E Groups and Ancestors

Maya E Groups ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Kathryn Brown
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Mortuary Practices ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
Preclassic Period ◽  
Middle Preclassic ◽  
Social Memories ◽  
Burial Rituals ◽  
Over Time

Over time, E Groups come to have a funerary function housing burials of important ancestors. Using the data recovered from the Preclassic Period (1000 BCE-250 CE) E Group at the site of Xunantunich (Benque Viejo), Belize, I trace the development and elaboration of ritual and mortuary practices from the early Middle Preclassic (1000-350 BCE) to the Terminal Preclassic or Protoclassic Period (0-250 CE). I explore the transformation of Xunantunich’s Preclassic E Group from a venue for communal solar and maize rituals, to a sacred space also associated with commemoration of ancestors and elite individuals. I examine the ephemeral traces that ritual activities often leave behind such as fire features and perishable altars. Additionally, from the layout of architectural features found within the E Group plaza itself, such as paved ramps, I address the role of processions in early ritual practices. Although the built environment can encode important messages, it is through activities like commemorative events that those messages are embodied and transformed into collective and social memories. Ritual activities like feasts, processions, and burial rituals performed at sacred locations made these places powerful, so that they became part of both the physical and ideological landscape of an ancient community.

The Architecture of Parliaments: Legislative Houses and Political Culture

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Goodsell
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Spatial Relationships ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
Television Broadcasting ◽  
The World ◽  
Over Time

The architecture of houses of parliament and of legislative chambers in countries around the world is analysed for its relationship to political culture. It is argued that parliamentary buildings and spaces (1) preserve cultural values of the polity over time; (2) articulate contemporaneous political attitudes and values; and (3) contribute to the formation of political culture. Preservation is illustrated by how parliament buildings occupy sacred sites, symbolize the state and assure the continuity of legislative traditions. Articulation is exemplified by reflecting the relative importance of the two legislative houses and making expressive statements about the role of parties, executives and individual legislators. Formation can be affected by the physical dimensions of chambers, the arrangement of seats, aisles and lecterns, and spatial relationships between houses and the parliament versus the executive. It is concluded that the advent of television broadcasting of parliamentary sessions may make these architectural features even more important in perpetuating, manifesting and shaping political culture.

The Cunil Complex

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren A. Sullivan ◽  
Jaime J. Awe ◽  
M. Kathryn Brown
Keyword(s):  
River Valley ◽  
Maya Lowlands ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Belize River Valley ◽  
Preclassic Period ◽  
Ancient Site ◽  
Middle Preclassic ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Marine Shell

This chapter provides an overview of recent data pertaining to the first settled villages in the Belize River valley. The authors highlight the known Preceramic data from the region and suggest that sedentary villages appear at the beginning of the Preclassic, possibly as early as 1200 B.C. The Cunil phase pottery, first documented at the ancient site of Cahal Pech, represents the earliest ceramics found in the Maya lowlands. Long distance trade items such as obsidian, marine shell, and greenstone are associated with Cunil phase pottery, suggesting that these early villages were participating in a larger interaction sphere. As population grew over time in the Middle Preclassic period, interaction with neighboring regions increased leading to a more uniform ceramic tradition.

CROCODILES, SHARKS, AND SOME SPECULATIONS ON CENTRAL PETEN PRECLASSIC HISTORY

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prudence M. Rice
Keyword(s):  
Political Geography ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Preclassic Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Middle Preclassic ◽  
Lowland Maya

AbstractThe first part of this two-part essay discusses the important roles crocodiles and sharks played in Preclassic (and later) political geography and myths of cosmogenesis in Mesoamerica. They are associated with sacrifices resulting in creation of the world and births of some major gods. Crocodiles are also associated with fertility, rebirth, and renewal of seasonal and temporal/calendrical cycles. Recent investigations at Nixtun-Ch'ich’ show that its gridded urban landscape, established in the Middle Preclassic period (ca. 800–400 b.c.), was likely modeled on a crocodile's back. The second part of the essay presents some speculations on the early role of this site and crocodiles in central Peten. At Tikal, archaeology and retrospective texts indicate that crocodiles appeared in early versions of the site's emblem glyph and in the name of an early ruler. Nixtun-Ch'ich’ might be the legendary chi place, important in the dynastic foundations of several lowland Maya centers.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Raza, ciencia, sociedad

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wade
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Human Biology ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Race Science ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Over Time

<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Resumen </strong></span>| En este trabajo quiero presentar una cronología convencional del concepto raza que marca un movimiento en el cual raza cambia de ser una idea basada en la cultura y el medio ambiente, a ser algo biológico, inflexible y determinante, para luego volver a ser una noción que habla de la cultura<span class="s2"><strong>.</strong></span>Resumo cómo la idea de raza ha cambiado a través del tiempo, mirando necesariamente el rol que ha desempeñado la ciencia, y enfocando los diferentes discursos de índole <em>natural-cultural </em>sobre los cuerpos, el medio ambiente y el comportamiento, en los cuales las dimensiones culturales y naturales siempre coexisten<span class="s2"><strong>.</strong></span>“La naturaleza” no puede ser entendida solamente como “la biología” y ni la naturaleza ni la biología necesariamente implican sólo el determinismo, la fijeza y la inmutabilidad Estar abiertos a la coexistencia de la cultura y la naturaleza y a la mutabilidad de la naturaleza nos permite ver mejor el ámbito de acción del pensamiento racial.</p><p class="p1"><strong><em>Race, Science and Society</em></strong></p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p2"><span class="s1"><strong>Abstract </strong></span>| In this article I present and critique a standard chronology of race as, first, a concept rooted in culture and environment, and later in human biology and determinism, and finally back to culture alone<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>I will outline changing understandings of race over time, with some attention to the role of science, broadly understood, and on the continuing but changing character of race as a natural-cultural discourse about organic bodies, environments and behavior, in which both cultural and natural dimensions always co-exist<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>“Nature” is not to be understood simply as “biology,” and neither nature nor biology necessarily imply the fixity and determination that they are often assumed nowadays to involve<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>Being open to the co-existence of culture and nature and the mutability of the latter allows us to better comprehend the whole range of action of racial thinking.</p>

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