In a lecture titled The Ancient Maya: (Not a) Lost Civilization, Megan O'Neil, assistant professor of art history at Emory, discusses her new book in the Reaktion Books Lost Civilization series, The Maya, in which she demonstrates that this remarkable culture is anything but lost.
"Readable and full of new ideas, this is a powerful—and distinctive—book on the Maya. Engaged at every step with Maya visual culture, this is also a book of history, anthropology, and the Maya today, one that makes strong connections between the artistic efforts of the first millennium CE and life and practice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." —Mary Miller, director, Getty Research Institute
"This beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched book is a wholly new, contextual study of the Maya people of Mexico and Central America. It is a groundbreaking study for several reasons. First, it does not end with the fall of the Postclassic Maya in the sixteenth century, but continues to trace Maya culture and society’s continuous evolution through the colonial period and into the present day. Additionally, it presents a richly detailed panorama of the ways that scholarly and popular audiences in Latin America and beyond have sought to collect, display, remix, and decipher the ancient Maya since the nineteenth century. The result is a thought-provoking study of how our understandings of this ancient civilization have evolved dramatically over time, and are still being constructed today." —Ellen Hoobler, William B. Ziff, Jr, Associate Curator of the Art of the Americas, Walters Art Museum
