Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare

Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare

Author: M. Kathryn Brown

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780759102835

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Collection of articles providing new research on warfare in ancient Maya and other Mesoamerican societies based on archaeological, ethnohistorical, and linguistic evidence


Aztec Warfare

Aztec Warfare

Author: Ross Hassig

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780806127736

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In exploring the pattern and methods of Aztec expansion, Ross Hassig focuses on political and economic factors. Because they lacked numerical superiority, faced logistical problems presented by the terrain, and competed with agriculture for manpower, the Aztecs relied as much on threats and the image of power as on military might to subdue enemies and hold them in their orbit. Hassig describes the role of war in the everyday life of the capital, Tenochtitlan: the place of the military in Aztec society; the education and training of young warriors; the organization of the army; the use of weapons and armor; and the nature of combat.


War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica

War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica

Author: Ross Hassig

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1992-08-19

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0520077342

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In this study of warfare in ancient Mesoamerica, Ross Hassig offers new insight into three thousand years of Mesoamerican history, from roughly 1500 B.C. to the Spanish conquest. He examines the methods, purposes, and values of warfare as practiced by the major pre-Columbian societies and shows how warfare affected the rise of the state.


The Cambridge History of War: Volume 2, War and the Medieval World

The Cambridge History of War: Volume 2, War and the Medieval World

Author: David A. Graff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 854

ISBN-13: 1108901190

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Volume II of The Cambridge History of War covers what in Europe is commonly called 'the Middle Ages'. It includes all of the well-known themes of European warfare, from the migrations of the Germanic peoples and the Vikings through the Reconquista, the Crusades and the age of chivalry, to the development of state-controlled gunpowder-wielding armies and the urban militias of the later middle ages; yet its scope is world-wide, ranging across Eurasia and the Americas to trace the interregional connections formed by the great Arab conquests and the expansion of Islam, the migrations of horse nomads such as the Avars and the Turks, the formation of the vast Mongol Empire, and the spread of new technologies – including gunpowder and the earliest firearms – by land and sea.


Blood and Beauty

Blood and Beauty

Author: Rex Koontz

Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press

Published: 2009-12-31

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1938770439

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Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame have been the traditional categories through which scholars have examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. This volume expands those traditional categories to include such concerns as gladiatorial-like boxing combats, investiture rites, trophy-head taking and display, dark shamanism, and the subjective pain inherent in acts of violence. Each author examines organized violence as a set of practices grounded in cultural understandings, even when the violence threatens the limits of those understandings. The authors scrutinize the representation of, and relationships between, different types of organized violence, as well as the implications of those activities, which can include the unexpected, such as violence as a means of determining and curing illness, and the use of violence in negotiation strategies.


Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica

Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica

Author: Shawn G. Morton

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2019-11-29

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1607328860

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Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica focuses on the conflicts of the ancient Maya, providing a holistic history of Maya hostilities and comparing them with those of neighboring Mesoamerican villages and towns. Contributors to the volume explore the varied stories of past Maya conflicts through artifacts, architecture, texts, and images left to posterity. Many studies have focused on the degree to which the prevalence, nature, and conduct of conflict has varied across time and space. This volume focuses not only on such operational considerations but on cognitive and experiential issues, analyzing how the Maya understood and explained conflict, what they recognized as conflict, how conflict was experienced by various groups, and the circumstances surrounding conflict. By offering an emic (internal and subjective) understanding alongside the more commonly researched etic (external and objective) perspective, contributors clarify insufficiencies and address lapses in data and analysis. They explore how the Maya defined themselves within the realm of warfare and examine the root causes and effects of intergroup conflict. Using case studies from a wide range of time periods, Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica provides a basis for understanding hostilities and broadens the archaeological record for the “seeking” of conflict in a way that has been largely untouched by previous scholars. With broad theoretical reach beyond Mesoamerican archaeology, the book will have wide interdisciplinary appeal and will be important to ethnohistorians, art historians, ethnographers, epigraphers, and those interested in human conflict more broadly. Contributors: Matthew Abtosway, Karen Bassie-Sweet, George J. Bey III, M. Kathryn Brown, Allen J. Christenson, Tomás Gallareta Negrón, Elizabeth Graham, Helen R. Haines, Christopher L. Hernandez, Harri Kettunen, Rex Koontz, Geoffrey McCafferty, Jesper Nielsen, Joel W. Palka, Kerry L. Sagebiel, Travis W. Stanton, Alexandre Tokovinine


Warlords of Ancient Mexico

Warlords of Ancient Mexico

Author: Peter G. Tsouras

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-09-02

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1632201798

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Learn the unbelievable true history of the great warrior tribes of Mexico. More than thirteen centuries of incredible spellbinding history are detailed in this intriguing study of the rulers and warriors of Mexico. Dozens of these charismatic leaders of nations and armies are brought to life by the deep research and entertaining storytelling of Peter Tsouras. Tsouras introduces the reader to the colossal personalities of the period: Smoking Frog, the Mexican Machiavelli, the Poet Warlord, the Lion of Anahuac, and others . . . all of them warlords who shaped one of the most significant regions in world history, men who influenced the civilization of half a continent. The warlords of Mexico, for all their fascinating lives and momentous acts, have been largely ignored by writers and historians, but here that disappointing record is put right by a range of detailed biographies that entertain as they inform. Students of the area, historians working in American history, and long-term visitors and tourists to the region will gain a much clearer understanding of the background history of these territories and the men who formed and reformed them. Lavishly illustrated with dozens of photographs and color paintings, Warlords of Ancient Mexico is essential reading for anyone interested in this tumultuous, endlessly captivating period of Central American history. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.


Mormon's Codex

Mormon's Codex

Author: John L. Sorenson

Publisher: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship Deseret Book

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 826

ISBN-13: 9781609073992

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The author demonstrates that the Book of Mormon is a native Mesoamerican book (or codex) that exhibits what one would expect of a historical document produced in the context of ancient Mesoamerican civilization. He also shows that scholars' discoveries about Mesoamerica and the contents of the Nephite record are clearly related, listing more than 400 points where the Book of Mormon text corresponds to characteristic Mesoamerican situations, statements, allusions, and history.


Everyday Life in the Aztec World

Everyday Life in the Aztec World

Author: Frances F. Berdan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1108894410

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In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.


The Mesoamerican Ballgame

The Mesoamerican Ballgame

Author: Vernon L. Scarborough

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780816513604

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The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife, war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological, sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental life and outlook of New World peoples.