PURPOSE Cultural diversity in clinical encounters is common, yet mental constructions regarding cancer that influence expected treatment are poorly studied for indigenous people. We explored Maya healers' conceptions, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer to remedy this problem. METHODS In-depth structured interviews with 67 traditional Maya healers in Guatemala across Kaqchikel, Kiche', Mam, Mo...

Getting at the Maya Collapse has both temporal and geographic dimensions, because it occurred over centuries and great distances. This requires a wide range of research sites and proxy records, ranging from lake cores to geomorphic evidence, such as stratigraphy and speleothems. This article synthesizes these lines of evidence, together with previously undescribed findings on Maya wetland forma...

Among the Maya, the cultural history of steambathing spans more than two millennia. Although it has largely disappeared from the lowlands, household-level steambathing persists in several highland Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico. In this article, I present an overview of therapeutic steambathing among the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya. Through an extended discussion of the beliefs and practices ...

C lassic Period Maya society (A.D. ∼250–850) is almost as well known for its collapse as for its tremendous accomplishments in hieroglyphic writing, monumental art, and architecture and an extensive, populous network of cities and towns that crossed the terrain of parts of four modern nations (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras). Indeed, interest in the political and demographic collapse o...

Argumentsfor the cosmological significance of ancient Maya city layouts are plausible, but empirical applications are subjective and lack rigor. I illustrate this contention through brief comments on a recent article by Ashmore and Sabloff. I first discuss some of the complexities and pitfalls in studying cosmology from ancient city plans, and then focus on one component of the authors' cosmolo...

The formal development of industrial-size software is an errorprone and therefore an evolutionary process. Verifying formal specifications usually reveals hidden errors causing the change of parts of the specification. Also adding new functionality will result in changes of the specification which always endangers the verification work already done. In this paper we describe the system Maya whi...

Textiles formed a major part of any ancient Mesoamerican economy. Based on ethnohistory and iconography, the Maya were great producers of cloth for both internal and external use. However, the archaeological identification of textile production is difficult in any tropical area because of issues of preservation. This paper examines the evidence for the production and distribution of cloth that ...

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...

Archaeology is in mortal danger of losing itself on the bypaths of abracadabra. ere is precious little diierence between the Maya medicine man mystifying his patients with muttered incantations and the ceramicist awing his scant congregation with still more esoteric names. ompson : xvii e vast majority of artifactual materials recovered at Maya sites are broken sherds recovered from the lls of ...

We previously described a tic-tac-toe playing molecular automaton, MAYA-II, constructed from a molecular array of deoxyribozyme-based logic gates, that uses oligonucleotides as inputs and outputs. We are now developing an ensemble modeling tool for high-throughput oligonucleotide input and logic gate designs. The modeling tool is based on exhaustive reconstruction of both intended and unintende...