24 – NEW – The Ancient Maya: Millennia of Art and Architecture of a Rainforest Civilisation
On campus
Course 24 – Summer School on campus
Monday 15 – Friday 19 July 2024
Dr Sanja Savkic Sebek
£645
Course description
This course explores the rich and diverse visual and material culture of the ancient Maya, one of the greatest civilisations that thrived in the ‘New World’, in modern-day southern Mexico and northern Central America, for approximately three millennia until the arrival of the Spanish in the first decades of the sixteenth century.
Given the long duration of Maya civilisation and the sheer number of ancient sites, there is great variation in art, architecture, history and politics. We shall therefore focus on the overall picture of individual regions and their histories, with more detailed insight into selected places, artworks, calligraphic writing, and prominent individuals. We shall examine a series of paradigmatic cases, such as significant monuments and art objects in a variety of media. They will be studied in terms of style and original socio-political or sacred context. Artworks and hieroglyphic texts will be used as primary sources to learn how the ancient Maya expressed ideas about history, political power, and the divine. We shall also consider encounters of the West with the Maya to show how this civilisation has been represented historically and today. Lectures are complemented by visits to the British Museum and by a workshop on Mayan writing.
How to book
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Lecturer's biography
Dr Sanja Savkic Sebek is an art historian specialising in Latin American Indigenous societies’ art and visual culture, particularly focusing on Mesoamerica and New Spain. She has held prestigious postdoctoral positions, including at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)’s Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas and Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence (KHI), and is currently an affiliated fellow at KHI. Sanja’s research lies at the intersection between art history, anthropology, and archaeology, and explores themes such as ritual art; time and space in visual arts and architecture; and Maya and Aztec writing systems. Among her recent publications are Indigenous Visual Cultures and Aesthetic Practices in the Americas’ Past and Present, edited with Hannah Baader (Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, 2019) and Writing as a Visual Art: The Maya Script (with Erik Velásquez García, 2021). Forthcoming publications include The Challenge of Mobile Images and Objects in Mesoamerica (edited with Rex Koontz) and Material Transformations in Amerindian Artistic Practices (edited with Bat-ami Artzi and Elizabeth Baquedano).