DOCSLIB.ORG

ANTH 1031 Spring 2017 Classic Maya Civilization 10:30 Pm - 11:50 Pm TR

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
ANTH 1031 Spring 2017 Classic Maya Civilization 10:30 Pm - 11:50 Pm TR ANTH 1031 Spring 2017 Classic Maya Civilization 10:30 pm - 11:50 pm TR Instructor: Prof. Stephen Houston, [email protected] Classroom: List 210 Office Hours: Tue 4:00 - 6:00, Giddings 103 Phone: 401-270-6195, until 9 pm From AD 250 until 850 the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula developed one of the world’s great civilizations, with a sophisticated writing system, urban dwellings, courtly society, and an historical record that is unmatched anywhere else in ancient America. Classic Maya Civilization explores this lost world in detail, from the perspective of ancient politics, economy, political organization, and worldview. By the end of the course, students should have an in-depth familiarity with present evidence of this civilization, and with the latest interpretations of how the world of the Classic Maya developed, flourished, and collapsed. The organizing principle of the course will be a concern with categories, activities, and mentalities of people, including supernatural beings that were felt to be part of their communities. Course Structure Classic Maya Civilization is an introductory course that draws on lectures, review of readings and class materials, and a rich web component. Students should always come to class prepared. Faithful and punctual attendance by all! The class will begin with an Orientation to the region, its natural setting, plant and wildlife population, a sense of the Maya today. It continues by examining the tools of our trade as Mayanists: when we began to explore, how we investigate this distant people, the time periods and their attributes, and the hieroglyphic and conceptual tools used to plumb their beliefs. The second section, Precursors, examines the poorly understood beginnings of the Classic Maya in the so-called “Preclassic period,” itself a time of signal achievements, including many associated with the Classic Maya. Subsequent sections, Encountering the Classic Maya, looks at categories of ancient Maya, and what the latest research says about them and their ways of life. Finally, we investigate one of the signal events in humanity, Coda, when the Classic Maya civilization and its people experienced catastrophic decline, in lessons for us all. Readings All readings are indicated by a code that keys into the syllabus (see below). Readings should always be done prior to class, please! -- (HI) The Classic Maya, Houston and Inomata, 2009. Cambridge U Press, Cambridge. -- (M) The Maya, Michael Coe and Houston, 2015. Thames and Hudson, New York. -- (PV) Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya, tr. Allen Christenson, 2007. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. -- Other readings (on web, designated by boldface name, i.e., Brady) Requirements n Students will prepare three short papers, of 3 pages (750-900 words) single-spaced, exclusive of figures; due on Feb. 16 (Thu), March 9 (Thu), and April 6 (Thu). Topics will be set on the web, with supporting images and information. -- Paper 1: you will be given a map of the Classic Maya city of Piedras Negras, Guatemala. Derive a population estimate based on parameters to be explained. -- Paper 2: you will be given a short text in Maya writing; read on basis of information given to you in class, describe the attendant iconography. -- Paper 3: you will be given information about Maya ceramics, and then look at actual potsherds in the Giddings lab; draw, describe, and date them, explain what they were. n The (Classic) City of (Your) Dreams (due April 20): you will be asked to create the plan of a Maya city from Preclassic, Classic or Postclassic periods, explaining why you have selected its features, how it functioned, who lived where, how it related to the environment and the landscape. n There will be 4 quizzes throughout the semester: (1)Feb. 23; (2) March 16; (4) April 13; April 28 (n.b., a Friday!). These will be timed, on-line exams that you will take within a 24-hr span, on an honor-code principle (do them on your own, please!). The quiz shuts down after an hour, so be sure to focus and prepare. They will only cover material between the quizzes, although I reserve the right to throw in an odd question from another section. This will help you review and acquire a sense of cumulative knowledge throughout the term. Grading Short papers = 3 x 15 pts. = 45 points Imagined City project = 15 points Quizzes = 4 x 10 = 40 points TOTAL = 100 points Short Paper 1: Estimating Population (due Feb. 16) n This involves a study of Piedras Negras, Guatemala. You will read a technical article, “Historical Contexts for Population Reconstruction in the Maya Lowlands,” by D. S. Rice and T. P. Culbert, and attempt to estimate the population of this part of the site. Explain what you could do, what you couldn’t, and why. What are you looking at in this image, what are the features, the rectangles? (Hint: they are the platforms of agricultural terraces and rectangular bases of house mounds around small open plazas for reach group.) Think of this in terms of possibilities and imponderables – how precise can one be, what do these numbers tell us about the city? How did the settlement cluster? What is likely to be residential, what isn’t? And, of course, what is likely to be a plausible range of population? Is this exercise worth doing or too imprecise? Welcome to the challenges of nitty-gritty archaeology! Short Paper 2: Reading a Maya inscription, Interpreting Imagery (due March 9) n This is the real deal: a glyphic and iconographic carving. Using the course/web- resources, (1) how is the text structured, can you see names or dates?; (2) tell me where you think it came from; and (3) explain what the image (the iconography) seems to show. I will give you a list of Emblem glyphs (dynastic names) to help. I do not expect full literacy from you, no worries! But I do wish to see an attempt to grapple with content and to begin to exercise your eyes. Short Paper 3: Understanding Classic Maya pottery (due April 6) n The Maya made tremendous quantities of pottery, for a variety of functions. Being human, they also broke a lot of pottery and place it in fill or trash heaps, or, being spiritual, they incorporated ceramics into tombs and caches. This pottery is celebrated for its beauty, surface finish, and rapid changes in form and color, all of which are temporally diagnostic. A set of sherds (smashed pottery) are your data. Examine the actual sherds in the lab; tell me what the ceramics looked like originally, in unbroken form, what period they date to, what they seem to show, and how the ceramics might have been used. Try to draw, date, and explain these objects. How does one show, as with sherds, the wall thickness? What are the details an archaeologist would want to look at? Who would have made and used these objects, and for what purpose? An Imagined City (due April 20) § Understanding the features of a Maya city, what generates it, who lives and does what where, what varies, what does not vary–these demand close attention. I summon your powers of imagination and empirical knowledge by asking you to create (in plan, model, whatever form you wish as long as it is carefully produced, lucid, and explanatory) a city from a slice of time. Pick a century or two. Justify in prose why you have picked what you have. Put it in a particular region of the Maya world, too. Think of topography, where people live, what ritual and practical needs would need to be satisfied. What is the flow within this city of yours, what would be seen from what? Justify what you’ve included on the basis of information from other Maya cities. Work Load + Textbooks We are now obliged by the university administration to give you some idea of the work load in classes at Brown. Each student varies enormously, of course. But we estimate that, each week, students will spend some 2 hrs + 20 min attending both classes and 4 hours on the reading. Moreover, each of the three projects will take about 5-10 hrs, the imagining and presentation of a Classic Maya city about 10 hrs. The quizzes will be 1 hr in duration, with 10 questions taken from lectures and reading. Also, of course, the texts cost money! (…rather strangely, the University obliges us to state this.) Costs for the three texts will be under $100, as all are in paperback. The Maya, my book with Michael Coe, exists in the multiple editions. You must acquire or access the 9th edition. Disabilities Brown University is committed to full inclusion of all students. Please inform us if you have a disability or other condition that might require accommodations or modification of any of these course procedures. You may speak with us after class or during office hours. For more information, contact Student and Employee Accessibility Services at 401-863- 9588 or [email protected]. Course Syllabus Key: The Classic Maya (HI) The Maya (M) Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya (PV) Boldface names (e.g., Brady) are Canvas on-line Part 1: Orientation Jan. 26 (Th) - Orientation Jan. 31 (T) - Classic Maya + their World, I Readings: HI xiii-27, PV14-56 – to be done over next two weeks! Mandatory talk: Takeshi Inomata, “Origins of Maya Civilization Reconsidered: Ritual, Sedentism, and Olmec Connection.” Tuesday, 5:00 6:30 p.m., Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute Feb. 2 (Th) - Classic Maya + their World, II Readings: M 10-32 Feb. 7 (T) - Finding the Classic Maya Feb. 9 (Th) - Time among the Maya Readings: M 259-263; Houston, “Chronosophy,” on Canvas Feb.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Ashes to Caches: Is Dust Dust Among the Heterarchichal Maya?
    West Chester University Digital Commons @ West Chester University Anthropology & Sociology Faculty Publications Anthropology & Sociology 6-2020 Ashes to Caches: Is Dust Dust Among the Heterarchichal Maya? Marshall Joseph Becker Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/anthrosoc_facpub Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons Volume 28, Issue 3 June 2020 Welcome to the “28 – year book” of The Codex. waxak k’atun jun tun hun Now in its 28th year, The Codex continues to publish materials of substance in the world of Pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican studies. We continue that tradition in this issue. This new issue of The Codex is arriving during a pandemic which has shut down all normal services in our state. Rather than let our members and subscribers down, we decided to go digital for this issue. And, by doing so, we NOTE FROM THE EDITOR 1 realized that we could go “large” by publishing Marshall Becker’s important paper on the ANNOUNCEMENTS 2 contents of caches in the Maya world wherein he calls for more investigation into supposedly SITE-SEEING: REPORTS FROM THE “empty” caches at Tikal and at other Maya sites. FIELD: ARCHAEOLOGY IN A GILDED AGE: THE UNIVERSITY OF Hattula Moholy-Nagy takes us back to an earlier PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM’S TIKAL era in archaeology with her reminiscences of her PROJECT, 1956-1970 days at Tikal in the 1950s and 1960s. Lady by Sharp Tongue got her column in just before the Hattula Moholy-Nagy 3 shut-down happened, and she lets us in on some secrets in Lady K’abal Xook’s past at her GOSSIP COLUMN palace in Yaxchilan.
    [Show full text]
  • The Rulers of Palenque a Beginner’S Guide
    The Rulers of Palenque A Beginner’s Guide By Joel Skidmore With illustrations by Merle Greene Robertson Citation: 2008 The Rulers of Palenque: A Beginner’s Guide. Third edition. Mesoweb: www. mesoweb.com/palenque/resources/rulers/PalenqueRulers-03.pdf. Publication history: The first edition of this work, in html format, was published in 2000. The second was published in 2007, when the revised edition of Martin and Grube’s Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens was still in press, and this third conforms to the final publica- tion (Martin and Grube 2008). To check for a more recent edition, see: www.mesoweb.com/palenque/resources/rulers/rulers.html. Copyright notice: All drawings by Merle Greene Robertson unless otherwise noted. Mesoweb Publications The Rulers of Palenque INTRODUCTION The unsung pioneer in the study of Palenque’s dynastic history is Heinrich Berlin, who in three seminal studies (Berlin 1959, 1965, 1968) provided the essential outline of the dynasty and explicitly identified the name glyphs and likely accession dates of the major Early and Late Classic rulers (Stuart 2005:148-149). More prominent and well deserved credit has gone to Linda Schele and Peter Mathews (1974), who summarized the rulers of Palenque’s Late Classic and gave them working names in Ch’ol Mayan (Stuart 2005:149). The present work is partly based on the transcript by Phil Wanyerka of a hieroglyphic workshop presented by Schele and Mathews at the 1993 Maya Meet- ings at Texas (Schele and Mathews 1993). Essential recourse has also been made to the insights and decipherments of David Stuart, who made his first Palenque Round Table presentation in 1978 at the age of twelve (Stuart 1979) and has recently advanced our understanding of Palenque and its rulers immeasurably (Stuart 2005).
    [Show full text]
  • COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL NOT for DISTRIBUTION Part I
    CONTENTS List of Figures xiii List of Tables xvii Preface xix The Inevitable Note on Orthography xxiii Acknowledgments xxv PART I. CULTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIves 3 1 COPYRIGHTEDINTRODUCTION: THE ITZA MAYAS MATERIAL AND THE PETÉN ITZA MAYAS, THEIR ENVIRONMENTS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS NOTPrudence FOR M. Rice DISTRIBUTIONand Don S. Rice 5 The Maya Lowlands: Environmental Perspectives 5 Who Were the Itzas? Etymological Perspectives 8 The Itzas of Petén 11 The Itzas of the Northern Lowlands and Their Allies 22 2 ITZAJ MAYA FROM A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Charles Andrew Hofling 28 Yukateko versus Southern Yukatekan Language Varieties 31 Itzaj and Mopan 35 vii viii Contents Contact with Ch'olan Languages 35 Concluding Discussion 38 3 THE LAKE PETÉN ITZÁ WATERSHED: MODERN AND HISTORICAL ECOLOGY Mark Brenner 40 Geology and Modern Ecology 40 Modern Limnology 42 Lacustrine Flora and Fauna 45 Historical Ecology 46 Climate Change 50 Summary 53 PART II. THEORETicAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE EpicLASSic ITZAS: FACTIONS, MIGRATIONS, ORIGINS, AND TEXTs 55 4 THEORETICAL CONTEXTS Prudence M. Rice 59 Migration: Travel Tropes and Mobility Memes 59 Identities 65 Factions and Factionalism 67 Spatiality 70 5 ITZA ORIGINS: TEXTS, MYTHS, LEGENDS Prudence M. Rice 77 The Books of theChilam Balam 79 Some Previous Reconstructions of Itza Origins 88 COPYRIGHTEDConcluding Thoughts 93 MATERIAL NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 6 LOWLAND MAYA EpiCLASSIC MIGRATIONS Prudence M. Rice 97 Western Lowlands 98 Southwestern Petén 101 Central Petén Lakes Region 102 Eastern Petén, Belize, and the Southeast 105 Northern Lowlands 106 Rethinking Epiclassic Migrations and the Itzas 109 Contents ix 7 EpiCLASSIC MATERIAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE ITZAS Prudence M.
    [Show full text]
  • The Significance of Copper Bells in the Maya Lowlands from Their
    The significance of Copper bells in the Maya Lowlands On the cover: 12 bells unearthed at Lamanai, including complete, flattened and miscast specimens. From Simmons and Shugar 2013: 141 The significance of Copper bells in the Maya Lowlands - from their appearance in the Late Terminal Classic period to the current day - Arthur Heimann Master Thesis S2468077 Prof. Dr. P.A.I.H. Degryse Archaeology of the Americas Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology (1084TCTY-F-1920ARCH) Leiden, 16/12/2019 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 5 1.1. Subject of The Thesis ................................................................................................................... 6 1.2. Research Question........................................................................................................................ 7 2. MAYA SOCIETY ........................................................................................................................... 10 2.1. Maya Geography.......................................................................................................................... 10 2.2. Maya Chronology ........................................................................................................................ 13 2.2.1. Preclassic ............................................................................................................................................................. 13 2.2.2.
    [Show full text]
  • What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands
    J Archaeol Res (2007) 15:329–377 DOI 10.1007/s10814-007-9015-x ORIGINAL PAPER What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands James J. Aimers Published online: 17 August 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract Interest in the lowland Maya collapse is stronger than ever, and there are now hundreds of studies that focus on the era from approximately A.D. 750 to A.D. 1050. In the past, scholars have tended to generalize explanations of the collapse from individual sites and regions to the lowlands as a whole. More recent approaches stress the great diversity of changes that occurred across the lowlands during the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic periods. Thus, there is now a consensus that Maya civilization as a whole did not collapse, although many zones did experience profound change. Keywords Maya Á Collapse Á Terminal Classic–Early Postclassic Introduction ‘‘Much has been published in recent years about the collapse of Maya civilization and its causes. It might be wise to preface this chapter with a simple statement that in my belief no such thing happened’’ (Andrews IV 1973, p. 243). More than three decades after Andrews made this statement, interest in the lowland Maya collapse is more intense than ever. Of the more than 400 books, chapters, or articles of which I am aware, over half were published in the last ten years. As always, speculation about the collapse follows contemporary trends (Wilk 1985), and widespread concern over war and the physical environment have made the lowland Maya into a cautionary tale for many (Diamond 2005; Gibson 2006; J.
    [Show full text]
  • Cecil, Leslie, Prudence M
    Cecil, Leslie, Prudence M. Rice y Don S. Rice 1999 Los estilos tecnológicos de la cerámica Postclásica con engobe de la región de los lagos de Petén. En XII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 1998 (editado por J.P. Laporte y H.L. Escobedo), pp.788-795. Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala. 61 LOS ESTILOS TECNOLÓGICOS DE LA CERÁMICA POSTCLÁSICA CON ENGOBE DE LA REGIÓN DE LOS LAGOS DE PETÉN Leslie Cecil Prudence M. Rice Don S. Rice El periodo Postclásico (950-1524 DC) y el de Contacto (1524-1700 DC) en las Tierras Bajas Mayas de Petén, Guatemala, son relativamente poco conocidos, pero recientemente han sido investigados por el Proyecto Maya Colonial (Jones 1989, 1996, s.f.; Jones et al. 1981; D. Rice 1986, 1988; Rice y Rice 1981, 1984, 1990; P. Rice 1979, 1986, 1987a, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c; Rice et al. 1996). Socio-políticamente, dichos siete y medio siglos pueden ser mejor caracterizados como una situación de movimiento de límites como resultado de cambios de alianzas, relaciones de cambios de dominio y una repetida migración de grupos sociales étnicos. Los estilos tecnológicos de la cerámica en asociación con la arquitectura y otros aspectos de la cultura material pueden ayudar a dilucidar la situación socio-política en la región de los lagos de Petén central durante los periodos Postclásico y de Contacto. Si los límites cambiaron con frecuencia, se daría el caso que algunos sitios arqueológicos podrían haber sido ocupados por varios grupos sociales diferentes, situación que se vería reflejada en la cerámica, así como en otros aspectos de la cultura material y rasgos arquitectónicos diagnósticos.
    [Show full text]
  • Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya. A
    those who commissioned the works. Many have inscribed dates calcu­ lated accord ing to the Long Count, a way of marki ng historical time that scholarsfirst identified in the 1960s. One carved limestone hiero­ glyphic inscription on a lintel from Yaxchilan includes a date that is equivalent to Feb. 11,526, when K'inich Tatb'u Skull II,a ruler of this northern Guatemalan city-state, ascended to the throne. The Long Count began on a specific day in the year 3114 B.C., when, the Maya believed, their gods extracted blood from themselves and mi xed it with cornmeal to make humans. K'inich Tatb'u Skull II and other lords had Long Co unt dates carved on public wo rks both to locate themselves within historical time and to place themselves amo ng the gods, heroes and supernatural entities who had initiated and contin­ ued to perpetuate humanity. The text of this inscription is meticulously carved in so-called "full­ figure" form s ofanimalsand human faces, rather than the more frag­ mented shorthand of most Maya hieroglyphics. It reveals the essen­ tially hybrid and multivalent nature of Maya writing, filled with Three eccentric fl ints, Centro Regional, Copan, Honduras, ca. 755 A.D., combinations of animate and inanimate elements that stand for (left to right) J2 '/" 13 '/, and 10%inches high. Institu te Hondureiio de Antropologia e His toria, Tegucigalpa. sound, word or symbol [see sidebarJ. Just as Maya inscriptions can be intricately visual, so can visual representations be calligraphic, as in a number of so-called "eccen­ competitive ly pressuring each other to attain ever higher levels of tric" flints on view.
    [Show full text]
  • Identifying Immigration to the Maya Site of T
    MISSIONIZATION AND SHIFTING MOBILITY ON THE SOUTHEASTERN MAYA-SPANISH FRONTIER: IDENTIFYING IMMIGRATION TO THE MAYA SITE OF TIPU, BELIZE THROUGH THE USE OF STRONTIUM AND OXYGEN ISOTOPES A Dissertation by WILLA RACHEL TRASK Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Lori E. Wright Committee Members, David L. Carlson Darryl J. de Ruiter Deborah J. Thomas Head of Department, Cynthia Werner August 2018 Major Subject: Anthropology Copyright 2018 Willa Rachel Trask ABSTRACT The early Colonial Period visita mission cemetery Tipu represents an important opportunity to understand the role mobility played in indigenous Maya resistance on the southeastern Maya-Spanish frontier. This dissertation seeks to identify the geographical origin of a subset (N=195) of the over 600 Postclassic and early Colonial period Maya buried at Tipu. As geographic and cultural frontier, Tipu experienced a dynamic history of fluctuating political alliances and was a pivotal player in frontier politics. Ethnohistorical records indicate that the remote frontier community of Tipu functioned as a place of refuge for a large southern exodus of indigenous Maya from the northern Yucatan escaping the hardships encountered in more populated regions under Spanish colonial control; to date little concrete evidence for this migration has been identified. To test whether the frontier community of Tipu functioned as a haven for refugee Yucatec Maya, strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and oxygen (δ18O) isotopes are used as geologic and climatic tracers to estimate potential childhood homelands for individuals buried at Tipu.
    [Show full text]
  • Wayeb Notes No. 37
    f No. 37, 2011 WAYEB NOTES ISSN 1379-8286 A LOOK AT THE ENIGMATIC "GI TITLE" ASSOCIATED WITH THE MAYA WOMEN Boguchwała Tuszyńska Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland Many different titles used by the ancient Maya kings and nobles still remain poorly understood. Even if epigraphers are able to transliterate and transcribe some of them, their exact meaning and significance is not clear to us. It seems still more complicated in the case of titles that have not been fully deciphered, though at times it is possible to establish for what reason a specific title was held by a specific person. Such is the case with the so-called “vase title” (Proskouriakoff 1961). Even without an exact reading we know that this title was associated with Goddess O and was used by the Maya to designate married women, able to give birth (Colas 2004: xxiii). In the case of Maya women we have another enigmatic “godly title” found only in a few Classic period texts, known as the “GI title”. The title consists of three signs: 1) the undeciphered sign T217d, 2) the logogram T4 NAH and 3) the glyph representing the head of GI. The title is found in a few Early Classic texts (Boot 2001, Stuart 2005: 121) and Linda Schele considered it one of the name phrases of GI (Schele 1994). There are some glyphic variations of the title (Figure 1). The “hand” sign and the glyph NAH are sometimes accompanied only by the so-called “dotted” ajaw. In another example the “hand” sign and the logogram NAH are accompanied by the ajaw sign and the head of GI, and finally we have the “hand” sign attached to the logogram NAH and the head of GI.
    [Show full text]
  • Baj “Hammer” and Related Affective Verbs in Classic Mayan
    ThePARIJournal A quarterly publication of the Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute Volume XI, No. 2, Fall 2010 In This Issue: Baj “Hammer”and Related Affective Baj “Hammer” and Verbsin Classic Mayan Related Affective Marc Zender Verbs in Classic Peabody Museum, Harvard University Mayan by Some years ago now, I proposed a deci- Marc Zender pherment of the Classic Maya logograph PAGES 1-16 BAJ (Figure 1)—clearly representing a • stone object wielded as some kind of tool or weapon, most likely a hammer, The Western 1 b Sun: An Unusual chisel, or celt. Although some of the epigraphic evidence for this value Tzolk'in–Haab a Correlation in was complicated by the abbreviations Classic Maya characteristic of nominal contexts in Inscriptions Maya writing, the linguistic evidence was strongly supportive, with several relevant by c Alexandre Tokovinine languages providing evidence of a root PAGES 17-21 baj “to hammer” of appropriate form Figure 1. The BAJ “hammer” sign: (a) Dos Pilas and meaning. More encouraging still, Panel 7, A5a; (b) ‘Ocosingo Jade,’ American • modern Mayan languages suggested that Museum of Natural History, New York (after Squier A New Look at the the root pertained to a class of affective 1869:Fig. 9); (c) Dos Pilas HS 2, East, Step 1, E2a (all drawings by the author unless otherwise noted). Inscription of Copan verbs which had hitherto escaped notice Altar K in Maya writing. However, while the has been well received by my colleagues,2 by decipherment and its implications have the full extent of the evidence has not Péter Bíró been presented in several forums (e.g., yet been made generally available.
    [Show full text]
  • A Heretofore Unknown Monument of Tonina,Chiapas
    "Off with his head!" A Heretofore Unknown Monument of Tonina, Chiapas Nielsen, Jesper; Helmke, Christophe; Stuart, David ; Sánchez Gamboa, Ángel Published in: The P A R I Journal Publication date: 2019 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Document license: Unspecified Citation for published version (APA): Nielsen, J., Helmke, C., Stuart, D., & Sánchez Gamboa, Á. (2019). "Off with his head!": A Heretofore Unknown Monument of Tonina, Chiapas. The P A R I Journal, 20(1), 1-14. Download date: 27. sep.. 2021 ThePARIJournal A quarterly publication of the Ancient Cultures Institute Volume XX, No. 1, Summer 2019 “Off with his head!”A Heretofore In This Issue: Unknown Monument of Tonina,Chiapas JESPER NIELSEN “Off With His University of Copenhagen Head!” A Heretofore Unknown CHRISTOPHE HELMKE University of Copenhagen Monument of Tonina, Chiapas DAVID STUART University of Texas at Austin by Jesper Nielsen, ÁNGEL A. SÁNCHEZ GAMBOA Christophe Helmke, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia David Stuart, and Ángel A. Sánchez In 2013, the Institute for Cross-Cultural Gamboa and Regional Studies at the University of PAGES 1-14 Copenhagen moved from its earlier loca- tion to become part of a large new campus • for the entire Faculty of Humanities on Arild Hvidtfeldt’s the island of Amager in the southern Contribution to part of Copenhagen. As part of the mov- Mesoamerican ing process, various archives containing Studies personal papers, photos, slides, and pub- by lications pertaining to the Department Jesper Nielsen of American Indian Languages and Cultures and its former employees were PAGES 15-16 reorganized.
    [Show full text]
  • Codex-Style Fragments from Structure XX, Calakmul
    Codex-style fragments from Structure XX, Calakmul by Kai Delvendahl During excavations in 2001 and 2003 by the Proyecto Arqueológico Calakmul (PAC) under the general direction of Ramón Carrasco Vargas, a so-called 'trash deposit' was uncovered on the south side of Structure XX of Calakmul, consisting of more than fifteen thousand ceramic fragments (Fig. 1). Structure XX, located on the western extreme of the Plaza de los Prisioneros of the Grand Acropolis or ‘West Group’, was during much of the Late Classic probably the main entrance to the largest palace complex in the Maya Lowlands, the Grand Acropolis Group. This palace complex measures roughly 336 m north-south by 344 m east-west and consists of 17 courtyards, surrounded by an estimated 80 buildings. The deposit was associated with the latest floor of a relatively small courtyard immediately behind Structure XX, some 1.6 m underneath actual soil surface. During the building’s use as an entrance to the Grand Acropolis Group at least from the early Late Classic onwards, the courtyard behind Structure XX might have functioned as a point of dispersion, granting relatively easy access to several of the other 16 courtyards of the palace complex (Delvendahl 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008). Of course, the location close to the only entrance to the palace group and the fact that almost no other material (such as conch, obsidian, carbon, etc.) was found, makes the term 'trash' dubious. However, around 95% of the ceramics were of domestic kind, especially of 'Ciricote Compuesto'-type, large bowls with wide necks used for storage, which were so popular in Calakmul that the same type was used all through the Early and Late Classic.
    [Show full text]