El esplendor físico de la cultura maya se aprecia sobre todo en la arquitectura y decorado de sus ciudades. Estas ciudades-estado constituían la sede del poder de los reyes-sacerdotes que administraban la obediencia, el tributo y la fuerza de trabajo del pueblo que creía en ellos. Se han identificado muchas ciudades y centros ceremoniales mayas, […]
Continue ReadingThe ancient game of amalla was not mere sport. The ballcourt was a “middleworld” between gods and humans, a battleground for the cosmic tension between life and death, good and evil, sacrifice and rebirth. After all, the Maya Hero Twins — Hunahpu and Xbalanque — had outsmarted the Lords of Death on the ballcourt by replacing a […]
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Baseball is not the oldest ballgame in the Americas Forget modern “traditions” like the World Series! Forget soccer, tennis and golf! By far the oldest ballgame in the Americas is the little known game of Ulama! Amazingly, this game is still played in some regions of Mexico, where it is believed to have originated more […]
Continue ReadingThe story of the Conquest of Mexico in 1521 by Cortés and the Spanish Conquistadores has been told many times, but usually from the standpoint of the victors. An notable exception is The Broken Spears (Boston, 1962), an attempt by the Mexican scholar Miguel Leon-Portilla to give voice to the victims and survivors of the […]
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Legendary Mexican artist and master muralist Diego Rivera spent so much time avidly collecting pre-Hispanic art it’s a wonder he ever got around to painting. Rivera amassed a collection of thousands of objects: pottery items, stone and jade figures of animals, gods and humans. Many of the purchases were made on the black market. On […]
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During twenty-four years of reconnoitering the highways and byways of western Mexico, I have never come across a road as rewarding as the 53-kilometer stretch from Tala to San Marcos in the state of Jalisco. This road is marked as Jalisco Highway 4 on many maps, but beware: you might also find it labeled highway […]
Continue ReadingAnyone who has ever had enough stamina or time to traipse through the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City gets a mere glimpse of Mexico’s treasures. I’ve heard there are enough artifacts in storage to fill the museum twenty times over, and still have skeletons in the closet. There was a time when it […]
Continue ReadingMexico is a country rich in creative expression, and its creative roots go far back into the history of its people. In much of the modern work done today, one can still catch a glimpse of the mysterious energy that permeated all pre-Columbian work. In the state of Veracruz, the Xalapa Anthropological Museum houses a […]
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Tala is a small town located 30 kilometers due west of Guadalajara and best known for its large, government-operated sugar refinery, infamous for being the major polluter of Lake La Vega. Two thousand years ago, however, Tala was the residential district of a large metropolis with a population of some 60,000 people. “Most likely,” says […]
Continue ReadingAbstract In the past, environmental conservation has emphasized the protection of the physical environment through the exclusion of humans. As a result, the local inhabitants in and surrounding protected areas often perceive conservation policies to be a threat to their land-use rights and source of livelihood. The objective of this project was to examine the […]
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