The Ancient Maya

The Maya Forest: destroyed or cultivated by the ancient Maya?

B oth academic and popular perceptions concerning the relationship between the Maya (ancient and modern) and the Maya Forest in which their culture developed and persisted formore than three millennia are varied and continuously subject to change (1). The analysis of a sediment core from a pond located near the ancient Maya city of Copan, Honduras, interpreted byMcNeil et al. (2) in this issue ...

The fractal geometry of ancient Maya settlement

Ancient Maya settlement patterns exhibit fractal geometry both within communities and across regions. Fractals are self-similar sets of fractional dimension. In this paper, we show how Maya settlement patterns are logically and statistically self-similar. We demonstrate how to measure the fractal dimensions (or Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimensions) of several data sets. We describe nonlinear dynami...

MENU FOR THE ANCIENT MAYA Modeling Considerations

The Geographic Analysis of Ancient Maya Settlement and Polity

Many elements of ancient Maya culture — language, art, ecology, economics, politics — have a geographic aspect and can be profitably investigated through geographic analysis. We are developing a geographic information system (GIS) for the purpose of studying prehistoric Maya settlement and society. The GIS is composed of archaeological, epigraphic, and locational data. It includes the whole May...

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...