The jaguar in Mesoamerican culture - The jaguar in Mesoamerican culture The jaguar played an important role in the culture and religion of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Quick, agile, and powerful enough to take down the largest prey of the jungle, the jaguar is the largest of the big cats in the Americas, and one of the most efficient and ferocious predators. Endowed with a magnificent spotted coat and well adapted for the jungle, hunting either in the trees or water, making it one of the only felines tolerant of water, the jaguar was and still is revered among the indigenous Americans who reside closely with the jaguar. For the Olmec and the Maya, this regal feline became a symbol of authority and one’s prowess in hunting and battle, as well as an integral.
Aztec calendar - The Aztec calendar is perhaps the best known Mesoamerican calendar today due to the famous Aztec monument in Mexico, the Piedra del Sol which means the Stone of the Sun. The text under Aztec calendar offers a new solution to it, including its starting point (October 23, 4004 BCE). The Aztec calendar This below was taken from Z.A. Simon (1984: 9-31) by permission, in a condensed form. Some of it is disputed by mainstream scholars of ancient Mesoamerica. 1) Proof of the nonexistence of intercalary days in the Aztec calendar, verifying Professor Michael Coe's theory. 2) Establishment of an exact starting date of the calendar (day, month, and year), which was unknown until 1984. 3) Solution of the contradictory interpretations of the ancient chroniclers: Sahagún and Diego Durán. 4) Mathematical proven.
B'alam - Maya mythology, B'alam referred to any of a group of jaguar gods who protected people and communities against threats. Balam Balam-Agab Balam-Quitzé See also: The jaguar in Mesoamerican culture.
Teotihuacan Spider Woman - a series of murals was found in the Tepantitla compound in Teotihuacan. While many of these murals simply depicted scenes of everyday life in ancient Teotihuacan and some simple Mesoamerican figures, a few contained paintings of a previously-unknown deity. To this day, no one has found any evidence of her name. Although often referred to as the “great goddess”, Karl Taube is the first to appropriately christen her the “Teotihuacan Spider Woman” in his article in the 1983 edition of The Journal of Latin American Lore. The Tepantitla compound was a kind of apartment complex for what appears to be some very high status citizens. The walls are adorned with brightly painted frescoes fit for royalty. There are two nearly identical murals at this site, separated by a doorway, that illustrate.
Olmec - Mojarra. Their homeland is characterized by swampy lowlands punctuated by low hill ridges and volcanoes. The Olmec response to this environment was the construction of permanent cities, and they are, in fact, understood to be the progenitors of every primary element common to later MesoAmerican civilizations. They were the first to build permanent city-temple complexes. They were the first to develop a hieroglyphic script for their language, the earliest known example dating from 650 BCE. They were perhaps the originators of the Mesoamerican ballgame so prevalent among later cultures of the region and used for recreational and religious purposes - certainly they were playing it before anyone else has been documented doing so. Their religion developed all the important themes (an obsession with mathematics and with calendars, and a spiritual focus.
Maya civilization - Central America with some 3,000 years of rich history. The Maya were part of the Mesoamerican Pre-Columbian cultures. Contrary to popular myth, the Maya people never "disappeared"; millions still live in the region, many of them still speak one of the Maya family of languages. This article will mostly concern itself with their civilization before the conquest by Spain. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Origins 2 Art 3 Architecture 3.1 Urban Design 3.2 Building Materials 3.3 Building Process 3.4 Notable Constructions 3.4.1 Ceremonial Platforms 3.4.2 Palaces 3.4.3 E-groups 3.4.4 Pyramids and Temples 3.4.5 Ball Courts 4 Writing system 5 Mathematics 6 Decline of the Maya 7 List of Maya Sites 7.5 Most important sites 7.6 Other important Maya sites Origins Archaelogical evidence shows the Maya started to build ceremonial architecture some.
Mesoamerica - set of culturally related civilizations before the discovery of the New World by Columbus. Mesoamerican is a general adjective to refer to that group of Pre-Columbian cultures. Some common shared Mesoamerican traits include intensive agriculture based heavily on maize corn; worship of a set of deities including a rain god, a sun god, a feathered-serpent god (Quetzalcoatl); a Vigesimal numbering system; the use of a 260 day ritual calendar in addition to the solar year calendar; the construction of temples elevated atop stepped pyramids; a ritual ball-game; and various other artistic and cultural conventions. Mesoamerican civilizations included the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec, Huastec, Tarascan, Teotihuacan, Totonac, Toltec, and the Aztec. In some writings from the 1920s and 1930s the alternative term Middle America has been used to refer to Mesoamerica, but.
La Venta - 1960s. The site itself is about 18 miles inland with the island consisting of slightly more than 2 square miles of dry land. The main part of the site is a complex of clay constructions stretched out for 12 miles in a North-South direction, although the site is 8° West of true North. The entire southern end of the site is covered by a petroleum refinery, and has been largely demolished, making excavations difficult or impossible. Many of the site's monuments are now on display in the archeological museum and park in the city of Villahermosa, Tabasco. In its heyday, La Venta was a monumental center that contained an elaborate series of buried offerings and tombs as well as monumental sculptures similar to the many found at San Lorenzo, perhaps the.
Kaminaljuyu - sites more frequented by tourists. The site lies in a valley in the outskirts of Guatemala City and contains a total of over 100 platforms and mounds created before the end of the Middle Culture period (ending approximately 150 A.D.). The valley is surrounded by hills which culminate in a string of lofty volcanoes to the south that separate the area from the Pacific coastal plain. The climate is temperate and the soil is rich. The area was largely swallowed up by real estate developments in the late 20th century, although a portion of the center of Kaminaljuyu is preserved as a park. The site was first excavated in 1925 by Manuel Gamio when he made stratigraphic excavations and found deep cultural deposits yielding potsherds and clay figurines from the Middle.
Vision Serpent - the sun and stars, cross the heavens. The shedding of their skin made them a symbol of rebirth and renewal. They were so revered, that one of the main Mesoamerican deities, Quetzalcoatl, was represented as a feathered serpent. The name means "quetzal serpent" (Michael Coe, pg 79). The Vision Serpent is thought to be the most important of the Maya serpents. "It was usually bearded and had a rounded snout. It was also often depicted as having two heads or with the spirit of a god or ancestor emerging from its jaws". During Mayan bloodletting sacrifices, participants would experience visions in which they communicated with the ancestors or gods. These visions took the form of a giant serpent "which served as a gateway to the spirit realm". The ancestor or god.
History of Honduras - Pre-Columbian times, what is now Honduras was part of the MesoAmerican cultural area. The western part of Honduras was part of the famous Maya civilization; Honduras's most impressive Pre-Columbian ruins are the ancient Maya city state of Copan, near the border with Guatemala. The great Maya culture that flourished there for hundreds of years until the early 9th century. Remains of other Pre-Columbian cultures are found throughout the country, notably at sites like La Travecia and the Ulua valley. A collection of the nation's pre-Hispanic artifacts can be found at the National Museum in Tegucigalpa. Spanish period Christopher Columbus landed at mainland Honduras (Trujillo) in 1502. He named it "Honduras" (meaning "depths") for the deep water off the coast. Spaniard Hernan Cortes arrived in 1524. Some local tribes and nations continued.
History of physics - early ideas in physics, and the extent to which they were experimentally tested, is sketchy. Almost all direct record of these ideas was lost when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed, around 400 AD. Perhaps the most remarkable idea we know of from this era was the deduction by Aristarchus of Samos that the Earth was a planet that travelled around the Sun once a year, and rotated on its axis once a day (accounting for the seasons and the cycle of day and night), and that the stars were other, very distant suns which also had their own accompanying planets (and possibly, lifeforms upon those planets). The discovery of the Antikythera mechanism points to a detailed understanding of movements of these astronomical objects, as well as a use of gear-trains.
History of El Salvador - a tribe of nomadic Nahua people long established in Central Mexico. Early in their history, they became one of the few Mesoamerican indigenous groups to abolish human sacrifice. Otherwise, their culture was similar to that of their Aztec and Mayan neighbours. Remains of Nahua culture are still found at ruins such as Tazumal (near Chalchuapa), San Andres (northeast of Armenia), and Joya De Ceren (north of Colón). The first Spanish attempt to subjugate this area failed in 1524, when Pedro de Alvarado was forced to retreat by Pipil warriors. In 1525, he returned and succeeded in bringing the district under control of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, which retained its authority until 1821, despite an abortive revolution in 1811. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Independence 2 From Military to Civilian Rule.
Gukumatz - in Yucatán he was known as "Kukulcan". All these names mean specifically "Quetzal feathered serpent". He was the Maya equivalent of the central-Mexican Quetzalcoatl (see also for a longer discussion of this Mesoamerican Deity.) He was a god of the four elements of fire, earth, air and water, as well as a culture hero who taught the Toltecs (his original followers) the arts of civilization, including codes of law, agriculture, fishing and medicine. He came from an ocean, and eventually returned to it. He had four divine organisms, each associated with a specific element: Air Vulture Earth Maize Fire Lizard Water Fish Alternative names include: Kucumatz, Gucumatz, Kukulcan, Kukumatz, Gugumatz, Quetzalcoatl (Aztec)..
Abacus - late 1960s, abacus arithmetic was still being taught in school, as in Hong Kong; and into the 1990s in Taiwan. When handheld calculators became popular, schoolchildren's willingness to learn the use of the abacus decreased dramatically. In the early days of handheld calculators, news of abacus operators beating electronic calculators in arithmetic competitions in both speed and accuracy often appeared in the media. The reason for this was that early electronic calculators were often plagued by rounding and overflow errors. While most handheld calculators can only handle 8 to 10 significant digits, the abacus is virtually limitless in precision. Inexperienced operators might contribute to the loss too. But when the functionality of calculators improved, most Chinese realized that the abacus could never compute higher functions -- such as those in trigonometry.
Archaeology and the Book of Mormon - do not place much emphasis on archaeological evidences (and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially places none) for at least the following reasons: The Introduction to The Book of Mormon states that "[The Lamanites] are the principal ancestors of the American Indians." However, according to some interpretations of the text of The Book of Mormon, there may have been other people and cultures in the same lands at the same time (though the book concerns itself exclusively with the peoples of the narrative), possibly large populations and many different cultures. This would make it impossible to distinguish which archeological discoveries relate to the culture(s) in the narrative. Anthropological issues are further complicated due to the uncertainty on the location of Book of Mormon events. The Book of Mormon.
Benjamin Whorf - met, and later studied with Edward Sapir (1884-1939), he never took up linguistics as a profession, though his contribution to the field was profound. Whorf's primary area of interest in linguistics was the study of native American and Mesoamerican languages. He became quite well known for his work on the Hopi language, and for a theory he called the Principle of Linguistic Relativity. Developed in conjunction with Sapir (who had already published a version of it in 1929) it became more widely known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. He was considered to be a captivating speaker and did much to popularize his linguistic ideas through popular lectures and articles written to be accessible to lay readers, as well as publishing numerous technical articles. Some of Whorf's early work on linguistics and particularly.
Chac Mool - the name given to a type of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican stone altar. The so called "Chac-Mool" altars depict a human figure in an awkward position of reclining with the head up and turned to one side, holding a tray over the stomach. It is believed that the tray part of the sculpture was used for offerings of incense and of human hearts from human sacrifices. Chac-Mool altars are typically found in front of temples in Toltec and other post-Classic central Mexican sites, and in post-Classic Maya civilization sites with heavy Toltec influence, such as Chichen Itza. The ancient name for these sculptures is unknown. The name was coined by Augustus Le Plongeon, an eccentric 19th century antiquitarian who excavated some Maya sites in Yucatan and published multiple volumes of "history" of the.
Chichén Itzá - the vernal equinox, the Moon's greatest northern and southern declinations, and other astronomical events) sacred to Kululcan, the feathered-serpent god of the wind and learning. Temple of the Warriors Apparently about 987 a Toltec king named Quetzalcoatl arrived here with an army from central Mexico, and (with local Maya allies) made Chichén Itzá his capital, and a second Tula. The art and architecture from this period shows an interesting mix of Maya and Toltec styles. Chichén's "Temple of the Warriors" was clearly built as a copy of Temple B at the Toltec capital of Tula, although thanks to the Maya architects is grander than the original. This is a stone building (originally with a wood and plaster roof) atop a step-pyramid, with the columns in the interior carved with the likenesses.
Clans (BattleTech) - Scorpion 1.9 Clan Hell's Horse 1.10 Clan Ice Hellion 1.11 Clan Jade Falcon 1.12 Clan Jade Wolf 1.13 Clan Mongoose 1.14 Clan Nova Cat 1.15 Clan Sea Fox 1.16 Clan Smoke Jaguar 1.17 Clan Snow Raven 1.18 Clan Star Adder 1.19 Clan Steel Viper 1.20 Clan Widowmaker 1.21 Clan Wolf 1.22 Clan Wolverine 2 Culture 3 Language The Clans Clan Blood Spirit Clan Burrock No longer in existence. Clan Cloud Cobra Clan Coyote Clan Diamond Shark Clan Fire Mandrill Clan Ghost Bear Clan Goliath Scorpion Clan Hell's Horse Clan Ice Hellion Clan Jade Falcon Clan Jade Wolf A temporary Clan, in existence a short time, when Clan Wolf was nearly absorbed into Clan Jade Falcon. Clan Mongoose No longer in existence. Clan Nova Cat Clan Sea Fox No longer in existence..
