{"title":"The Linda Schele Series In Maya And Pre-Columbian Studies","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the fascinating world of Maya and Pre-Columbian studies with this essential series. Explore groundbreaking research and insights into ancient cultures, perfect for history enthusiasts and academics alike.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"monkey-business-theatre-book-robert-m-laughlin-9780292717596","title":"Monkey Business Theatre","description":"In 1983, a group of citizens in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, formed Sna Jtz'ibajom, the Tzotzil-Tzeltal Maya writers' cooperative. In the two decades since, this group has evolved from writing and publishing bilingual booklets to writing and performing plays that have earned them national and international renown. Anthropologist Robert M. Laughlin has been a part of the group since its beginnings, and he offers a unique perspective on its development as a Mayan cultural force. The Monkey Business Theatre, or Teatro Lo'il Maxil, as this branch of Sna Jtz'ibajom calls itself, has presented plays in virtually every corner of the state of Chiapas, as well as in Mexico City, Guatemala, Honduras, Canada, and in many museums and universities in the United States. It has presented to the world, for the first time in drama, a view of the culture of the Mayas of Chiapas. In this work, Laughlin presents a translation of twelve of the plays created by Sna Jtz'ibajom, along with an introduction for each. Half of the plays are based on myths and half on the social, political, and economic problems that have confronted-and continue to confront-the Mayas of Chiapas.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49615963685137,"sku":"GOR012645342","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0292717598.jpg?v=1751324080"},{"product_id":"beauty-that-hurts-book-w-george-lovell-9780292721838","title":"A Beauty That Hurts","description":"Though a 1996 peace accord brought a formal end to a conflict that had lasted for thirty-six years, Guatemala's violent past continues to scar its troubled present and seems destined to haunt its uncertain future. George Lovell brings to this revised and expanded edition of A Beauty That Hurts decades of fieldwork throughout Guatemala, as well as archival research. He locates the roots of conflict in geographies of inequality that arose during colonial times and were exacerbated by the drive to develop Guatemala's resources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lines of confrontation were entrenched after a decade of socioeconomic reform between 1944 and 1954 saw modernizing initiatives undone by a military coup backed by U.S. interests and the CIA. A United Nations Truth Commission has established that civil war in Guatemala claimed the lives of more that 200,000 people, the vast majority of them indigenous Mayas. Lovell weaves documentation about what happened to Mayas in particular during the war years with accounts of their difficult personal situations. Meanwhile, an intransigent elite and a powerful military continue to benefit from the inequalities that triggered armed insurrection in the first place. Weak and corrupt civilian governments fail to impose the rule of law, thus ensuring that Guatemala remains an embattled country where postwar violence and drug-related crime undermine any semblance of orderly, peaceful life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49728108200209,"sku":"NGR9780292721838","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50192075718929,"sku":"CIN0292721838VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50206667309329,"sku":"CIN0292721838G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0292721838.jpg?v=1752317160"},{"product_id":"ritual-and-power-in-stone-book-julia-guernsey-9780292726048","title":"Ritual and Power in Stone","description":"The ancient Mesoamerican city of Izapa in Chiapas, Mexico, is renowned for its extensive collection of elaborate stone stelae and altars, which were carved during the Late Preclassic period (300 BC-AD 250). Many of these monuments depict kings garbed in the costume and persona of a bird, a well-known avian deity who had great significance for the Maya and other cultures in adjacent regions. This Izapan style of carving and kingly representation appears at numerous sites across the Pacific slope and piedmont of Mexico and Guatemala, making it possible to trace political and economic corridors of communication during the Late Preclassic period.  In this book, Julia Guernsey offers a masterful art historical analysis of the Izapan style monuments and their integral role in developing and communicating the institution of divine kingship. She looks specifically at how rulers expressed political authority by erecting monuments that recorded their performance of rituals in which they communicated with the supernatural realm in the persona of the avian deity. She also considers how rulers used the monuments to structure their built environment and create spaces for ritual and politically charged performances. Setting her discussion in a broader context, Guernsey also considers how the Izapan style monuments helped to motivate and structure some of the dramatic, pan-regional developments of the Late Preclassic period, including the forging of a codified language of divine kingship. This pioneering investigation, which links monumental art to the matrices of political, economic, and supernatural exchange, offers an important new understanding of a region, time period, and group of monuments that played a key role in the history of Mesoamerica and continue to intrigue scholars within the field of Mesoamerican studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49749374402833,"sku":"CIN029272604XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49768901902609,"sku":"GOR004106590","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0333628543.jpg?v=1752316649"},{"product_id":"signs-of-the-inka-khipu-book-gary-urton-9780292785403","title":"Signs of the Inka Khipu","description":"In an age when computers process immense amounts of information by the manipulation of sequences of 1s and 0s, it remains a frustrating mystery how prehistoric Inka recordkeepers encoded a tremendous variety and quantity of data using only knotted and dyed strings. Yet the comparison between computers and khipu may hold an important clue to deciphering the Inka records. In this book, Gary Urton sets forth a pathbreaking theory that the manipulation of fibers in the construction of khipu created physical features that constitute binary-coded sequences which store units of information in a system of binary recordkeeping that was used throughout the Inka empire. Urton begins his theory with the making of khipu, showing how at each step of the process binary, either\/or choices were made. He then investigates the symbolic components of the binary coding system, the amount of information that could have been encoded, procedures that may have been used for reading the khipu, the nature of the khipu signs, and, finally, the nature of the khipu recording system itself-emphasizing relations of markedness and semantic coupling. This research constitutes a major step forward in building a unified theory of the khipu system of information storage and communication based on the sum total of construction features making up these extraordinary objects.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50170489602321,"sku":"CIN0292785402G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50487072293137,"sku":"GOR006259477","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0292785402.jpg?v=1751227823"},{"product_id":"lightning-warrior-book-matthew-g-looper-9780292705562","title":"Lightning Warrior","description":"The ancient Maya city of Quirigua occupied a crossroads between Copan in the southeastern Maya highlands and the major centers of the Peten heartland. Though always a relatively small city, Quirigua stands out because of its public monuments, which were some of the greatest achievements of Classic Maya civilization. Impressive not only for their colossal size, high sculptural quality, and eloquent hieroglyphic texts, the sculptures of Quirigua are also one of the few complete, in situ series of Maya monuments anywhere, which makes them a crucial source of information about ancient Maya spirituality and political practice within a specific historical context.  Using epigraphic, iconographic, and stylistic analyses, this study explores the integrated political-religious meanings of Quirigua's monumental sculptures during the eighth-century A.D. reign of the city's most famous ruler, K'ak' Tiliw. In particular, Matthew Looper focuses on the role of stelae and other sculpture in representing the persona of the ruler not only as a political authority but also as a manifestation of various supernatural entities with whom he was associated through ritual performance. By tracing this sculptural program from its Early Classic beginnings through the reigns of K'ak' Tiliw and his successors, and also by linking it to practices at Copan, Looper offers important new insights into the politico-religious history of Quirigua and its ties to other Classic Maya centers, the role of kingship in Maya society, and the development of Maya art.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51612416049425,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51612417491217,"sku":"CIN0292705565G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0292705565.jpg?v=1763473325"},{"product_id":"lightning-gods-and-feathered-serpents-book-rex-koontz-9780292718999","title":"Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents","description":"Presents the treatment in over the years of the iconography displayed on public monuments in an important Mesoamerican city in Veracruz, Mexico. This title focuses on three major architectural features and investigates the meanings of their sculpture and how these meanings would have been experienced by specific audiences.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53259269734673,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53259269800209,"sku":"GOR014839230","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780292718999.jpg?v=1773747359"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/the-linda-schele-series-in-maya-and-pre-columbian-studies-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}