Word: mayan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Menchu, a Quiche Mayan, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for this autobiographical work, which details the terrors perpetrated against her family during the Guatemalan insurrection...
...said he doubts this, however, since an independent truth commission has just released a report showing that the majority of deaths were Mayan, and that these offenses were usually perpetrated by the Guatemalan army...
...larger metropolis. Indeed, at 8 sq. mi. and with an estimated population of 150,000, Teotihuacan was the largest city in Mesoamerica in its heyday (about A.D. 500) and one of the six largest in the world--larger even than Rome. Its political power reached all the way to Mayan city-states hundreds of miles away, with outposts as far away as Guatemala...
Unlike its Mayan counterparts, though, Teotihuacan has yielded very few inscriptions, and those are in a hieroglyphic language that archaeologists have not yet been able to decipher. The city's celebrated painted murals don't provide many clues either. "There are very few glimpses of daily life," complains Arizona State University anthropologist George Cowgill. The best information scientists have to date comes from a series of mass graves discovered about a decade ago in the so-called Feathered Serpent Pyramid by Cowgill, his Arizona State colleague Saburo Sugiyama and Ruben Cabrera of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History...
...DECEPTIVE COAT OF VARNISH? One challenge to the radiocarbon dating that has received a good deal of publicity is that of Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a San Antonio, Texas, pediatrician with interests in microbiology and archaeology. In 1983, while examining a Mayan jade artifact that art experts claimed was a recent forgery, Garza-Valdes discovered that it was covered by a lacquer-like coating produced by bacteria. Since it also had traces of ancient blood on it that should have been datable by the radiocarbon method, he took it to the University of Arizona dating lab, where scientists scraped...