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This volume presents the most current research on domestic, public, and ritual architecture created over four millennia ago along the Ohio River, its tributaries, and the adjacent lower Great Lakes.
This book explores the development and political history of Southeast Mesoamerica from its earliest inhabitants up to the Spanish conquest.
This volume explores the dynamics of human adaptation to social, political, ideological, economic, and environmental factors in Mesoamerica and includes a wide array of topics, such as the hydrological engineering behind Teotihuacan’s layout, the complexities of agriculture and sustainability in the Maya lowlands, and the nuanced history of abandonment among different lineages and households in Maya centers. The authors aptly demonstrate how culture is the mechanism that allows people to adapt to a changing world, and they address how ecological factors, particularly land and water, intersect with nonmaterial and material manifestations of cultural complexity. Contributors further illustra...
Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities is the first focused book-length discussion of migration in central Mexico, west Mexico and the Maya region, presenting case studies on population movement in and among Classic, Epiclassic, and Postclassic Mesoamerican societies and polities within the framework of urbanization and de-urbanization. Looking beyond the conceptual dichotomy of sedentism versus mobility, the contributors show that mobility and migration reveal a great deal about the formation, development, and decline of town- and city-based societies in the ancient world. In a series of data-rich chapters that address specific evidence for movement in their respective study ...
The Skyband Group is an impressive elite site in the urban core of Copán, Honduras, which is dominated by the palatial compounds of Maya sub-royal nobles. Such grandees often bore court titles showing that they were clients and officials of kings, but also competitors for political power, especially just before the dynastic collapse around AD 800.
Then, based on the project's findings, Demarest presents interpretive reconstructions of the linked histories of the Pasion River kingdoms and correlates these interpretations with the variable evidence and culture-histories of other regions of the Classic Maya lowlands. He points out that only through linking such accurate regional culture-histories can we begin to understand the eighth- through tenth-century changes in Classic Maya civilization. The volume describes how the Petexbatun project addressed this challenge in its research design, structure, and large, multicentered zone of study. Building on the previous twenty years of Harvard research in adjacent zones, the Vanderbilt projects succeeded in reconstructing events and processes throughout the Pasion River Valley, the largest single inland trade route of the ancient Maya world.
The Emergence of the Moundbuilders: The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio presents the process of tribal formation and change in the region.
From the Preclassic to the present, Maya peoples have continuously built, altered, abandoned, and re-used structures, imbuing them with new meanings at each transformation. RUINS OF THE PAST is the first volume to focus on how later Maya peoples perceived, used, and sometimes ritually destroyed ruins of structures built by ancestors.
This volume explores the ritual life of Mesoamerica's common citizens, inside and outside of the domestic sphere, from Formative through Postclassic periods. Building from the premise that ritual and ideological expression inhered at all levels of society in Mesoamerica, the contributors demonstrate that ideology did not emanate solely from exalted individuals and that commoner ritual expression was not limited to household contexts. Taking an empirical approach to this under-studied and under-theorized area, contributors use material evidence to discover how commoner status conditioned the expression of ideas and values.
The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands revisits one of the great problems in Mayan archaeology - the apparent collapse of Classic Maya civilization from roughly A.D. 830 to 950. During this period the Maya abandoned their power centers in the southern lowlands and rather abruptly ceased the distinctive cultural practices that marked their apogee in the Classic period. Archaeological fieldwork during the past three decades, however, has uncovered enormous regional variability in the ways the Maya experienced the shift from Classic to Postclassic society, revealing a period of cultural change more complex than acknowledged by traditional models. Featuring an impressive roster of scholars, The Terminal Classic presents the most recent data and interpretations pertaining to this perplexing period of cultural transformation in the Maya lowlands. Although the research reveals clear interregional patterns, the contributors resist a single overarching explanation. Rather, this volume's diverse and nuanced interpretations provide a new, more properly grounded beginning for continued debate on the nature of lowland Terminal Classic Maya civilization.