June 3, 2021
Last month, we announced that AIA Society Members now have full access to the complete digital archives of ARCHAEOLOGY magazine. If you haven’t started to explore the archive yet, we encourage you to do so! To kick things off, we asked ARCHAEOLOGY Deputy Editor Eric A. Powell to share his favorite article.
The rapid cascade of breakthroughs in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs in the 1980s and 1990s was the fuel for the fascinating article “Maya Superstates,” written by epigraphers Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, in our November/December 1995 issue. The scholars explore the theory that royal dynasties at the cities of Calakmul and Tikal dominated the ancient Maya world for much of the Classic Period, from a.d. 250–900. In the years since the article was published, discovery after discovery has supported Martin and Grube’s vision of the two superstates, ruled by kings with names like Jaguar Paw and Smoking Squirrel, vying for political control over complex networks of alliances that archaeologists continue to unravel.
For more information on how to access the archive, click here.
