The Legacy Of Mesoamerica

The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization summarizes and integrates information on the origins, historical development, and current situations of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. It describes their contributions from the development of Mesoamerican Civilization through 20th century and their influence in the world community. For courses on Mesoamerica (Middle America) taught in departments of anthropology, history, and Latin American Studies.

This accessible, state-of-the-art review of Mayan hieroglyphics and cosmology also serves as a tribute to one of the field's most noted pioneers. The core of this book focuses on the current study of Mayan hieroglyphics as inspired by the recently deceased Mayanist Linda Schele. As author or coauthor of more than 200 books or articles on the Maya, Schele served as the chief disseminator of knowledge to the general public about this ancient Mesoamerican culture, similar to the way in which Margaret Mead introduced anthropology and the people of Borneo to the English-speaking world. Twenty-five contributors offer scholarly writings on subjects ranging from the ritual function of public space at the Olmec site and the gardens of the Great Goddess at Teotihuacan to the understanding of Jupiter in Maya astronomy and the meaning of the water throne of Quirigua Zoomorph P. The workshops on Maya history and writing that Schele conducted in Guatemala and Mexico for the highland people, modern descendants of the Mayan civilization, are thoroughly addressed as is the phenomenon termed "Maya mania"—the explosive growth of interest in Maya epigraphy, iconography, astronomy, and cosmology that Schele stimulated. An appendix provides a bibliography of Schele's publications and a collection of Scheleana, written memories of "the Rabbit Woman" by some of her colleagues and students. Of interest to professionals as well as generalists, this collection will stand as a marker of the state of Mayan studies at the turn of the 21st century and as a tribute to the remarkable personality who guided a large part of that archaeological research for more than two decades.

Paloma Martinez-Cruz argues that the medicine traditions of Mesoamerican women constitute a hemispheric intellectual lineage that continues to thrive despite the legacy of colonization. Martinez-Cruz asserts that indigenous and mestiza women healers are custodians of a knowledge base that remains virtually uncharted. The few works looking at the knowledge of women in Mesoamerica generally examine only the written—even academic—world, accessible only to the most elite segments of (customarily male) society. These works have consistently excluded the essential repertoire and performed knowledge of women who think and work in ways other than the textual. And while two of the book’s chapters critique contemporary novels, Martinez-Cruz also calls for the exploration of non-textual knowledge transmission. In this regard, the book's goals and methods are close to those of performance scholarship and anthropology, and these methods reveal Mesoamerican women to be public intellectuals. In Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica, fieldwork and ethnography combine to reveal women healers as models of agency. Her multidisciplinary approach allows Martinez-Cruz to disrupt Euro-based intellectual hegemony and to make a case for the epistemic authority of Native women. Written from a Chicana perspective, this study is learned, personal, and engaging for anyone who is interested in the wisdom that prevailing analytical cultures have deemed “unintelligible.” As it turns out, those who are unacquainted with the sometimes surprising extent and depth of wisdom of indigenous women healers simply haven’t been looking in the right places—outside the texts from which they have been consistently excluded.

This volume brings together the work of some of the most prominent archaeologists to document the impact of Jeffrey R. Parsons on contemporary archaeological method and theory. Parsons is a central figure in the development of settlement pattern archaeology, in which the goal is the study of whole social systems at the scale of regions. In recent decades, regional archaeology has revolutionized how we understand the past, contributing new data and theoretical insights on topics such as early urbanism, social interactions among cities, towns and villages, and long-term population and agricultural change, among many other topics relevant to the study of early civilizations and the evolution of social complexity. Over the past 40 years, the application of these methods by Parsons and others has profoundly changed how we understand the evolution of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilization, and now similar methods are being applied in other world areas. The book's emphasis is on the contribution of settlement pattern archaeology to research in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, but its authors also point to the value of regional research in South America, South Asia, and China. Topics addressed include early urbanism, household and gender, agricultural and craft production, migration, ethnogenesis, the evolution of early chiefdoms, and the emergence of pre-modern world-systems.

The concept of death can be viewed from different perspectives. In general terms, it can be defined as the end of life, but a more spiritual interpretation would describe it as the separation of the soul from the body. Regardless of the definition, death implies change and transformation, even if only on a physical level. The idea of transcendence has served as a source of comfort for humanity that is usually represented in the belief of an afterlife which takes place in another realm. Since the beginning of history, understanding and explaining it has been a large concern for people all over the world. Death is both a daily occurrence and an irreversible condition, and countless efforts have been made to avoid or postpone it. The constant struggle to transcend its permanence has led cultures to create the idea of an afterlife; of a place or world where life carries on after its end on earth. In ancient Mesoamerica, this concept of an afterlife greatly permeated the worldview of the many pre-Hispanic cultures that developed all throughout the region. Among Mesoamericans, life and death were closely related and often deeply integrated, and the two conditions were perceived to exist in an opposition that was at once dynamic and complementary. Described later by the Aztecs as the state of nepantla, life and death were viewed by the indigenous people of Mesoamerica as yet another example of the "back and forth" fluctuations common to human life. Sometimes simplistically described as a borderland or liminal place, nepantla is a far more nuanced term and concept. For Mesoamericans there were no "disasters"; life only happened, and the way of that happening was by this back-and-forth, give-and-take model. Since death, killing, and sacrifice were necessary for life and required for nourishment, their necessity was understood and accepted. The introduction of ancestor worship and rebirth into the equation further clouds modern potential for understanding Mesoamerican conceptions of death. In Mayan communities, deceased ancestors were not buried apart from their families; rather, they were often buried beneath the floor of the family home. In that way, ancestors were included in daily life and were kept apprised of family milestones. Also, ancestors could influence their living descendants or act as intermediaries between the living and the gods. Unhappy or dishonored ancestors could even inflict diseases from the underworld, seen as the source for illness. Thus, major festivals honored the deceased, and the living sought to commune with them by presenting offerings of food and flowers. This reverence, and attempts to appease departed loved ones, is another example of a ritual which survived the conquest and became an accepted, albeit folk-Catholic, tradition. Originally conducted during late summer (August), post-conquest iterations of the celebrations gradually migrated through the calendar until they coincided with the Catholic celebrations of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Commonly known as the Day of the Dead, this Mesoamerican ancestor-honoring ritual still occurs throughout Latin America, the American Southwest, and anywhere that Latinos with ancestral ties to Mesoamerica live. The physical genuineness of the gifts presented at Day of the Dead shrines, food, drinks, and flowers, mimics the both the content and the idea behind the funeral goods often found in internments of Maya elites. Furthermore, the underworld in Maya religion is also associated with foul smells, and often these levels were steaming hot scenes of decay and decomposition where the gods of death lived. The Maya equivalent of the Aztec god of the underworld, Mictlantecuhtli, is referred to as cizin or "the flatulent one" in the Madrid Codex (one of the four surviving Maya codices), and Lacondon and Yucatec Maya still refer to the death god as Cizin (kee-ZEEN).

For more than a millennium the great Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan (c. 150 B.C.E. - 750 C.E.) has been imagined and reimagined by a host of subsequent cultures, including our own. Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage engages the subject of the unity and diversity of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica by focusing on the classic heritage of this ancient city. This new volume is the product of several years of research by members of Princeton University's Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project and Mexico's Proyecto Teotihuacán. Offering a variety of disciplinary perspectives - including the history of religions, anthropology, archaeology, and art history - and a wealth of new data, Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage examines Teotihuacan's rippling influence across Mesoamerican time and space, including important patterns of continuity and change, and its relationships, both historical and symbolic, with Tenochtitlan, Cholula, and various Maya communities. The contributors to Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage offer a wide range of individual interpretations, but they agree that Teotihuacan, more than any other pre-Hispanic center, was a paradigmatic source that formed the art and architecture, cosmology and ritual life, and conceptions of urbanism and political authority for significant parts of the Mesoamerican world. This great city achieved the prestige of being the site of the creation of the cosmos and of effective social and political space in Mesoamerica through its capacity to symbolize, perform, and export its imperial authority. These essays reveal the different ways in which Teotihuacan's classic heritage both fed and fed on the dynamic interactivity of the entire area. Whether or not a paradigm shift in Mesoamerican studies is taking place, certainly a new contextual understanding of Teotihuacan and the diversities and unities of Mesoamerica is emerging in these pages.

Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica offers the most thorough and up-to-date book-length treatment of Olmec society and culture available.

This volume accompanies a major international loan exhibition featuring more than three hundred works of art, many rarely or never before seen in the United States. It traces the development of gold working and other luxury arts in the Americas from antiquity until the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century. Presenting spectacular works from recent excavations in Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico, this exhibition focuses on specific places and times—crucibles of innovation—where artistic exchange, rivalry, and creativity led to the production of some of the greatest works of art known from the ancient Americas. The book and exhibition explore not only artistic practices but also the historical, cultural, social, and political conditions in which luxury arts were produced and circulated, alongside their religious meanings and ritual functions. Golden Kingdoms creates new understandings of ancient American art through a thematic exploration of indigenous ideas of value and luxury. Central to the book is the idea of the exchange of materials and ideas across regions and across time: works of great value would often be transported over long distances, or passed down over generations, in both cases attracting new audiences and inspiring new artists. The idea of exchange is at the intellectual heart of this volume, researched and written by twenty scholars based in the United States and Latin America.