A Classic Maya Mystery of a Medicinal Plant and Maya Hieroglyphs

Human Taste and Cognition in Tzeltal Maya Medicinal Plant Use

Results of recent research strongly suggest that people find beneficial phytochemicals by selecting plants to use as medicinals and that taste plays a major role in this process. The research reported here involved an experiment performed with Highland Tzeltal Maya of Chiapas, Mexico to determine if bitterness served as a chemical cue for plants appropriate for treating gastrointestinal versus ...

Evaluating Shape Descriptors for Detection of Maya Hieroglyphs

In this work we address the problem of detecting instances of complex shapes in binary images. We investigated the effects of combining DoG and Harris-Laplace interest points with SIFT and HOOSC descriptors. Also, we propose the use of a retrieval-based detection framework suitable to deal with images that are sparsely annotated, and where the objects of interest are very small in proportion to...

Statistical Shape Descriptors for Ancient Maya Hieroglyphs Analysis

The preservation, analysis, and management of valuable and fragile historical and cultural materials with digital technologies is a field of multidisciplinary nature, and significant to the society at large. The benefits of using visual and multimedia analysis techniques in this domain are manifold. First, automatic and semi-automatic content-based analysis methods can provide scholars in the h...

Dance in Maya Art : Ritual Performance of the Classic Maya . University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

This research is a study of the characteristics of Maya dance during the Early to Late Classical periods, which is approximately 250 CE to 900 CE. The artistic expression of the Maya culture developed its highest aesthetic in art during this period and much of the images in the artwork relate to dance. The practice of dance in Maya cultures had several purposes, but the most prominent were reli...

Cognitive Implications of an Economic Approach to Classic Maya Exchange