Proceedings of the conference "The Origins of Maya States," held in Philadelphia, April 10-13, 2007.

This book examines the emergence of political institutions in Maya civilization through studies of landscape, architecture and material culture.

The Pre-Columbian Maya were organized into a series of independent kingdoms or polities rather than unified into a single state. The vast majority of studies of

Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a preeminent student of the Maya, made many breakthroughs in deciphering Maya writing, particularly in demonstrating that the glyphs rec

Ancient Maya comes to life in this new holistic and theoretical study.