Mayas, and indeed all Guatemalans, are currently experiencing the collapse of their way of life. This collapse is disrupting ideologies, symbols, life practices, and social structures that have undergirded their society for almost five hundred years, and it is causing rapid and massive religious transformation among the K’iche’ Maya living in highland western Guatemala. Many Maya are converting to Christian Pentecostal faiths in which adherents and leaders become bodily agitated during worship. Drawing on over fifty years of research and data collected by field-school students, Hawkins argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed. Guatemala serves as a window on religious change around the world, and Hawkins examines the rapid pentecostalization of Christianity not only within Guatemala but also throughout the global South. The “pentecostal wail,” as he describes it, is ultimately an acknowledgment of the angst and insecurity of contemporary Maya.

This book examines medical systems and institutions in three K'iche' Maya communities to reveal the conflicts between indigenous medical care and the Guatemalan biomedical system. It shows the necessity of cultural understanding if poor people are to have access to medicine that combines the best of both local tradition and international biomedicine.

In Maya Roads, McConahay draws upon her three decades of traveling and living in Central America's remote landscapes to create a fascinating chronicle of the people, politics, archaeology, and species of the Central American rainforest, the cradle of Maya civilization. Captivated by the magnificence and mystery of the jungle, the author brings to life the intense beauty, the fantastic locales, the ancient ruins, and the horrific violence. She witnesses archaeological discoveries, the transformation of the Lacandon people, the Zapatista indigenous uprising in Mexico, increased drug trafficking, and assists in the uncovering of a war crime. Over the decades, McConahay has witnessed great changes in the region, and this is a unique tale of a woman's adventure and the adaptation and resolve of a people.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another. The thirteen contributions in this volume offer a glimpse of the diversity of bilingualism present in the Hispanic and Lusophone world, shedding light on the sheer variety of speaker communities, language pairings (e.g., Spanish-English, Spanish-Basque, Spanish-Dutch, Portuguese-Spanish-English, Portuguese-English, Spanish-K’ichee Maya, and Spanish-Ixcatec) and speaker types (e.g., simultaneous bilinguals, and early and late sequential bilinguals). The diversity present in this collection of papers, both in empirical coverage and methodological and theoretical approaches, will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in bilingualism and Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics.

The Maya has long been established as the best, most readable introduction to the ancient Maya on the market today. This classic book has been updated by distilling the latest scholarship for the general reader and student. This tenth edition incorporates the most recent archaeological and epigraphic findings, which continue to proceed at a fast pace, along with full-colour illustrations. The new material includes evidence of the earliest human occupants of the Maya region and the beginnings of agriculture and settled life; analysis from lidar on swampy areas, such as Usumacinta, that show enormous rectangle earthworks, including Aguada Fénix, dating from 1050 to 750 BC; and recent advances in decoding Maya writing and imagery. It also expands on information on the roles of women, courtiers and outsiders; covers novel research about Maya cities, including research into water quality, marketplaces, fortifications and integrated road systems; and features coverage of more recent Maya history, including the displacement and mistreatment of the Maya people, along with growing affirmations of their cultural identity and rights. Highlighting the vitality of current scholarship about this brilliant culture, The Maya remains the gold standard introductory book on the subject.

This book presents the current state of Maya archaeology by focusing on the history of the field for the last 100 years, present day research, and forward looking prescription for the direction of the field.

This text is the result of the IGU-LUCC 2000 workshop in Japan and Korea, which focused on comparative case studies of land-use/cover changes. Topics range from methodological/data-related issues to regional urban/rural land-use changes at various settings.

This third, thoroughly updated edition of a well received book, presents the most complete collection of theories, paradigms and methods utilized by the landscape sciences. With the introduction of new ecosemiotic concepts and innovative managing procedures, it offers a broad list of ecological, ecosemiotical and cultural tools to investigate, interpret and manage the environmental complexity according to a species-specific individual-based approach. Readers will discover the importance of a landscape perspective to create strategic bridges between science and humanities favored by the holistic sight of sensorial (visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile, and thermal) “scapes”. Distributed in 10 chapters, the content covers many aspects of the landscape sciences ranging from the description of fundamental theories, principles and models originated by ecological approaches like source-sink models, island biogeography, hierarchical theory and scale. The ecosemiotical approaches like the eco-field model, the ecoscape paradigm, and the general theory of resources are widely described and discussed. A cultural approach to landscape is utilized to focus on the heritage values of territories and their environmental identity. This book, written in an accessible and didactic style, is particularly dedicated to undergraduate and graduate students but also scholars in ecology, agroforestry, urban planning, nature design, conservation and remediation. Land practitioners, farmers and policymakers can use this book as an authoritative guide to better understand the function and role of environmental systems according to a social-economic integrated perspective.