David Freidel

David Freidel
Washington University in St. Louis | WUSTL , Wash U · Department of Anthropology

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Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (99)
Article
Full-text available
Classic Maya history was rife with shifting political coalitions and disputes with the key antagonists, Tikal and the Kaan regime, at the center. Understanding how power dynamics and political shifts were experienced among subordinate polities is best viewed from multiple perspectives. We employ elements of Graeber and Sahlins' (2017) stranger-king...
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This chapter describes the archaeology of the royal palace of El Perú-Waka’. This structure, only partially explored, reflects the royal history of Classic Maya kingship in its architecture. The architecture served royal authority as an effective tool to spread messages that affirmed the ruler’s ability to achieving economic prosperity and social o...
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The Maya materialized beings from Creation Time by shaping natural features of the landscape. They made cosmographic landscapes from the Preclassic period. This chapter focuses the crocodile orthogonal form of Nixtun Ch’ich’ at the western end of Lake Peten Itza, dating from the beginning of the Middle Preclassic, and the turtle terraformed hill wi...
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In this introductory chapter, the editors begin by pointing out that the materialization of time, the most famous intellectual interest of the ancient Maya, was aspirational through charting of the future through prophecy and divination as well as contemplative of the past in myth and historical chronicle. They then outline important themes of the...
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Classic Maya rulers of the southern lowlands commissioned carved stone monuments that embodied them and placed their lives in historical time. They were, as Stuart declares, Time Lords. The practice also rendered rulers visible, shifting public focus from the buildings with images of gods on them to the rulers who conjured those gods. The animate n...
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This chapter presents the latest epigraphic discoveries from the site of El Perú-Waka’. These are placed within the context of the Mayan epigraphy of Waka’, its long procession of kings and queens and, in turn, their connections to the great powers of the Classic Maya history. They are also placed in the context of Classic civilization itself, the...
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This chapter concludes the volume, arguing that the large pyramids of El Perú-Waka’ served as an oracle, the architecture itself best glossed as “Turtle Mountain.” The oracular powers of Turtle Mountain served a parade of conquerors and would-be conquerors through the centuries of Classic Maya political history. In this way, El Perú-Waka’ served no...
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Full-text available
The Kaan (“Snake”) kings, a powerful political entity in the Classic Maya Lowlands, were housed in the Early Classic period at Dzibanche, and they moved their capital to Calakmul by the year a.d. 642 (Helmke and Awe 2016; Martin 2020:138–139). Their network of alliance and intermarriage radiated southward, and Waka's early eighth-century queen, Lad...
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Anthropologists have shown that many cultures across the globe do not consider the natural world and the cultural world as separate but rather operating as a single ontological reality—sometimes referred to as an animistic or relational ontology. From this perspective, the idealism of cosmology (magic) and the materialist realism of economy (Marxis...
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Full-text available
The royalty of the Classic Maya of Mesoamerica, and later sages of the Maya, used a powerful diphrastic kenning chab akab’, glossed as “generation-darkness” to convey a range of objectives, conjuring foremost among them. Known principally from hieroglyphic written expressions, but also depicted in the form of sacrificial instruments and offerings,...
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This Special Section focuses on recent research centered on iron-ore mirrors in Mesoamerica and Central America. Iron-ore mirrors are rare and esoteric artifacts, mainly crafted by specialized centers in the Maya, central Mexico, and Zapotec areas from the Early Preclassic to the Postclassic. They were found in numerous archaeological sites and cul...
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Full-text available
The Classic period lowland Maya used iron-ore mosaic mirrors and deposited mirrors in the burials of rulers and other people. Depictions of mirrors suggest that they were used for scrying, as were mirrors in Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish arrival. Maya mirror users of this kind were conjurors, who used a variety of other divining and conjur...
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Nearly 60 complete or fragmentary slate backings from iron-ore mirrors have been found in pre-Columbian funerary contexts in northern Costa Rica, including a couple that bear Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. With the exception of a single example dating between a.d. 800 and 1550, these slate objects typically occur in contexts dating from 300 b.c. t...
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Full-text available
Shamanism and animism have proven to be useful cross-cultural analytical tools for anthropology, particularly in religious studies. However, both concepts root in reductionist, social evolutionary theory and have been criticized for their vague and homogenizing rubric, an overly romanticized idealism, and the tendency to ‘other’ nonwestern peoples...
Chapter
Olivia Navarro-Farr and colleagues explore another example of how the Snake Kings manipulated the political landscape of the Classic period with a fascinating case study in ancient Maya queenship at Waka’ in Chapter 10. Waka’ was first embroiled by the geopolitics of the lowlands during the Teotihuacan entrada of AD 378, after which the kingdom was...
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Full-text available
The origins of religion and ritual in humans have been the focus of centuries of thought in archaeology, anthropology, theology, evolutionary psychology and more. Play and ritual have many aspects in common, and ritual is a key component of the early cult practices that underlie the religious systems of societies in all parts of the world. This boo...
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The material symbol-systems of the Preclassic (1000 BCE–250 CE) Maya reflect a focus on the daily and annual cycles of the sun and the relationship between these and the cycles of the agrarian year, particularly as represented in the anthropomorphic Maize God. The Maya sun gods, the Maize God, and the solar avatar of the Creator God Itzamnaaj or th...
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The significance of E Groups to the ancient Maya has been recognized for almost a century. Placed facing each other across a formal plaza, a western pyramid and a long eastern platform that usually supports three structures form the architectural arrangement known as an E Group. The solar alignments within an E Group were recognized first at Uaxact...
Book
“Leading archaeologists present the most recent evidence on a complex of architecture, iconography, and artifacts closely linked to the rise of the divine kingships of the ancient Maya. An important volume for anyone interested in the rise of ancient states.” —Arthur Demarest, author of Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization “...
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I had one other encounter with Don Pablo and talking stones. One day in the summer of 1989, after he had done some work on the camp kitchen, I found a clear glass marble in the area. Thinking it belonged to Don Pablo and was one of his saso’ob, the ‘lights’ he used when focusing on spiritual forces, I took it next door to him that evening. He took...
Book
Full-text available
This volume illuminates human lifeways in the northern Maya lowlands prior to the rise of Chichén Itzá. This period and area have been poorly understood on their own terms, obscured by scholarly focus on the central lowland Maya kingdoms. Before Kukulkán is anchored in three decades of interdisciplinary research at the Classic Maya capital of Yaxun...
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Exploring the long-term use of accounting practices and currencies by literate and numerate authorities contributes new information regarding the complexity of the political economy of ancient Maya society. Two forms of indirect, yet compelling, lines of evidence for accounting practices and currencies are presented in this article. First, we ident...
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Full-text available
This paper argues for the importance of complex market exchange in the Maya area prior to the so-called Postclassic “mercantile” period. We suggest that market exchange was foundational to the stability of Classic era polities, and by extension, that it was of key strategic interest to dynasts and their retinues. We reject some of the prevailing du...
Chapter
I come today as a pilgrim from the east, from Maya lowland country, sister and daughter civilization, to the heartland of the first civilization in our American part of the world: Olman, Olmec country. I will return to Maya country at the end of this journey. In Olman human ingenuity met a confluence of circumstances that gave birth to civilization...
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Full-text available
Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics of the Classic Period. Dorie Reents-Budet.
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Like other descendants of ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya today occupy a world in ruins, with temples, palaces, pyramids, and platforms so worn and naturalized as to be familiar but still haunting, strange, and, perhaps for some, even sacred. The Precolumbian city-dwelling Maya also inhabited such a world, one in which past ruins were perha...
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Masks of gods, a conqueror's elbows, and three other recent discoveries are determining the future of Maya archaeology.
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A series of Formative Period causeways (sacbeob) at the Maya site of Yaxuná, Yucatán, Mexico, constituted elements of an early geomantic plan that was renegotiated by the inhabitants of this centre for 1500–2000 years. This plan embodied a series of sacred metaphors including the World Tree and Milky Way. After its initial construction, this widely...
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The Maya of Central America constitute the only truly literate pre-Columbian civilization. Analysis of ancient Maya hieroglyphic texts and accompanying images dating from the Classic period (A.D. 200–900) documents the presence of a central and pervasive institution of governance: ahaw. The material symbol systems of the Lowland Maya of the protoli...
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The Bariba are the dominant ethnic group in the culturally heterogeneous northern provinces of the modern state of Bénin. Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes in some aspects of Bariba material culture, while others have remained more stable. An investigation of change and stability in Bariba material culture, with particular attention to...
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Full-text available
This chapter discusses subsistence, trade, and development of the Coastal Maya. The correlation of commercial production with trade centers can be documented at other locations on the lowland coasts. Even the great trading center of Chauaca located near the rich north-coast salt beds diversified production into groves of trees bearing copal incense...
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Full-text available
The rubber-ball game is a characteristic feature of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization. Masonry courts designed for variants of the game are relatively common at lowland Maya sites of the Late Classic period (660–900 A.C.). Before this period, ballcourts are extremely rare in this region; the developmental history of the game, therefore, remai...
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Recently several models have been proposed for the origin and evolution of lowland Maya civilization. These models share a basic spatial framework, the culture area, which is logically tied to a particular theoretical approach to the emergence of lowland Maya civilization. The culture area approach rests on the premise that sociocultural innovation...
Article
Excavation in a small pyramid at the lowland Maya site of Cerros has brought to light a well-preserved polychrome painted stucco façade dominated by a monumental mask. The façade constituted the first well- preserved example of Late Preclassic Maya architectural decoration exposed since discovery of Str. E-VII-sub at Uaxactun, Guatemala, in 1927. S...
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Traducción de: A forest of kings. The untold story of the ancient maya Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Este es el relato del reino maya desde el principio de su institución y los primeros constructores de grandes pirámides, hace 2000 años, hasta la decadencia de la civilización maya y su destrucción final.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1976. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 424-433).
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Traducción de:A forest of kings. The untold story of the ancient Maya Incluye bibliografía e índice

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