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Libraries in Indonesia are starting to compete in developing digital libraries. College, public, and regional libraries have started to develop digital libraries. The development of digital libraries is based on the consideration of providing opportunities for greater access to collections owned by libraries and adjusting the format of library services with the characteristics of users who are familiar with information technology products. Seeing the importance of digital libraries, BPAD DIY began to develop a digital library under the name I-Jogja. I-Jogja is a digital library portal developed in the Android and iOs operating systems. I-Jogja was developed using the iLibrary software created by PT. Woolu Maya script. I–Jogja offers a new concept in digital library management, where to access public collections, people do not need to download but borrow collections from the digital library portal. This digital collection lending concept is known as e-lending. Through research, the researcher aims to describe the management of I-Jogja as a new concept of digital library management. Research that researchers conducted using qualitative research methods. From this research, it is found that the text-based I-Jogja collection, to access I-Jogja must be registered in the application, functions as a means of fostering reading interest, policies related to membership and access patterns, is able to be a means of fostering reading interest, able to run on the operating system Android and iOS.

Recent archaeological investigations at Tipan Chen Uitz, Belize, yielded two remarkable Classic Maya ballplayer panels. Iconographic and glyphic analysis of these panels within a regional context provides new insights into large-scale socio-political relationships, demonstrating that the ballgame was an important means and mechanism for macro-political affiliation in the Maya Lowlands. The panels suggest that Tipan was part of a wider system of vassalage that tied it to other Maya centres, including Naranjo, a regional capital under the dominion of Calakmul where the Snake-Head dynasty held sway. The data presented here underpin a more general discussion of archaeological approaches to ancient interaction spheres.

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.

In 2004, Lacadena and Wichmann proposed a set of orthographic rules for the Maya script. The choice of using one of three different patterns of syn- or disharmonic spellings allowed Maya scribes to signal whether word-final syllables contained a short vowel, a long vowel or a glottal stop. In our earlier paper we focused on the lexical evidence for these orthographic «harmony rules». Although it was stated that the rules apply equally well when a suffix is involved and when no suffix is involved, the data relating to the former situation were not discussed in detail. This is the aim of the present paper. Lacadena y Wichmann propusimos en 2004 un conjunto de reglas ortográficas para la escritura maya. Escogiendo uno u otro de tres patrones ortográficos de sinarmonía o desarmonía, los escribas mayas podían indicar si la sílaba final de una palabra contenía una vocal corta, una vocal larga o una oclusiva glotal. En aquel artículo nos centramos en la evidencia léxica de estas «reglas de armonía» de la ortografía. Aunque se afirmaba que las reglas se aplican igualmente bien cuando está implicado un sufijo y cuando no lo está, los datos relacionados con la primera de ambas situaciones no se analizaron en detalle. Hacerlo es el objetivo del presente artículo.

This paper examines ethnohistoric accounts and oral histories accumulated during the last 50 years concerning the movements of the mythical personage of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan (Kukul Can) and the role of these narratives in political ideologies between the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods. These narratives outline the movements of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan by way of terrestrial, celestial, and subterranean routes that connected pilgrimage centers across the Maya lowlands in the peninsula of Yucatan. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric data presented in this paper describe linkages between important political, economic, and ritual centers that had roots in pan-Mesoamerican social dynamics originating as early as the Terminal Classic or Epiclassic period. Links between cities included not just the physical intersite connections evidenced by causeways that are so prominent in the archaeological record but also intangible, mythical, and symbolic connections embodied in mythical histories of subterranean passageways and celestial umbilical cords. These accounts and oral histories highlight the importance of migration and founding events in the establishment of new cities during the major political, economic, and social reorganizations that took place after the end of the Late Classic period. As a whole, these linkages comprised a political infrastructure connecting a network of cities within the highly integrated and international Postclassic Mesoamerican world. The indigenous histories outlined in this paper complement archaeological data, reflecting an increase in internationalism, economic integration, and the spread of new religious movements beginning in the Terminal or Epiclassic periods across Mesoamerica.

Maya archaeology is flourishing; across three millennia, four countries and an impressive range of intellectual and practical approaches, the eight books under review here make that point well. One is the ninth edition of a deservedly successful book for a general readership, one the catalogue of the first Maya exhibition to be held in Britain in nearly half a century. A further volume deals with sites in the northern Maya lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, another with those in the eastern lowlands, the former British colony of Belize. Two are site-specific: the major city of El Perú-Waka’ in the southern lowland Maya heartland of El Petén, Guatemala, and the idiosyncratic élite centre of Cacaxtla in central highland Mexico where Maya influence on the famous murals is both striking and puzzling. Finally, two have a scientific bent: collections of papers on bioarchaeology/population studies and archaeoastronomy respectively. All draw their evidence, and their illustrations, largely from the Classic Period (AD 250–900), although there are forays into both the Preclassic (1200 BC–AD 250) and Postclassic (AD 900–1500+).

Wissensorganisation is the name of a series of biennial conferences / workshops with a long tradition, organized by the German chapter of the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The 15th conference in this series, held at Freie Universität Berlin, focused on knowledge organization for the digital humanities. Structuring, and interacting with, large data collections has become a major issue in the digital humanities. In these proceedings, various aspects of knowledge organization in the digital humanities are discussed, and the authors of the papers show how projects in the digital humanities deal with knowledge organization., Wissensorganisation ist der Name einer Konferenzreihe mit einer langjährigen Tradition, die von der Deutschen Sektion der International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) organisiert wird. Die 15. Konferenz dieser Reihe, die an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand, hatte ihren Schwerpunkt im Bereich Wissensorganisation und Digital Humanities. Die Strukturierung von und die Interaktion mit großen Datenmengen ist ein zentrales Thema in den Digital Humanities. In diesem Konferenzband werden verschiedene Aspekte der Wissensorganisation in den Digital Humanities diskutiert, und die Autoren der einzelnen Beiträge zeigen, wie die Digital Humanities mit Wissensorganisation umgehen.

Wissensorganisation is the name of a series of biennial conferences / workshops with a long tradition, organized by the German chapter of the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The 15th conference in this series, held at Freie Universität Berlin, focused on knowledge organization for the digital humanities. Structuring, and interacting with, large data collections has become a major issue in the digital humanities. In these proceedings, various aspects of knowledge organization in the digital humanities are discussed, and the authors of the papers show how projects in the digital humanities deal with knowledge organization., Wissensorganisation ist der Name einer Konferenzreihe mit einer langjährigen Tradition, die von der Deutschen Sektion der International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) organisiert wird. Die 15. Konferenz dieser Reihe, die an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand, hatte ihren Schwerpunkt im Bereich Wissensorganisation und Digital Humanities. Die Strukturierung von und die Interaktion mit großen Datenmengen ist ein zentrales Thema in den Digital Humanities. In diesem Konferenzband werden verschiedene Aspekte der Wissensorganisation in den Digital Humanities diskutiert, und die Autoren der einzelnen Beiträge zeigen, wie die Digital Humanities mit Wissensorganisation umgehen.

The discovery of mural paintings at the Classic Maya site of Xultun, Guatemala, provides an important context for the study of ancient literacy and writing in practice. The mural chamber was a place of writing where the hands of multiple scribes recorded events and astronomical tabulations on walls that were also painted with portraits of ritual specialists and the reigning king. We present evidence suggesting that creation and inscription of indigenous Maya books, called codices, also took place onsite by a specific cohort of ritual specialists called taaj. In this article, we seek to archaeologically “situate” these codex-like inscriptions in the mural room—revealing a crucial and distinctly Precolumbian window (as opposed to colonial Spanish view) into Maya bookmaking, its practitioners, and the physical contexts in which it was carried out. Together, the images, texts, and archaeological materials found in and around the chamber enable us to contextualize acts of writing and their authorship as well as engage larger questions regarding the social and political structures shaping literacy in Maya society during the eighth century.

Pecked crosses, a variant of a common Prehispanic American symbol often referred to as a “quartered” or “quadripartite” circle, are commonly found in central and northern Mexico during the florescence of Teotihuacan (ca. A.D. 100–650) and often interpreted as astronomical devices. The subject of this article is a pecked cross found in the Candelaria Caves, Guatemala, one of four examples that have been found to date in the Maya world. The author interprets the symbol through two distinct lenses—first as an archaeologist and then through its cosmological significance according to contemporary Q'eqchi' Maya daykeepers. Although the methodologies and approaches differ, there is common ground between them—both point to the symbol’s associations with ritual events, directionality, and the passage of time.

This article presents a cultural reconstruction of ancient Maya economic development derived through etymological study of exchange-related terms in Mayan languages. It applies the results of historical linguistic analysis to archaeological and epigraphic data in order to gain insight into Maya economic prehistory. Cognitive spheres examined include generalized exchange, reciprocation, appropriation and vertical transfers of goods and labor, open commerce, and material valuables. Among the most poignant implications of the results are the antiquity of commerce and its rather extended evolutionary trajectory. Indicators of intense commercialization, however, are few and rather late. Widespread recognition of several elements of the diverse complex of Contact period Mesoamerican valuables can be traced only to the latter part of the Late Formative period or afterward. Evidence of formalized market systems—specifically linking commerce to towns and architectural plazas—appears only late in the Classic period. Terms associated with the hierarchical appropriation of goods and labor appear earlier and are more persistent and stable over time. In particular, there is a single widespread root for tribute obligation apparently subsuming tax, plunder, and work debt all under a single term, as well as evidence for the great antiquity of formalized servitude. Finally, various forms of general reciprocity and gifting are, as might be expected, shown to be of great diversity, complexity, and antiquity. In the course of analysis, several recent models of Mayan language interaction and diversification are examined and evaluated, and a slightly revised linguistic chronology is suggested that better reconciles linguistic data with archaeological facts as they are currently known. The results also have interesting implications for proto-Mayan geographical origins.

Since its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, Fray Diego de Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan (1566?) has been essential reading for specialists in various areas of Mesoamerican or Mayan studies. In this study, however, I focus on Landa himself rather than on Maya society at the time of European contact. Specifically, I argue that Landa's project was informed by the medieval Joachimist tradition and examine the ways this strain of millenarian thought helped to frame Fray Diego's understanding of the importance of the Maya, the way he wrote about them and the way he treated them as leader of the church in Yucatan. Landa stands out from other Franciscan missionaries of his time because of his savage inquisitorial practices. I suggest Landa's approach to converting the Maya is best understood as consistent with Spanish practices well established in the late Middle Ages during the period of intense conversion of the Jews.

By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and manipulating assertions about a wide variety of matters.Broader definitions of writing that embrace purely semantic devices (semasiography, Sampson 1985:29) relate to ancient systems of communication, especially “Mexican pictography” (Boone 2000:29), but depart from the linguistic underpinnings that characterize the writing systems reviewed here. Semasiographic definitions are not very helpful in understanding heavily phonic systems. Their limited applicability to writing systems of the world identifies a typological weakness; even the Mexican examples are inconclusive, since these texts bundle genuine lexical items with supporting graphic devices. An alternative view is that the mixed Mexican pictography contains writing, yet supplements it with effective pictorial clues. From this comes a narrative that is translatable, with some controlled liberties, into language. Equating this distinctive package of features with the preponderantly phonic nature of Egyptian, cuneiform, or Mayan glyphs blurs distinctions. A broad definition of writing does not elucidate these scripts, although it is useful for understanding the relation of texts and accompanying images (Baines 1989; Taube 2000). In part, the first writing attracts attention because it contributes to a teleological narrative of progress (Trigger 1998: 42). The invention of writing is thought, with good justification, to undergird and enable present-day society. In its more developed forms, it is indispensable to bureaucracy, propaganda, and administration.

This paper outlines the establishment of Catholic missions among the Maya in colonial Yucatan, Mexico. A central element in the broader project of reduccion (re-ordering, subjugation, missionization) was conducted in the Maya language, which was also the language of governance and the Indian towns. As a result, the colonial period marks the emergence of a new variety of Maya language, born of translation, appropriated by Maya speakers, and ultimately (and ironically) used as an instrument of resistance to colonial oppression. I call this language variety Maya reducido and trace its formation in the translation practices and pedagogy of the Franciscans, who shaped the early missions and codified the new, pervasively neologistic variety in grammars, dictionaries, and catechisms. Maya reducido spread into the Indian towns and ultimately into every genre of Maya discourse, including the Books of Chilam Balam. This would have profound consequences for the historical formation of the language and the pe...

According to the 2008 article "Unmasking the Maya: The Story of Sna Jtz'ibajom," which appears on the website of the Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "One million Maya Indians from Mexico and Guatemala are living here in the United States." This same piece states that "unlike earlier waves of immigrants to our shores the Maya are descendants of a New World civilization whose mystery resonates across this continent, and the globe" (http://anthropology.si.edu/maya/mayaprint.html).

In a nation that often silences them, Maya in Guatemala are increasingly expressing themselves through public murals. When teachers, artists, students, and other residents of San Juan Comalapa painted the history of their nation, town, and people, they portrayed resistance, accommodation, and collaboration. The persistence of Mayan markers throughout the images stands as a reminder that Maya-Kaqchikel are not simply reinventing a sense of nation with murals; rather, they have been reclaiming the nation at every step in its long, often harsh history. For the recent past, the images depict Guatemala's civil war (1960-96), the poverty and racism that were among its causes, and Kaqchikel responses to violence and economic injustice. Based on local Kaqchikel interpretations of history, the murals serve multiple purposes for Comalapenses: local historical representations of the past, critiques of the government and of themselves, expressions of community creativity, mobilizations of development aid funds, and a source of civic pride. This essay considers these multiple purposes: first, by culturally and historically contextualizing the murals as a distinct Comalapa tradition; and second, by placing the murals in dialogue with the state and with Comalapenses who think about the past and critique the murals themselves.

Ritual and Power in Stone: The Performance of Rulership in Mesoamerican Izapan Style Art. By Julia Guernsey. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Pp. 213. $45.00 cloth. The Teotihuacan Trinity: The Sociopolitical Structure of an Ancient Mesoamerican City. By Annabeth Headrick. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Pp. 210. $55.00 cloth. The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. By Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Pp. 324. $55.00 cloth. Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica. By Christopher A. Pool. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 354. $30.99 cloth.

The role of the Maya in Wdliam S. Burroughs's writing, though often noted, has not been extensively explored. Burroughs's readers may know that he studied Maya culture and language at Mexico City CoUege in 1950-1951, but those unversed in Maya archaeology of the last half-century cannot evaluate the extent or accuracy of his knowledge or its relevance to his life-long resistance to control. For instance, Burroughs radicady reworked the role of Maya priests to meet his own thematic needs, making them gods of death in command of a telepathic control system, whde, with the exception of the death god Ah Puch, completely ignoring Xibalba and the nine lords of the underworld in the Maya creation myth, the Popol Vuh. Burroughs's thematization of Maya priests as gods of death is not consistent with either the archaeological views of the 1950s or of the present, but for different reasons. In the 1950s when Burroughs studied the Maya at Mexico City CoUege, they were believed to have been a benevolent theocracy, but in the mid 1980s some leading Mayanists came to believe that there were no Maya priests at all. It requires a fine balancing act to keep straight the state of knowledge about the Maya in 1950 along with Burroughs's literary appropriation of that knowledge while at the same time distinguishing what he may have known in the 1950s from the radical changes in knowledge established in the mid-1980s. Since Burroughs's studies in Mexico City, archaeology has undergone a dramatic transformation in its interpretations of the Maya, showing Burroughs's appropriation of the Maya to be not only idiosyncratic but also curiously prescient. He anticipated a dramatic change in archaeological interpretation that began in the 1960s but crystallized only in 1986, recognition of the violence in ancient Maya culture-human sacrifice and exquisite tortures inflicted on victims before death. And within his idiosyncratic theories on language he anticipated Derrida's radical argument that writing preceded speech.Because students of Burroughs are not typicaUy grounded in Maya archaeology or in Burroughs's knowledge of the Maya, the literature on Burroughs includes occasional naive, credulous, even absurd comments on his Maya motif. Some are tempted to read Burroughs literally, resulting in conclusions like the foUowing from an anthropologist: "From Burroughs we can also glean perspectives on the uses of haUucinogenic drugs grown in Mexico, the power structure of Mayan society and the futuristic nightmares of Mexican megalopolises" (CampbeU 2003, 225). It is self-evident that the Maya priests' telepathic control "machine" (which can be reprogrammed to self-destruct) is pure fantasy. The extent to which Burroughs fabricated his priesdy gods of death out of his own imagination and thematic needs urges close examination of his related Maya motifs-hieroglyphs as "transparent language," priestly manipulation of the "secret" codices, or the sacrifice of the hanged man. For instance, he was romanticaUy naive in believing that hieroglyphic "picture" writing could communicate ideas directly without the intervention of language, bypassing the Word Virus. These critiques conclude this essay.Readers without some knowledge of Maya archaeology can easily be led astray while attempting to elucidate Burroughs, including the writers of two book-length critical studies, Eric Mottram, The Algebra of Need (1977), and Timothy Murphy, Wising Up the Marks (1997). Mottram's misconstrual of Maya archaeology is far more damaging than Murphy's. Mottram sets out to "ascertain Burroughs's bases" in Paul Westheim's The Art of Ancient Mexico (1965), a peculiar choice for a variety of reasons. Mottram first cites Westheim's Spanish language Mexico City edition published in 1950, the time when Westheim was active in the inteUectual life of Mexico City and when Burroughs studied there. Westheim could conceivably have influenced Burroughs, but there is no evidence to suggest that he did. …

Recent years have seen rapid advancement in our understanding of the phonology and grammar of Classic Ch'olan and the distribution of Lowland Mayan languages in the Classic period. The control over the data has advanced to such an extent that Classic Ch'olan should no longer be considered chiefly a product of reconstruction, but rather a language in its own right, providing fresh input to historical reconstruction. The interpretation of writing system principles has moved into the forefront of research, and recent discussions of these and other major issues are summarized here. This review suggests that the exceptional phonological transparency of the Maya script, which is a precondition for the current advances in linguistic epigraphy, is rooted in the need of scribes to spell out regional linguistic variants, and a sociolinguistically oriented theory of the evolution of writing in general is formulated and tested on the Mayan hieroglyphic materials.

This paper examines various lines of evidence for the classification and linguistic affiliation of writing at Late Preclassic Kaminaljuyu. The linguistic evidence for the ethnic composition of the Maya highlands and Pacific slopes during the Late Preclassic period points to contact among Ch'olan-Tzeltalan, Greater K'iche'an, and other non-Mayan languages, and to a dominant political economic role of Ch'olan-Tzeltalan. The epigraphic evidence supports classifying the script together with the Lowland Mayan script, and separately from the Epi-Olmec script, and hints at the presence of uniquely Ch'olan traits, some of which have been pointed out by other authors. A comparison with contemporaneous texts of unambiguous Lowland Mayan (Ch'olan or Yukatekan) affiliation suggests an overlap of orthographic, calligraphic, and semantic traits. Both lines of evidence support the hypotheses that Ch'olan-Tzeltalan speakers were the innovators of the Maya script, and that such a development perhaps took place in the Maya highlands. At the very least, the evidence points to a much closer relationship between the Maya highlands and lowlands during the Late Preclassic than previously thought.

his essay is a descriptive analysis of a 2000 encounter with Mayan "mambo" dancing in a mountain community, an encounter that challenges assumptions about prevalent notions of exoticism, identity, and cultural authenticity. Traveling in Guatemala with a group of international scholars, I witnessed a public performance of the transnational mambo by costumed Guatemalans that was not mambo, not Mayan, and not social. Male performers, in celebration of Corpus Christi, dressed as Disney-style costume characters and executed routines to merengue music while nondancing participants watched the spectacle. This contradictory display of dancing encouraged me to reflect on the impact of popular social dance and to examine the complicated meanings communicated by performers who incorporate body-based art into indigenous social and economic paradigms. The performers' unique interpretation of mambo dance within the context of a public Corpus Christi festival underscored discrepancies between institutional perceptions of the mambo and the popular reuse of dance motifs. At the same time, the performance, which used clowning as a mechanism to engage the audience, inverted the solemnity of the religious feast day. Antigua is a highlands Guatemala town distinctly different from the tropical islands of the Caribbean. It is a colonial mountain village in the middle of what is marketed to foreign tourists as "the Mayan World." The highlands mambo was danced by local youth of the town who staged their dance spectacle of as part of a daytime pre-Corpus Christi parade. A local church sponsored the street parade as a strategy to attract resi

This article explores the fraught historical politics of a 20th-century controversy over a Classic Maya king. The controversy ostensibly concerned the age at death of a ruler discovered in 1952 in an elaborate sarcophagus at the Mexican site of Palenque. Combining osteological and epigraphic techniques, Mexican scholars estimated that the ruler died at about 40 or 50 years of age. Two decades later, an emerging collective of US hieroglyph experts claimed to have determined the grammatical structure of Maya glyphs for the first time and reevaluated the sarcophagus inscriptions. They concluded that the king, given the name ‘Pakal’, lived a remarkably long life of 80 years (603–683 ce). This reading sparked a controversy that would persist until 1999. At stake was not just how to tell the story of an ancient Maya lord, but who could tell it, with what evidence, and with what degree of certainty. The inclination of some Mexican archaeologists to adopt nationalist and Marxist orientations came into palpable tension with foreign scholars’ liberal, universalist knowledge practices. To address this problem, I rethink Pakal’s material mediation through bones and inscriptions as a ‘matter of concern’ (Bruno Latour) and ‘matter of care’ (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa). I show how these concepts facilitate the reconsideration of contradictory historical propositions as potential sites of coexistence among actors temporarily ill equipped to listen to each other’s claims. Ultimately, I present ‘listening’ as a technique of cosmopolitical care that complements the extensive emphasis on speech and spokespersonship in Latourian cosmopolitics.

Data repurposing has made it possible for scientists to lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, evolution, and modern astronomy. It has enabled us to understand past lives (e.g., Mesoamerican history and culture) and has given us a way to identify every organism on earth (e.g., biometrics). This chapter explains the pivotal role played by data repurposing in these important intellectual achievements.

This paper seeks to understand the symbolic structure that support the two ritual phases of the feast of mak , a twenty-day period of the Maya calendar. We use mainly the testimony of Diego de Landa, bishop of Yucatan in the sixteenth century. In order to study the phenomenology of the religious fact, we use other testimonies: the Maya prehispanic Codices, the Colonial Maya Literature and the ethnographic contemporary reports. Through the parallelism between the ritual and agriculture practices, we can think about the Mayan beliefs on fertility and about the ways to accomplish the normative and practical function of the Maya Religion.

1. The Ancient Maya and Their Central American Neighbors Geoffrey E. Braswell PART I: EL SALVADOR AND HONDURAS 2. Practices of Spatial Discourse at Quelepa Wendy Ashmore 3. Ancient Quelepa, Colonial San Miguel: Shifting Cultural Frontiers and Rogue Colonialism in Eastern El Salvador Kathryn Sampeck 4. Shifting Fortunes and Affiliations on the Edge of Ruin: A Ceramic Perspective on the Classic Maya Collapse and its Aftermath at Copan Cassandra R. Bill PART II: THE HIGHLANDS OF GUATEMALA 5. The Other Preclassic Maya: Interaction, Growth, and Depopulation in the Eastern Kaqchikel Highlands Geoffrey E. Braswell and Eugenia J. Robinson 6. The Other Maya Late Classic Maya: Regionalization, Defense, and Boundaries in the Central Guatemalan Highlands Eugenia J. Robinson PART III: THE SOUTHERN MAYA LOWLANDS 7. A Tangled Web: Ceramic Adoption in the Maya Lowlands and Community Interaction in the Early Middle Preclassic as Seen in the K'awil Complex from Holmul, Peten, Guatemala Nina Neivens de Estrada 8. The Royal Port of Cancuen and the Role of Long Distance Exchange in the Apogee of Maya Civilization Arthur A. Demarest 9. Real/Fictive Lords/Vessels: A List of M.A.R.I. Lords on the Newly Discovered Andrews Coffee Mug Markus Eberl PART IV: THE EASTERN PERIPHERY OF BELIZE 10. The Dynastic History and Archaeology of Pusilha, Belize Christian M. Prager, Beniamino Volta, and Geoffrey E. Braswell 11. Follow the Leader: Fine Orange Pottery in the Maya Lowlands James J. Aimers PART V: YUCATAN 12. The Role and Realities of Popol Nahs in Northern Maya Archaeology George J. Bey III and Rossana May Chiau 13. Alternative Narratives and Missing Data: Refining the Chronology of Chichen Itza Beniamino Volta and Geoffrey E. Braswell PART VI: BEFORE AND BEYOND: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE 14. Peer-Polity Interaction in the Norte Chico, Peru, 3000-1800 B.C. Winifred Creamer, Jonathan Haas, and Allen Rutherford

McAnany, Patricia A. Living With the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. xvi + 213 pp. including index. $27.95 cloth. Sabloff, Jeremy A. and John S. Henderson, eds. Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D. Baltimore, MD: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993. xii + 482 pp. including index. $35.00 cloth.

What better way to understand ourselves than to compare our habits, our customs, our behavior with those of another? This is the goal of anthropology: to comprehend our own culture by reflecting it from the mirror of otherness. When most effective its results can be unsettling. Consider the possibility of discovering other ways of knowing that challenge our own - that can even cause us to doubt whether the knowledge we hold dear really constitutes the whole of the matter. When it comes to the study of time there are few cultures, past or present, worth reflecting upon that match the ancient Maya of Yucatan. They have been characterized in their classical (AD 200-900) heyday as a people preoccupied with time, obsessed by time; they were worshipers of time: "The great theme of Maya civilization is the passage of time . . ." (Thompson 1954, p. 13). "The central importance of the calendar . . . and the central importance of religion to everything else conspire to make the history of [their] calendar something of a key to the general cultural history of the region." (Edmonson 1988, p. 4). "Nothing in man's life would be set apart as being unrelated to the realm of the destinies of time" (Leon Portilla 1989, p. 222). The study of Maya time offers us the added bonus that since all pre-Columbian cultures were hermetically sealed by two oceans from outside influence prior to Hispanic contact, whatever we may glean concerning the perception of time from its artifacts offers us the unique opportunity to seek cultural universals and to address specifically whether diverse civilizations might develop similar practices and ideas in their encounters with the problem of time. This essay examines the connections between time and history,with special emphasis upon the unusual role played by the concept of number, in the ancient Maya world.The resources for such a study are many and varied. I begin with a discussion of the content of the monumental inscriptions.A major focus of Mayanists since great advances in decoding the Maya script were made in the 1970's, most texts are carved on impressive stone stelae erected about the Maya ruins, well remembered by visitors to Tikal, Copan and Calakmul. I then move on to the esoteric world of the sacred books.Though scarcely a handful of them remain, they hold the keys to the deepest understanding of what time meant to the elite daykeepers who devised them. Along the way we supplement our understanding of these texts by referring to colonial period documents and ethnological studies of contemporary cultures descended from the ancient Maya. Here we discover a remarkable continuity of culture, which greatly illuminates our understanding of the Maya past.

The bilingualism recently discovered in the Maya codices by Robert Wald and Alfonso Lacadena has parallels in the Colonial Maya Books of Chilam Balam, which show both linguistic and scriptural bilingualism — involving, on the one hand, the Maya and Spanish languages, and on the other, the logosyllabic and alphabetic scripts of these two cultures. The article explores the continuities and discontinuities in these language contact phenomena with respect to vocabulary, morphology, syntax, spelling conventions, style, and text format.

Recent decipherments of Classic Maya hieroglyphs (ca. a.d. 250 to 850) reveal phonological and morphological patterns that, through epigraphic and historical analyses, isolate a single, coherent prestige language with unique and widespread features in script. We term this language “Classic Ch’olti’an” and present the evidence for its explicable historical configuration and ancestral affiliation with Eastern Ch’olan languages (Ch’olti’ and its still‐viable descendant, Ch’orti’). We conclude by exploring the possibility that Ch’olti’an was a prestige language that was shared by elites, literati, and priests and had a profound effect on personal and group status in ancient Maya kingdoms.

A decade of Maya glyphic decipherment creates many opportunities for historical, linguistic, cultural, and archaeological interpretation. New evidence points to improvements in understanding decipherment as a discipline and social practice, the origins of Maya script, the use and meaning of glyphs in ancient society, and the language and sociolinguistic implications of Maya texts. The glyphs reveal information about Maya kingship and its relation to supernatural forces along with cues to a synthesis of history during the Classic period (A.D. 250–850). A test case from Piedras Negras, Guatemala, relates such discoveries to the ongoing excavation of a Classic city with abundant inscriptions.

For much of this century, scholars have tended to dismiss the Madrid Codex as a resource because of the large number of apparent scribal errors in the hieroglyphic text of the manuscript. An examination of naming patterns and attribute distribution with respect to the codical deities, however, reveals that many of these so-called errors are patterned in meaningful ways. These patterns suggest that our view of the Maya pantheon as consisting of a series of discrete entities with distinct conceptual domains is a Western construct, rather than a valid representation of pre-Hispanic Maya ideology. Reference to ethnohistoric sources from both within the Maya area and elsewhere in Mesoamerica (e.g., accounts from central Mexico) provides a model for conceptualizing Maya deities as members of overlapping complexes or clusters, each composed of a small number of underlying divinities characterized by various aspects, or manifestations.

SUMMARYFloyd G. Lounsbury (1914-1998), one of the 20th century's most influential anthropological linguistics, will be remembered especially for his contributions to three major areas of scholarship: Iroquoian linguistics, the analysis of kinship systems, and the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphs. His earliest Iroquoian work was with the Oneida language in Wisconsin, and his description of the verb morphology of Oneida became the basis for all future studies of Iroquoian languages, many of them carried forward by his students. His analyses of Native American and other kinship systems in terms of semantic 'components' were central to the development of componential analysis in linguistic anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s. He was a pioneer in the phonetic interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphs, relating them to the grammatical structures of Mayan languages as well as to the astronomical and mathematical systems that formed much of the content of Mayan texts.RESUMEOn se souviendra de Floyd G. Lounsbury (1914-1998) un des plus influents specialistes en linguistique anthropologique du XXe siecle, surtout en raison de ses contributions aux trois domaines suivants: la linguistique iro-quoise, l'analyse des systemes de parente, et le dechiffrement des hieroglyphes mayas. Ses premiers travaux sur l'iroquois portaient sur la langue Oneida du Wisconsin, et sa description de la morphologie du verbe oneida devint par la suite la base de toutes les recherches en linguistique iroquoise, plusieurs desquelles furent entreprises par ses etudiants. Ses analyses des systemes de parente (amerindiens et autres) en termes de 'composantes' semantiques furent cruciales pour ce qui est de l'utilisation, en linguistique anthropologique, de l'analyse en composantes durant les annees cinquante et soixante. Il fut l'un des pionniers de l'interpretation phonetique des hieroglyphes mayas, les rattachant a la structure grammaticale des langues mayas comme aux systemes astronomiques et mathematiques qui comptaient pour beaucoup dans ces textes.ZUSAMMENFASSUNGMan wird sich Floyd G. Lounsburys (1914-1998), einem der einfluB-reichsten anthropologischen Linguisten des 20. Jahrhunderts, am besten we-gen seines Beitrags zu drei wichtigen Gebieten der Forschung erinnern: die irokesische Sprachwissenschaft, die Analyse von Verwandtschaftssystemen und die Entzifferung der Hieroglyphen der Maya. Seine fruheste Arbeit gait der irokesischen Sprache der Oneida im U.S. Staat Wisconsin; seine Be-schreibung der Morphologie des Verbs dieser Sprache wurde die Grundlage fur aue nachfolgenden Studien der irokesischen Sprachen, die zum GroBteil von seinen Schulern vorgenommen wurden. Seine Analysen der Verwandt-schaftssysteme der amerikanischen Eingeborenen und anderer Kulturen anhand von semantischen 'Komponenten' trugen masgeblich zur Entwick-lung der 'componential analysis' in der linguistischen Anthropologie der 50er und 60er Jahre bei. Er war Pionier auf dem Gebiet der phonetischen Interpretation der Hieroglyphen der Maya und brachte sie in Zusammenhang mit grammatischen Strukturen der Sprachen der Mayan ebenso wie mit den astro-nomischen und mathematischen Systemen, die vornehmlich den Inhalt der Texte der Maya ausmachen.

For generations scholars have explained the marked difference in the ruins of Chichen Itza by attributing the southern buildings to indigenous Yucatecan Maya and then telling of central Mexican Toltec invaders who built (or forced the Maya to build) the Tula-like plaza to the north. But evidence now suggests that the infamous "Toltec conquest of the Maya" never happened. The story may actually be the manifestation of a Western tendency to express ambivalent attitudes toward Native Americans in terms of polar opposites, in this case, "gentle Maya priests" versus "brutal Mexican warriors." In the end, the story may reveal more about the Western politics of knowledge than about pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history.

The reading of T168 has long been a major problem for Maya epigraphers (Thompson, 1950; Berlin, 1968; Proskouriakoff, 1960, 1963, 1964; Barthel, 1968; Lounsbury, 1976; Marcus, 1976; Mathews and Justeson, 1984). The only evidence for its meaning which does not rest upon a translation is provided by its apperance with titles such as those examined in Appendix B of this paper. Similarly the nature of the itsa' has long been a thorn in the side of Maya historians (Roys, 1933; Thompson, 1970, 1977; Edmonson, 1982; Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, 1983). The primary evidence concerning the nature of the itsa' comes from such difficu1.t to interpret sources as the Yucatec Books of Chilam Balam and the accounts of early Spanish chroniclers. The reading presented here, of Tl68 as itsa', suggests these two problems cannot be examined in isolation as they are facets of the same problem, a problem of paramount importance to Maya studies as a whole.

Bishop Diego de Landa (Tozzer, 1941: 27, 63-4) showed that the knowledge of highly sophisticated methods for conceptualizing and recording the passage of time was the peculiar possession of specialists in the Maya society. Nash (1957: 149) correctly predicted the demise of such specialists in the geographic area occupied by Cubulco, Baja Verapaz, "south of a line which runs through Nebaj, San Cristobal, and Santa Cn1z in Guatemala" and suggested that their demise may be traced to the failure to regularly elect them, incorporating them into the existent political structure. The longtime absence of such elected calendar specialists in Cubulco leads one to expect that these descendants of the ancient Maya have been divested of the means for precisely calculating time. Surprisingly, such is not the case. The Cubulco Achi nonspecialist possesses a well developed system for pinpointing an event in time several years backward or forward without recourse to the numeration, day names and month names of either the Gregorian calendar or the 260-day or 365-day cycles utilized by their ancestors. While the twenty day names of the 260-day divinatory calendar are known to a few native priests (ah 'ih "of days/sun"), their use is mainly restricted to divinations.

As an Archaeologist James C. Gifford has played a very distinctive role in the development of taxanomy and typology. He was one of the co-authors of the Type-Variety Concept as a method for analyzing pottery. He amplified this concept by establishing a publication, Ceramica de Cultura Maya, with a primary function of listing all of the new place and geographic names used in the archaeological nomenclature of the Maya territory and neighboring regions. He was also especially interested in the archaeology of Mesoamerica with particular reference to the Ancient Maya. His other major interests included : synthesis, prehistory as anthropology; the Prehistory of Pennsylvania, and the History of Archaeology.