Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica

Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica PDF

Author: Shawn G. Morton

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2019-11-29

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1607328879

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Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica focuses on the conflicts of the ancient Maya, providing a holistic history of Maya hostilities and comparing them with those of neighboring Mesoamerican villages and towns. Contributors to the volume explore the varied stories of past Maya conflicts through artifacts, architecture, texts, and images left to posterity. Many studies have focused on the degree to which the prevalence, nature, and conduct of conflict has varied across time and space. This volume focuses not only on such operational considerations but on cognitive and experiential issues, analyzing how the Maya understood and explained conflict, what they recognized as conflict, how conflict was experienced by various groups, and the circumstances surrounding conflict. By offering an emic (internal and subjective) understanding alongside the more commonly researched etic (external and objective) perspective, contributors clarify insufficiencies and address lapses in data and analysis. They explore how the Maya defined themselves within the realm of warfare and examine the root causes and effects of intergroup conflict. Using case studies from a wide range of time periods, Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica provides a basis for understanding hostilities and broadens the archaeological record for the “seeking” of conflict in a way that has been largely untouched by previous scholars. With broad theoretical reach beyond Mesoamerican archaeology, the book will have wide interdisciplinary appeal and will be important to ethnohistorians, art historians, ethnographers, epigraphers, and those interested in human conflict more broadly. Contributors: Matthew Abtosway, Karen Bassie-Sweet, George J. Bey III, M. Kathryn Brown, Allen J. Christenson, Tomás Gallareta Negrón, Elizabeth Graham, Helen R. Haines, Christopher L. Hernandez, Harri Kettunen, Rex Koontz, Geoffrey McCafferty, Jesper Nielsen, Joel W. Palka, Kerry L. Sagebiel, Travis W. Stanton, Alexandre Tokovinine

War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica

War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica PDF

Author: Ross Hassig

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1992-08-19

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0520077342

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In this study of warfare in ancient Mesoamerica, Ross Hassig offers new insight into three thousand years of Mesoamerican history, from roughly 1500 B.C. to the Spanish conquest. He examines the methods, purposes, and values of warfare as practiced by the major pre-Columbian societies and shows how warfare affected the rise of the state.

Why War?

Why War? PDF

Author: Richard Overy

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1324021756

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Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was “a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war.” Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud’s conclusion that the “death drive” made any deliverance impossible—the psychological impulse to destruction was universal in the animal kingdom. The global wars of the later 1930s and 1940s seemed ample evidence of the dismal conclusion. A preeminent historian of those wars, Overy brings vast knowledge to the title question and years of experience unraveling the knotted motivations of war. His approach is to separate the major drivers and motivations, and consider the ways each has contributed to organized conflict. They range from the impulses embedded in human biology and psychology, to the incentives to conflict developed through cultural evolution, to competition for resources—conflicts stirred by the passions of belief, the effects of ecological stresses, the drive for power in leaders and nations, and the search for security. The discussions show remarkable range, delving deep into the Neolithic past, through the twentieth-century world wars, and up to the current conflict in Ukraine. The examples are absorbing, from the Roman Empire’s voracious appetite for resources to the impulse to power evident in Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler. The conclusion is not hopeful, but Overy’s book is a gift to readers: a compact, judicious, engrossing examination of a fundamental question.

Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare

Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare PDF

Author: M. Kathryn Brown

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780759102835

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Collection of articles providing new research on warfare in ancient Maya and other Mesoamerican societies based on archaeological, ethnohistorical, and linguistic evidence

The Maya and Climate Change

The Maya and Climate Change PDF

Author: Kenneth Seligson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-11-29

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0197652921

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"The Classic Maya civilization thrived between 200-950 CE in the tropical forests of eastern Mesoamerica before undergoing a period of breakdown and transformation known colloquially as the Classic Maya Collapse. This book draws on archaeological, environmental, and historical datasets to provide a comprehensive overview of Classic Maya human-environment relationships, including how communities addressed challenges wrought by climate change. Researchers today understand that the breakdown of Classic Maya society was the result of many long-term processes. Yet the story that continues to grip the public imagination is that Maya civilization mysteriously "collapsed." This book shifts the focus from the Classic Maya "collapse" to the multitude examples of adaptive flexibility that allowed Pre-Colonial Maya communities to persevere in a challenging natural environment for over seven centuries. This idea is so enthralling partly because it makes people think about the impermanence of present-day society. A misunderstanding of Maya conservation practices persists in non-academic circles to the disservice not only of the Pre-Colonial Maya, but also to their descendants living in eastern Mesoamerica today. Although the Classic Maya civilization did not leave behind much in the way of secret environmental knowledge for us to rediscover (that is unfortunately rarely how archaeology works), a critical lesson that can be learned from studying the Classic Maya is the importance of socio-ecological adaptability-the ability and willingness to change cultural practices to address long-term challenges"--

Geography of World Pilgrimages

Geography of World Pilgrimages PDF

Author: Lucrezia Lopez

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-07-01

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 3031322096

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This book points out how pilgrimage studies rely on interdisciplinary academic interests, being always more determined by anthropological, social, cultural and economic factors. The volume gathers interdisciplinary contributions revealing different approaches and academic interests when researching pilgrimage. Finally, the proposal introduces a comparative international breath to reflect upon such complex phenomenon that since Antiquity still impregnates the history of human being across the world. As pilgrimage studies are closely related to mobility issues, how the contemporary mobile world is altering and re-signifying pilgrimage dynamics and meanings will also be discussed in detail. The term “pilgrimage” evokes key concepts deriving from different fields, all of them collected in the final glossary. The primary audience of this work are academics and researchers from different fields involved in pilgrimage studies. The work may also be useful in teaching (advanced) university courses.

The Skyband Group, Copán Honduras

The Skyband Group, Copán Honduras PDF

Author: David Webster

Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1803274301

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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.

Before Kukulkán

Before Kukulkán PDF

Author: Vera Tiesler

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0816537437

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This volume illuminates human lifeways in the northern Maya lowlands prior to the rise of Chichén Itzá. This period and area have been poorly understood on their own terms, obscured by scholarly focus on the central lowland Maya kingdoms. Before Kukulkán is anchored in three decades of interdisciplinary research at the Classic Maya capital of Yaxuná, located at a contentious crossroads of the northern Maya lowlands. Using bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology, and culturally sensitive mainstream archaeology, the authors create an in-depth regional understanding while also laying out broader ways of learning about the Maya past. Part 1 examines ancient lifeways among the Maya at Yaxuná, while part 2 explores different meanings of dying and cycling at the settlement and beyond: ancestral practices, royal entombment and desecration, and human sacrifice. The authors close with a discussion of the last years of occupation at Yaxuná and the role of Chichén Itzá in the abandonment of this urban center. Before Kukulkán provides a cohesive synthesis of the evolving roles and collective identities of locals and foreigners at the settlement and their involvement in the region’s trajectory. Theoretically informed and contextualized discussions offer unique glimpses of everyday life and death in the socially fluid Maya city. These findings, in conjunction with other documented series of skeletal remains from this region, provide a nuanced picture of the social and biocultural dynamics that operated successfully for centuries before the arrival of the Itzá.

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