Product Description: In the first millennium AD, the Classic Maya created courtly societies in and around the Yucatan Peninsula that have left some of the most striking intellectual and aesthetic achievements of the ancient world, including large settlements like Tikal, Copan, and Palenque...read more

Product Description: Book Plus CD. This volume is the supplement to Warfare and the Fall of a Fortified Center. It contains 10 folded large-format maps approximately 22 x 28 inches; a CD-rom containing data on architectural style and dimensions and data on artifacts, including their classification, dimensions, and other results of artifact analysis; and a 32-page 5 x 7 booklet that serves as a guide to the mapping and the CD-rom...read more

Product Description: This volume presents for the first time the detailed data and dramatic findings of Inomata's investigations of this Classic period second capital of the ancient Maya Petexbatun kingdom. As widely discussed in journals and the media, the autonomous Aguateca subproject of the Vanderbilt Petexbatun research recovered remarkable new evidence on the violent end of a great Maya center,...read more

Product Description: Performances in the premodern communities shaped identities, created meanings, generated and maintained political control. But unlike other social scientists, archaeologists have not worked much with these concepts. Archaeology of Performance shows how the notions of theatricality and spectacle are as important economics and politics in understanding how ancient communities work...read more

Mesoamerican archaeologists have long been interested in the collapse of political systems or civilizations but have been slow to undertake detailed abandonment analyses of specific settlements. The Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Middle America explores some of the old questions in Middle American archaeology in light of the newer theoretical approach provided by abandonment studies. Unlike much of the abandonment work previously done in the American Southwest, a number of contributions to this volume examine relatively large population centers.Among the original contributions in this collection is the discovery that deposits resulting from termination rituals are more common than previously thought. Several chapters point out that structures and places can continue to serve ritual functions even after abandonment. Another finding is that the causes of abandonment—warfare, economic marginalization, or natural cataclysm—are likely to have varied effects on different social groups, which in turn sheds light on occupational histories in specific sites preceding major abandonments.  (view table of contents)

Product Description: The two volumes of Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya provide current archaeological perspectives on Maya courts conceived as vital, functioning social groups composed of lords, courtiers, scribes, priests, and entertainers, among many others...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The two volumes of Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya provide current archaeological perspectives on Maya courts conceived as vital, functioning social groups composed of lords, courtiers, scribes, priests, and entertainers, among many others...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)