ADAM HERRING. Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, a.d. 600-800: A Poetics of Line. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 316. $85.00

Abstract

Adam Herring has written an engaging, informative, and generally readable book that provides an intriguing new perspective on late classic lowland Maya art (a.d. 600–800). The book presents a welcome and long overdue redirection in contemporary studies of classic Maya art, for the last twenty years obsessed with “awesome” insights by a handful of select authors, and vicious criticism of previous research. These are replaced here with a noncritical, postprocessual (“emic”), culture-based view of ancient Maya culture and society. Herring argues the essence of elite classic Maya world view to be manifest in the single term, ts'ib', roughly glossed as “the brushwork of Maya calligraphy,” and that this view is communicated through the multiple physical expressions of Maya art. The book consists of a discursive examination of the many possible meanings and subtle nuances of ts'ib', and the “visual idiom(s) by which the Maya submitted the world's varied aspects to the rationalizing logic of human pattern and cultural meaning” (p. 7).