This comprehensive and accessible reference explores the greatest and most mysterious of civilizations, hailed for its contributions to science, mathematics, and technology. Each chapter is supplemented by an extensive bibliography as well as photos, original line drawings, and maps.

This is a presentation of research on all aspects of Maya civilisation, from its earliest beginnings to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.

Describes the Ancient Mayan civilization, including their religious views, intellectual achievements, and everyday life.

Theirs was one of the few complex societies to emerge in and to adapt successfully to a tropical-forest environment. Their architecture, sculpture, and painting were sophisticated and compellingly beautiful.

The Maya World brings together over 60 authors, representing the fields of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, geography, and ethnography, who explore cutting-edge research on every major facet of the ancient Maya and all sub-regions within the Maya world. The Maya world, which covers Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, contains over a hundred ancient sites that are open to tourism, eight of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and many thousands more that have been dug or await investigation. In addition to captivating the lay public, the ancient Maya have attracted scores of major interdisciplinary research expeditions and hundreds of smaller projects going back to the 19th century, making them one of the best-known ancient cultures. The Maya World explores their renowned writing system, towering stone pyramids, exquisitely painted murals, and elaborate funerary tombs as well as their creative agricultural strategies, complex social, economic, and political relationships, widespread interactions with other societies, and remarkable cultural resilience in the face of historical ruptures. This is an invaluable reference volume for scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.

Describes daily life in the Aztec world, including coverage of geography, foods, trades, arts, games, wars, political systems, class structure, religious practices, trading networks, writings, architecture and science.

"Comprehensive synthesis of ancient Maya scholarship. Extensive summary of the archaeology of the Maya world provides the historical context for a detailed topical synthesis of chronological and geographic variability within the Maya cultural tradition"--