The Monuments of Piedras Negras, an Ancient Maya City
Author: Flora Simmons Clancy
Publisher:
Published: 2009-02-01
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780826344526
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The Monuments of Piedras Negras, an Ancient Maya City
Author: Flora S. Clancy
Publisher:
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 246
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala
Author: Megan E. O'Neil
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2014-02-25
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0806188367
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNow 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.
Piedras Negras Archaeology, 1931-1939
Author: Linton Satterthwaite
Publisher: UPenn Museum of Archaeology
Published: 2005-03-04
Total Pages: 450
ISBN-13: 9781931707756
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSituated on the banks of the Usumacinta River in northwestern Guatemala, Piedras Negras is an important Maya site known for its carved monuments and panels. Between 1931 and 1938 the University Museum conducted research at Piedras Negras, excavating the site core, producing an excellent site map, and documenting architectural developments to an unprecedented standard. Project member Tatiana Proskouriakoff revolutionized Maya historiography with her architectural reconstructions and visionary synthesis of the position and dating of texts and monuments at the site. Innovative excavation methods included test pitting, probing in more modest structures, and the identification of new building types such as sweat baths. More importantly, the Piedras Negras project developed the logistical and methodological criteria that are now standard in the field. Fewer than a dozen copies of the preliminary papers were issued between 1933 and 1936; the later descriptive and interpretive essays of the architecture series have likewise become rare. Piedras Negras Archaeology, 1931-1939 reintroduces to the scholarly community and public these pioneering works, meticulously scanned and edited from the fragile originals, with all the maps, tables, line art, and photographs from the initial reports, and an interpretive essay and index for modern readers. University Museum Monograph, 122
Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity
Author: Maline D. Werness-Rude
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 440
ISBN-13: 082635579X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMaya 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.
Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya
Author: Walter R. T. Witschey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2015-12-24
Total Pages: 575
ISBN-13: 0759122865
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEncyclopedia of the Ancient Maya offers an A-to-Z overview of the ancient Maya culture from its inception around 3000 BC to the Spanish Conquest after AD 1600. Over two hundred entries written by more than sixty researchers explore subjects ranging from food, clothing, and shelter to the sophisticated calendar and now-deciphered Maya writing system. They bring special attention to environmental concerns and climate variation; fresh understandings of shifting power dynamics and dynasties; and the revelations from emerging field techniques (such as LiDAR remote sensing) and newly explored sites (such as La Corona, Tamchen, and Yaxnohkah). This one-volume reference is an essential companion for students studying ancient civilizations, as well as a perfect resource for those planning to visit the Maya area. Cross-referencing, topical and alphabetical lists of entries, and a comprehensive index help readers find relevant details. Suggestions for further reading conclude each entry, while sidebars profile historical figures who have shaped Maya research. Maps highlight terrain, archaeological sites, language distribution, and more; over fifty photographs complement the volume.
The Ancient Maya, 6th Edition
Author: Robert J. Sharer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 986
ISBN-13: 9780804748179
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe rich findings of recent exploration and research are incorporated in this completely revised and greatly expanded sixth edition of this standard work on the Maya people. New field discoveries, new technical advances, new successes in the decipherment of Maya writing, and new theoretical perspectives on the Maya past have made this new edition necessary.
A Maya Universe in Stone
Author: Stephen Houston
Publisher: Getty Publications
Published: 2021-12-28
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 1606067451
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
The Maya
Author: Megan E. O’Neil
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2022-07-06
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 1789145511
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn illuminating look at the myriad communities who have engaged with the ancient Maya over the centuries. This book reveals how the ancient Maya—and their buildings, ideas, objects, and identities—have been perceived, portrayed, and exploited over five hundred years in the Americas, Europe, and beyond. Engaging in interdisciplinary analysis, the book summarizes ancient Maya art and history from the preclassical period to the Spanish invasion, as well as the history of outside engagement with the ancient Maya, from Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century to later explorers and archaeologists, taking in scientific literature, visual arts, architecture, world’s fairs, and Indigenous activism. It also looks at the decipherment of Maya inscriptions, Maya museum exhibitions and artists’ responses, and contemporary Maya people’s engagements with their ancestral past. Featuring the latest research, this book will interest scholars as well as general readers who wish to know more about this ancient, fascinating culture.
The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing
Author: Stephen D. Houston
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 584
ISBN-13: 9780806132044
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing is an important story of intellectual discovery and a tale of code breaking comparable to the interpreting of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the decoding of cuneiform. This book provides a history of the interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs. Introductory essays offer the historical context and describe the personalities and theories of the many authors who contributed to the understanding of these ancient glyphs.
