Word: anthropologist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Maya sites. By marking their clothing with the symbols of their ancestors, the Maya artisans build a material link to pre-Columbian gods -- and the indelible spirit of their cultural past. "Depictions of everyday life do not occur in the weaving," notes Walter F. Morris Jr., a Seattle-based anthropologist and author of Living Maya. "It's always something supernatural, something dreamt, something you can only see in dreams...
...agree that warfare played a key role in Maya civilization. The rulers found reasons to use torture and human sacrifice throughout their culture, from religious celebrations to sporting events to building dedications. "This has come as something of a shock to many Mayanists," says Carlos Navarrete, a leading Mexican anthropologist...
...Maya also had a highly developed -- and to modern eyes, highly bizarre -- aesthetic sense. "Slightly crossed eyes were held in great esteem," writes Yale anthropologist Michael Coe in his book The Maya. "Parents attempted to induce the condition by hanging small beads over the noses of their children." The Maya also seemed to go in for shaping their children's skulls: they liked to flatten them (although this may have simply been the inadvertent result of strapping babies to cradle boards) or squeeze them into a cone. Some Mayanists speculate that the conehead effect was the result of trying...
...legacy of triumph and , self-destruction. And there usually comes a point when a Mayanist has to decide how to draw joyful inspiration from the culture's destiny. "It's a very rare thing for the past to be a source of deep-seated pessimism," says David Freidel, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University. So Freidel has come up with this way to think of the Maya: "When I see the past, what I see are not just the failures of human effort, of human imagination, but that unquenchable desire to make of life a meaningful thing...
...second son of famed paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, Richard first burst into global prominence in 1972 when his team in Kenya unearthed a beautifully preserved 1.9 million-year-old skull of Homo habilis, an early hominid species first discovered by his parents. Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, observes that the younger Leakey has more than his share of luck. "Louis Leakey had to crawl over hot rocky outcrops for 30 years before he found anything of importance; Richard struck gold from the start." Roger Lewin, collaborator on three...