SPECIAL SECTION: NEW DIALOGUES ABOUT ANCIENT MAYA

Antiquity ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 90 (350) ◽  
pp. 425-425
Author(s):  
Stephen Houston ◽  
Chris Scarre
Keyword(s):  
El Salvador ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Recent Past

Most people think of Maya civilisation, if they do at all, while on vacation. A daytrip from a beach takes them to ruins nearby, crowded with tourists in correct holiday gear. In the recent past, others might have grown anxious about the portentous significance of the year 2012. Maya glyphs, so the hucksters affirmed, predicted a cascade of dire events, not one of which (predictably) has come to pass. Then there are those living in Mayaland itself, an area embracing parts of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and all of Belize. Their personal identities stem in part from a sense of direct inheritance, extending to rights of ownership and interpretation.

INTRODUCTION

2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-62
Author(s):  
William R. Fowler ◽  
Jon B. Hageman
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Settlement Studies

This issue's Special Section presents recent archaeological research and interpretive perspectives on ancient Maya social organization. This topic has received increasing archaeological attention in recent years, with inferences drawn primarily from settlement studies, excavation data from households, and mortuary patterns complemented by evidence from ethnohistoric sources and ethnographic data and interpretations (Fash 1994:187–188, 190–192).

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION

2001 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-259
Author(s):  
William R. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Maya Lowlands ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
The Status ◽  
Road Systems

This issue's special section presents a series of papers focusing on recent research on ancient Maya causeways, or sacbeob (“white roads”—a reference to their gleaming, plastered surfaces). Often relegated to the status of “minor architectural features,” even a casual perusal of the literature quickly convinces one that sacbeob were a major feature of the ancient Maya landscape. Throughout the Maya lowlands from at least the Late Preclassic onward, these elevated roads facilitated internal and external transportation within and between Maya centers for a combination of economic, political, social, and ritual purposes. Constructed as an organic element of the built environment, road systems grew in size and expanded in complexity as the Maya centers themselves did (Andrews 1975:89, 323, 428).

Writing on Communist History in Central Europe: Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542110495
Author(s):  
Muriel Blaive
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Methodological Choices ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Practices ◽  
Communist Countries

What challenges have we met while writing the history of communist countries before and after 1989? This article introduces a special section devoted to the historiography of the recent past in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It shows that many of the methodological choices made after 1989 eschewed any critical examination and replicated or denied choices made before 1989 without reflecting on them. The section also reflects upon personal continuities. And it finally shows that history writing has been instrumentalized for political purposes after 1989 just as it had been before 1989. In other words, it acutely raises the question of continuities in historical practices despite the 1989 political rupture.

Accountability in a Global Economy: The Emergence of International Accountability Standards

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Ulrich Gilbert ◽  
Andreas Rasche ◽  
Sandra Waddock
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Responsibility ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Accountability Standards ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Do So

ABSTRACT:This article assesses the proliferation of international accountability standards (IAS) in the recent past. We provide a comprehensive overview about the different types of standards and discuss their role as part of a new institutional infrastructure for corporate responsibility. Based on this, it is argued that IAS can advance corporate responsibility on a global level because they contribute to the closure of some omnipresent governance gaps. IAS also improve the preparedness of an organization to give an explanation and a justification to relevant stakeholders for its judgments, intentions, acts and omissions when appropriately called upon to do so. However, IAS also face a variety of problems impeding their potential to help address social and environmental issues. The contribution of the four articles in this special section is discussed in the context of standards’ problems and opportunities. The article closes by outlining a research agenda to further develop and extend the scholarly debate around IAS.

MANIOC CULTIVATION AT CEREN, EL SALVADOR: OCCASIONAL KITCHEN GARDEN PLANT OR STAPLE CROP?

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Payson Sheets ◽  
Christine Dixon ◽  
Monica Guerra ◽  
Adam Blanford
Keyword(s):  
El Salvador ◽  
Drought Resistance ◽  
Classic Period ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Late Archaic ◽  
Kitchen Garden ◽  
Kitchen Gardens ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Garden Plant ◽  
Staple Crop

AbstractMany scholars have thought the Classic period Maya did not cultivate the root crop manioc, while others have suggested it may have been an occasional cultigen in kitchen gardens. For many decades there was no reliable evidence that the ancient Maya cultivated manioc, but in the 1990s manioc pollen from the late Archaic was found in Belize, and somewhat older pollen was found in Tabasco. At about the same time of those discoveries, research within the Ceren village, El Salvador, encountered occasional scattered manioc plants that had grown in mounded ridges in kitchen gardens. These finds adjacent to households indicated manioc was not a staple crop, and vastly inferior to maize and beans in food volume produced. However, 2007 research in an agricultural area 200 m south of the Ceren village encountered intensive formal manioc planting beds. If manioc was widely cultivated in ancient times, its impressive productivity, ease of cultivation even in poor soils, and drought resistance suggest it might have been a staple crop helping to support dense Maya populations in the southeast periphery and elsewhere.

Method in the archaeology of Greece

2014 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 22-24
Author(s):  
Zosia Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Survey Methods ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
The Past ◽  
Or Methodology ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Many ◽  
Of Greece

Discussions of method, of the different ways in which we may try and answer research questions, are perhaps rarer in the historiography of ancient Greece than discussions of theory. Theory has, quite rightly, played a significant role in historiography, but the comparative unimportance of method is rather mysterious. Methods are central to archaeology because a researcher has to make choices, from the very start of a project, about which methods will be the most appropriate for delivering answers to the chosen research questions. The archaeological journal Antiquity has a special section on Method. The content of that section may seem to be rather more technical than the kinds of methods I want to consider here. Nevertheless, all discussions of method, or methodology, help to give substance to theory; they help us to make clearer the connections between evidence and theory. Stewart's paper, in this issue of AG, offers a series of reflections on the values and limitations of survey methods. Archaeologists are conscious of the fact that different methods produce different results. This can sometimes be perplexing for historians, as I discuss further below. Method refers not just to the ways in which we go about a particular research project. It also applies to the broad perspectives within which we do research. Catherine Morgan's report on the work of the BSA in 2013–2014 draws together the many new strands that are connecting people and places of the past, but also contemporary preoccupations with environments, societies and their habits in the recent past.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION

2002 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Maya Civilization ◽  
Maya Area

In this issue's Special Section we present the first of a two-part series on studies of ancient climate change in the Maya area. Since the time of Ellsworth Huntington (1917, 1924) and Karl Sapper (1931), Mesoamericanists and Mayanists in particular have been aware of the possibility that climate change played a role in the fortunes of ancient Maya civilization.

Introduction

2002 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-265
Author(s):  
William R. Fowler ◽  
Molly Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climatic Factors ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Climatological Data ◽  
Global Correlation ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Maya Area ◽  
The Impact

In this issue's Special Section we offer the second part of a group of studies dealing with the impact of climate change on ancient Maya civilization. As mentioned in the Introduction to the first part (Fowler 2002), Mayanists have been aware of the possible effects of climatic factors on Maya culture since the early decades of last century. At first, comments on the effects of climate change in the Maya area were largely speculative. By the 1980s such work became increasingly compelling and sophisticated, including correlations of worldwide glacial, palynological, and other climatological data, as reflected in several publications (Dahlin 1983; Folan et al. 1983; Gunn and Adams 1981). Soon after, Lewis Messenger provided a broad global correlation with specific reference to archaeological sequences in Mesoamerica and the Maya area (Messenger 1990). Perhaps it would be fair to say that Maya paleoclimatological studies may have peaked with the massive work of Richardson Gill (2000), which has attracted much critical attention. David Webster (2002:241–247), for example, praises the book for its directness and clarity of purpose but expresses skepticism about the climatological bias and stresses that much more research is needed.

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