The Mesoamerican Ballgame - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Mesoamerican Ballgame write by Vernon L. Scarborough. This book was released on 1993-01-01. The Mesoamerican Ballgame available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife, war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological, sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental life and outlook of New World peoples.
The Sport of Life and Death
The Sport of Life and Death - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Sport of Life and Death write by E. Michael Whittington. This book was released on 2001. The Sport of Life and Death available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Mesoamerican ballgame was no ordinary sport. Played by the Olmecs, Maya and Aztecs, from at least 1200 BC to the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century AD, it was both a contest of breathtaking athletic skill and a ritual spectacle in which the struggle between the opposing forces of day and night, good and evil, life and death was enacted by the teams on the ballcourt. ''The Sport of Life and Death'', the most comprehensive work ever on the Mesoamerican ballgame, brings together a range of these works of art, of striking beauty, vivacity and power, from tiny jade carvings of the Olmecs depicting their player kings to the ring-shaped stone goals that once stood in Aztec ballcourts. Essays by leading authorities on Mesoamerican art and culture discuss all aspects of the ballgame, such as the natural history of rubber, the magnificent architecture of the ballcourts, the extraordinary equipment worn by the players, the complex religious symbolism and ritual elements of the games and descriptions of versions that are still played today in Mexico.
Ritual, Play, and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies
Ritual, Play, and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Ritual, Play, and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies write by Colin Renfrew. This book was released on 2018. Ritual, Play, and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book presents unique new insights into the development of human ritual and society through our heritage of play and performance.
Blood and Beauty
Blood and Beauty - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Blood and Beauty write by Rex Koontz. This book was released on 2009-12-31. Blood and Beauty available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame have been the traditional categories through which scholars have examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. This volume expands those traditional categories to include such concerns as gladiatorial-like boxing combats, investiture rites, trophy-head taking and display, dark shamanism, and the subjective pain inherent in acts of violence. Each author examines organized violence as a set of practices grounded in cultural understandings, even when the violence threatens the limits of those understandings. The authors scrutinize the representation of, and relationships between, different types of organized violence, as well as the implications of those activities, which can include the unexpected, such as violence as a means of determining and curing illness, and the use of violence in negotiation strategies.
Houses in a Landscape
Houses in a Landscape - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Houses in a Landscape write by Julia A. Hendon. This book was released on 2010-04-22. Houses in a Landscape available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In Houses in a Landscape, Julia A. Hendon examines the connections between social identity and social memory using archaeological research on indigenous societies that existed more than one thousand years ago in what is now Honduras. While these societies left behind monumental buildings, the remains of their dead, remnants of their daily life, intricate works of art, and fine examples of craftsmanship such as pottery and stone tools, they left only a small body of written records. Despite this paucity of written information, Hendon contends that an archaeological study of memory in such societies is possible and worthwhile. It is possible because memory is not just a faculty of the individual mind operating in isolation, but a social process embedded in the materiality of human existence. Intimately bound up in the relations people develop with one another and with the world around them through what they do, where and how they do it, and with whom or what, memory leaves material traces. Hendon conducted research on three contemporaneous Native American civilizations that flourished from the seventh century through the eleventh CE: the Maya kingdom of Copan, the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque, and the dispersed settlement of the Cuyumapa valley. She analyzes domestic life in these societies, from cooking to crafting, as well as public and private ritual events including the ballgame. Combining her findings with a rich body of theory from anthropology, history, and geography, she explores how objects—the things people build, make, use, exchange, and discard—help people remember. In so doing, she demonstrates how everyday life becomes part of the social processes of remembering and forgetting, and how “memory communities” assert connections between the past and the present.
