Maya News Updates

On June 30, 2005, I started an irregular e-mail news alert service on anything related to the culture of the (ancient) Maya (southeastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, western Honduras, western El Salvador), at that time referred to as Maya News Alerts. In 2005 a total of 16 Maya News Alerts were send to a growing group with subscribers from Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Australia. Topics varied from 16th century murals in Mani (Yucatan) to the royal massacre at the Classic site of Cancuen (Guatemala). The service continued into 2006, in which year a total of 35 Maya News Alerts were send. When No. 25 (August 9, 2006) was reached I changed the name to Maya News Updates. Maya News Update 2006 - No. 35 was send on September 2, 2006. Topics ranged from the latest archaeological news from San Bartolo and Holmul (Guatemala) to a ch'achaak rain petition performed on the initiative of farmer's women in Peto (Yucatan) in which they participated themselves.

From today Maya News Updates will be made available in a different format. Instead of being send to a growing number of subscribers, Maya News Updates has found its place on Blogspot.com. As in the past the updates will appear irregularly, depending on the availability of news items pertaining to Maya research, museum exhibits, education (and conferences), and travel, as well as news items on related cultures of (ancient) Mesoamerica.

The present forum additionally enables me to post descriptions and comments on anything related to Maya culture. New series of descriptions and comments that will be started in 2006 include "Maya Object of the Month" and "Maya Glyph of the Month".

In the coming weeks the contents of Maya News Updates will be frequently enlarged through the posting of all previous Maya News Updates (Alerts) from 2005 and 2006. This might turn out to be a lengthy process as I want to check the availability of all original web posting (news papers, web magazines, institutional newsletters, press releases, etc.).

Subscribers to the email group will be informed on new postings on this web log. The additional service of providing PDFs of web pages and documents discussed in any Maya News Update will be continued in 2006. Depending on time availability, specifically in 2007, this service may not be extended. A web archive is in development to contain all previously generated PDFs, originally send as attachments of Maya News Updates.