Search results for ""author arlen f. chase""

This collection represents a major step forward in understanding the era from the end of Classic Maya civilization to the Spanish conquest.

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This volume represents the concerted efforts of a group of Maya archaeologists to employ a different approach to their archaeological data that is consistent with an effort called IHOPE: Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. IHOPE is a global network of scientists and researchers that seeks to use a wide range of data to examine how changes in the Earth's systems of the past have been correlated with changes in the coupled human-biophysical environment (Costanza et al. 2007). “The specific objectives for IHOPE are to identify slow and rapidly moving features of complex social-ecological systems, on local to continental spatial scales, which induce resilience, stress, or collapse in linked systems of humans and nature. These objectives will be reached by exploring innovative ways of conducting inter and trans-disciplinary science, including theory, case studies, and integrated modeling” (Costanza et al. 2012:1). The integration of these data, a large portion of which are derived from archaeology, is seen as an important contribution to the accurate and applicable information base for addressing both short- and long-term planning issues facing modern populations.

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New understandings of how Maya people expressed timekeeping in daily lifeThis book discusses the range of ways the ancient Maya people made time tangible through their architecture, arts, writing, beliefs, and practices. These chapters show how the Maya incorporated cyclicality and expanded dimensionality into the built environment, embedding notions of time in shared political and economic institutions, religious and philosophical traditions, and mythology.Beginning several millennia ago, the Maya observed and calculated the solar year cycle and scheduled collective activities that integrated cities, towns, and villages over great distances. Their timekeeping approaches evolved from commemorative ceremonial architectural complexes starting around 1000 BCE to the formal public inscription of calendar jubilees on stone monuments, the use of calendar almanacs, written prophetic and historical accounts, and the customs of modern priest shamans. Contributors to this volume discuss everyday examples of how the Maya kept time through these practices, including divining with snail shells, laying out center designs with creation stories and star patterns, singing those stories while drinking from vases depicting mythic history, and embedding symbolic temporal deposits within their buildings and living areas. This comprehensive volume includes analyses of groundbreaking recent discoveries, such as the early center of Aguada Fénix and the connections it shows between Maya and Olmec timekeeping. By sharing how the Maya crafted a cosmological sense of time into their daily lives, The Materialization of Time in the Ancient Maya World addresses and rethinks the most famous intellectual feature of this civilization.A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

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As complex societies emerged in the Maya lowlands during the first millen¬nium BCE, so did stable communities focused around public squares and the worship of a divine ruler tied to a Maize God cult. "E Groups," central to many of these settle¬ments, are architectural complexes: typically, a long platform supporting three struc¬tures and facing a western pyramid across a formal plaza. Aligned with the movements of the sun, E Groups have long been interpreted as giant calendrical devices crucial to the rise of Maya civilization. This volume presents new archaeological data to reveal that E Groups were constructed earlier than previously thought. In fact, they are the earliest identifiable architectural plan at many Maya settlements. More than just astronomical observatories or calendars, E Groups were a key ele¬ment of community organization, urbanism, and identity in the heart of the Maya lowlands. They served as gathering places for emerging communities and centers of ritual; they were the very first civic-religious public architecture in the Maya lowlands. Investigating a wide variety of E Group sites—including some of the most famous like the Mundo Perdido in Tikal and the hitherto little known complex at Chan, as well as others in Ceibal, El Palmar, Cival, Calakmul, Caracol, Xunantunich, Yaxnohcah, Yaxuná, and San Bartolo—this volume pieces together the development of social and political complexity in ancient Maya civilization.

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