How the Maya Built Their World by Elliot M Abrams

How the Maya Built Their World by Elliot M Abrams

Maya architecture is often described as "massive" and "monumental," but experiments at Copan, Honduras, convinced Elliot Abrams that 300 people could have built one of the large palaces there in only 100 days. In this groundbreaking work, Abrams explicates his theory of architectural energetics, which involves translating structures into volumes of raw and manufactured materials that are then multiplied by the time required for their production and assembly to determine the labor costs of past construction efforts. Applying this method to residential structures of the Late Classic period (A.D. 700-900) at Copan leads Abrams to posit a six-tiered hierarchic social structure of political decision making, ranging from a stratified elite to low-ranking commoners. By comparing the labor costs of construction and other economic activities, he also prompts a reconsideration of the effects of royal construction demands on commoners. How the Maya Built Their World will interest a wide audience in New and Old World anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and engineering.

"Abrams is proposing what I think is a very useful and potentially powerful tool; personally, I would even hope it becomes a standard archaeological analysis for ancient architecture, with concomitant development of site-specific analogues" - Wendy Ashmore, associate professor of anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Elliot M. Abrams is an associate professor of anthropology at Ohio University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780292704626
ISBN 10	0292704623
Title	How the Maya Built Their World
Author	Elliot M Abrams
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Texas Press
Year published	1994-09-01
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable