Leading Maya hieroglyphics expert David Stuart draws on decades of research, new decipherments, and archaeological discoveries to bring this ancient civilization to life and tell a new history of the Maya. The decipherment of ancient Indigenous Maya writings allows their story to be told from their own perspective. It is told by one of the world’s leading Mayanists, who began contributing to the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs at age 13. The son of two Maya scholars, Stuart became the youngest person ever to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, at age 18. For the first time, specific information about people, places, and events allows for a detailed history of ancient Maya extending back to the second century.
Beautifully illustrated with many of Stuart’s own drawings and images, The Four Heavens reflects recent discoveries and thinking about Maya civilization, offering insights into Maya belief systems and lifeways more than 2,000 years ago. The highly readable book is organized into four parts that reflect Mesoamerican understandings of time, cosmology, and spatial balance: paskab/The World Revealed, which explores the founding of new ceremonial plazas and spaces; kabch’en/The Earth and Caves, a detailed historical narrative of Classic-period dynasties and the sociopolitical world they occupied and shaped; chante’chan/The Four Heavens, which examines the underlying structure of Maya cosmology; and lok’oy/The Leaving, which considers the much-debated Maya “collapse” of the ninth century and its aftermath. Rather than portraying a classic story of rise and fall, Stuart demonstrates that the Maya’s ups and downs were adaptive responses to changing sociopolitical and environmental conditions over nearly three millennia. Part of the public-facing Unearthing the Past series, this groundbreaking book is an incredible addition to Maya scholarship.
