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The Terminal Classic period (ca. AD 800–1000) in the Southern Maya Lowlands witnessed a precipitous decline in the erection of carved stone monuments, a decline that corresponds to shifts in political ideologies and the disappearance of many prominent royal dynasties. Although Southern Lowland sites are often considered peripheral to the events and innovations occurring elsewhere in Mesoamerica during this time, a recently discovered stela, Stela 29, at the site of Ucanal in Peten, Guatemala, underscores the active role of the site in broader political movements in the ninth century. Our iconographic, textual, and stylistic analysis of this stela, in concert with other Terminal Classic monuments from the site, reveals a vernacular cosmopolitan aesthetic whereby local Classic Maya styles were infused with images and elements that referenced connections with peoples from northern Yucatan, the Gulf Coast, and Central Mexico.

In postwar Germany, the Allies and the German authorities moved quickly and systematically to destroy or physically remove all traces of Nazi art. No such process occurred in postwar Italy. This meant that hundreds of ideologically inspired statues, mosaics, murals and other artefacts survived into the republican period. This article uses Luigi Montanarini’s mural, the Apotheosis of Fascism, as a case study to examine the management, meaning and memory of fascist monumental art (and, more broadly, fascist monumental architecture) in postwar and contemporary Italy. To date, memory studies of fascism have largely overlooked the artistic and architectural legacies of the dictatorship. This article helps to address this historiographical lacuna and speaks to current debates and controversies in Italy surrounding the meaning and significance of historic fascism.

Sports editor of the Corriere della Sera, Emilio De Martino was one of Fascist Italy's most vitriolic sports journalists and prolific authors of sporting fiction. Analysis of his three novels for children published from 1941 to 1943 will consider how his works contributed, first, to the regime's attempt to forge and reinvent both real and imagined traditions through literature, and, second, to Fascism's drive to create a virile, physically and mentally strong youth. Offering a new perspective on Fascism's investment in and exploitation of sport, this article will reveal how a variety of the regime's policies, ideals, myths and goals were propagated and transmitted through fictional stories and adventures. The increasingly radical content and narratives will also show the regime's growing frustration at society's failure to respond to its mobilisation campaigns and increasing desperation following Italy's disastrous entry into the Second World War. Rather than hastening the maturity of young people to create a warrior race ready to risk all for the regime, Fascism's use of ‘Boy's Own’ heroes and fantasy space will be seen to have contributed to the illusion of strength that young Italians could not match and readiness that the regime could not offer.

The 1960 Rome Olympic Games were held at a pivotal moment in the history of modern Italy and its capital. At the height of the ‘economic miracle’, tourists, international movie stars and entertainers, in addition to a record number of international athletes, flocked to the city to participate in the Games and the dolce vita. As a great ‘national’ project within a global and European context, Rome 1960 offered the organizers and ruling Christian Democratic Party (DC) the opportunity to rebrand Italy and show how far the country had come since the fall of Fascism and the end of the Second World War. While Rome 1960 was a marketing success – Italy’s international reputation was significantly enhanced – close examination of the preparations for the tournament, as well as the Games itself, reveals significant continuities, deep and unresolved political and social tensions, evidence of corruption, and a failure to come to terms with Italy’s recent past and the memory of Fascism. Questioning the extent t...

Maya script�the most elaborate and extensive system of native writing in the New World�was in active use across the Yucatan Peninsula from 300 BC�AD 1700. Maya epigraphy began in the late nineteenth century, developing through the efforts of key figures, often with oblique approaches from other disciplines. Today, the research landscape is increasingly virtual; new discoveries have been combined with greater precision in translation, providing unique access to the complex interactions of Maya society, where the elite shared a language across political boundaries that was incomprehensible to most of their subjects.

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was a mid-nineteenth-century feminist, philanthropist and painter. This article examines Bodichon the female traveller as a way of discussing the process of identity-formation in letter-writing. It proposes reading letters through the lens of Judith Butler's theory of gender (1990). Following her concept of performativity, letter-writing is conceived as a performative act of identity-formation. The article argues that, conditioned by the addressee she wrote to, Bodichon gave written expression to her subjectivity in her travel letters via her epistolary persona. This autobiographical gesture acted as one means through which she constituted her identity as a female traveller. In turn, drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, the article concludes that the resulting multiple epistolary ‘I's Bodichon developed in accordance with each of her addressees permitted her to venture into her subjectivity as a female traveller—ultimately prompting her epistolary challenge of ...

The authors describe the excavation and interpretation of an intact seventh-century high status burial at the Maya site of Nakum. The dead person wore an incised pectoral with an eventful biography, having started out as an Olmec heirloom 1000 years before. No less impressive was the series of votive rituals found to have been enacted at the tomb for another 100 years or more. The beautiful objects, their architectural setting and the long story they recount, offer a heart-breaking indictment of the multiple losses due to looting.

Since the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the role of sport in the country’s social, political, and economic development has been significant. With three national sporting dailies in the postwar period, as well as hundreds of sport-specific publications, the potential for research into the nation’s sporting history is considerable. However, while the importance of music, art, theatre, opera, and cinema in modern Italy’s development has been widely considered, analysis of the role of sport has been conducted by a dedicated minority of sports, rather than social or cultural, historians. Much existing research has taken nationalism as a base. With particular focus upon the Liberal and Fascist periods, the postwar era is largely neglected. Studies tend to be sport- or event-specific, and the bulk of contributions come from well-established names. Better contextualizing of sport’s role in the modernization of Italy and penetrating mainstream history are the pressing challenges, ideally for a new generation of scholars.

Research into ancient societies frequently faces a major challenge in accessing the lives of those who made up the majority of their populations, since the available evidence so often concerns only the ruling elite. Our excavations at the ancient Maya site of Calakmul, Mexico, have uncovered a “painted pyramid:” a structure decorated with murals depicting scenes of its inhabitants giving, receiving, and consuming diverse foods, as well as displaying and transporting other goods. Many are accompanied by hieroglyphic captions that describe the participants, and include spellings of key subsistence items. Collectively, they offer insights into the social mechanisms by which goods were circulated within major Maya centers.

Taking as starting points a number of Gumbrecht's ideas and assertions about the merits and values of sport, this article considers if and why it might be worthy of our attention; as a spectacle and focus of study. Gumbrecht's questions about sport and ancient identities, its irresistible ability to seize the imagination, capture and distract attention, and his intrigue at the power of the mass crowds and empty stadia are related to various examples of sport in Fascist Italy. The first dictatorship to fully appreciate its power, this article shows how sport was both actor and object, exactly why this made it so important to the regime, and just how, in fact, this supports many of Gumbrecht's points. This brief analysis of Fascist sport that was both vast, ruthlessly organised and very successful, considers international and domestic football, boxing and Italy's World Heavyweight Champion Primo Carnera, plus the importance of crowds, stadiums and sporting venues, in assessing the role of athletes and event...

Emerging from the Balkan wars and the London Conference of Ambassadors of 1913, the nation state of Albania frustrated the expansionist ambitions of Serbia and Greece which had planned to partition the area. Early indications suggested Albania would be, potentially, one of the most destabilising regions of the Balkans. This was primarily due to its geographical position vis à vis the Adriatic coast, and to the manner in which the Great Powers deemed Albanian independence an issue of international concern. For Britain, the proximity of the important military base of Malta and the existence of oil in Albania were further reasons why Italian domination had to be checked, and it is of little surprise that Albania quickly became the focus of attention for jealous and covetous eyes.

The reasons for the development and collapse of Maya civilization remain controversial and historical events carved on stone monuments throughout this region provide a remarkable source of data about the rise and fall of these complex polities. Use of these records depends on correlating the Maya and European calendars so that they can be compared with climate and environmental datasets. Correlation constants can vary up to 1000 years and remain controversial. We report a series of high-resolution AMS (14)C dates on a wooden lintel collected from the Classic Period city of Tikal bearing Maya calendar dates. The radiocarbon dates were calibrated using a Bayesian statistical model and indicate that the dates were carved on the lintel between AD 658-696. This strongly supports the Goodman-Martínez-Thompson (GMT) correlation and the hypothesis that climate change played an important role in the development and demise of this complex civilization.