Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya offers an A-to-Z overview of the ancient Maya culture from its inception around 3000 BC to the Spanish Conquest after AD 1600. Over two hundred entries written by more than sixty researchers explore subjects ranging from food, clothing, and shelter to the sophisticated calendar and now-deciphered Maya writing system. They bring special attention to environmental concerns and climate variation; fresh understandings of shifting power dynamics and dynasties; and the revelations from emerging field techniques (such as LiDAR remote sensing) and newly explored sites (such as La Corona, Tamchen, and Yaxnohkah). This one-volume reference is an essential companion for students studying ancient civilizations, as well as a perfect resource for those planning to visit the Maya area. Cross-referencing, topical and alphabetical lists of entries, and a comprehensive index help readers find relevant details. Suggestions for further reading conclude each entry, while sidebars profile historical figures who have shaped Maya research. Maps highlight terrain, archaeological sites, language distribution, and more; over fifty photographs complement the volume.

Mayan daykeeper Hunbatz Men reveals the multi-calendar system of the Maya that guided the lives of his ancestors and how it can guide us today • The first book to reveal the secrets of the Mayan Pleiades calendar: the Tzek’eb • Explains how the Maya used their astronomical knowledge to guide their lives on Earth The Mayan Calendar has taken on special prominence with the imminent arrival of 2012, a date that many claim is the end of that calendar. However, as Mayan elder and daykeeper Hunbatz Men shows, the cosmological understanding of his ancestors was so sophisticated that they had not one, but many calendars, each based on the cycles of different systems in the cosmos. In this book he reveals for the first time the Tzek’eb, or Pleiades, Calendar of 26,000 years, which charts the revolution of our solar system around Alcyone, the central star of the Pleiades system. He also discusses the K’uuk’ulcan Calendar of the 4 seasons of the solar year and the wheel of the K’altunes Calendar, which is composed of 13 cycles of 20 years each that form a calendar of 260 years. In traditional Mayan culture the computation of time was not determined by simple economic or social motives. The calendars served the higher purpose of synchronizing the lives of human beings and their societies to the great cosmic pulsation, to the rhythm of the annual seasons, and to the other cycles that dictate changes upon Earth. Mayan understanding of the cosmic cycles was so exact that this knowledge could be used to influence all stages of life--from planning when to conceive (parents could choose not only the sex of their child but its vocation and future destiny) to plotting out the course of the entire society. Pyramids played a crucial role in applying this wisdom because, as Hunbatz Men shows, they were able to produce and transform energy in accordance with the cosmic cycles charted by the calendars. This book reveals for the first time the wisdom of the multi-calendar Mayan system and how it can help guide our modern world.

This volume offers new calendrical models and methodologies for reading, dating, and interpreting the general significance of the Madrid Codex. The longest of the surviving Maya codices, this manuscript includes texts and images painted by scribes conversant in Maya hieroglyphic writing, a written means of communication practiced by Maya elites from the second to the fifteenth centuries A.D. Some scholars have recently argued that the Madrid Codex originated in the Petén region of Guatemala and postdates European contact. The contributors to this volume challenge that view by demonstrating convincingly that it originated in northern Yucatán and was painted in the Pre-Columbian era. In addition, several contributors reveal provocative connections among the Madrid and Borgia group of codices from Central Mexico. Contributors include: Harvey M. Bricker, Victoria R. Bricker, John F. Chuchiak IV, Christine L. Hernández, Bryan R. Just, Merideth Paxton, and John Pohl. Additional support for this publication was generously provided by the Eugene M. Kayden Fund at the University of Colorado.

When his archaeologist parents go missing in Central America, fourteen-year-old Max embarks on a wild adventure through the Mayan underworld in search of the legendary Jaguar Stones, which enabled ancient Mayan kings to wield the powers of living gods. Includes cast of characters, glossary, facts about the Maya cosmos and calendar, and a recipe for chicken tamales.

Unlock the mysteries of the Mayan world. Deep in the rain forests of South and Central America, the Mayan culture thrived for almost 4,000 years. From the earliest Mayan farmer in 2,600 BC through the thirteenth century AD, the Maya developed an elaborate society, built great cities and temples, and created the only real system of writing native to the Americas. Although many of the intricacies of the Mayan culture remain shrouded in mystery, hundreds of new discoveries have come to light in recent years, and our body of knowledge about the Maya has grown by leaps and bounds. Now, the most fascinating new discoveries have been compiled into one volume: Secrets of the Maya, a book from the editors of Archaeology Magazine. From the discovery of ancient caves used for religious rituals—including human sacrifice—to the search for the long-lost "White City," Secrets of the Maya will take readers on an exciting and surprising archaeological journey. Featuring articles on the latest research, a comprehensive time line, and a special section on Mayan hieroglyphs, Secrets of the Maya will appeal to experts and amateurs alike.

Traces implications of a previously unrecognized image of the solar year in the Madrid Codex to find new meanings in the Dresden Codex and the Maya calendar system and a regional settlement organization in Yucatan.

By 1,800 years ago, speakers of proto-Ch’olan, the ancestor of three present-day Maya languages, had developed a calendar of eighteen twenty-day months plus a set of five days for a total of 365 days. This original Maya calendar, used extensively during the Classic period (200–900 CE), recorded in hieroglyphic inscriptions the dates of dynastic and cosmological importance. Over time, and especially after the Mayas’ contact with Europeans, the month names that had originated with these inscriptions developed into fourteen distinct traditions, each connected to a different ethnic group. Today, the glyphs encompass 250 standard forms, variants, and alternates, with about 570 meanings among all the cognates, synonyms, and homonyms. In The Maya Calendar, Weldon Lamb collects, defines, and correlates the month names in every recorded Maya calendrical tradition from the first hieroglyphic inscriptions to the present—an undertaking critical to unlocking and understanding the iconography and cosmology of the ancient Maya world. Mining data from astronomy, ethnography, linguistics, and epigraphy, and working from early and modern dictionaries of the Maya languages, Lamb pieces together accurate definitions of the month names in order to compare them across time and tradition. His exhaustive process reveals unsuspected parallels. Three-fourths of the month names, he shows, still derive from those of the original hieroglyphic inscriptions. Lamb also traces the relationship between month names as cognates, synonyms, or homonyms, and then reconstructs each name’s history of development, connecting the Maya month names in several calendars to ancient texts and archaeological finds. In this landmark study, Lamb’s investigations afford new insight into the agricultural, astronomical, ritual, and even political motivations behind names and dates in the Maya calendar. A history of descent and diffusion, of unexpected connectedness and longevity, The Maya Calendar offers readers a deep understanding of a foundational aspect of Maya culture.

In Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos, Prudence M. Rice proposed a new model of Maya political organization in which geopolitical seats of power rotated according to a 256-year calendar cycle known as the May. This fundamental connection between timekeeping and Maya political organization sparked Rice's interest in the origins of the two major calendars used by the ancient lowland Maya, one 260 days long, and the other having 365 days. In Maya Calendar Origins, she presents a provocative new thesis about the origins and development of the calendrical system. Integrating data from anthropology, archaeology, art history, astronomy, ethnohistory, myth, and linguistics, Rice argues that the Maya calendars developed about a millennium earlier than commonly thought, around 1200 BC, as an outgrowth of observations of the natural phenomena that scheduled the movements of late Archaic hunter-gatherer-collectors throughout what became Mesoamerica. She asserts that an understanding of the cycles of weather and celestial movements became the basis of power for early rulers, who could thereby claim "control" over supernatural cosmic forces. Rice shows how time became materialized—transformed into status objects such as monuments that encoded calendrical or temporal concerns—as well as politicized, becoming the foundation for societal order, political legitimization, and wealth. Rice's research also sheds new light on the origins of the Popol Vuh, which, Rice believes, encodes the history of the development of the Mesoamerican calendars. She also explores the connections between the Maya and early Olmec and Izapan cultures in the Isthmian region, who shared with the Maya the cosmovision and ideology incorporated into the calendrical systems.