity, its relationship to politics, and its manifestation in warfare from the earliest pottery-making villages through the late colonial period by studying the material remains and written texts of the Maya. This volume is an invaluable reference for students and scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists.

Download or read book Maya Kingship written by Tsubasa Okoshi and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bones of the Maya written by Stephen L. Whittington and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2006-08-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes an indexed bibliography of the first 150 years of Maya osteology. This volume pulls together a spectrum of bioarchaeologists that reveal remarkable data on Maya genetic relationship, demography, and diseases.

Download or read book Understanding Collapse written by Guy D. Middleton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.

Download or read book The Ancient Maya of Mexico written by Geoffrey E. Braswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The archaeological sites of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula are among the most visited ancient cities of the Americas. Archaeologists have recently made great advances in our understanding of the social and political milieu of the northern Maya lowlands. However, such advances have been under-represented in both scholarly and popular literature until now. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' presents the results of new and important archaeological, epigraphic, and art historical research in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. Ranging across the Middle Preclassic to the Modern periods, the volume explores how new archaeological data has transformed our understanding of Maya history. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' will be invaluable to students and scholars of archaeology and anthropology, and all those interested in the society, rituals and economic organisation of the Maya region.

Download or read book Maya E Groups written by David A. Freidel and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As complex societies emerged in the Maya lowlands during the first millennium BCE, so did stable communities focused around public squares and the worship of a divine ruler tied to a Maize God cult. “E Groups,” central to many of these settlements, are architectural complexes: typically, a long platform supporting three struc¬tures and facing a western pyramid across a formal plaza. Aligned with the movements of the sun, E Groups have long been interpreted as giant calendrical devices crucial to the rise of Maya civilization. This volume presents new archaeological data to reveal that E Groups were constructed earlier than previously thought. In fact, they are the earliest identifiable architectural plan at many Maya settlements. More than just astronomical observatories or calendars, E Groups were a key element of community organization, urbanism, and identity in the heart of the Maya lowlands. They served as gathering places for emerging communities and centers of ritual; they were the very first civic-religious public architecture in the Maya lowlands. Investigating a wide variety of E Group sites—including some of the most famous like the Mundo Perdido in Tikal and the hitherto little known complex at Chan, as well as others in Ceibal, El Palmar, Cival, Calakmul, Caracol, Xunantunich, Yaxnohcah, Yaxuná, and San Bartolo—this volume pieces together the development of social and political complexity in ancient Maya civilization. James Aimers | Anthony F. Aveni | Jamie J. Awe | Boris Beltran | M. Kathryn Brown | Arlen F. Chase | Diane Z. Chase | Anne S. Dowd | James Doyle | Francisco Estrada-Belli | David A. Freidel | Julie A. Hoggarth | Takeshi Inomata | Patricia A. Mcanany | Susan Milbrath | Jerry Murdock | Kathryn Reese-Taylor | Prudence M. Rice | Cynthia Robin | Franco D. Rossi | Jeremy A. Sabloff | William A. Saturno | Travis W. Stanton A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

Download or read book Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities written by M. Charlotte Arnauld and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities is the first focused book-length discussion of migration in central Mexico, west Mexico and the Maya region, presenting case studies on population movement in and among Classic, Epiclassic, and Postclassic Mesoamerican societies and polities within the framework of urbanization and de-urbanization. Looking beyond the conceptual dichotomy of sedentism versus mobility, the contributors show that mobility and migration reveal a great deal about the formation, development, and decline of town- and city-based societies in the ancient world. In a series of data-rich chapters that address specific evidence for movement in their respective study areas, an international group of scholars assesses mobility through the isotopic and demographic analysis of human remains, stratigraphic identification of gaps in occupation, and local intensification of water capture in the Maya lowlands. Others examine migration through the integration of historic and archaeological evidence in Michoacán and Yucatán and by registering how daily life changed in response to the influx of new people in the Basin of Mexico. Offering a range of critical insights into the vital and under-studied role that mobility and migration played in complex agrarian societies, Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities will be of value to Mesoamericanist archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and bioarchaeologists and to any scholars working on complex societies. Contributors: Jaime J. Awe, Meggan Bullock, Sarah C. Clayton, Andrea Cucina, Véronique Darras, Nicholas P. Dunning, Mélanie Forné, Marion Forest, Carolyn Freiwald, Elizabeth Graham, Nancy Gonlin, Julie A. Hoggarth, Linda Howie, Elsa Jadot, Kristin V. Landau, Eva Lemonnier, Dominique Michelet, David Ortegón Zapata, Prudence M. Rice, Thelma N. Sierra Sosa, Michael P. Smyth, Vera Tiesler, Eric Weaver