Customer Reviews (1)

Rather dry
This book is a slight improvement over its predecessor, Davies' own work entitled The Toltecs: until the fall of Tula. There is more chronological flow, and somewhat less space devoted to scholarly disputes. Nonetheless, the style still is rather dry.A shorter, one-volume overview of the Toltecs, written in a more engaging way, would fill a gap. ... Read more

Product Description
From the Seminole Wars to the Little Big Horn, the history of America's native peoples and their contacts with those seeking to settle or claim a new land has often been marked by violence. The sites of these conflicts, unlike many sites related to the American Revolution and the War Between the States, are often difficult to locate, and information on these battles is frequently sketchy or unclear. This reference work provides essential information on these sites. The arrangement is by state, with sections for Canada and Mexico. Each entry has information about how to find the site, tours, museums, and resources for further study. In addition, there is a chronological list of battles and other encounters between Indians and non-Indians, including dates, location in the text, and the larger conflict of which each battle was a part. There is an index of battle locations and an index of prominent people involved. The bibliography and site listings are cross-referenced for further research. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A great historical reference!
I found this book to be quite helpful and informative, as well as historically accurate (contrary to what the previous reviewer found). I think he may need to do a little more research.

Sloppy research and poor editing
I picked up this work with much anticipation, but was sadly disappointed.This work suffers from sloppy research and poor editing.Steve Rajtar book promises much, but fails to deliver.By way of example, he has placed the Battle of Hembrillo Canyon in Arizona rather New Mexico, he refers to the arms carried by Capt. James Powell's 18th Infantrymen as breechloading, Springfield repeaters.Breechloading yes, but not repeaters.They were .50 Allyn conversions, single-shot trapdoor rifles.According to Rajtar, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie's 4th Cavalry lost hundreds of soldiers in the Red River War, a patently absurb assertion.According to his bibliography, Rajtar neglected using some well-regarded classics like Dan Thrapp's Conquest of Apacheria and James Haley's Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874.I'm returning my copy.As a professional historian teaching military history, courses on the Indian Wars at the university level, and actively engaged in research on these subjects I say to all, do not spend your hard-earned dollars on this slipshod, amateurish work undertaken by an unqualified author. ... Read more

Product Description
"Part field guide, part book of vignettes discussing the animals and plants most commonly seen in the Maya area, this fine guide provides a fresh synthesis of anthropological and biological research that will serve as an engaging and practical resource for visitors, students, and burgeoning naturalists."--Paul R. Ehrlich, President, Center for Conservation Biology, StanfordUniversityA growing interest in all things Maya brings an increasing number of visitors to prehistoric Maya ruins and contemporary Maya communities in Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the southern areas of Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. For these visitors and indeed everyone with an interest in the Maya, this field guide highlights nearly 100 species of plants and animals that were significant to the ancient Maya and that continue to inhabit the Maya region today. Drawing from the disciplines of biology, ecology, and anthropology, Victoria Schlesinger describes each plant or animal's habitat and natural history, identifying characteristics (also shown in a black-and-white drawing), and cultural significance to the ancient and contemporary Maya. An introductory section explains how to use the book and offers a concise overview of the history, lifeways, and cosmology of the ancient Maya. The concluding section describes the collapse of ancient Maya society and briefly traces the history of the Maya region from colonial times to the present. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Disappointing from the Mayanist perspective
I give this book three stars because, from the other reviews, it seems to have been quite good from the naturalist perspective.Unfortunately, I am far more of a Mayanist then a naturalist and from that point of view, the book was a sad disappointment.
First, although the title offers a Mayan concentration, the few references to indigenous cultures would be more appropriately labeled, 'Meso-American', especially as the author either cannot, or simply does not, distinguish one from the other.Many depictions, although easily traced (i.e. to the Aztecs) are labeled simply Meso-American.
Second, there is very little in the text about the plants and animals and their relations to the ancient inhabitants of Meso-America at all.Most entries fail to mention them altogether and the few that do, offer only the scantiest references.
Finally, several of the illustrations and factoid snippets that do relate to the indigenous cultures of Meso-America are woefully out of date.Indeed the author quotes Mayanist 'authorities' that, although laudable for their early work in the field, were of such an eccentric nature that it would be laughable in any other context to refer to their 'scholarship'.
As stated above, I cannot criticize this text from the standpoint of a simple field guide to various flora and fauna, but from the title, I had hoped for much, much more.Perhaps if the publisher would make a few pages available for viewing, this problem would be solved.

EARTH-SHATTERING!!!!
I have no idea who wrote this book, but it is the best thing I have ever read.Victoria Schlesinger's writing shows muscle as well as sensitivity.She disects, trisects, and intersects completely, revealing jungular dimensions of phantasmaflora.

A thousand botanists bow down before
eye flush with pride from afar.

Incredible!
This book is not simply an introduction to South American plants and animals.It is a fascinating journey through Mayan culture, with the role these elements played for the ancient Maya.This book is equal parts history, medicine, education, and adventure.I got it for Christmas and couldn't put it down.

Exceptional!
(Planeta.com Journal) - One of the best books of the past year, this work combines the details of a scientific field guide with anthropological research. The result is outstanding.

Author Victoria Schlesinger tells the story about the animals and plants most commonly seen in Mundo Maya -- Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. The book provides a synthesis of current research and will delight specialists and travelers alike. Chapters focus on Pine-Oak, Cloud and Tropical Forests, Savannas, Mangroves and Coral Reefs.

The book is well illustrated with line drawings by Juan C. Chab-Medina. This is a beautiful book which would make an excellent holiday gift. I'm trying to think of a book that has piqued my interest as much as Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya, and I'd have to put this a category with Lane Simonian's Defending the Land of the Jaguar. Excellent!

A stunningly imaginative guide to the past
This is one of those incredibly rare guidebooks that pushes past the confines of the genre and brings something totally fresh to the endeavor. I am not a Maya scholar, but Schlesinger's writing is so evocative that I couldn't help but be totally pulled in by her descriptions of the plants and animals that inhabited the Maya world. ... Read more

Product Description
This book presents discussions on the formation of complex society of Southeastern Mesoamerica throughout pre-Columbian times. These societies include ones from the Early Preclassic or Formative period to those encountered by the Spaniards when they arrived in the early 16th century. Diverse classes of data from archaeology, ethnography, and ethnohistory are utilized. The book provides wide spatial and temporal coverage, as well as a wide diversity of theoretical perspectives. Anyone interested in archeology or the evolution of prehistoric complex societies will find this book fascinating. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Comments from one of the contributors.
Although admittedly pricey, this is an excellent source of recent information on Early Formative cultures of Mesoamerica and southern Central America.Contributors are:Michael Blake, Marilyn Beaudry, John Clark, Arthur Demarest, Bill Fowler, John Hoopes, Gloria Lara Pinto, Mike Love, Skip Messenger, Mary Pye, Ed Schortman, Pat Urban, David Whitley, and Tony Wonderley. ... Read more

Product Description
"This is one of the more fascinating travel works I have read on Mexico, and I have read many. It provides an important addition to the scanty literature on the Tarahumara and enriches the material available on this important group. I would also think this book would be fascinating to the general reader."--Joseph W. Whitecotton, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of OklahomaIn 1930, anthropologists Robert Zingg and Wendell Bennett spent nine months among the Tarahumara of Chihuahua, Mexico, one of the least acculturated indigenous societies in North America. Their fieldwork resulted in The Tarahumara: An Indian Tribe of Northern Mexico (1935), a classic ethnography still familiar to anthropologists. In addition to this formal work, Zingg also penned a personal, unvarnished travelogue of his sojourn among the Tarahumara. Unpublished in his lifetime, Behind the Mexican Mountains is now available in print for the first time. This colorful account provides a compelling description of the landscape, people, traditions, language, and archaeology of the Tarahumara region. Abandoning the scientific detachment of the observer, Zingg frankly records his reactions to the people and their customs as he vividly evokes the daily experience of doing fieldwork. In the introduction, Howard Campbell examines Zingg's writing in light of current critiques of anthropology as literature. He makes a strong case that although earlier anthropological writing reveals unacceptable cultural biases, it also demonstrates the ongoing importance and vitality of field research. ... Read more

Product Description
For more than a millennium the great Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacn (c. 150 b.c.a.d. 750) has been imagined and reimagined by a host of subsequent cultures including our own. Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage engages the subject of the unity and diversity of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica by focusing on the classic heritage of this ancient city.This new volume is the product of several years of research by members of Princeton University's Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project and Mexico's Proyecto Teotihuacn.Offering a variety of disciplinary perspectives--including the history of religions, anthropology, archaeology, and art history--and a wealth of new data, Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage examines Teotihuacn's rippling influence across Mesoamerican time and space, including important patterns of continuity and change, and its relationships, both historical and symbolic, with Tenochtitlan, Cholula, and various Mayan communities.

The contributors to Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage offer a wide range of individual interpretations, but they agree that Teotihuacn, more than any other pre-Hispanic center, was a paradigmatic source that informed the art and architecture, cosmology and ritual life, and conceptions of urbanism and political authority for significant parts of the Mesoamerican world.This great city achieved the prestige of being the site of the creation of the cosmos and of effective social and political space in Mesoamerica through its capacity to symbolize, perform, and export its imperial authority.These essays reveal the different ways in which Teotihuacn's classic heritage both fed and fed on the dynamic interactivity of the entire area. Whether a paradigm shift in Mesoamerican studies is taking place, certainly a new contextual understanding of Teotihuacn and the diversities and unities of Mesoamerica is emerging in these pages. ... Read more

Product Description
Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica presents different analytical approaches for interpreting household composition and cultural site formation processes in prehispanic western Mesoamerica. Archaelogical data collected using both stratigraphic and reconnaisance methods are combined with and interpreted using a combination of ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological information. The result is a richer and more complete picture of prehispanic household structure than any single analytic approach could produce on its own. The book is organized into several sections based on common theme and geographic area. The first three chapters provide a broad discussion of conceptual and methodological difficulties that archaeologists must resolve in the study of prehispanic households. Subsequent chapters present case studies which examine households from two areas of western Mesoamerica: the Central Mexican highlands and the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Eight case studies from the Central Mexican highlands provide a longitudinal perspective on changing household composition.Four of these examine households during the late Formative, Classic, Epiclassic, and Early Postclassic periods (650 B.C.-A.D. 1200), while four others focus specifically on household structure during the century immediately preceding the Spanish Conquest. Two additional case studies provide comparative information on household organization in the South Gulf Coast region during the Classic period. Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica: Studies of the Household, Compound, and Residence will be an excellent reference for all anthropologists and archaeologists interested in prehispanic western Mesoamerica. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an anthropological study of the role of hieroglyphic writing in the prehispanic Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya states. First, Joyce Marcus compares the four systems with regard to eight major themes: calendrics, the naming of nobles, the naming of places, royal marriages, accession to the throne, divine ancestors, warfare, and the rewriting of history. Then she establishes a new theoretical framework within which to conduct further analysis. Her basic contention is that ancient Mesoamerican writing was a tool used by an elite minority in their competition for positions of leadership, prestige, territory, tribute, and advantageous marriages. Marcus convincingly demonstrates that while it may have been based on actual persons and events, this body of prehistoric writing is a deliberately created tangle of what we could call propaganda, myth, and fact, written for political purposes, and not (as many contemporary scholars have come to believe) reliable "history" in a modern sense. "This is a major contribution. The scholarship is first-rate!"--Jeremy A. Sabloff, University of Pittsburgh "A brilliant work, carefully reasoned and effectively argued, but balanced and not overstated. The scholarship is truly outstanding. Joyce Marcus is one of the great Mesoamericanists of our generation."--E. Wyllys Andrews V, Tulane University "A masterful piece of work. We are in the presence of a tour de force."--Robert L. Carneiro, American Museum of Natural History ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Ancient Mesoamerican Writing and What It Tells Us
Marcus's volume is the most comprehensive book on the market in the field of Mesoamerican epigraphy, the study of ancient writing systems among four high cultures that arose in what was later to become Mexico and Guatemala: the Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Maya.Marcus is recognized as one of the preeminent scholars of these early writing systems, with a pedigree that includes having studied with perhaps the greatest of the Mesoamerican epigraphers, Tatiana Proskouriakoff.Marcus also is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which indicates the esteem with which she is held by her peers.Thus she is more than capable of pushing the field of Mesoamerican epigraphy forward, and the present volume demonstrates adequately that she has done so.Unlike some modern epigraphers, Marcus casts a wary eye on the literal nature of the hieroglyphic notations contained in the various texts, a caution reflected in the subtitle of the book.In short, she views Mesoamerican writing systems as part propaganda, part myth, and part history; thus, as she states, it was both a tool and a by-product of competition for prestige and leadership positions.

The volume includes 12 chapters that integrate various topics such as the nature of Mesoamerican calendars, royal marriages, place names, and ancestors-a much better format than arranging the book strictly by cultural group.The greatest strength of the book lies in clarity of presentation and the inclusion of several hundred line drawings of examples of glyphs.The drawings make it easy to follow Marcus's discussion of things such as the various Mesoamerican calendars in use throughout Mesoamerica.

I recommend the volume to anyone with an interest in calendrics, epigraphy, and/or Mesoamerican archaeology, from the advanced undergraduate to the professional as well as members of the general public.Anyone except experts will have to be willing to work a little bit to fully comprehend Marcus's explanations of the writing systems, but the task is not as daunting as it seems.All in all, a five-star treatise. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on March 27, 1997. The length of the article is 512 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Operan en Chiapas Defensorías de Oficio. (Defensorías de Oficio Indígenas)(TT: Defense Departments operate in Chiapas) (TA: Office of the Defenders ofIndigenous People)
Publication: Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: March 27, 1997
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: v43Issue: n2284Page: p96(1)

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