Note to editors
and news directors:
Professor
Roberto Cantú and others are available for advance interviews in English
and Spanish. To make arrangements, please call or email the Public
Affairs contacts listed above.
Journalists are
welcome to attend the conference.
Photos of Mesoamerican ruins and artifacts are also available below.
Please credit the photographer, Cal State L.A. Art History Professor
Manuel Aguilar-Moreno. (High-resolution versions are available by
clicking on photos below.)
___
MESOAMERICA’S MYSTERIES, MANIFESTATIONS –
FROM MAYAN CODE TO
MODERN CULTURE Cal State
L.A. invites public to free 2-day exploration into hieroglyphics,
Los Angeles, CA
– “The Mesoamerican world was not destroyed in the 16th
Century. It is a living culture,” said Roberto Cantú. “People still
speak Mayan. People speak Nahua.”
An expert on
Latin American literature and a professor at California State
University, Los Angeles, Cantú and his colleagues at Cal State L.A. are
hosting a free conference Friday and Saturday, May 15 and 16, to explore
the ancient ways of the Aztec, Maya, Toltec and other cultures of
Mesoamerica civilization – and to examine how remnants of those worlds
remain vital today.
The public is
invited to the conference, which will include international scholars
presenting more than a dozen panels, lectures and workshops. Topics will
range from archaeology to ulama, an ancient basketball-soccer-like sport
still played in Mexico. Other sessions will cover, among other topics,
offering bowls and funeral urns, ancient astronomy, statues and
symbolism, ancient and modern Mesoamerican writing systems, colonial
Oaxaca, and portrayals in modern literature and film, including the 2007
film “Apocalypto.”
Titled
“Continuity and Change in Mesoamerican History, From the Pre-Classic to
the Colonial Era,” the conference will feature leading experts –
including David Carrasco, founder of the Mesoamerica archive at Harvard
University; John Pohl, curator at UCLA’s Arts of the Americas Fowler
Museum; Viola Konig of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, Germany; and
Karl Taube of UC Riverside. It will also include panel presentations by
more than 30 other scholars, including nine from Cal State L.A.; several
from other UC and CSU campuses; and others from U.S. universities,
Mexico, the Ukraine and Canada.
The film
“Breaking the Maya Code” will be also screened Friday evening, followed
by a workshop on deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics Saturday morning.
The major events
will be in the University-Student Union Theatre; other events will be at
various locations on the Cal State L.A. campus. No preregistration is
necessary. A schedule and other details are here:
http://calstatela2009conferenceonmesoamerica.blogspot.com/
According to
Cantú, the conference attracted high-caliber scholars because it also
celebrates the centennial of the birth of Tatiana Proskouriakoff . A
Siberian-born, Pennsylvania-raised, Harvard-based archaeologist,
Proskouriakoff made her first (published) research mark by linking
carved jade to a lineage of ancient rulers in present-day Guatemala.
Later her work reordered contemporary interpretations of Mayan
hieroglyphics.
“In her own
time,” said Cantú, “she was not taken as seriously perhaps as she should
have been because she was a woman coming up with very different ideas
about hieroglyphics. Sometimes scholars are not acknowledged in their
own time. She also was in a generation (of anthropologists) that was at
the cusp. Much of the Mayan hieroglyphic alphabet has been decoded in
the last 30 years. In retrospect, a new generation of scholars has
acknowledged her as a luminary for opening up a new paradigm.”
Formerly largely
considered decorative, now much of the hieroglyphic designs are known to
be an alphabet. The film “Breaking the Maya Code” outlines that
transformation of understanding.
Carrasco, a
professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, will conclude the
conference with a keynote address Saturday at 6 p.m. titled
“Re-Discovering Aztlán and a Mesoamerican Odyssey: An Interpretive
Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan.” Presented as Cal State L.A.’s
2009 Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Lecture, the talk will be followed by
a book-signing.
Gaucher-Morales,
who died in 2007, was a professor of French and Spanish at Cal State
L.A. from 1965 to 2005. She taught about the literature and culture of
France, of the Anglophone world, and of Latin America, including the
Caribbean. With her husband, Dr. Alfredo Morales, she co-founded,
directed, and served as advisor of Cal State L.A.’s Teatro Universitario
en Espańol for almost 25 years.
# # #
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history, sports, religion, cosmology, more with scholars, filmmaker
Teotihuacan, the city of the gods.
Teotihuacan mask.
Malinalco, the eagle’s nest, an Aztec city.
Aztec skull of Santa Maria Acatitla.
The palace of Palenque, a Maya city.
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