The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context

The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context
Author: Gyles Iannone
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2014-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607322803

In The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, contributors reject the popularized link between societal collapse and drought in Maya civilization, arguing that a series of periodic “collapses,” including the infamous Terminal Classic collapse (AD 750–1050), were not caused solely by climate change–related droughts but by a combination of other social, political, and environmental factors. New and senior scholars of archaeology and environmental science explore the timing and intensity of droughts and provide a nuanced understanding of socio-ecological dynamics, with specific reference to what makes communities resilient or vulnerable when faced with environmental change.Contributors recognize the existence of four droughts that correlate with periods of demographic and political decline and identify a variety of concurrent political and social issues. They argue that these primary underlying factors were exacerbated by drought conditions and ultimately led to societal transitions that were by no means uniform across various sites and subregions. They also deconstruct the concept of “collapse” itself—although the line of Maya kings ended with the Terminal Classic collapse, the Maya people and their civilization survived. The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context offers new insights into the complicated series of events that impacted the decline of Maya civilization. This significant contribution to our increasingly comprehensive understanding of ancient Maya culture will be of interest to students and scholars of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.

Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed

Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed
Author: Melissa S. Murphy
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813072220

"Breaks new ground regarding how to think about colonial encounters in innovative ways that pay attention to a wide range of issues from health and demography to identity formations and adaptation."—Debra L. Martin, coeditor of The Bioarchaeology of Violence "Amply demonstrates the breadth and variability of the impact of colonialism."—Ken Nystrom, State University of New York at New Paltz European expansion into the New World fundamentally altered Indigenous populations. The collision between East and West led to the most recent human adaptive transition that spread around the world. Paradoxically, these are some of the least scientifically understood processes of the human past. Representing a new generation of contact and colonialism studies, this volume expands on the traditional focus on the health of conquered peoples by considering how extraordinary biological and cultural transformations were incorporated into the human body and reflected in behavior, identity, and adaptation. By examining changes in diet, mortuary practices, and diseases, these globally diverse case studies demonstrate that the effects of conquest reach further than was ever thought before—to both the colonized and the colonizers. People on all sides of colonial contact became entangled in cultural and biological transformations of social identities, foodways, social structures, and gene pools at points of contact and beyond. Contributors to this volume illustrate previously unknown and variable effects of colonialism by analyzing skeletal remains and burial patterns from never-before-studied regions in the Americas to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The result is the first step toward a new synthesis of archaeology and bioarchaeology. Contributors: Rosabella Alvarez-Calderón | Elliot H. Blair | Maria Fernanda Boza | Michele R. Buzon | Romina Casali | Mark N. Cohen | Danielle N. Cook | Marie Elaine Danforth | J. Lynn Funkhouser | Catherine Gaither | Pamela García Laborde| Ricardo A. Guichón | Rocio Guichón Fernández | Heather Guzik | Amanda R. Harvey | Barbara T. Hester | Dale L. Hutchinson | Kristina Killgrove | Haagen D. Klaus | Clark Spencer Larsen | Alan G. Morris | Melissa S. Murphy | Alejandra Ortiz | Megan A. Perry | Emily S. Renschler | Isabelle Ribot | Melisa A. Salerno | Matthew C. Sanger | Paul W. Sciulli | Stuart Tyson Smith | Christopher M. Stojanowski | David Hurst Thomas | Victor D. Thompson | Vera Tiesler | Jason Toohey | Lauren A. Winkler | Pilar Zabala

The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture

The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture
Author: Jeb J. Card
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2013-10-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0809333163

In recent years, archaeologists have used the terms hybrid and hybridity with increasing frequency to describe and interpret forms of material culture. Hybridity is a way of viewing culture and human action that addresses the issue of power differentials between peoples and cultures. This approach suggests that cultures are not discrete pure entities but rather are continuously transforming and recombining. The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture discusses this concept and its relationship to archaeological classification and the emergence of new ethnic group identities. This collection of essays provides readers with theoretical and concrete tools for investigating objects and architecture with discernible multiple influences. The twenty-one essays are organized into four parts: ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; ethnicity and material culture in pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America; culture contact and transformation in technological style; and materiality and identity. The media examined include ceramics, stone and glass implements, textiles, bone, architecture, and mortuary and bioarchaeological artifacts from North, South, and Central America, Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, Europe, and Mesopotamia. Case studies include Bronze Age Britain, Iron Age and Roman Europe, Uruk-era Turkey, African diasporic communities in the Caribbean, pre-Spanish and Pueblo revolt era Southwest, Spanish colonial impacts in the American Southeast, Central America, and the Andes, ethnographic Amazonia, historic-era New England and the Plains, the Classic Maya, nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, and Upper Paleolithic Europe. The volume is carefully detailed with more than forty maps and figures and over twenty tables. The work presented in The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture comes from researchers whose questions and investigations recognized the role of multiple influences on the people and material they study. Case studies include experiments in bone working in middle Missouri; images and social relationships in prehistoric and Roman Europe; technological and material hybridity in colonial Peruvian textiles; ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; and flaked glass tools from the leprosarium at Kalawao, Moloka‘i. The essays provide examples and approaches that may serve as a guide for other researchers dealing with similar issues.

Climates, Landscapes, and Civilizations

Climates, Landscapes, and Civilizations
Author: Liviu Giosan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 574
Release: 2013-05-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1118704436

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 198. Climates, Landscapes, and Civilizations brings together a collection of studies on the history of complex interrelationships between humans and their environment by integrating Earth science with archeology and anthropology. At a time when climate change, overpopulation, and scarcity of resources are increasingly affecting our ways of life, the lessons of the past provide multiple reference frames that are valuable for informing our future decisions and action plans. Volume highlights include discussions of multiple connotations of the Anthropocene, landscapes as a link between climate and humans, synoptic approaches to explore large-scale cultural patterns, regional studies for contextualizing cultural complexity, and environmental determinism and social theory. Straddling the fields of Earth sciences, anthropology, and archaeology and presenting research from across several continents, Climates, Landscapes, and Civilizations will appeal to a wide readership among scientists, scholars, and the public at large.

The Maya of the Cochuah Region

The Maya of the Cochuah Region
Author: Justine M. Shaw
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826348645

This book, the first major collection of data from the Cochuah region investigations, presents and analyzes findings on more than eighty sites and puts them in the context of the findings of other investigations from outside the area.

3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands

3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands
Author: Geoffrey E. Braswell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2022-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351267981

3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands presents the cutting-edge research of 25 authors in the fields of archaeology, biological anthropology, art history, ethnohistory, and epigraphy. Together, they explore issues central to ancient Maya identity, political history, and warfare. The Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and southeast Mexico have witnessed human occupation for at least 11,000 years, and settled life reliant on agriculture began some 3,100 years ago. From the earliest times, Maya communities expressed their shifting identities through pottery, architecture, stone tools, and other items of material culture. Although it is tempting to think of the Maya as a single unified culture, they were anything but homogeneous, and differences in identity could be expressed through violence. 3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands explores the formation of identity, its relationship to politics, and its manifestation in warfare from the earliest pottery-making villages through the late colonial period by studying the material remains and written texts of the Maya. This volume is an invaluable reference for students and scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists.

Beyond Collapse

Beyond Collapse
Author: Ronald K. Faulseit
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0809333996

This book interprets how ancient civilizations responded to various stresses, including environmental change, warfare, and the fragmentation of political institutions. It focuses on what happened during and after the decline of once powerful regimes, and posits that they experienced social resilience and transformation instead of collapse.

Perspectives on the Ancient Maya of Chetumal Bay

Perspectives on the Ancient Maya of Chetumal Bay
Author: Debra S. Walker
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081305589X

"Brings novel, synthetic insight to understanding a region that was a hub of waterborne trade and an important locus of production for some of the Maya’s most valued crops."--Cynthia Robin, author of Everyday Life Matters: Maya Farmers at Chan "This one of a kind volume shows us how important this region was to the ancient Maya with detailed and vivid descriptions of sociopolitical and economic organization and their relation to the unique landscape and geography of Chetumal Bay."--Laura J. Kosakowsky, author of Preclassic Maya Pottery at Cuello, Belize Chetumal Bay is central to discussions of ancient Maya politics, warfare, economy, exchange and communication because of its unique location. Although the ancient Maya invested prodigious amounts of labor in the construction of road systems called sacbeob for communication and trade, recent archaeological discoveries around Chetumal Bay in both Belize and Mexico reveal an economic alternative to these roads: an extensive network of riverine and maritime waterways. Focusing on sites ringing the bay such as Cerro Maya, Oxtankah, and Santa Rita Corozal, the contributors to this volume explore how the bay and its feeder rivers affected all aspects of Maya culture from settlement, food production, and the production and use of special goods to political relationships and social organization. Besides being a nexus for long distance exchange in valuable materials such as jade and obsidian, the region was recognized for its high quality agricultural produce, including cacao, achiote, vanilla, local fruits, honey, and salt, and for its rich marine environment. The Maya living on the fringes of the bay perceived the entire region as a single resource procurement zone. Waterborne trade brought the world to them, providing a wider horizon than would have been available to inland cities dependent only on Maya roads for news of the world. The research reveals that trade relations played a central role in the organization of human social life on Chetumal Bay. Contributors: James Aimers | Timothy Beach | Clifford Brown | Beverly A. Chiarulli | Lisa G. Duffy | Dori Farthing | David A. Freidel | Elizabeth Graham | Thomas Guderjan | Elizabeth Haussner | Linda Howie | Samantha Krause | Javier López Camacho | Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach | Marc D. Marino | Lucas R. Martindale Johnson | Heather McKillop | Nathan J. Meissner | Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc | Susan Milbrath | Satoru Murata | Maxine Oland | Terry Powis | Kathryn Reese-Taylor | Robin Robertson | Luis A. Torres Díaz | Araceli Vázquez Villegas | Debra S. Walker

Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities

Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities
Author: M. Charlotte Arnauld
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2021-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 164642073X

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 areas, an international group of scholars assesses mobility through the isotopic and demographic analysis of human remains, stratigraphic identification of gaps in occupation, and local intensification of water capture in the Maya lowlands. Others examine migration through the integration of historic and archaeological evidence in Michoacán and Yucatán and by registering how daily life changed in response to the influx of new people in the Basin of Mexico. Offering a range of critical insights into the vital and under-studied role that mobility and migration played in complex agrarian societies, Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities will be of value to Mesoamericanist archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and bioarchaeologists and to any scholars working on complex societies. Contributors: Jaime J. Awe, Meggan Bullock, Sarah C. Clayton, Andrea Cucina, Véronique Darras, Nicholas P. Dunning, Mélanie Forné, Marion Forest, Carolyn Freiwald, Elizabeth Graham, Nancy Gonlin, Julie A. Hoggarth, Linda Howie, Elsa Jadot, Kristin V. Landau, Eva Lemonnier, Dominique Michelet, David Ortegón Zapata, Prudence M. Rice, Thelma N. Sierra Sosa, Michael P. Smyth, Vera Tiesler, Eric Weaver