Wendy Ashmore

University of California, Riverside | UCR · Department of Anthropology

This chapter examines ancient Maya landscapes to bring into relief two areas of ancient Maya life: centering urban landscapes within a cosmology; and sustainable communities. It suggests that understanding ancient Maya landscapes and taking the implications of their meanings seriously provide insight into what productive human–land relationships co...

Archaeology and anthropology generally share with geography an interest in the relationship of humans to their environments. This relationship involves material exchanges but also draws from social relations as well as political, symbolic, and religious practices. Thus, while climate and natural resources shape human biology and culture over time,...

This presentation is about sexed and gendered individuals in contexts of social relations and mortuary practices. More specifically, we consider women who were interred with seeming respect in several burial chambers in the Late Classic Maya elite residential compound of Copan Groups 8L-10 and 8L-12, nicknamed the Copan North Group. We reflect on w...

Classic Maya history is deeply political, and religious and political activities frequently inseparable. This essay advocates directly comparing mortuary practices over time for rulers at politically and economically linked centers. Most specifically it outlines an experimental model of how acts of remembrance in royal ancestor veneration articulat...

Landscapes are undeniably among the liveliest, most enduring, and well-grounded topics in studies of the ancient Maya. This article explores how geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, epigraphers, artists, art historians, and other outside observers, together with indigenous Maya, have shaped our thinking about landscapes. In what follows, I...

Essays in this Special Section highlight varied and convergent North, Central and South American expressions of knowledge and belief about time, space, and cosmovision, especially as manifest in lived experience inflected by politico-economic circumstance.

Capturing the fluid, dynamic interactions that constitute political form and change is best accomplished by adopting a network perspective. This approach calls attention to how power contests are waged close to the ground by self‐reflexive agents who co‐operate within wider webs to mobilize material and conceptual resources in support of common pol...

Landscapes figure centrally in conceptions and writings about ancient Mesoamerica. This selective review considers four interrelated kinds of landscapes investigated archaeologically in Mesoamerica: ecology and land use, social history, ritual expression, and cosmologic meaning. The literature on each topic is large, and from its inception, Ancient...

From critical ecology to phenomenology, landscape archaeology takes many forms. Interpretations are shaped by researchers' theoretical perspectives, which vary with intellectual traditions and changing social and political milieus. All, however, share one central concern - how humans interact with the world around them. Ecological studies examine e...

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Concerns with spatial dimensions and social inference have long histories in archaeology. However, the two histories are not always conjoined. This article considers changing understandings of space in archaeology in the last half century, and the variable nature of what "social" has denoted and connoted during that same span. The review highlights...

Interest in the history of archaeology has grown dramatically in the past two decades, and rapidly growing publications, from books to articles to a newsletter devoted to the subject, have provided syntheses of the development of archaeological knowledge and significant new insights into the growth of the discipline of archaeology in both methodolo...

Comparing the source of a commodity with the social levels of the people amongst whom it is found can reveal important aspects of social structure. This case study of a Maya community, using archaeological and ethnographic data, shows that pine and pine charcoal was procured at a distance and distributed unevenly in settlements. The researchers ded...

[English] In response to Smith's critique, we situate our work within the scientific method. We review how our hypotheses arose, how and by whom they have been tested, and with what results. Like Smith, we focus on whether Maya civic centers include emphatic expression of a north-south axis, and on the inference of a partially cosmological basis of...

Ancient civic centers materialize ideas of proper spatial organization, among the Maya as in other societies. We argue that the position and arrangement of ancient Maya buildings and arenas emphatically express statements about cosmology and political order. At the same time, the clarity of original spatial expression is often blurred in the sites...

This article presents the chronological framework used to reconstruct the political history of the ancient Lowland Maya site of Xunantunich in the upper Belize River valley. Extensive excavations from 1991 to 1997 by the Xunantunich Archaeological Project produced the ceramic, architectural, and epigraphic data needed to place the site within...

This article presents the chronological framework used to reconstruct the political history of the ancient Lowland Maya site of Xunantunich in the upper Belize River valley. Extensive excavations from 1991 to 1997 by the Xunantunich Archaeological Project produced the ceramic, architectural, and epigraphic data needed to place the site within a tem...

The author argues that the built environment becomes a constraint on the long-term development of a settlement. The author states that it is costly to move settlements, or to demolish and rebuild from scratch, so the initial layout and buildings, and the associated forms of communication, may come to shackle further development and to place constra...

Many societies use architecture for symbolic expression, and often buildings or other constructions constitute maps of a culture's worldview. Archaeological identification of such ideational expressions is receiving renewed attention, in the Maya area as in many other regions. Excavations in 1988-1989 in Groups 8L-10 through 8L-12, Copán, Honduras,...

The Santa Barbara Archaeological Project was initiated in 1983 to investigate the middle drainage of the Ulua River in west-central Honduras. Regional cultural development has been traced, in a basically continuous sequence, from the Late Preclassic through the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century and into the early colonial era. -from Author...

Archaeological study of the SE Maya Periphery has lagged considerably behind research in other portions of Mesoamerica, resulting in a dearth of time-space systematics for this extensive zone. In addition, the examination of prehistoric interaction networks encompassing state and non-state level societies and their mutual effects has not received m...

After 1977, archaeological field research at Quirigua, Guatemala, was to have constituted primarily finishing touches for programs nearly completed in prior seasons. Instead, the unanticipated solution of what had been an enduring data-collection problem provided a wealth of new information that has substantially broadened knowledge of the nature a...

Studies of ancient Maya water management tend to emphasize consideration of features related either to agriculture or to the provision of communal water supplies in water-poor settings. Ceramic-lined wells in eighth-century Quirigua, however, constituted household facilities of standardized form, distributed widely in a community where water suppli...

Thesis (Ph.D. in Anthropology)--Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1981.