Publisher's Synopsis
Hendon conducted research on three contemporaneous Native American civilizations that flourished from the seventh century through the eleventh CE: the Maya kingdom of Copan, the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque, and the dispersed settlement of the Cuyumapa valley. She analyzes domestic life in these societies, from cooking to crafting, as well as public and private ritual events including the ballgame. Combining her findings with a rich body of theory from anthropology, history, and geography, she explores how objects-the things people build, make, use, exchange, and discard-help people remember. In so doing, she demonstrates how everyday life becomes part of the social processes of remembering and forgetting, and how "memory communities" assert connections between the past and the present.
