The term otoot or dwelling' appears in many Mayan inscriptions placed on various buildings and built structures. Taking this as a starting point, Shannon Plank embarks on a quest to discern in what ways the Mayans used and conceive of lived space. Looking at four main sites in the Mayan Lowlands - Yaxchilan, Copan, Cichen Itza and Oxkintok - she studies the nature and context of the inscriptions, questions the function and role of the structures and tries to link the two together to reach an understanding both of the use of the term otoot and how it relates to the notion of space conceived by a Mayan elite.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
"Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure in the southern lowlands, assessing, comparing, and interpreting the wide variation in Classic period Maya polity and city composition, development, and integration. Traditionally, discussions of Classic Maya political organization have been dominated by the debate over whether Maya polities were centralized or decentralized. With new, largely unpublished data from several recent archaeological projects, this book examines the premises, strengths, and weaknesses of these two perspectives before moving beyond this long-standing debate and into different territory.The volume examines the articulations of the various social and spatial components of Maya polity—the relationships, strategies, and practices that bound households, communities, institutions, and dynasties into enduring (or short-lived) political entities. By emphasizing the internal negotiation of polity, the contributions provide an important foundation for a more holistic understanding of how political organization functioned in the Classic period."
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.
This book offers a new perspective on the ancient Maya that emphasizes the importance of dwelling as a social practice. Using excavations of ancient Chunchucmil as a case study, it investigates how Maya personhood was structured and transformed in and beyond the domestic sphere and examines the role of the past in the production of contemporary Maya identity.
Deep within the forest in northern Guatemala lie the ruins of Río Azul, a Maya city that reached one-third the size of Tikal. Discovered and partially explored in the early 1960s, Río Azul and the surrounding region were more fully investigated between 1983 and 1987 by an archaeological team led by Richard E. W. Adams. In this summary, Adams integrates the findings of field archaeologists with those of the epigraphers and art historians to recreate the life of this Maya city from the little-known Early Classic period. Remains in the Río Azul area date from 900 B.C. to A.D. 850. The data indicate that, unlike most Maya cities that have been studied, Río Azul was a frontier town, an administrative center, with alternating defense and trade outpost functions. About A.D. 385, the Río Azul region was conquered and the city founded by Tikal, serving as a Teotihuacan-linked garrison for that capital. Nearly all of the more than seven hundred structures found within Río Azul were erected between A.D. 390 and 530. Acres of pavement were laid down around some thirty complexes of residences, temples, and tombs notable for the brightly painted red hieroglyphs and murals on their walls. The elaborate complexes and sumptuous artifacts suggest a city with a heavy proportion of aristocratic families and retainers. Around A.D. 530, Río Azul appears to have been suddenly destroyed. The city was abandoned, then reoccupied--only to stagnate and finally collapse, like many other Classic Maya cities, in the late ninth century.
Foias argues that there is no single Maya political history, but multiple histories, no single Maya state, but multiple polities that need to be understood at the level of the lived experience of individuals. She explores the ways in which the dynamics of political power shaped the lives and landscape of the Maya and how this information can be used to look at other complex societies.
These articles mark a significant stage in the study of Maya architecture and the society that built it. They represent advances in our understandings of the past, point toward avenues for further studies, and note the distance yet to travel in fully appreciating and understanding this ancient American culture and its material remains.
In Maya Narrative Arts, authors Karen Bassie-Sweet and Nicholas A. Hopkins present a comprehensive and innovative analysis of the principles of Classic Maya narrative arts and apply those principles to some of the major monuments of the site of Palenque. They demonstrate a recent methodological shift in the examination of art and inscriptions away from minute technical issues and toward the poetics and narratives of texts and the relationship between texts and images. Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins show that both visual and verbal media present carefully planned narratives, and that the two are intimately related in the composition of Classic Maya monuments. Text and image interaction is discussed through examples of stelae, wall panels, lintels, benches, and miscellaneous artifacts including ceramic vessels and codices. Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins consider the principles of contrast and complementarity that underlie narrative structures and place this study in the context of earlier work, proposing a new paradigm for Maya epigraphy. They also address the narrative organization of texts and images as manifested in selected hieroglyphic inscriptions and the accompanying illustrations, stressing the interplay between the two. Arguing for a more holistic approach to Classic Maya art and literature, Maya Narrative Arts reveals how close observation and reading can be equally if not more productive than theoretical discussions, which too often stray from the very data that they attempt to elucidate. The book will be significant for Mesoamerican art historians, epigraphers, linguists, and archaeologists.
In Unseen Art, Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomena in Mesoamerican art history: why many of the objects that we view in museums today were once so difficult to see. She examines the importance that ancient Mesoamerican people assigned to the process of making and enlivening the things we now call art, as well as Mesoamerican understandings of sight as an especially godlike and elite power, in order to trace a gradual evolution in the uses of secrecy and concealment, from a communal practice that fostered social memory to a tool of imperial power. Addressing some of the most charismatic of all Mesoamerican sculptures, such as Olmec buried offerings, Maya lintels, and carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculptures, Brittenham shows that the creation of unseen art has important implications both for understanding status in ancient Mesoamerica and for analyzing art in the present. Spanning nearly three thousand years of the Indigenous art of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, Unseen Art connects the dots between vision, power, and inequality, providing a critical perspective on our own way of looking.
