Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - Central America

"Maya Archaeologis"t is an autobiographical account of explorations in Mayan ruins by J. Eric Thompson, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Maya Indians of Mexico and Central America. Based on his expeditions from 1926 to 1936 - when conditions in the Maya area were very close to those in the years of the Conquest - this book is an intensely personal account of the investigation of the "stone cities," such as Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Copan, Tikal, and Quirigua, as well as lively portraits of the archaeologists who probed this civilization - Morley, Gann, Ruppert, Vaillant, Roys, and...

Believing that Maya studies today are "suffering from imbalance," J. Eric S. Thompson here approaches Maya history and religion from the standpoint of ethno-history. Present-day archaeologists often tend to restrict their curiosity to their excavations and social anthropologists to observe the modern Maya as members of a somewhat primitive society in an era of change. In this volume, a distinguished Maya scholar seeks to correlate data from colonial writings and observations of the modern Indian with archaeological information in order to extend and clarify the panorama of Maya...

Central America has been a region of global importance since it was first explored by the Spanish early in the sixteenth century. Yet this mosaic of seven states, extending from Guatemala and Belize to Panama, remains one of the least known regions of Latin America. Drawing on more than fifty combined years of research and teaching in Central America, Carolyn Hall and Hector Perez Brignoli provide a new interpretation and an innovative synthesis of the region's history and culture in the Historical Atlas of Central America.

The first two sections of the atlas review five centuries...

Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q'eqchi'-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in...

Costa Rica Before Coffee centers on the decade of the 1840s, when the impact of coffee and export agriculture began to revolutionize Costa Rican society. Lowell Gudmundson focuses on the nature of the society prior to the coffee boom, but he also makes observations on the entire sweep of Costa Rican history, from earliest colonial times to the present, and in his final chapter compares the country's development and agrarian structures with those of other Latin American nations. These wide-ranging applications follow inevitably, since the author convincingly portrays the 1840s as they key...