All-Maya, all the time

[lblanchard]

I felt the need to do something other than the usual stuff today, so I've reached back into time to edit my photos from the Maya 2012: Lords of Time exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. They're from mid-August and I'm just now up to them in my backlog. I've finished the exhibit, but still have a ton more photos from that day to edit.

Hard to believe, but if I had stuck with my archaeology and my focus on the Maya in the late 60s instead of dropping out and getting married, I might have been one of the young hotshot epigraphers in the golden age of the Maya Decipherment, instead of an armchair enthusiast. Oh, the life-changing decisions we make at a tender age.

[Note: if you click through the slideshow to Flickr itself, you'll find that all exhibition labels are legible in the larger sizes of the photos -- just in case you want to become an expert on these Time Lords.]

While I was at the museum in August, I did buy the current Standard Reference on the Maya (Robert A. Sharer with Loa P. Traxler, The Ancient Maya, Sixth Edition), which weighs in at an impressive 931 pages and 3 lb 12 oz. I've just signed up for a lecture this coming Wednesday evening on the epic and game-changing battle between the city-states of Copan and Quirigua in the early 700s. I'll need to do a little reading between now and then.

And also, there's the little matter of getting some exercise today. Would the sky fall, I wonder, if I were to skip two days in a row? Yes, I think it might.

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

That's wonderful! Not the same civilization but it puts me in mind of a major Great Civilizations exhibit I saw on the Incas at the Royal Academy in London some years ago.

And I didn't know you had started to study archaeology!

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Yes -- Precolumbian Mesoamerican high cultures -- but the siren call of matrimony derailed me. Also, I realized that Mesoamerican field work probably meant a lot of sweating. Also mosquitoes.

EDITED TO ADD: And since the time I studied them, epigraphers have done wonders deciphering Maya hieroglyphs -- so now we know, for example, that the epic battle was the result of an ambush/betrayal by the king's vassal, probably aided and abetted by a competing Great Power. Just like the Wars of the Roses, actually.

[chakolate.livejournal.com]

And also, there's the little matter of getting some exercise today. Would the sky fall, I wonder, if I were to skip two days in a row? Yes, I think it might.

See, this is why you're going to outlive me. Most of my exercise consists of thinking I should.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

*guffaw*

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I never knew you'd started off in archaeology, either!!