This year’s symposium, titled The Blood Pooled, the Heads Piled Up: How the Maya Waged War, will explore how the ancient Maya conceived, planned, and conducted warfare throughout their history.
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 such as war preparation, fighting, and depicting battle in art. New texts, new analytical techniques, and new discoveries discussed in these presentations will help us appreciate how complex and dynamic Maya warfare 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!
Speaker
"The Bold and the Bellicose: Maya Warfare in the Conquest Era" -- Dr. Matthew Restall
"Contested Landscapes: Competition and Warfare in the Mopan Valley of Western Belize" -- Jason Yaeger and M. Kathryn Brown
"Fortresses, Refuges, and Surveillance: Reconsidering the Pervasiveness of Maya Warfare" -- Thomas Garrison and Stephen Houston
"The War and its Consequences: La Blanca (Petén) at the Terminal Classic Period" -- Cristina Vidal Lorenzo and Gaspar Muñoz Cosme
"Fractured Lands: War in the Kingdoms of Piedras Negra and Yaxchilan" -- Andrew K. Scherer and Charles Golden
"The Epigraphy of Classic Maya Warfare" -- Simon Martin
"Scattered to the Wind: The Monuments of Caracol’s K’an II and the Wars of the 7th Century" -- Christophe Helmke and Jaime J. Awe
"De Arte Duellica: Military Sciences and the Ancient Maya" -- Harri Kettunen
"Multun Tzec (Mountains of Skulls)-Conquest Era Encounters with Yucatec Maya Warfare: A Study in the Tactics, Weapons and Battle Strategies of Late Postclassic and Conquest Era Warfare, 1517-15" -- John F. Chuchiak IV
"7th Annual Tulane Hieroglyphic Forum: The "Star Wars" Glyph" -- Marc Zender, Christophe Helmke, Harri Kettunen,and Simon Martin
"A Comparative Perspective on the Bioarchaeology of War in the Maya and Andean Worlds" -- John Verano
"De Ultima Ratio Regio: A Reading of the Komkom Vase Discovered at Baking Pot, Belize" -- Christophe Helmke, Julie A. Hoggarth, and Jaime J. Awe
"Tools of the Maya: A Lithic Analysis Workshop" -- Rachel Horowitz
"An Interdisciplinary Approach to Ancient Maya Warfare" -- Harri Kettunen
"LiDAR: The Future of Lowland Maya Archaeology" -- Francisco Estrada-Belli