front cover of Ancient Zapotec Religion
Ancient Zapotec Religion
An Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Perspective
Michael Lind
University Press of Colorado, 2015

Ancient Zapotec Religion is the first comprehensive study of Zapotec religion as it existed in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on the eve of the Spanish Conquest. Author Michael Lind brings a new perspective, focusing not on underlying theological principles but on the material and spatial expressions of religious practice.

Using sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish colonial documents and archaeological findings related to the time period leading up to the Spanish Conquest, he presents new information on deities, ancestor worship and sacred bundles, the Zapotec cosmos, the priesthood, religious ceremonies and rituals, the nature of temples, the distinctive features of the sacred and solar calendars, and the religious significance of the murals of Mitla—the most sacred and holy center. He also shows how Zapotec religion served to integrate Zapotec city-state structure throughout the valley of Oaxaca, neighboring mountain regions, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Ancient Zapotec Religion is the first in-depth and interdisciplinary book on the Zapotecs and their religious practices and will be of great interest to archaeologists, epigraphers, historians, and specialists in Native American, Latin American, and religious studies. 

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front cover of Food Production in Native North America
Food Production in Native North America
An Archaeological Perspective
Kristen J. Gremillion
University Press of Colorado, 2018
This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series provides a broad overview of the development of agriculture and other forms of resource management by the Native peoples of North America. Its geographical scope includes most of the continent’s temperate zone, but regions where agriculture took hold are emphasized. Temporally, this volume looks back as far as the first indigenous domesticates that emerged in the midcontinental region and follows the story into the era of European conquest.
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front cover of The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850
The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850
An Archaeological Perspective
Javier Martínez Jiménez, Isaac Sastre de Diego, and Carlos Tejerizo García
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The vast transformation of the Roman world at the end of antiquity has been a subject of broad scholarly interest for decades, but until now no book has focused specifically on the Iberian Peninsula in the period as seen through an archaeological lens. Given the sparse documentary evidence available, archaeology holds the key to a richer understanding of the developments of the period, and this book addresses a number of issues that arise from analysis of the available material culture, including questions of the process of Christianisation and Islamisation, continuity and abandonment of Roman urban patterns and forms, the end of villas and the growth of villages, and the adaptation of the population and the elites to the changing political circumstances.
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