Living with the Ancestors

Download or read book Living with the Ancestors written by Patricia A. McAnany and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of this book proved to be extremely useful to students of archaeology because it provided a highly readable explanation for why people might bury valued family members under house and plaza floors in Preclassic and Classic Maya societies of the first millennium BCE and CE. By casting this ancestralizing practice within the larger framework of land, inheritance, identity, and genealogies of place, the author demonstrates the cultural logic of a practice that initially appears alien to Western eyes. This new edition contains an entirely new introduction that synthesizes new scholarship, as well as an updated bibliography.