The Maya (Ancient Peoples and Places)

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The greater the number of possible responses to environmental change, the greater the chance of staying alive, not simply as individuals, but also as societies, cultures, and civilisations. In many ways these conflicts are a continuation of the half-century Caste War in the 19th century which was fought by the Yucatan Mayas against the domineering white population. Despite collapse in the ninth century, Spanish invasion in the sixteenth, and recent civil wars, seven million people still speak Mayan languages and strive to uphold their resilient culture. Complete with poetry-related meditations and writing prompts, this collection of lively, elegantly written essays can be read as a standalone book or as a companion to the author’s acclaimed anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.

But I’m not sure whether that’s true or not as this book seems designed for something more than just a general introduction. Analyse primary sources, discover the Mayan inventions still with us today, find out about Mayan artefacts, archaeology, rituals, social structures and more in our most popular world history collection. This edition incorporates the most recent archaeological and epigraphic findings, which continue to proceed at a fast pace, along with full-color illustrations. The original text, beautifully translated and introduced by Sarah Harding, is further brought to life by an in-depth commentary by the contemporary master Thrangu Rinpoche.The result is the most thorough and incisive study of the origins and development of ancient Maya civilization ever published. A few of the more coherent of these lumps have been preserved, with the slim hope that some technique to be developed by future generations of archaeologists may be able to recover some information from these remains of ancient pages. Traditionally, Zen koans—the teaching stories of Zen—are drawn from the words and teachings of ancient masters and primarily address the concerns of (male) monastic practitioners. His many other books include Mexico (with Rex Koontz), The True History of Chocolate (with Sophie D. Women played major roles in the history of Buddhist China, but given the paucity of the remaining records, their voices have all but faded.

Additionally, it presents a richly detailed panorama of the ways that scholarly and popular audiences in Latin America and beyond have sought to collect, display, remix, and decipher the ancient Maya since the nineteenth century. History in Infographics helps children to visualise facts and statistics using a clever and appealing mix of graphics and numbers. A triumph of scholarship, it can be read with profit by specialists and students, as well as by visitors to the realm of the Maya.

While there is no publicised drug problem among the Maya themselves, they nevertheless have a serious and growing issue that may be the ultimate challenge for their cultural adaptability. Its unique features include an introduction that discusses the themes of impermanence, mindfulness, and joy and explores the relationship between them. If I’m honest, even as a historian, a straight textual study without knowledge of any material culture is pretty useless. Even though the last date entry in the book is from several centuries before its relocation, the book was likely used and added to until just before the conquerors took it.

As a curious amateur (I have no training in anything remotely related to anthropology or archaeology) I have been fascinated with the native peoples of the North, Central, and South American continents. The information is there (I think) - its just that its hidden within reams of text about the academic main-players and debates about bits of archaeological evidence.There was something dry about this — and though you might be inclined to put that down to this being non-fiction, I read a very similar book on the Incas just a little later and found it riveting.