Here are 100 books that Breaking the Maya Code fans have personally recommended if you like
Breaking the Maya Code.
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I was lucky enough to have been taught Latin at school, and I remember my first teacher telling the class that a tandem bicycle was so called because Latin tandem means ‘at length’. That was the beginning with my fascination for words, etymologies, and languages. At University I was able to specialise in Greek, Latin, and Indo-European languages and then for my PhD I learnt Armenian (which has an alphabet to die for: 36 letters each of which has four different varieties, not counting ligatures!). I am now Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Cambridge.
I read this book while still at school and it was my first introduction to one of the most famous decipherments in history, the cracking of Linear B by the architect and amateur enthusiast Michael Ventris. Unlike most other decipherments, there is no Rosetta Stone to Linear B, which was deciphered by techniques similar to those used in code-breaking. I was later lucky enough to be taught by the author, the great John Chadwick, who writes with beautiful clarity and precision.
The languages of the ancient world and the mysterious scripts, long undeciphered, in which they were encoded have represented one of the most intriguing problems of classical archaeology in modern times. This celebrated account of the decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris was written by his close collaborator in the momentous discovery. In revealing the secrets of Linear B it offers a valuable survey of late Minoan and Mycenaean archaeology, uncovering fascinating details of the religion and economic history of an ancient civilisation.
I was lucky enough to have been taught Latin at school, and I remember my first teacher telling the class that a tandem bicycle was so called because Latin tandem means ‘at length’. That was the beginning with my fascination for words, etymologies, and languages. At University I was able to specialise in Greek, Latin, and Indo-European languages and then for my PhD I learnt Armenian (which has an alphabet to die for: 36 letters each of which has four different varieties, not counting ligatures!). I am now Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Cambridge.
Andrew Robinson has written an excellent biography of Michael Ventris and also of Champollion, the man who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this book he gives overviews of three decipherments and surveys of as undeciphered languages and languages that we can read but not necessarily understand (one of my favourite languages, Etruscan, falls into this category). This book is a great jumping-off point if you want to plunge into the waters of decipherment, and has excellent illustrations.
Beginning with the stories of three great decipherments - Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan Linear B and Mayan glyphs - Lost Languages moves on to dissect the most well-known and enigmatic undeciphered scripts from around the world.
These include the Etruscan alphabet of Italy, the Indus Valley seal script, Rongorongo from remote Easter Island, the Zapotec script of Mexico (probably the first writing system in the Americas), and the unique Phaistos disc of Crete. Lost Languages reports from the front lines of scholarship where obsessions, genius, occasional delusion and sometimes bitter rivalry are de rigueur among those currently competing for the rare…
I was lucky enough to have been taught Latin at school, and I remember my first teacher telling the class that a tandem bicycle was so called because Latin tandem means ‘at length’. That was the beginning with my fascination for words, etymologies, and languages. At University I was able to specialise in Greek, Latin, and Indo-European languages and then for my PhD I learnt Armenian (which has an alphabet to die for: 36 letters each of which has four different varieties, not counting ligatures!). I am now Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Cambridge.
Not all adventures in lost languages involve undeciphered scripts. I know nothing about the native language of Australia, but was immediately hooked by this book’s vivid account of a specialist as he attempts to locate the last speaker or speakers of a language—and then get them to speak to him. It was great for me to see how the techniques I use to reconstruct ancient languages can also reveal the structures of modern languages where there is scarcely any evidence remaining.
In the early 1960s, R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon was one of the first linguists to study the Aboriginal languages of northeast Queensland, Australia. He found that some languages of the coastal rainforest were still in daily use, but others were only half-remembered by a single elder. This autobiographical account of fourteen years of research, first published in 1984, paints a fascinating picture of the frontier society that existed in the region nearly fifty years ago. It reveals the difficulties and the excitement of linguistic fieldwork, but most of all it focuses on the people who agreed to work with…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
I was lucky enough to have been taught Latin at school, and I remember my first teacher telling the class that a tandem bicycle was so called because Latin tandem means ‘at length’. That was the beginning with my fascination for words, etymologies, and languages. At University I was able to specialise in Greek, Latin, and Indo-European languages and then for my PhD I learnt Armenian (which has an alphabet to die for: 36 letters each of which has four different varieties, not counting ligatures!). I am now Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Cambridge.
Linear A, the script that preceded Linear B in Crete, has long attracted attempts at decipherment. Ester Salgarella, who is a colleague of mine at Cambridge, would not claim to have deciphered Linear A, but her work on the script and its relation to Linear B is brilliant at reframing the question about the relationship between the two. If you read this after Andrew Robinson’s account of Linear A (in his Lost Languages book mentioned above), you might be surprised by how much progress has been made.
When does a continuum become a divide? This book investigates the genetic relationship between Linear A and Linear B, two Bronze Age scripts attested on Crete and Mainland Greece and understood to have developed one out of the other. By using an interdisciplinary methodology, this research integrates linguistic, epigraphic, palaeographic and archaeological evidence, and places the writing practice in its sociohistorical setting. By challenging traditional views, this work calls into question widespread assumptions and interpretative schemes on the relationship between these two scripts, and opens up new perspectives on the ideology associated with the retention, adaptation and transmission of a…
I was Curator of Archaeology at the Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder; recently retired. Before landing at the University of Colorado, I held research, curatorial, or administrative positions with the University of Tennessee, Eastern New Mexico University, National Park Service Chaco Project, Arizona State Museum, Museum of New Mexico, and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Over four decades, I directed more than 20 archaeological projects throughout the Southwest. I wrote a dozen books, chapters in many edited volumes, and scores of articles in journals and magazines. While many of these were technical treatises, I also tried to write scholarly books accessible to normal intelligent readers.
One of the most important Southwestern sites isn’t in the USA’s “Southwest.” This is the site of Paquimé, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Paquimé (pronounced pah-key-may) was the capital city of a region that encompassed much of northeastern Chihuahua and portions of southern New Mexico, from 1250 to 1450. While Pueblo people to the north recovered from the traumas of Chaco by deliberately simplifying their societies, Paquimé rose in glittering glory with a massive city center (hence Paquimé’s other name, Casas Grandes) surrounded by Mesoamerican-style ball courts, (small) pyramids, a football-field-long effigy of a plumed serpent, and all the wealth in the world: for example, copper artifacts fancier and more plentiful than at many central Mexican sites, and 500+ colorful macaws – birds brought up from the tropical south and bred at Paquimé.
The list of the architectural and artifactual wonders goes on and on. Archaeologists were aware of…
In the mid-1560s Spanish explorers marched northward through Mexico to the farthest northern reaches of the Spanish empire in Latin America. They beheld an impressive site known as Casas Grandes in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Row upon row of walls featured houses and plazas of what was once a large population center, now deserted. Called Casas Grandes (Spanish for “large houses”) but also known as Paquimé, the prehistoric archaeological site may have been one of the first that Spanish explorers encountered. The Ibarra expedition, occurring perhaps no more than a hundred years after the site was abandoned, contained a…
I’ve always enjoyed mystery and suspense stories—Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark being two of my all-time favorite authors. Throw in some legends and folklore, and I’m hooked. I like well-crafted stories that keep me turning the pages. Those that stump me in figuring out the mystery are a plus for me. I love books with descriptive settings that place me, as the reader, in the heart of the action.
Real-life mysteries intrigue me, and one of the strangest unsolved cases involved a group of nine Soviet hikers in the area known as Dyatlov Pass. Preston and Child took this story, set it in the mountains of New Mexico, and weaved an enticing tale that kept me turning the pages and guessing right up to the end.
This is the fourth book of their Nora Kelly series, but it can easily be read as a stand-alone.
In 2008, nine mountaineers failed to return from a winter backpacking trip in the New Mexico mountains. At their last campsite, searchers found a bizarre scene: something had appeared at the door of their tent so terrifying that it impelled them to slash their way out and flee barefoot to certain death in a blizzard. Despite a diligent search, only six bodies were found, three violently crushed and missing eyes and tongues. The case, given the code name “Dead Mountain” by the FBI, was never solved.
Now, two more bodies from the lost expedition are unexpectedly discovered in a cave,…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I have researched human origins professionally for almost decades by studying the trail of fossils that have survived millions of years. But, before then, and since I can remember, I’ve been a lover of adventure and science fiction stories in all formats: action movies (Indiana Jones, Back to the Future), TV shows (The X Files), novels (Jack London!), or anime and manga (Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Alita). So, I guess my mind constantly travels from the past to the future. I think this list will also work as a time machine for others.
Reading this book is like watching an adventure movie on a Sunday afternoon on the couch. But it’s not a movie; it actually happened. The late author, a recognized geologist, recounts his personal biography during the 1970s, exploring the Afar region of Ethiopia and searching for the earliest human ancestors.
The “plot” involves the US government, spy accusations, funny stories about personalities in the field, and one of the “game changers” in paleoanthropology: The discovery of “Lucy,” the skeleton of a tiny female of Australopithecus afarensis that lived more than 3 million years ago. Knowing some of the personalities mentioned in the book, the pages flew in front of my face, and I effortlessly read it in no time.
Over the past 25 years, a stream of fossil and artifact discoveries in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia has produced the longest single record of human ancestors in the world. Many of the fossils found in this region are the missing links leading to modern humans. This book chronicles the exploration of this unique desert area, focusing especially on the 1970s when the valley was mapped and many fossils and archeological sites were discovered. The author gives his personal account of the 25 years he spent researching the region. As co-founder of the team that discovered Lucy, Jon Kalb has…
As an author of 50+ books of historical fiction and non-fiction for kids, teens, and adults I am handicapped by being unable to travel in time or go to the places I set my stories. I have long used photography as an attempt to capture a sense of places and the people who inhabit them, but I gradually realized that my images were not simply an adjunct to the stories I was telling but that the best of them had their own tales to tell. Through photographs, jumbled piles of stone became a gateway to a lost, magical past and a trigger for my imagination.
Many, many years ago, Rose Macauley’s classic book, The Pleasure of Ruins, went a long way to inspiring my sense of wonder at the remnants of past worlds.
In this book, Roloff Beny interprets Macauley’s words in the same way that I attempt to encapsulate and share some of the feelings of awe I get when I visit these magical places.
I was Curator of Archaeology at the Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder; recently retired. Before landing at the University of Colorado, I held research, curatorial, or administrative positions with the University of Tennessee, Eastern New Mexico University, National Park Service Chaco Project, Arizona State Museum, Museum of New Mexico, and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Over four decades, I directed more than 20 archaeological projects throughout the Southwest. I wrote a dozen books, chapters in many edited volumes, and scores of articles in journals and magazines. While many of these were technical treatises, I also tried to write scholarly books accessible to normal intelligent readers.
My archaeological career began in 1971 in the Mimbres region of Southwestern New Mexico. I continued to work in the area, on and off, until 2013. Along the way, I wrote four books and many chapters/articles about Mimbres, and I formed some strong opinions on ancient Mimbres history.
Centered in the Mimbres River valley, the Mimbres built about twenty sizable stone villages at the same time as Chaco Canyon, from 1000 to 1125. Their towns were notably large for the time, fueled by sophisticated canal irrigation (probably adopted from the Hohokam, see above). But Mimbres is most famous for its remarkable black-on-white pottery: artfully-painted bowl interiors show bugs, fish, antelopes, birds, and people – people doing things, tableaus of daily life, esoteric rituals, mythical events. These images appeal strongly to us, today. In ancient times, however, Mimbres bowls and Mimbres art seems to have been limited to the Mimbres region…
People have called the mountains, rolling hills, wide valleys, and broad desert plains of southwestern New Mexico home for at least ten thousand years. When they began to farm a little over two thousand years ago, they settled near the rich soils in the river floodplains. Then, around 900, the people of this region burned all of their kivas and started gathering in large villages with small ritual spaces and open plazas. Between 900 and about 1100, they also made the intricately painted geometric and figurative bowls today called Mimbres, their best-known legacy. Then, in the 1130s, they stopped making…
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
I love stories, and as a child I found that some of the best and most powerful stories I ever heard were those that people told about the past. When I grew up, I pursued a career as an academic archaeologist and historian, and I am now Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. But while I am of course interested in the past, in recent years I have been increasingly thinking about the politics of the past as well. Why do we choose to celebrate some stories about the past and not others? I have found these books all useful in helping me to think through this.
This more recent book focuses specifically on archaeology, which is my own area of expertise, and so I rushed to buy it when it first came out.
I don’t agree with absolutely everything in it, but it’s the mark of a good book if you come away with a head full of questions and exciting thoughts, which I definitely did with this one!
Archaeology, Nation, and Race is a must-read book for students of archaeology and adjacent fields. It demonstrates how archaeology and concepts of antiquity have shaped, and have been shaped by colonialism, race, and nationalism. Structured as a lucid and lively dialogue between two leading scholars, the volume compares modern Greece and modern Israel - two prototypical and influential cases - where archaeology sits at the very heart of the modern national imagination. Exchanging views on the foundational myths, moral economies, and racial prejudices in the field of archaeology and beyond, Hamilakis and Greenberg explore topics such as the colonial origins…
