Professor argues Mayan culture urban
By JOHN PIPER
Of the Emerald
The ancient Mayan Indian
culture was probably more urban
than agricultural, a University
architecture professor contends
in a book to be released next
spring.
George Andrews, who spent 14
years gathering material for his
book “Maya Cities—Place
Making and Urbanization,” says
he believes many Mayan set
tlements were full-scale cities,
rather than just ceremonial
centers as first believed.
He has spent eight sum
mers in Mexico, British Hon
duras and Guatemala exploring
Mayan ruins. The book—which
was underwritten partly by a
$8,500 grant from the National
Science Foundation—will be
published by the University of
Oklahoma Press as part of its
American Indian Series.
The sudden collapse of the
highly advanced Mayan
civilization—which existed from
the first through the ninth cen
turies A.D.—has never been
adequately explained, and An
Apws says his book makes no
^fi'tempt to clear up the mystery.
Mayan life
Instead, Andrews is concerned
primarily with the nature of
Mayan settlements. He looks at
the ancient civilization from the
standpoint of an environmental
designer, trying to make in
ferences about what Mayan life
was like.
“Up until the last 5 or 10 years,
most of the attention of ar
cheologists focused on artifacts,
monumental architecture and the
hieroglyphic writing of the
Mayans,” he says.
But work by archeologists
doesn’t “provide any information
about the nature of the settlement
itself” he explains because
mapping during this early phase
was confined almost entirely to
monumental structures.
Andrews says it has been
assumed that Mayan settlements
consisted of buildings that were
used only for religious or
ceremonial purposes. Such an
assumption infers the Mayans
didn’t live in the settlements, but
^merely used them as ceremonial
^Bt-iters on special occasions.
Urban buildings
But Andrews says he tried to
make a case in his book that the
larger settlements—“not all of
them by any means because they
vary in size considerably”—can
be called urban.
“If you accept that proposition,
then you also have to accept the
idea that the buildings represent
a whole range of functions,
beyond that you would associate
with religion or ceremonial ac
tivity.”
The settlements “become
Not fond
of Fonda
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep.
Fletcher Thompson, R-Ga.,
Tuesday accused actress Jane
Fonda of treason and said the
Justice Department should take
action against her.
Fonda, Thompson told the
House, was quoted last week by
Radio Hanoi as urging U.S.
military personnel in Vietnam to
disobey orders.
'This is treason,” he said, and
“is giving aid and comfort to the
enemy."
He said he was asking the at
torney general to bring charges
of treason against Fonda, a
recent visitor to North Vietnam
much more analogous to a
contemporary city, which is
made up out of a great variety of
buildings.”
If the larger settlements can be
called urban, Andrews says,
‘‘then you have to assume a fairly
large resident population carried
on quite a different kind of life.
They were not agriculturalists
living out in the brush, in rural
areas, but rather urban
residents.
Negative evidence
Andrews says the assumption
that Mayan settlements were
only ceremonial centers was
made by using negative
evidence. “It’s as though you
drew a map of Eugene and only
showed the central business area
and reasoned from that there
isn’t anything more.”
He says at the six or seven sites
where extensive mapping has
been done, it is clear in all cases
that the settlements “are much
more extensive than just looking
at the central core portion would
suggest, and that some of them
are indeed very large.”
Large Mayan settlements had
a central precinct (analogous to
downtown), he explains, with a
number of “sub-centers”
(suburban shopping centers)
surrounded by houses.
Mapping and excavation
The major problems Andrews
faced in the eight summers he
spent exploring Mayan ruins
were those of mapping and ex
cavation.
Mapping is “extremely dif
ficult,” he says “because the
areas you’re dealing with are
A
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1954 105min. COLOR
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177 LAWRENCE
$1 or by season ticket
completely covered over with a
very heavy growth of jungle. The
character of that varies
depending on where you are—
from a kind of scrub-thorny
jungle in the northern part of the
Maya area to a rain-forest in the
southern part.”
“You can be within 20 feet of a
50-foot high structure and not
realize it’s there—that’s how
thick the growth is,” he says.
Machetes and axes are used to
“cut down enough to see what’s
there,” he explains, and the
“amount of clearing required is
fantastic.”
Smaller mounds are more
difficult to find, Andrews says,
but in many cases they tell more
about the life-style of the Mayans
than do the larger monuments.
Accidental interest
Andrews says he became in
terested in Mayan culture ac
cidentally.
“The first time 1 went to that
part of the world, I was
fascinated by what I saw, I guess
partly because it was so obvious
from even the little bit you could
see at that time that the ar
chitecture was very sophisticated
and somehow it just appealed to
me very much personally.”
He decided to work on studying
the culture seriously in 1958.
“1 look at it from the point of
view of the environmental
designer, trying to reason about
it from the reference of how all of
the aspirations of a society are
given form through what they do
in making buildings and what
they do in making cities,” he
says.
Andrews’ book—which will
include 75 original detailed
drawings, 250 photographs and
more than 500 pages of text—is
not intended to be a text book or a
picture book, but somewhere in
between.
“I’m really trying to get more
people interested in Maya ar
chitecture and Maya settlements
by trying to make more clear
what they represent,” he says.
And, even after spending 14
years preparing “Maya Cities—
Place Making and Ur
banization," Andrews says he
wants to write another book on
the Mayans -this one about their
architecture, rather than their
settlement patterns.
You really know how
to hurt an elephant
OQUAWKA, 111. (AP) — Norma Jean, a 6,500-pound circus elephant
struck and killed by lightning, was buried Monday night in Oquawka's
village square, where she was to have performed in a benefit with the
Clark and Walters Circus.
The elephant, 27 years old and the featured animal attraction of the
circus, was killed earlier Monday during a severe thunderstorm.
The circus, which was in Oquawka for a benefit for a softball league,
borrowed an elephant from another circus touring in western Illinois,
and the show went on as planned.
Jim Silverlake, general manager of the circus, said Norma Jean
was buried in a 12- by 14-foot grave near the tree at which she was
tethered when the lightning struck.
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