The defeat of the Aztecs of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1521 was but the beginning of a long and torturous conquest of Central America that did not always result in the mastery of people and production for which the Spanish had hoped. The Maya of the resource-poor Yucatán peninsula were spared the heavy colonial hand that held fast to central Mexico and its riches. In addition, the dense forests...

We have coupled the three-dimensional solver for the two-phase incompressible Navier-Stokes equations NaSt3DGPF with Autodesk Maya. Maya is the industry standard software framework for the creation of three-dimensional animations. The parallel level-set-based fluid solver NaSt3DGPF simulates the interaction of two fluids like air and water. It uses high-order finite difference discretization me...

The Maya area is well endowed with cave art, one of the rarest art forms known in the world. Over 25 caves with paintings and handprints have been documented in a recent survey by the author, and an undetermined additional number contain carvings. In this paper, I outline regional differences in the corpus. For example, cave painting in the Puuc area of western Yucatan has a relatively coherent...

This paper examines how a new highway in Belize will change a tropical forest landscape. Since the end of British colonialism (1981), the Maya communities in Belize’s Toledo District have struggled with the state for control of the lands they have customarily used to produce a livelihood. We were approached by some Maya leaders, who recognize that the paving of a new highway through their villa...

We present a system for hieroglyphical composition of ancient Maya texts, to be used for their palaeography, the production of dictionaries, epigraphical articles and textbooks. It is designed on the base of TEX and PostScript using the Dvips interface, and includes a set of Maya fonts. The ancient Mayan writing system is very particular: base writing signs attach to each other from all four si...

and Middle Formative (ca. 1200-500 B.C.) Olmec symbol system is the focus of the present study.1 We have identified a series of symbols in largeand small-scale stone objects and ceramics representing perforators and a zoomorphic supernatural associated with bloodletting. While aspects of this iconography are comparable to later Classic Lowland Maya iconography of bloodletting, its deployment in...

Previous research on the tone system of Yucatec Maya provides contradictory accounts which this paper intends to do away with, disentangling tonal and intonational effects. The first part presents the mere realisation of lexical high and low tones, the only tonal distinction we identify for Yucatec Maya. Second, we claim that in Yucatec Maya no interaction exists between intonation and lexical ...

I criticize recent applications of the "cosmogram" concept to ancient Maya architecture and cities. Although cosmogramsgraphic representations of aspects of the cosmos-are known from Late Postclassic and early colonial Aztec and Maya sources, there is no textual suggestion that buildings or cities were viewed as cosmograms. Numerous authors, how eve^ assert confidently that architectural cosmog...

During April and May 2013, a total of 1057 km of LiDAR was flown by NCALM for a consortium of archaeologists working in West-central Belize, making this the largest surveyed area within the Mayan lowlands. Encompassing the Belize Valley and the Vaca Plateau, West-central Belize is one of the most actively researched parts of the Maya lowlands; however, until this effort, no comprehensive survey...

How did people in preIndustrial ancient civilizations produce and distribute bulk items, such as salt, needed for everyday use by their large urban populations? This report focuses on the ancient Maya who obtained quantities of salt at cities in the interior of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala in an area where salt is scarce. I report the discovery of 41 Late Classic Maya ...