War in the Land of True Peace
Autor: Brent K. S. Woodfill
Número de Páginas: 323
For the ancient and modern Maya, the landscape is ruled by powerful entities in the form of geographic features like caves, mountains, springs, and abandoned cities—spirits who must be entreated, through visits and rituals, for permission to plant, harvest, build, or travel their territories. Consequently, such places have served as points of domination and resistance over the millennia—and nowhere is this truer than in Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip, the subject of Brent K. S. Woodfill’s War in the Land of True Peace. This strategic region with its wealth of resources—fertile soil, petroleum, and the only noncoastal salt in the Maya lowlands—is the site of some of the most sacred Maya places, and thus also the focus of some of the signal struggles for power in Maya history. In War in the Land of True Peace Woodfill delves into archaeology, epigraphy, ethnohistory, and ethnography to write the biographies of several of these places, covering their histories from the rise of the Preclassic Maya through the spread of transnational corporations in our time. Again and again the region, known since Spanish conquest as Vera Paz, or True Peace, has seen incursion by a ...