Product Description
Synopsis
Flourishing by AD 250-300, Maya civilisation extended over large sections of modern Mexico and Guatemala, as well as Belize, and into present-day El Salvador and Honduras. This book provides an ingenious and thorough new study of parts of two of the Maya books, or codices, with particular focus on a previously unrecognised image of the solar year that appears in the manuscript known as the Madrid Codex. The motif of the solar year also underlies her identification of a regional organisation among the ruins of the Yucatec Maya settlements. Incorporating analyses of art, archaeology, astronomy, and colonial and modern ethnography pertaining to Yucatan, as well as studies of sixteenth-century Spanish beliefs, she elicits fascinating new meanings from her sources. She invites Mesoamerican specialists and students to consider links between components of pre-Conquest Maya civilisation. This innovative, scholarly text is essential reading for all who are interested in Mesoamerica, and it is sure to stimulate additional developments in the field of Maya cosmology and ideology.
