Papers of the New World Archaeological Foundation PDF Download

Author: New World Archaeological Foundation
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Central America
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Author: Vernon L. Scarborough
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816513604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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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.

Author: Loa P. Traxler
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1934536083
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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The Pre-Columbian Maya were organized into a series of independent kingdoms or polities rather than unified into a single state. The vast majority of studies of Maya states focus on the apogee of their development in the classic period, ca. 250-850 C.E. As a result, Maya states are defined according to the specific political structures that characterized classic period lowland Maya society. The Origins of Maya States is the first study in over 30 years to examine the origins and development of these states specifically during the preceding preclassic period, ca. 1000 B.C.E. to 250 C.E. Attempts to understand the origins of Maya states cannot escape the limitations of archaeological data, and this is complicated by both the variability of Maya states in time and space and the interplay between internal development and external impacts. To mitigate these factors, editors Loa P. Traxler and Robert J. Sharer assemble a collection of essays that combines an examination of topical issues with regional perspectives from both the Maya area and neighboring Mesoamerican regions to highlight the role of interregional interaction in the evolution of Maya states. Topics covered include material signatures for the development of Maya states, evaluations of extant models for the emergence of Maya states, and advancement of new models based on recent archaeological data. Contributors address the development of complexity during the preclassic era within the Maya regions of the Pacific coast, highlands, and lowlands and explore preclassic economic, social, political, and ideological systems that provide a developmental context for the origins of Maya states. Contributors: Marcello A. Canuto, John E. Clark, Ann Cyphers, Francisco Estrada-Belli, David C. Grove, Norman Hammond, Richard D. Hansen, Eleanor King, Michael Love, Simon Martin, Astrid Runggaldier, Robert Sharer, Loa Traxler.

Author: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Library
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Author: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Library
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Author: Julia Guernsey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139536508
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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This book examines the functions of sculpture during the Preclassic period in Mesoamerica and its significance in statements of social identity. Julia Guernsey situates the origins and evolution of monumental stone sculpture within a broader social and political context and demonstrates the role that such sculpture played in creating and institutionalizing social hierarchies. This book focuses specifically on an enigmatic type of public, monumental sculpture known as the 'potbelly' that traces its antecedents to earlier, small domestic ritual objects and ceramic figurines. The cessation of domestic rituals involving ceramic figurines along the Pacific slope coincided not only with the creation of the first monumental potbelly sculptures, but with the rise of the first state-level societies in Mesoamerica by the advent of the Late Preclassic period. The potbellies became central to the physical representation of new forms of social identity and expressions of political authority during this time of dramatic change.

Author: Ross Hassig
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520077342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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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.

Author: Charles D. Trombold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521383374
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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The presence of ancient road networks in the New World is a puzzle, because they predate the use of wheeled transport vehicles. But whatever their diverse functions may have been, they remain the only tangible indication of how extinct American societies were regionally organised. Contributors to this volume, originally published in 1991, describe past studies of prehispanic roads in the southwestern United States, Mexico, Central and South America, paying special attention to their significance for economic and political organisation, as well as regional communication.

Author: Robert James Sharer
Publisher: UPenn Museum of Archaeology
ISBN: 9780934718592
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Final report of the 1970-1974 research conducted in the Salama Valley, Baja Verapaz, and adjacent areas of the highlands of Guatemala. The volume presents the results of the first comprehensive study of northern highland preclassic occupation and cultural development in light of the question of highland-lowland interaction and its role in the growth of Maya civilization.

Author: Martha J. Macri
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806134970
Category : Inscriptions, Mayan
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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For hundreds of years, Maya artists and scholars used hieroglyphs to record their history and culture. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, archaeologists, photographers, and artists recorded the Maya carvings that remained, often by transporting box cameras and plaster casts through the jungle on muleback. The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs, Volume I: The Classic Period Inscriptions is a guide to all the known hieroglyphic symbols of the Classic Maya script. In the New Catalog Martha J. Macri and Matthew G. Looper have produced a valuable research tool based on the latest Mesoamerican scholarship. An essential resource for all students of Maya texts, the New Catalog is also accessible to nonspecialists with an interest in Mesoamerican cultures. Macri and Looper present the combined knowledge of the most reliable scholars in Maya epigraphy. They provide currently accepted syllabic and logographic values, a history of references to published discussions of each sign, and related lexical entries from dictionaries of Maya languages, all of which were compiled through the Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project. This first volume of the New Catalog focuses on texts from the Classic Period (approximately 150-900 C.E.), which have been found on carved stone monuments, stucco wall panels, wooden lintels, carved and painted pottery, murals, and small objects of jadeite, shell, bone, and wood. The forthcoming second volume will describe the hieroglyphs of the three surviving Maya codices that date from later periods.