Read and Download eBook Full
Author: Takeshi Inomata
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-04
Total Pages: 742
ISBN-13: 0429977166
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book discusses courts at specific centers and areas, presenting data from major research projects. It examines the beginning of the Copan dynasty and the possibility of its foreign origin. The book addresses the functions and meanings of thrones, referring to archaeological data from Uaxactun.
Author: Takeshi Inomata
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2001-05-11
Total Pages: 440
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe two volumes of Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya provide current archaeological perspectives on Maya courts conceived as vital, functioning social groups composed of lords, courtiers, scribes, priests, and entertainers, among many others. In addition to archaeological data on the architecture and other spatial attributes of courts, the studies in the two volumes bring to bear on the topic the most recent evidence from inscriptions, vase paintings, murals and friezes, and ethnohistoric records in order to flesh out a portrait of the actors and roles that made up Maya courts through time and across space. The attributes of courts are explored in the Maya highlands and lowlands, from the origins of early kingship through the Classic period to the Postclassic and Terminal epochs. Pertinent comparisons are also drawn from the Aztecs and other ancient and contemporary societies. Volume 1: Theory, Comparison, and Synthesis establishes a carefully considered framework for approaching the study of courts and their functions throughout the world of the ancient Maya. Volume 2: Data and Case Studies provides authoritatively current data and insights from key Maya sites, including Copán, Tikal, Caracol, Bonampak, and Calakmul.
Author: Sarah E. Jackson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2013-06-24
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 0806189258
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn recent decades, advances in deciphering Maya hieroglyphic writing have given scholars new tools for understanding key aspects of ancient Maya society. This book—the first comprehensive examination of the Maya royal court—exemplifies the importance of these new sources. Authored by anthropologist Sarah E. Jackson and richly illustrated with drawings, photographs, and maps, Politics of the Maya Court uses hieroglyphic and iconographic evidence to explore the composition and social significance of royal courts in the Late Classic period (a.d. 600–900), with a special emphasis on the role of courtly elites. As Jackson explains, the Maya region of southern Mexico and Central America was not a unified empire but a loosely aggregated culture area composed of independent kingdoms. Royal courts had a presence in large, central communities from Chiapas to Yucatan and the highlands of Guatemala and western Honduras. Each major polity was ruled by a k’uhul ajaw, or holy lord, who embodied intertwined aspects of religious and political authority. The hieroglyphic texts that adorned walls, furniture, and portable items in these centers of power provide specific information about the positions, roles, and meanings of the courts. Jackson uses these documents as keys to understanding Classic Maya political hierarchy and, specifically, the institution of the royal court. Within this context, she investigates the lives of the nobility and the participation of elites in court politics. By identifying particular individuals and their life stories, Jackson humanizes Maya society, showing how events resulted from the actions and choices of specific people. Jackson’s innovative portrayal of court membership provides a foundation for scholarship on the nature, functions, and responsibilities of Maya royal courts.
Author: Jessica Joyce Christie
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2010-01-01
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 0292782624
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMaya "palaces" have intrigued students of this ancient Mesoamerican culture since the early twentieth century, when scholars first applied the term "palace" to multi-room, gallery-like buildings set on low platforms in the centers of Maya cities. Who lived in these palaces? What types of ceremonial and residential activities took place there? How do the physical forms and spatial arrangement of the buildings embody Maya concepts of social organization and cosmology? This book brings together state-of-the-art data and analysis regarding the occupants, ritual and residential uses, and social and cosmological meanings of Maya palaces and elite residences. A multidisciplinary team of senior researchers reports on sites in Belize (Blue Creek), Western Honduras (Copan), the Peten (Tikal, Dos Pilas, Aguateca), and the Yucatan (Uxmal, Chichen-Itza, Dzibilchaltun, Yaxuna). Archaeologist contributors discuss the form of palace buildings and associated artifacts, their location within the city, and how some palaces related to landscape features. Their approach is complemented by art historical analyses of architectural sculpture, epigraphy, and ethnography. Jessica Joyce Christie concludes the volume by identifying patterns and commonalties that apply not only to the cited examples, but also to Maya architecture in general.
Author: Andrew K. Scherer
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2024-12-01
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0826366570
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSubstance of the Ancient Maya: Kingdoms and Communities, Objects and Beings collects twelve essays by top scholars that highlight what is new in research pertaining to the ancient Maya. Subjects range from updated political histories of major kingdoms in the southern Maya Lowlands to explorations of the nature of Maya writing and materiality. These essays were inspired by the scholarship of Stephen Houston and celebrate his transdisciplinary commitment to research in anthropological archaeology, epigraphy, and art history. The contributions in this volume are organized into two sections that respectively reflect different scales from which to approach the substance of the ancient Maya—from hand-held objects to entire kingdoms. This dichotomy reflects the breadth of questions central to current research on the Maya. It also illustrates how certain themes, such as the relationship between the living and the realm of the supernatural, are fundamental to both thinking by and about the Maya at all scales. A diversity of methods is not only embodied by this assemblage of essays but is also spread equally across the two sections of the book, illustrating that archaeologists, epigraphers, geographers, and art historians can equally contribute to the substance of kingdoms and communities, as they can to objects and beings. Collectively, these contributions show how the objects and beings that composed the Classic Maya world were both literal and sacred substances that mediated relations not only among living people but with gods and ancestors. A final chapter by Stephen Houston reflects on unfinished projects of the ancient Maya as a metaphor for all of the work yet to be done to move forward in our studies of the past.
Author: Eleanor M. King
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2015-11-12
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 081650041X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTrading was the favorite occupation of the Maya, according to early Spanish observers such as Fray Diego de Landa (1566). Yet scholars of the Maya have long dismissed trade—specifically, market exchange—as unimportant. They argue that the Maya subsisted primarily on agriculture, with long-distance trade playing a minor role in a largely non-commercialized economy. The Ancient Maya Marketplace reviews the debate on Maya markets and offers compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces in the Maya Lowlands. Its authors rethink the prevailing views about Maya economic organization and offer new perspectives. They attribute the dearth of Maya market research to two factors: persistent assumptions that Maya society and its rainforest environment lacked complexity, and an absence of physical evidence for marketplaces—a problem that plagues market research around the world. Many Mayanists now agree that no site was self-sufficient, and that from the earliest times robust local and regional exchange existed alongside long-distance trade. Contributors to this volume suggest that marketplaces, the physical spaces signifying the presence of a market economy, did not exist for purely economic reasons but served to exchange information and create social ties as well. The Ancient Maya Marketplace offers concrete links between Maya archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary cultures. Its in-depth review of current research will help future investigators to recognize and document marketplaces as a long-standing Maya cultural practice. The volume also provides detailed comparative data for premodern societies elsewhere in the world.
Author: Joseph J. Tinguely
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2024
Total Pages: 803
ISBN-13: 3031541367
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Deborah L. Nichols
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-08-22
Total Pages: 996
ISBN-13: 0199875006
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
Author: Antonia E Foias
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2012-09-23
Total Pages: 553
ISBN-13: 0813042518
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScholars have long debated the nature of Maya political organization during the Classic period (AD 250-950). Complex questions regarding political centralization, economic change, and the role of politics and economics in the rise and collapse of the civilization have been examined and reexamined from a variety of perspectives. Antonia Foias and Kitty Emery have assembled a broad collection of essays all focused on a single polity, that of Motul de San José. By presenting a coherent interdisciplinary body of archaeological and environmental data, the volume offers an intensely deep, focused investigation of the various models of the ancient Maya political and economic systems. Research conducted over six seasons of fieldwork reveals a more centralized political system than expected and uncovers the workings of the ancient economic structure. The contributors offer new details concerning how involved royals and nonroyal elites were in the politics of nearby states, as well as an extensive tribute system.
Author: Matthew T. Rutz
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Published: 2014-12-30
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 1782977694
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScholars working in a number of disciplines – archaeologists, classicists, epigraphers, papyrologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, Mayanists, philologists, and ancient historians of all stripes – routinely engage with ancient textual sources that are either material remains from the archaeological record or historical products of other connections between the ancient world and our own. Examining the archaeology-text nexus from multiple perspectives, contributors to this volume discuss current theoretical and practical problems that have grown out of their work at the boundary of the division between archaeology and the study of early inscriptions. In 12 representative case-studies drawn from research in Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Mesoamerica, scholars use various lenses to critically examine the interface between archaeology and the study of ancient texts, rethink the fragmentation of their various specialized disciplines, and illustrate the best in current approaches to contextual analysis. The collection of essays also highlights recent trends in the development of documentation and dissemination technologies, engages with the ethical and intellectual quandaries presented by ancient inscriptions that lack archaeological context, and sets out to find profitable future directions for interdisciplinary research.
