About the Book
New
understandings of how Maya people expressed timekeeping in daily life
This book discusses
the range of ways the ancient Maya people made time tangible through their architecture,
arts, writing, beliefs, and practices. These chapters show how the Maya incorporated
cyclicality and expanded dimensionality into the built environment, embedding
notions of time in shared political and economic institutions, religious and
philosophical traditions, and mythology.
Beginning
several millennia ago, the Maya observed and calculated the solar year cycle and
scheduled collective activities that integrated cities, towns, and villages
over great distances. Their
timekeeping approaches evolved from commemorative ceremonial architectural
complexes starting around 1000 BCE to the formal public inscription of calendar
jubilees on stone monuments, the use of calendar almanacs, written prophetic
and historical accounts, and the customs of modern priest shamans. Contributors
to this volume discuss everyday examples of how the Maya kept time through these
practices, including divining with snail shells, laying out center designs with
creation stories and star patterns, singing those stories while drinking from
vases depicting mythic history, and embedding symbolic temporal deposits within
their buildings and living areas.
This
comprehensive volume includes analyses of groundbreaking recent discoveries,
such as the early center of Aguada Fénix and the connections it shows between
Maya and Olmec timekeeping. By sharing how the Maya crafted a cosmological
sense of time into their daily lives,
The
Materialization of Time in the Ancient Maya World addresses and rethinks
the most famous intellectual feature of this civilization.
A
volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase
