Word: mayan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Charles Mann: I had always been aware that people lived here before my European ancestors arrived. But it wasn't until I kind of stumbled across the Mayan ruins 20 some years ago that I realized these people had incredibly complicated and interesting societies. I was just curious, and I tried to arrange my reporting so that I would be able to go and visit more and more of these places. Then about 10 -15 years ago, I realized that there was this whole world of archeologists and geographers and anthropologists who had come to conclusions about Indian societies that...
Part of the adventure for tourists who visit the ancient Mayan city of Tikal is in getting there. The site's famous ruins are buried deep in the Guatemalan jungle, and the 40-min. flight from Guatemala City affords sightseers spectacular views of the lush terrain. But last Saturday morning that journey ended in tragedy as a twin-engine Caravelle operated by the private carrier Aerovias crashed on its way to the airport at Santa Elena, 37 miles south of Tikal. Early reports put the number killed at 90, including six Americans. Some of the passengers had apparently traveled...
Diamond is not an eloquent writer, but he doesn't have to be: Collapse is full of spectacles of unbearable, nightmarish poignance. He shows us the last desperate Norsemen rioting and eating newborn calves and even their own hunting dogs. He lays out the decline of the Mayan empire, the extinction of the Anasazi--whose five-story buildings were the tallest in North America until the 1880s--and the final days of Mangareva, a tiny tropical island where the last inhabitants not only ate one another but dug up buried corpses and ate them...
...curator explains. "The free, poetic side, and also the very practical, analytical side." Once inside, the visitor is thrust before the architect's very eyes. As a young graduate from Copenhagen's Royal Academy of Arts, Utzon zoomed his home-movie lens on ancient world monuments, from the Mayan temples of Yucatan, to Chinese pagodas and Iranian mosques. Watching such footage in the show, one can see the steps of the Opera House forming, and its ceramic shells glittering in Utzon's mind...
...finds himself back on the building he has found impossible to leave. During his 38-year absence, the Opera House has opened up, rather inelegantly, three new theatres along the western boardwalk. To integrate them better with the harbor, Utzon and his architects have turned once more to the Mayan temples of his youthful travels. Their $A6 million colonnade, due to open late next year, has been inspired by the Court of a Thousand Columns at Yucatan. In the meantime, we have the modest and lovely Utzon Room, which reveals his original vaulted ceiling, the bare bones of his genius...