Maya civilization

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version:

A deeply inadequate placeholder. I have been fascinated by the ancient Maya since reading about them as a boy, and finally got to see some of the ruins in 2009...

See also: Pre-Columbian Civilizations in general

Michael D. Coe, The Maya
David Freidel, Linda Schele and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path
Robert Sharer with Loa Traxler, The Ancient Maya
Dennis Tedlock (ed. and trans.), 2000 Years of Mayan Literature

Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code
Peter D. Harrison, The Lords of Tikal: Rulers of an Ancient Maya City
Jessica Munson, Viviana Amati, Mark Collard and Martha J. Macri, "Classic Maya Bloodletting and the Cultural Evolution of Religious Rituals: Quantifying Patterns of Variation in Hieroglyphic Texts", PLoS ONE 9 (2014): e107982 [Not a context in which I ever expected to find one of my own papers cited!]
Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatán
Matthew Restall and Amara Solari, 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse
John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan
B. L. Turner II and Jeremy A. Sabloff, "Classic Period collapse of the Central Maya Lowlands: Insights about human-environment relationships for sustainability", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 109 (2012): 13908--13914 [Jargony, but persuasive]

Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya
Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517--1570
Arthur Demarest, Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization
Arthur Demarest and Don Rice (eds.), The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation
James Doyle, Architecture and the Origins of Preclassic Maya Politics
Peter M. J. Douglas, Mark Pagani, Marcello A. Canuto, Mark Brenner, David A. Hodell, Timothy I. Eglinton, and Jason H. Curtis, "Drought, agricultural adaptation, and sociopolitical collapse in the Maya Lowlands", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 112 (2015): 5607--5612
Barbara W. Fash, The Copan Sculpture Museum: Ancient Maya Artistry in Stucco and Stone
Finamore et al. (eds.), Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea
Lynn V. Foster, Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World
Thomas H. Guderjan, The Nature of an Ancient Maya City: Resources, Interaction, and Power at Blue Creek, Belize
John S. Henderson, The World of the Ancient Maya
Stephen D. Houston and Takeshi Inomata, The Classic Maya
David L. Lentz, Nicholas P. Dunning and Vernon L. Scarborough (eds.), Tikal: Paleoecology of an Ancient Maya City
John Lowe, The Dynamics of Apocalypse [A computer model of the collapse of the Classic Maya]
Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations
Simon Martin, Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150--900 CE
Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens
Heather McKillop, The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives
Cameron L. McNeil, David A. Burney, and Lida Pigott Burney, "Evidence disputing deforestation as the cause for the collapse of the ancient Maya polity of Copan, Honduras", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 107 (2010): 1017--1022
June Nash, Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization
Alexander Parmington, Space and Sculpture in the Classic Maya City
Vernon L. Scarborough, Nicholas P. Dunning, Kenneth B. Tankersley, Christopher Carr, Eric Weaver, Liwy Grazioso, Brian Lane, John G. Jones, Palma Buttles, Fred Valdez, and David L. Lentz, "Water and sustainable land use at the ancient tropical city of Tikal, Guatemala", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 12408--12413
L. Schele and M. E. Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art
David Webster, The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse