Word: itza
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico, is on view at New York City's American Museum of Natural History. Next month it will move on to four other U.S. cities. A less ambitious but highly illuminating show, "Cenote of Sacrifice: Maya Treasures from the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza," drew crowds at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. It will move on to the Oakland Museum in California in the autumn and is scheduled to continue on the road in U.S. museums during the next two years...
...counterpoise to these exquisitely delicate objects is the 1,000-year-old, 1,200-lb. limestone Chacmool, the ceremonial figure that is the very emblem of Maya civilization in its later phases. Found at the most celebrated of all Maya sites, Chichen Itza in Yucatan, the semireclining statue is a splendid example of the Chacmools found guarding the entrances of temples. Typically, the male figure leans back on his elbows, pulls up his knees and turns a forbidding gaze on intruders at the sacred gates. A flat plate poised on his belly is believed to have been a receptacle...
...works in the St. Paul exhibit are also from Chichen Itza. They were selected from a collection of 30,000 sacrificial objects that the Mayas threw into a 200-ft.-wide limestone sinkhole that was their sacred cenote, or well. The pieces -- jade pendants, gold jewelry, wooden idols and painted jars -- offer a peerless view of Central American aesthetic traditions over an 800- year period. Says the St. Paul museum's curator of archaeology, Orrin C. Shane III: "The objects from the cenote are the single most important archaeological treasure ever recovered in the Americas." Incredibly, nearly all the pieces...
...middle of a vast and desolate plain in Mexico, by the side of the long road stretching from Merida to Chichen Itza, stands a lonely, dead tree. Day and night, perched in the dried-out branches, are half a dozen vultures, just waiting for something to happen. You see, Hoving, art collecting is primarily a waiting game. Most of the time, you have to let the play come to you. Face it, a lot of curators are really nothing but creatures of carrion, picking off the leavings of creative artists...