buried mirror: latest reflections

Dale Pendell, author of Pharmako/Poeia, has argued that the “war on drugs” is like a religious war, intended to keep officially sanctioned drugs like alcohol and chocolate dominant. A new study, reported by Scott Norris in an article in National Geographic News, suggests that sunflowers may have been similarly suppressed by the Spanish in Mesoamerica. [...]

and arms, and hearts, and hands, and arrows . . . Geographer Barbara Williams and mathematician Maria del Carmen Jorge y Jorge have, after three decades of labor, deciphered an Aztec code used to calculate the areas of land plots. The Aztecs needed to calculate the area of irregular shaped parcels of land for tax [...]

A reader named “Yes” correctly identified the photographer of this week’s photos as Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). Muybridge was born in England and emigrated to the U.S. in 1851. While he would become best known for his motions studies such as yesterday’s jumping horse, I think he first won fame for his monumental photographs of Yosemite [...]

Here’s another image by our mystery photographer (see also the past two days’ posts). What’s going on here? (Hint: the picture documents a subject for which the photographer is well known.) Who is he? What is the approximate date of the photo? .

Amparo Ochoa’s take on Mexican history.

Cantina el Nivel opened its doors in 1872. It is considered one of the oldest continuously operating bars in Latin America. Located in Mexico City’s historic center, the bar will make way for expansion of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Defecito.com, the source of this story (and photo), comments: Es una lástima que espacios [...]

According to a study by Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, there is new support for the notion that syphilis was exported from the Americas to Europe by the conquistadors who followed in the wake of Columbus. The study was published in the Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases. Just [...]

This 45-minute video, shot entirely in Belize, presents an overview of the history of Garifuna people of the Central American Caribbean coast, as told in their own voices. (Around 18 mins. are some historical photos.) The Garifuna are an ethnic mix of Carib, Arawak, and African peoples. To the outsider, Garifuna drumming is the most [...]

For some time archaeologists have disputed whether manioc was a significant foodstuff of ancient Mesoamerica. While it seemed a logical possibility, there was scant hard evidence to support the thesis. Now a University of Colorado – Boulder team has uncovered an ancient field of manioc at a Maya site in present El Salvador, providing the [...]

The church of La Merced is one of the most distinctive in Antigua. Its history is strongly marked by earthquakes. Originally built in the mid-sixteenth century, it was destroyed and rebuilt several times until assuming more or less its present shape in the eighteenth century. Perhaps its most striking feature, its churrigueresque facade, was added [...]

Many years ago we lived in this little house in Mixco, on the outskirts of Guatemala City. The house was near the police checkpoint at the edge of town, where the road to Antigua (as I recollect you got there along Avenida Roosevelt) began to leave the broad Guate valley and wind up the bucolic [...]

Jorge Ubico y Castañeda ruled as dictator of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, the year documented in this great historical footage (with “Sail to the Moon” by Radiohead as a soundtrack). Ubico was one of the models for the president in Miguel Angel Asturias’s classic novel El Señor Presidente (The President). Asturias’s book stands as [...]

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 [...]

Over at Right Reading I’ve posted some comments about Borges’s trip to Uxmal when he was eighty.

Archaeologists have discovered traces of an ancient Maya city in a papaya plantation in the Corozal area of Belize. The find includes three Mayan foundations tentatively dated to the early classic period. Skeletons of a man and a woman were also uncovered, although they seem to be from a little earlier. According to the Belize [...]

I’ve reformatted and added a bit more information to my page about Mayan languages. It remains a confusing subject, since there are a large number of languages that are more often than not mostly mutually unintellible, yet at the same time “with the exception of Waxtek, these Mayan languages have been in contact with one [...]

I’ve posted a look back at the work of two great Mayanists of the early and mid twentieth century, Sylvanus Morley (shown at left) and Eric Thompson. The piece is slightly long for my taste as a blog post, so I did it as a html page, here. These guys invested a lot of energy [...]

For centuries travelers through the Maya world have encountered majestic ruins of a civilization that appears to have completely disappeared. Still today people ask what caused such a monumental collapse. While the relative importance of the various factors remains disputed, the general outlines of the collapse are now generally known. I’ve posted a new page [...]

I’m starting to put up some images from my recent trip to the Yucatan. The image at left is a picture of the little spring that sustained the rebel community of the Talking Cross, the Maya band that nearly drove the non-Maya from the peninsula during the Caste War in the second half of the [...]