Anth, 29 April 2002

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last class

final : Friday 12-2



Ancient Mayans cont'd

• pyramid stairs forced to crawl


• city design


• temples and stele


• cities as mountain, temples as caves by which the earth is entered


• stele are as tropical trees, frequently inscribed


• open plaza used as stage for rituals


• pyramid top used as grand stage for execution of prized captive, bound and rolled down the stairs into crowd


• hidden passages with benches for rest


• even passages were brilliantly painted


• facade: red with large masks


• bark paper soaks up blood of sacrifice and burn with black smoke


• many city-states had four or five plazas


• Tucal?: 7000 buildings known 5-7 sq mi


• renewal: level temple but not pyramid and start building on top of the rubble


• excavations sometimes unearth 3,4 temples on same site


• blood is the food of the earth


• treasured brilliantly colored feathers


• jaguar: alter-ego of king


• ball games: hard rubber ball


• ball had to be kept in motion to continue the motion of the heavens


• elbows, hips, knees


• later the stone ring was added for team games on large courts


• one goal scored would win (high hoop)


• closer to the fall of the Mayans, loosing team would be sacrificed


• astronomer priest obeservatory


• page of one of 4 remaining bark paper books


• inscription stone (being used as farm boundary)


• recorded the date of the birth of the successor to king Smoking Rabbit


• mural: bloodletting ritual: stringray spine, barbed rope, tongues


• carving: queen bleeding her tongue on birth of her trial


• Visions told the [victim] that the sacrifice was accepted


• vision serpent [naga] was particulary profound


• sucess signaled by priests to crowd by whistle


• carving: king's sacrifice blood from foreskin


• no substitute for royal sacrifices


• droughts came on -> calls for more blood


• wars between city states began to capture warriors not for work but for sacrifice


• and later still commoners were captured and sacrificed


• Mayan commoners deserted, returned to forest and tribal existence

Descendants of the Maya

• thatched hut, poles lashed together


• subsistence farming, wage labor


• big families common (Catholic, Protestants encourage this)


• hammocks, dirt floors


• water access problematic


• firewood becoming difficult to find (slash and burn)


• peasant lands overfarmed


• slash and burn soil, drought (brought on by deforestation)


• hillsides and rocky areas never farmed before are being stripped -> erosion


• transportation is by horse and bull cart


• peasant stores sell beans or seed a cup at a time


• two asprin for a quarter


• rivers are highways


• river taxi: large dugout with outboard, carry cargo school kids


• schooling up to about sixth grade


• open sewer systems, canals feed waste into river


• open market


• backstrap looms (lean backwards to keep tension on threads)


• Christmas festival competition: one radish carving (beachball sized)


• families come into town and sleep on sidewalks


• prize: $200 (an incredible fortune locally)

Peasants:

• limited access to land, water, tech, capital, and other resources


• subsistence farmers but cash dependant


• cash sources: wage labour (seasonal), handicrafts, cash crop


• impact of cash crops, marketing boards, plantation system, large scale ranching


• other links to State:
  
  
  
  • military service (conscription)
  
  
  • corvee: mandatory labor for government projects
  
  
  
  


• States are dependant on the (invisible) peasants' labor

Fair Trade?

• National Marketing Board sets price for a crop


• illegal to sell crop without Marketing Board


• "land reform" : sounds like nationalization


• land is controlled by a few elite


• thousands of acres of S. Mexico are owned by 3% population


• foreign aid (money, food) is gov't to gov't and goes through these systems


• try community to community, person to person aid

Handicrafts:

• Indonesia: hand (pen knife and chisel) monkey


• : hand () carving of elephants


• woven bird basket

Industrial society

• technological


• class system


• wasteful: superfluous plastic packaging


• cows: eat 90% of our corn crop and do no labour, dung wasted

everything in CP
50 multiple guess: hunting and gathering, tribes, chiefdoms, pre-i states, industrial states, net site about chiefdom in pacific, articles in Reader
(not children, not unassigned)

essay questions: HO, use an index card (3" by 5")