Saturday May 13, 2006 Dr. Jeremy Sabloff, "It Depends on How We
Look at Things: Perspectives
on the Postclassic Period in the Northern Maya Lowlands."
Dr. Jeremy Sabloff addressed and challenged some of the traditional
beliefs about the Postclassic Maya in his May talk. More than three
decades ago, William L. Rathje and Dr. Sabloff argued that it was time
for Maya scholars to reexamine the Postclassic Period. More
specifically, they contended that the Postclassic was a time of growing
economic and political complexity, not a period of decline and
decadence. They posited that the rising growth of mercantile interests
played a key role in these developments. In effect, they argued
that spectacular buildings and sophisticated, monumental works of art
were not always a necessary measure of cultural complexity, and their
presence in the Classic period and relative absence in the Postclassic
did not mean that the latter period was less complex. Many Maya
archaeologists have often contended that a decrease in complexity, even
to the point of decadence, was a hallmark of the Postclassic period.
Dr. Sabloff now counters this more traditional view with a new
perspective which has been refined and strengthened by a host of
research projects in recent years. His talk examined some of
these new scholarly understandings of the Postclassic Period, with
special attention to the Late Postclassic within the Northern Maya
Lowlands.
Dr. Sabloff is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of
Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a curator of the
American section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. He graduated
from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, and received his Ph.D.
from Harvard University in 1969. Dr. Sabloff has taught at
Harvard University, the University of New Mexico, the University of
Pittsburgh, the University of Utah, and was a visiting Fellow at the
St. John's College in Cambridge, England. He served as the
Charles K. Williams II Director of the University of Pennsylvania
Museum from 1994 through 2004, increasing research projects and
traveling exhibitions, as well as securing funding for and overseeing
the construction of the Mainwaring Wing for Collections Storage and
Study. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books and 130
articles, including Excavations at Seibal: Ceramics, The Cities of
Ancient Mexico, The New Archaeology, Ancient Maya, Ancient
Civilizations: The Near East and Mesoamerica, Cozumel: Late Maya
Settlement Patterns, and The Ancient Maya City of Sayil. He was
President of the Society for American Archaeology, Chair of Section H,
Anthropology, of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and was the Editor of American Antiquity. He currently sits on
numerous editorial boards including Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science, Latin American Antiquity, Journal of
Anthropological Research, and Archaeology Magazine. He is Chair of the
Smithsonian Council and is President of the Kolb Foundation.
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