The Maya: A Very Short Introduction
Matthew Restall · Amara Solari
Nov 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Tim Campbell
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3 hr 20 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control. There was never a single, unified Maya state or empire, but always numerous, evolving ethnic groups speaking dozens of distinct Mayan languages. The people we call "Maya" never thought of themselves as such; yet something definable, unique, and endlessly fascinating-what we call Maya culture-has clearly existed for millennia. So what was their self-identity and how did Maya civilization come to be "invented?" With the Maya historically subdivided and misunderstood in so many ways, the pursuit of what made them "the Maya" is all the more important. In this Very Short Introduction, Restall and Solari explore the themes of Maya identity, city-state political culture, art and architecture, the Maya concept of the cosmos, and the Maya experience of contact with including invasion by outsiders.
About the author
Matthew Restall is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and director of Latin American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He has written twenty books and sixty articles and essays on the histories of the Mayas, of Africans in Spanish America, and of the Spanish Conquest.
Amara Solari is professor of art history and anthropology at Penn State University. She is the coauthor of 2012 and the End of the World, and author of Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan, and Idolizing Mary: Maya-Christian Icons in Early Modern Yucatan.
Tim Campbell is the Audie and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning voice of hundreds of audiobook titles in almost every literary genre.
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