The Materialization of Time in the Ancient Maya World, livre ebook

New understandings of how Maya people expressed timekeeping in daily life

This 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.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Part 1. Landesque Cosmography

Chapter 1. The Maya Materialization of Time: An Introduction
Arlen F. Chase, Anne S. Dowd, David A. Freidel, and Jerry Murdock

Chapter 2. Landesque Cosmography: Crafting Creation-Era Time on the Maya Lowland Landscape
David A. Freidel, Prudence M. Rice, and Michelle E. Rich

Part 2. Building Time into Place

Chapter 3. Spatial and Temporal Standardization in Southern Mesoamerica during the Preclassic Period: New Insights from the Middle Usumacinta Region, Mexico
Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan

Chapter 4. Ordering Time and Space at Yaxnohcah: Creation and Renewal in a Preclassic Landscape
Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Verónica A. Vázquez López, Shawn G. Morton, Meaghan M. Peuramaki-Brown, Sarah E. Bednar, F. C. Atasta Flores Esquivel, Debra S. Walker, Armando Anaya Hernández, and Nicholas P. Dunning

Chapter 5. Domesticating Time: Quadripartite Symbolism and Founding Rituals at Yaxuná
Travis W. Stanton, Karl A. Taube, and Ryan H. Collins

Chapter 6. In the Shadow of Descending Gods: Monumental Posts and Solar Cycles in the Preclassic Maya Lowlands
Francisco Estrada-Belli and David A. Freidel

Chapter 7. Stelae, Spirits, Desecration, and Devotion: The Fate of Some Time Lords in the Classic Maya World
David A. Freidel and Olivia Navarro-Farr

Part 3. Chambers of Time

Chapter 8. Balamkú’s History House: Harkening to Primordial Rhythms of Mythic Time
Anne S. Dowd and Gabrielle Vail

Chapter 9. Scorpion Star: Constellations, Seasons, and Convergences of Meaning in a Classic Maya Entity
Franco D. Rossi

Chapter 10. Time as Ordinary Practice: A Divination Building at Chan
Cynthia Robin

Chapter 11. The Chamber of Secrets at Xunantunich
M. Kathryn Brown, Leah McCurdy, and Jason Yaeger

Part 4. Bridging Time

Chapter 12. Imagery of the Yearbearers in Maya Culture and Beyond
Susan Milbrath

Chapter 13. Lived Experience and Monumental Time in the Classic Maya Lowlands
Patricia A. McAnany

Chapter 14. The Materialization of Time in the Maya Archaeological Record: Examples from Caracol and Santa Rita Corozal, Belize
Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

Chapter 15. Materializing Time on Wax: The Cozumel Maya Bee Gardens
Adolfo Iván Batún-Alpuche and David A. Freidel

Chapter 16. Temporal Fusion: Mythical and Mortal Time in Maya Art
James A. Doyle

Chapter 17. “How Much May They Not Have Written?” K’atuns 11 Ajaw and the Itzá
Prudence M. Rice

Part 5. Materializing Mesoamerican Chronoscapes

Chapter 18. The Ideas and Images of Cities and Centers: Teotihuacan and the Lowland Maya
David A. Freidel, Saburo Sugiyama, and Nawa Sugiyama

Chapter 19. Epilogue: Architects of Time
Anne S. Dowd

References

List of Contributors

Index