Spring Intensives 2024

Like their regal counterparts in societies around the globe, ancient Maya rulers departed this world with elaborate burial ceremonies and lavish grave goods, which often included ceramics, red pigments, earflares, stingray spines, jades, pearls, obsidian blades, and mosaics. Archaeological investigation of these burials, as well as the decipherment of inscriptions that record Maya rulers' funerary rites, have opened a fascinating window on how the ancient Maya envisaged the ruler's passage from the world of the living to the realm of the ancestors. Focusing on the Classic Period (AD 250-900), James Fitzsimmons examines and compares textual and archaeological evidence for rites of death and burial in the Maya lowlands, from which he creates models of royal Maya funerary behavior.

Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying enters the expanding field of Death Studies and connects some of its key interpretive frameworks-such as issues of internment practice, trauma, or end of life care-to visual culture, and, more than that, to visual culture's socio-political, geographic and aesthetic specificities. Where the prevailing picture of death within this field is as a Western experience framed by its denial on one side and its sensationalism on the other, this collection confronts the specifics of death's marginalisation: its experience as local rather than universal, and the precise relationship between the context and the cultural mediation of death.

Contributors to this landmark volume demonstrate that ancestor veneration was about much more than claiming property rights: the spirits of the dead were central to domestic disputes, displays of wealth, and power and status relationships. Case studies from China, Africa, Europe, and Mesoamerica use the evidence of art, architecture, ritual, and burial practices to explore the complex roles of ancestors in the past.