This year’s symposium, titled The Center Could Not Hold: The Ancient Maya and Collapse, will explore the issue of political decline over the span of ancient Maya prehistory.
The goal of this symposium is to showcase some of the most recent research in the Maya region that helps us examine and understand an array of topics surrounding the political decline of the Maya Civilization. New texts, new analytical techniques, and new discoveries discussed in these presentations will help us appreciate how complex the cultural processes and environmental events in the Maya Lowlands that culminated in what has often been seen as a political collapse was.
Since 2002, Tulane University has hosted a weekend of talks and workshops dedicated to the study of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America. This yearly meeting has called upon scholars from a wide spectrum of specialties -- archaeology, art history, cultural anthropology, epigraphy, history, and linguistics -- to elucidate the many facets of this fascinating Mesoamerican culture. In developing a broad approach to the subject matter, we aim to draw the interest of a wide ranging audience -- from the expert to the beginner.
To that end, we have assembled a wonderful group of scholars in Maya archaeology whose different fields of expertise will allow us to muster as diverse an array of evidence as possible. Given how rare of an accomplishment such a consortium is, please JOIN US!
Speakers
"Is “Collapse” a Useful Term in Understanding Pre-Columbian Maya History?" -- Jeremy A. Sabloff
"Political Cycling, Resilience and Collapse during the Preclassic Period of Pacific Guatemala" -- Michael Love and Julia E. Guernsey
"The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Chichen Itza" -- Geoffrey E. Braswell
"Ecosystem and Cultural Collapse" -- Mark Brennerv
"Climate and Collapse? Developing High-Precision Chronologies to Bridge Disciplines" -- Julie A. Hoggarth
"Late Classic Maya Political Disintegration: Insights from Aguateca and Ceibal" -- Daniela Triadan
"The Classic Maya Collapse: Towards a Structural-Demographic Approach" -- Dmitri Beliaev
"And Then There Were None: The Terminal Classic Abandonment of the Puuc Region, Yucatan, Mexico" -- George J. Bey, III and Tomas Gallareta Negron
"Cycles of Demographic Catastrophe and Recovery from the Terminal Classic through Postclassic Periods of the Northern Plains: New Settlement and Chronological Data from the Mayapán Vicinity" -- Marilyn A. Masson, Carlos Peraza Lope, Timothy Hare, Douglas J. Kennett, Stanley Serafin, and Bradley W. Russell
"New Archaeological, Epigraphic, and Linguistic Evidence on the Classic Period ‘Collapse’" -- Marc Zender and Marcello Canuto
"Emergence, Collapse, and Transformation in Mississippian Chiefdoms of the American South" -- Christopher B. Rodning
"Animating Effigy Censers at Mayapán: Links to the Codices and Yucatec Ethnohistory" -- Susan Milbrath
"DIY Ceramic Analysis" -- Caroline Parris
"Last Men Standing: Uaxactun Dynasty in the Terminal Classic" -- Dmitri Beliaev
"Introduction to the Ch’orti Maya Language" -- James Dugan