Download or read book Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Ancient Maya Underworld written by Shawn Gregory Morton and published by British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited. This book was released on 2018 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asintegrated and varied ritual contexts, how do changing patterns ofpre-Columbian cave use inform the complex of historical, social, political,economic and related ideological processes in action during the inception,florescence, and collapse of Tipan Chen Uitz and other ancient Maya centres inCentral Belize? This book aims to highlight and, within a specific regionalcontext, to address, the tendency of the speleoarchaeology of the Maya area toisolate itself from broader topics of discourse. To this end, it explicitlycontextualizes primary research in several caves along a chain of relatedconcepts and datasets, extending from the broad body of literature on ritualand religion, through discussion of the conceptual cave context drawn fromepigraphic and iconographic sources, and its invocation as recorded incontemporary (or, at least, relatively recent) ethnographic contexts andearlier post-Columbian indigenous historic sources, to the well-travelled pathsof the archaeological study of caves.