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

This exciting new addition to the American Landscapes series provides an in-depth account of how flintknappers obtained and used stone based on archaeological, geological, landscape, and anthropological data. Featuring case studies from three key regions in North America, this book gives readers a comprehensive view of quarrying activities ranging from extracting the raw material to creating finished stone tools. Quarry landscapes were some of the first large-scale land modification efforts among early peoples in the New World. The chronological time periods covered by quarrying activities show that most intensive use took place during parts of the Archaic and Woodland periods or between roughly 4000–1000 years ago when denser populations existed, but use began as early as the Paleoindian Period, about 13,000–9000 years ago, and ended in the Historic or Protohistoric periods, when colonists and Native Americans mined chert for gunflints and sharpening stones or abrasives. From the procurement systems approach common in the 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists can now employ a landscape approach to quarry studies in tandem with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) computer mapping and digital analysis, Light and RADAR (LiDAR) airborne laser scanning for recording topography, or high resolution satellite imagery. Authors Dowd and Trubitt show how sites functioned in a broad landscape context, which site locations or raw material types were preferred and why, what cultures were responsible for innovative or intensive quarry resource extraction, as well as how land use changed over time. Besides discussions of the way that industrialists used natural resources to change their technology by means of manufacture, trade, and exchange, examples are given of heritage sites that people can visit in the United States and Canada.

In ancient Maya cities, "E Groups" are sets of buildings aligned with the movements of the sun. This volume presents new archaeological data to reveal that E Groups were constructed earlier than previously thought-in fact, they are the earliest identifiable architectural plan at many Maya settlements. More than just astronomical observatories or calendars, E Groups were gathering places for emerging communities and centers of ritual: the very first civic-religious public architecture in the Maya lowlands. Investigating a wide variety of E Group sites in different contexts, this volume pieces together the development of social and political complexity in the ancient Maya civilization. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase.

As complex societies emerged in the Maya lowlands during the first millennium BCE, so did stable communities focused around public squares and the worship of a divine ruler tied to a Maize God cult. "E Groups," central to many of these settlements, are architectural complexes: typically, a long platform supporting three structures and facing a western pyramid across a formal plaza. Aligned with the movements of the sun, E Groups have long been interpreted as giant calendrical devices crucial to the rise of Maya civilization. This volume presents new archaeological data to reveal that E Groups were constructed earlier than previously thought. In fact, they are the earliest identifiable architectural plan at many Maya settlements. More than just astronomical observatories or calendars, E Groups were a key element of community organization, urbanism, and identity in the heart of the Maya lowlands. They served as gathering places for emerging communities and centers of ritual; they were the very first civic-religious public architecture in the Maya lowlands. Investigating a wide variety of E Group sites-including some of the most famous like the Mundo Perdido in Tikal and the hitherto little known complex at Chan, as well as others in Ceibal, El Palmar, Cival, Calakmul, Caracol, Xunantunich, Yaxnohcah, Yaxuna, and San Bartolo-this volume pieces together the development of social and political complexity in ancient Maya civilization.