Download or read book The Beginnings of Mesoamerican Civilization written by Robert M. Rosenswig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosenswig proposes that we understand Early Formative Mesoamerica as an archipelago of complex societies.
Download or read book The Beginnings of Mesoamerican Civilization written by Robert M. Rosenswig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-28 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesoamerica is one of several cradles of civilization in the world. In this book, Robert M. Rosenswig proposes that we understand Early Formative Mesoamerica as an archipelago of complex societies that interacted with one another over long distances and that were separated by less sedentary peoples. These early 'islands' of culture shared an Olmec artistic aesthetic, beginning approximately 1250 BCE (uncalibrated), that first defined Mesoamerica as a culture area. Rosenswig frames the Olmec world from the perspective of the Soconusco area on Pacifica Chiapas and Guatemala. The disagreements about Early Formative society that have raged over the past thirty years focus on the nature of inter-regional interaction between San Lorenzo and other Early Formative regions. He evaluates these debates from a fresh theoretical perspective and integrates new data into an assessment of Soconusco society before, during, and after the apogee of the San Lorenzo polity.
Download or read book The Legacy of Mesoamerica written by Robert M. Carmack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization summarizes and integrates information on the origins, historical development, and current situations of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. It describes their contributions from the development of Mesoamerican Civilization through 20th century and their influence in the world community. For courses on Mesoamerica (Middle America) taught in departments of anthropology, history, and Latin American Studies.
Download or read book Prehistoric Mesoamerica written by Richard E. W. Adams and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-to-date overview of Mesoamerican cultures from early prehistoric times through the fall of the Aztec Empire, Prehistoric Mesoamerica, Third Edition will be useful and appealing to readers interested in Mesoamerican art, society, politics, and intellectual achievement.
Download or read book Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica written by Christopher Pool and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-26 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica offers the most thorough and up-to-date book-length treatment of Olmec society and culture available.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Mesoamerica written by Walter Robert Thurmond Witschey and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesoamerica is one of six major areas of the world where humans independently changed their culture from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle into settled communities, cities, and civilization. In addition to China (twice), the Indus Valley, the Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia, Egypt, and Peru, Mesoamerica was home to exciting and irreversible changes in human culture called the "Neolithic Revolution." The changes included domestication of plants and animals, leading to agriculture, husbandry, and eventually sedentary village life. These developments set the stage for the growth of cities, social stratification, craft specialization, warfare, writing, mathematics, and astronomy, or what we call the rise of civilization. These changes forever transformed humankind. The Historical Dictionary of Mesoamerica covers the history of Mesoamerica through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 900 cross-referenced dictionary entries covering the major peoples, places, ideas, and events related to Mesoamerica. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Mesoamerica.
Download or read book Mesoamerican History written by Captivating History and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-03 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four captivating manuscripts in one book: Olmecs Zapotec Civilization Maya History Aztec History
Download or read book The Legacy of Mesoamerica written by Robert M. Carmack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization summarizes and integrates information on the origins, historical development, and current situations of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. It describes their contributions from the development of Mesoamerican Civilization through 20th century and their influence in the world community. For courses on Mesoamerica (Middle America) taught in departments of anthropology, history, and Latin American Studies.
Download or read book Cycles of the Sun Mysteries of the Moon written by Vincent H. Malmström and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The simple question "How did the Maya come up with a calendar that had only 260 days?" led Vincent Malmström to discover an unexpected "hearth" of Mesoamerican culture. In this boldly revisionist book, he sets forth his challenging, new view of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican calendrical systems—the intellectual achievement that gave rise to Mesoamerican civilization and culture. Malmström posits that the 260-day calendar marked the interval between passages of the sun at its zenith over Izapa, an ancient ceremonial center in the Soconusco region of Mexico's Pacific coastal plain. He goes on to show how the calendar developed by the Zoque people of the region in the fourteenth century B.C. gradually diffused through Mesoamerica into the so-called "Olmec metropolitan area" of the Gulf coast and beyond to the Maya in the east and to the plateau of Mexico in the west. These findings challenge our previous understanding of the origin and diffusion of Mesoamerican civilization. Sure to provoke lively debate in many quarters, this book will be important reading for all students of ancient Mesoamerica—anthropologists, archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, geographers, and the growing public fascinated by all things Maya.
Download or read book Mesoamerican Writing Systems written by Joyce Marcus and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She convincingly demonstrates that while it may have been based on actual persons and events, this body of prehistoric writing is a deliberately created tangle of what we could call propaganda, myth, and fact, written for political purposes, and not (as many contemporary scholars have come to believe) reliable history in a modern sense.
Download or read book The Origins of Maya States written by Loa P. Traxler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proceedings of the conference "The Origins of Maya States," held in Philadelphia, April 10-13, 2007.
Download or read book Chocolate in Mesoamerica written by Cameron L. McNeil and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New models of research and analysis, as well as breakthroughs in deciphering Mesoamerican writing, have recently produced a watershed of information on the regional use and importance of cacao, or chocolate as it is commonly called today. McNeil brings together scholars in the fields of archaeology, history, art history, linguistics, epigraphy, botany, chemistry, and cultural anthropology to explore the domestication, preparation, representation, and significance of cacao in ancient and modern communities of the Americas, with a concentration on its use in Mesoamerica. Cacao was used by many cultures in the pre-Columbian Americas as an important part of rituals associated with birth, coming of age, marriage, and death, and was strongly linked with concepts of power and rulership. While Europeans have for hundreds of years claimed that they introduced “chocolate” as a sauce for foods, evidence from ancient royal tombs indicates cacao was used in a range of foods as well as beverages in ancient times. In addition, the volume’s authors present information that supports a greater importance for cacao in pre-Columbian South America, where ancient vessels depicting cacao pods have recently been identified. From the botanical structure and chemical makeup of Theobroma cacao and methods of identifying it in the archaeological record, to the importance of cacao during the Classic period in Mesoamerica, to the impact of European arrival on the production and use of cacao, to contemporary uses in the Americas, this volume provides a richly informed account of the history and cultural significance of chocolate.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology written by Deborah L. Nichols and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed by regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies--from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations--and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.
Download or read book Vanished Mesoamerican Civilizations written by Ernesto González Licón and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2001 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting extensive archaeological fieldwork carried out under the author's direction, and richly illustrated throughout, this is the first comprehensive reference on two great but little-known Mesoamerican cultures that flourished for thousands of years in the present-day southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The Zapotecs were skilled builders who constructed one of early America's most magnificant architectural complexes on the hilltop pf Monte Alban, a site that includes elaborately crafted temples, plaza, tombs and statuary. The nearby Mixtecs lived in smaller units and created fabulous mosaics, sculpture, and jewelry. They also developed a pictographic system of writing, which they drew on exquisite polychrome pottery and deersking codices. Through careful dechiphering and analysis of written, artistic, and architectural remains, Ancient Mesoamericans provides extraordinary glimpses of these two very different societies, their culture, rituals, and daily lives.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas written by Bruce G. Trigger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description: The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Volume II: Mesoamerica (Part One), gives a comprehensive and authoritative overview of all the important native civilizations of the Mesoamerican area, beginning with archaeological discussions of paleoindian, archaic and preclassic societies and continuing to the present. Fully illustrated and engagingly written, the book is divided into sections that discuss the native cultures of Mesoamerica before and after their first contact with the Europeans. The various chapters balance theoretical points of view as they trace the cultural history and evolutionary development of such groups as the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztec, the Zapotec, and the Tarascan. The chapters covering the prehistory of Mesoamerica offer explanations for the rise and fall of the Classic Maya, the Olmec, and the Aztec, giving multiple interpretations of debated topics, such as the nature of Olmec culture. Through specific discussions of the native peoples of the different regions of Mexico, the chapters on the period since the arrival of the Europeans address the themes of contact, exchange, transfer, survivals, continuities, resistance, and the emergence of modern nationalism and the nation-state.
Download or read book Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica written by Joshua Englehardt and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2019-05-27 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica explores the role of interregional interaction in the dynamic sociocultural processes that shaped the pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica. Interdisciplinary contributions from leading scholars investigate linguistic exchange and borrowing, scribal practices, settlement patterns, ceramics, iconography, and trade systems, presenting a variety of case studies drawn from multiple spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts within Mesoamerica. Archaeologists have long recognized the crucial role of interregional interaction in the development and cultural dynamics of ancient societies, particularly in terms of the evolution of sociocultural complexity and economic systems. Recent research has further expanded the archaeological, art historical, ethnographic, and epigraphic records in Mesoamerica, permitting a critical reassessment of the complex relationship between interaction and cultural dynamics. This volume builds on and amplifies earlier research to examine sociocultural phenomena—including movement, migration, symbolic exchange, and material interaction—in their role as catalysts for variability in cultural systems. Interregional cultural exchange in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica played a key role in the creation of systems of shared ideologies, the production of regional or “international” artistic and architectural styles, shifting sociopolitical patterns, and changes in cultural practices and meanings. Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica highlights, engages with, and provokes questions pertinent to understanding the complex relationship between interaction, sociocultural processes, and cultural innovation and change in the ancient societies and cultural histories of Mesoamerica and will be of interest to archaeologists, linguists, and art historians. Contributors: Philip J. Arnold III, Lourdes Budar, José Luis Punzo Diaz, Gary Feinman, David Freidel, Elizabeth Jiménez Garcia, Guy David Hepp, Kerry M. Hull, Timothy J. Knab, Charles L. F. Knight, Blanca E. Maldonado, Joyce Marcus, Jesper Nielsen, John M. D. Pohl, Iván Rivera, D. Bryan Schaeffer, Niklas Schulze
Download or read book LOST KINGDOMS OF CENTRAL AMERICA written by Norah Romney and published by DTTV PUBLICATIONS. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of years ago, people settled in the part of the world called Mesoamerica. This region consists of southern Mexico and most of Central America as it stretches between what is now called the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Although many different countries now exist within this space, it was the original home to just one civilisation: the Olmec. As time advanced, other well-known groups became dominant in the area. These were primarily the Aztecs and the Mayan. All these early civilizations that existed from approximately 1200 BCE to 900 CE were steeped with culture, tradition, commerce, and conflict. They also offer many mysteries and enigmas to modern understanding. These are the things that make people wonder about how the civilisations arose, gained such power, and why they disappeared. Travel back in time to the first days to discover the questions that still exist in the minds of archaeologists, historians, and others who strive to understand the ancient mysteries of Mesoamerica.
