Read more
Night and Darkness in Ancient Mesoamerica is the first volume to explicitly incorporate how nocturnal aspects of the natural world were imbued with deep cultural meanings and expressed by different peoples from various time periods in Mexico and Central America.
About the author
Nancy Gonlin is a Mesoamerican archaeologist who specializes in daily and nightly practices, household studies, and inequality. She is editor-in-chief of
Ancient Mesoamerica, and her publications include the coedited volumes
Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica,
Ancient Households of the Americas,
Human Adaptation in Ancient Mesoamerica, and
Archaeology of the Night. She is coauthor of
Copán: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom and
The Archaeology of Native North America, 2nd ed. Gonlin is a professor of anthropology at Bellevue College in Washington.
David M. Reed is an anthropological archaeologist with extensive experience in stable isotope biogeochemistry, mortuary analyses, sociopolitics of the ancient Maya, human genetics, and quantitative analysis, who has done pioneering research on ancient mitochondrial DNA of the Copán Maya. He was a Genome Science Training Program Research Fellow at the Center for Statistical Genetics at the University of Michigan; a visiting scholar at the Center for Archaeological Investigations at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale; and a Summer Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC. A former research specialist at the Kellogg Eye Center of the University of Michigan and current senior research statistician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, he researches the biology and genetics of eye diseases.
Summary
Night and Darkness in Ancient Mesoamerica is the first volume to explicitly incorporate how nocturnal aspects of the natural world were imbued with deep cultural meanings and expressed by different peoples from various time periods in Mexico and Central America.
