El Mayista 2 años en Blogspot

Es grato ver 118 países y más de 19,000 visitas en tan solo 1 año,  gracias por apoyar al mundo Maya, muchas más sorpresas por venir.

"Antes de este próximo 2012 compartamos la información Maya de forma responsable"

El Mayista

It is pleasing to see 118 countries and more than 19,000 visits in just 1 year, thanks for the support to the Mayan world, a lot more surprises to come.  

"Before the upcoming year of 2012 share the Maya information in a responsible way"

The Mayanist

 

The Mayanist Dr. David H. Kelley Passed away - Fallece el Mayista Dr. David Kelley

The Mayanist David Humiston Kelley passed away.

Canadian American archaeologist and epigrapher, well known for his work phonetic analysis related to the Maya civilization. Kelley was professor emeritus in the Deparment of Archaeology in the University of Calgary.

He was one of the first Mayanists to support in the late 1950s the theories of Yuri Knorosov, concerning to the syllabic and phonetic nature of Mayan script decipherment. Kelly in 1962 write Phoneticism in the Maya script, data that helps to the phonetic interpretations of Mayan glyphs.

Rest in Peace

David H. Kelley

Fallece el Mayista David Humiston Kelley.

El arqueólogo y epígrafo canadienses, bien conocido para su trabajo el análisis fonético relacionado con la civilización de maya. Kelley fue profesor honorario en el Deparmento de Arqueología en la Universidad de Calgary.

Fue uno de los primeros Mayistas en apoyar al final de la década del cincuenta las teorías de Yuri Knorosov, enfocado a la naturaleza silábica y fonética del desciframiento de la escritura Maya . Kelly en 1962 escribe La Fonética en la escritura Maya, datos que ayudan posteriormente a las interpretaciones fonéticas de los jeroglíficos Mayas.

Descanse en la Paz

David H. Kelley

Here one of his books: 
Aquí una de sus obras:

Fallece Leonora Carrington, en su trabajo artístico se inspiró también en la cultura Maya : "El mundo mágico de los mayas"

Entre su legado artístico Leonora se inspiro en la cultura Maya y su mitología fascinada por esta gran cultura.

En el Museo Nacional de Antropología se encuentra hoy en día el mural  "El mundo mágico de los Mayas"

En el libro "El mundo mágico de los Mayas" editado en 1964, interpreta artísticamente los textos del libro escrito por Andrés Medina y Laurette Séjourné, ejemplar donde se encuentran los dibujos que elaboró para la obra, aquí 2 ejemplos:

Leonora tomó como base las creencias de los indígenas de Chiapas, integrando mitos e historias del Popol Vuh, algúnos de sus bocetos se basaban en dibujos epigráficos y personajes fantásticos.

Leonora consideraba México como un lugar lleno de mística y magia, decía que el mundo visual siempre trata de ser intelectualizado, pero que el mundo visual no puede ser comparado con los juegos intelectuales. 

"Leonora te llevas tu alma y nos dejas parte de tu escencia y magia, ahora te volveras a reunir con Remedios, allá en el mundo detras del espejo, buen retorno a casa"

El Mayista

continuará...

Conferencia: El calendario Maya y el verdadero significado del año 2012 por Bruce Love

A los interesados en el tema año 2012 y los Mayas que se encuentren en Guatemala, se les invita el próximo jueves 19 de Mayo al Museo Popol Vuh donde se dará esta conferencia por Bruce Love.

Saludos.

El Mayista

The renowned Mayanist Merle Greene Robertson passed away

 Fotos from Mesoweb

Merle Greene Robertson was a great example as an artist, historian, photographer and mayanist, she fought for the preservation of the writing, iconography and art of in the research of the Maya World. Merle rest in piece and be sure that your work will shine and gives us more road to walk.

All the best.

The Mayanist

Here some more about her life and work: 
Thanks to Mesoweb Marc Zender and Joel Skidmore

In Memoriam: Merle Greene Robertson
by Marc Zender and Joel Skidmore

(Friday, April 22, 2011) The renowned Mayanist Merle Greene Robertson passed away in San Francisco today. Artist, art historian, photographer, and Mayanist, Merle was widely known for her extensive contributions to the investigation and preservation of the art, iconography, and writing of Maya civilization. 

Merle was born in Miles City, Montana, on August 30, 1913, a small town she once memorably described as "a little cattle crossing in the road" (Barnhart 2003:1). She moved to Great Falls when she was eight, a place which held her "fondest memories of childhood ... the Missouri River, Giant Springs, the sand hills, high mountains, mountain goats, and those great blue Montana skies, those wide-open spaces" (Robertson 2006:25). Merle's descriptions of her childhood environment in interviews and her autobiography Never in Fear (2006) are invariably painterly, mingling broad strokes of color with intimate descriptions of the natural surroundings, and she regularly associated these with her own development as an artist. As Peter Mathews (2006:13) wrote in his foreword to Merle's autobiography:

Two aspects of [Merle's] youth in Montana were to have a large influence over the direction of her life. One was an interest in Native American culture. Merle's family spent their vacations beside a mountain lake at the edge of Glacier National Park. Merle frequently went with her father to visit his friends, Blackfoot Indian chiefs, and it was here that she learned Indian sign language. The other influence was the great artist Charles M. Russell, who lived in Great Falls. The young Merle spent many an afternoon on his front porch observing and learning about painting.

In her second year of high school, Merle's family relocated to Seattle, where she later began university studies. Given the twin loves of her childhood, it is perhaps hardly to be wondered at that Merle took a degree in art. "Later," as Peter Mathews (2006:13) recounts, "she went to the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Here for three summers she studied watercolors, oils, photography, and mural painting from Mexico's top mural instructor, earning her MFA from the University of Guanajuato."
Merle's artistic background and practical experiences living and working in Mexico were critical preparation for her life's work as a Mayanist, which began in the summer of 1961 when she joined the University of Pennsylvania Museum project at Tikal, Guatemala.

[Merle] spent three summers making architectural drawings of the Central Acropolis, and also started recording monuments by means of rubbings. This technique had been used before in the Maya area, principally by John H. Denison Jr. at Chichen Itza and sites in the central part of the Yucatan peninsula. However, Merle Greene brought the technique to an art form, and also showed how useful the rubbings could be as a means of documentation of Maya relief sculpture. (Mathews 2006:13)

Merle would eventually make "about four thousand" rubbings (Barnhart 2003:4) during the course of a distinguished career spanning some five decades (Doyle 2000). These are now all critically important documents, many of them preserving details of the carved surfaces of monuments which have since deteriorated through erosion or been destroyed by the increasingly damaging depredations of looters. Today, more than 2,000 of Merle's rubbings are housed in the Merle Greene Robertson Collection of the Rare Book and Manuscript Department of Tulane University's Latin American Library in New Orleans (Hernández and Dressing 2011). Since 1993, Merle's entire collection of rubbings has been available to scholars and amateurs on CD, and they can also be viewed online at Mesoweb 

Merle's work in preserving Guatemala's Maya cultural heritage through these rubbings was acknowledged by the Museo Popol Vuh in 2004, 

when Merle was awarded the Orden del Pop (Museo Popol Vuh 2004). 

As Peter Mathews (2006:15) has noted

[O]ne could be forgiven for thinking that part-time exploring and "rubbing" would be quite enough to fill a life, but we're only just beginning to recount Merle's accomplishments. Her first love of the jungle was at Tikal, and in Mexico it has always been Palenque. During the 1970s she worked tirelessly, documenting the sculpture of Palenque. ... The result of Merle's Palenque work is brilliantly documented in the sumptuous series The Sculpture of Palenque, published by Princeton University Press [Robertson 1983-1991]. In this study, ... Merle has shown in great detail ... exactly how the beautiful stucco sculptures were built up, layer by layer, by the Palenque artists. She has investigated the paints that were used to color the sculptures, searching out pigment sources in the Palenque region and painstakingly experimenting to reproduce the exact colors used by the Palenque artists. In the process, she was able to document the entire method of making beautiful stucco sculptures for which Palenque is so famous.

Merle's rubbings, photographs, paintings, and drawings of Palenque's architecture and sculpture represent a lasting resource. In 1993, the Mexican government acknowledged Merle's remarkable contributions to the study of Palenque with an Order of the Aztec Eagle (Mathews 2006:17). 

Of equally lasting importance to the study of Palenque specifically, but also to Maya studies in general, have been Merle's series of Palenque Round Table conferences. Begun in December, 1973, and continuing annually and then semi-annually in eight separate meetings, the last held in June, 1993, the Mesa Redonda de Palenque produced numerous breakthroughs in the presentation and publication of Maya studies, producing ten volumes of conference proceedings edited by Merle and others. These critical meetings have since been continued by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico, with Merle in the capacity of Honorary President (Mathews 2006:16). 

In 1982, Merle founded the Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, a non-profit organization which has conducted important research in Mesoamerican art, iconography, and epigraphy. PARI has published numerous scholarly monographs and the quarterly PARI Journal and has sponsored the archaeological investigations of the Cross Group Project at Palenque. 

Merle's contributions to the study of the Maya will never be forgotten, so important is her legacy of documentation of primary materials in the form of drawing, paintings, photographs, and rubbings. But she will be sorely missed by her family, friends, colleagues, students, and legions of admirers.K'a'ayi usik sakik'aal.
 
References

Barnhart, Ed
2003 Periodic Interview Series: Merle Greene Robertson. Transcript of an interview with Merle Greene Robertson, December 2003. Maya Exploration Center: 

Doyle, John
2000 Digging Deep: Archaeologist Merle Greene Robertson Has Spent Four Decades Uncovering Treasures of Mayan Civilization. San Francisco Chronicle, September 4, 2000, A-5. Available online: http://articles.sfgate.com/2000-09-04/news/17659641_1_mayan-ruins-mayan-civilization-archaeological

Gidwitz, Tom
2002 Doyenne of Mayanists: Merle Greene Robertson Has Spent a Lifetime Chronicling Mesoamerican Art. Archaeology 55(3):42-49. Available online: www.archaeology.org/0205/abstracts/merlegreene.html


Hernández, Christine, and David Dressing
2011 Merle Greene Robertson Collection, 1920s-2010. Latin American Library Manuscripts Collection 133: lal.tulane.edu/collections/manuscripts/robertson_merle

 Mathews, Peter
2006 Foreword to Never in Fear, by Merle Greene Robertson, pp. 13-18. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

Museo Popol Vuh
2004 Dra. Merle Greene Robertson: Orden del Pop 2004. Museo Popol Vuh: www.popolvuh.ufm.edu/eng/popMerle2004.htm

Robertson, Merle Greene
1974-1996 Palenque Round Table (Mesa Redonda de Palenque). 8 volumes. Various presses.
1983-1991 The Sculpture of Palenque. 4 volumes. Princeton University Press.
2006 Never in Fear. San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute.

La pasajera y el Indígena... ¿Diferencia de clases?

  Agradecemos a Azbel por el arte, como siempre.

Ahora que mucha gente vacaciona, evitemos el racismo y desprecio hacia nuestros hermanos indígenas, convivamos y aprendamos junto con ellos. 

Se les comparte esta historia la cual desconozco el autor, no dudo que este inspirado en muchos casos reales ya que en lo personal me ha tocado intervenir en varias situaciones similares.

A veces la gente tiene miedo de romper los protocolos como en esta historia, pero cuando no se pierde nada y haces un bien común conscientizando vale la pena.  

Los invito a seguir el ejemplo así alcanzaremos poco a poco un mundo más libre y digno en armonía.

Saludos y que disfruten sus vacaciones.

El Mayista

La pasajera y el Indígena

En un avión, iniciado el vuelo, una "señora" oprime insistentemente el timbre para llamar a la sobrecargo

- ¿Cuál es el problema, Sra.? - Pregunta la sobrecargo

- ¿Es que no lo ve? - Responde la dama

  Me colocaron junto a un sucio indígena. No soporto estar al lado de uno de estos seres repugnantes. ¿¿¡¡No tiene otro asiento!!??

- Por favor, cálmese... -dice la sobrecargo- Casi todos los asientos están ocupados. Pero, voy a ver si hay un lugar disponible

La sobrecargo se aleja y vuelve de nuevo algunos minutos más tarde:

- Sra., como yo pensaba, ya no hay ningún lugar libre en la clase económica. Hablé con el comandante y me confirmó que no hay más sitios disponibles. No obstante, tenemos aún un lugar en primera clase.

Antes de que la dama pudiera hacer el menor comentario, la sobrecargo sigue:

- Es del todo inusual permitir a una persona de la clase económica sentarse en primera clase. Pero, dadas las circunstancias, el comandante encuentra que sería escandaloso obligar a alguien a sentarse junto a una persona tan repugnante.

Todos los pasajeros alrededor, observaban la escena, indignados.

Entonces, la sobrecargo, dirigiéndose al indígena, le dice: 
 
- Si el Sr. lo desea, tome su equipaje de mano, ya que un asiento en primera clase le espera.

Y los pasajeros, que sorprendidos, presenciaban la escena, se levantaron y aplaudieron.

Debemos de seguir este ejemplo

Ancient Maya Mathematics and Culture in the Yucatan

Ancient Maya Mathematics and Culture

Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

May 21-27, 2011

Led by Dr. Michael Grofe

This course is designed for participants all ages and varying levels of knowledge to learn about ancient Maya history, culture, and mathematics as they travel through the ruins of the Yucatan Peninsula. Day trips to the ruins of Coba, Chichen Itza and Ek Balam will be complimented by evening lectures about how the Maya calendar works and the latest discoveries in ancient Maya astronomy.

Dr. Grofe is a foremost authority on ancient Maya astronomy with cutting edge research regarding the evidence for an ancient understanding of the 26,000 year cycle of precession.  His vast knowledge of Maya astronomy, mathematics, and hieroglyphics will make this course an unparalleled learning experience.

A cancellation from one of our partner universities has led to openings in the course and a special offer for last minute sign ups.  If you join the course at this late date, you'll receive a 2011 MEC Research Membership, which includes access to JSTOR, a 2011 Mayan Calendar, and 10% off all of our travel courses (including this one) and educations tours throughout the year.

* For more details on the tour and to sign up, link the graphic above