Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala
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

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Now 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
Piedras Negras Archaeology, 1931-1939

Author: Linton Satterthwaite

Publisher: UPenn Museum of Archaeology

Published: 2005-03-04

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9781931707756

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Situated 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

Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya
Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya

Author: Walter R. T. Witschey

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-12-24

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 0759122865

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Encyclopedia 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
The Ancient Maya, 6th Edition

Author: Robert J. Sharer

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 986

ISBN-13: 9780804748179

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The 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.

The World of the Ancient Maya
The World of the Ancient Maya

Author: John S. Henderson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9780801482847

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Theirs was one of the few complex societies to emerge in and to adapt successfully to a tropical-forest environment. Their architecture, sculpture, and painting were sophisticated and compellingly beautiful.

Stone Trees Transplanted? Central Mexican Stelae of the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic and the Question of Maya ‘Influence’
Stone Trees Transplanted? Central Mexican Stelae of the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic and the Question of Maya ‘Influence’

Author: Keith Jordan

Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

Published: 2014-10-10

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1784910112

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Stelae dating to the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic from Tula, Xochicalco, and other sites in Central Mexico have been cited as evidence of Classic Maya `influence' on Central Mexican art during these periods. This book re-evaluates these claims via detailed comparative analysis of the Central Mexican stelae and their claimed Maya counterparts.

American Contact
American Contact

Author:

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 151282576X

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A Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball, repurposed by enslaved people in colonial Antigua; a book of poetry printed in a Peruvian penitentiary. Countless material texts—legible artifacts—resulted from the diverse intercultural encounters that characterize the history of the Americas. American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. The forty-eight short chapters present biographies about objects that range in size from four miles long to seven by ten centimeters; date from millennia in the past to the 2000s; and originate from South America, North America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Each essay demonstrates how particular ways of reading can render the complex meanings of the objects legible—or explains why and how the meanings remain illegible. In its diversity and breadth, this volume shows how the field of book history can be more inclusive and expansive. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the material practices of communicating power and resistance, subjection and survivance, in contact zones of America. Contributors: Carlos Aguirre, Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Chadwick Allen, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Molly H. Bassett, Brian Bockelman, George Aaron Broadwell, Rachel Linnea Brown, Nancy Caronia, Raúl Coronado, Marlena Petra Cravens, Agnieszka Czeblakow, Lori Boornazian Diel, Elizabeth A. Dolan, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Cecily Duffie, Devin Fitzgerald, Glenda Goodman, Rachel B. Gross, David D. Hall, Sonia Hazard, Rachel B. Herrmann, Alex Hidalgo, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Rachael Scarborough King, Danielle Knox, Bishop Lawton, Jessica C. Linker, Don James McLaughlin, John Henry Merritt, Gabriell Montgomery, Emily L. Moore, Isadora Moura Mota, Barbara E. Mundy, Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, Marissa Nicosia, Diane Oliva, Megan E. O’Neil, Sergio Ospina Romero, John H. Pollack, Shari Rabin, Daniel Radus, Nathan Rees, Anne Ricculli, Maria Ryan, Maria Carolina Sintura, Cristina Soriano, Chelsea Stieber, Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, Chris Suh, Mathew R. Swiatlowski, Marie Balsley Taylor, Martin A. Tsang, Germaine Warkentin, Adrian Chastain Weimer, Bethany Wiggin, Xine Yao, Corinna Zeltsman.

A Maya Universe in Stone
A Maya Universe in Stone

Author: Stephen Houston

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1606067443

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The 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.