buried mirror: latest reflections

That the ancient Maya produced high-quality textiles will come as little surprise to anyone who has traveled through the modern Maya world. But because few textiles are preserved from ancient times, it has been difficult to confirm that this was the case. Now researchers at the University of Rhode Island have performed a lab analysis [...]

In every civilization of the ancient world, there are art works and monuments that stand out among their fellows as objects of special character. The great portrait sculptures that stand in silent rows down the center of the Great Plaza of copan created one of these special places. They constitute one of the great masterpieces [...]

The bat’s association with night and with caves was significant to the ancient Maya, who equated nightime with death and viewed caves as the gateway to the underworld, called Xibalba (literally, “place of fright”). At nightfall the sun appears to pass through the earth to enter the underworld. In the northern Maya region, life-sustaining water [...]

PAPAC, the Proyecto Arqueologico para la Planificacion de la Antigua Copan (Copan Urban Planning Project) has announced a new interactive map of the ruins. In truth there isn’t much up yet, but it’s an exciting concept and shows promise of being nicely executed. Click the map to visit the site.

The tomb is dated to 650, placing it near the beginning of the Late Classic period. With typical journalistic hype, the National Geographic article announcing the find states that “until now, much about the political makeup and cultural range of the city—famous for its funerary slabs—has been poorly understood.” As if this discovery suddenly makes [...]

Mathematicians define the golden section as a relation in which the smaller unit is to te larger unit as the larger is to the sum. In other words, a:b = b:(a+b). The name for this relation is phi. Its numeric value is 1.618034. Phi is an interesting number. If you add 1 to it you [...]