The Road to Ruins edition by Ian Graham Politics Social Sciences eBooks
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For anyone who ever wanted to be an archaeologist, Ian Graham could be a hero. This lively memoir chronicles Graham's career as the "last explorer" and a fierce advocate for the protection and preservation of Maya sites and monuments across Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. It is also full of adventure and high society, for the self-deprecating Graham traveled to remote lands such as Afghanistan in wonderful company. He tells entertaining stories about his encounters with a host of notables beginning with Rudyard Kipling, a family friend from Graham's childhood.
Born in 1923 into an aristocratic family descended from Oliver Cromwell, Ian Graham was educated at Winchester, Cambridge, and Trinity College, Dublin. His career in Mesoamerican archaeology can be said to have begun in 1959 when he turned south in his Rolls Royce and began traveling through the Maya lowlands photographing ruins. He has worked as an artist, cartographer, and photographer, and has mapped and documented inscriptions at hundreds of Maya sites, persevering under rugged field conditions. Graham is best known as the founding director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1981, and he remained the Maya Corpus program director until his retirement in 2004.
Graham's careful recordings of Maya inscriptions are often credited with making the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphics possible. But it is the romance of his work and the graceful conversational style of his writing that make this autobiography must reading not just for Mayanists but for anyone with a taste for the adventure of archaeology.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Ian Graham currently lives in England. In addition to the many volumes of his Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, he is the author of a biography of the early Mayanist, Sir Alfred Maudslay.
ACCLAIM
"In this beguiling autobiography, Graham, who was awarded a MacArthur genius grant in 1981 and is the founding director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, recalls a charmed life as an archaeologist-explorer." -- The Atlantic
"This beguiling biography records forty-three years of 'Maya mania.'" -- The Times Literary Supplement
The Road to Ruins edition by Ian Graham Politics Social Sciences eBooks
Well it's a wonderful book especially if you are familiar with the subject of Mayan ruins and the areas of Guatemala and Mexico that's covered. Otherwise it might not resonate. Told largely as a series of what are essentially anecdotes; don't expect a continuous narrative. Ian Graham is mostly a photographer particularly of stelae for the purposes of iconography -the photographs in the book are all his so I suggest getting the original hardback version which I'm sure contains much better reproductions of the photos than the soft cover. Only the latter is available from Amazon directly: used copies, somewhat expensive are available through Amazon and others. However, I found a website that offered new copies at a price only slightly more that the soft-cover so look around. From a posted review I found that it contained color photographs of the " fire-walk' at Chamula. Although hardly a rare event occurring every year in February in front of hundreds of tourists and of course local people I've never seen photographs of it before. Understandable since the general scuttlebutt was you would be assaulted if you took pictures, a tradition -perhaps not really for Graham got his photos. The soft cover contains these in black and white. Also if you plan to read in bed get the Kindle; the book editions are thick and heavy, not easy for bed reading. From my point of view an audio version would not be of much use.Ian Graham was a mildly eccentric Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin, educated footloose kind of guy (that is reading the book} from a well to do and well connected English and Scottish family who became obsessed with photographing and otherwise capturing the details of the glyphs on Mayan stelea. He starts his studies on a free lance basis with thoughts of a coffee table book but eventually becomes an established Mayanist making his way into archeology through a kind of back door. He retires from the field as director of the Corpus of Maya Heiroglyphic Inscription program, a still ongoing program at the Peabody Museum, Harvard, particularly important because it provides the material for studying Mayan iconography. His work really begins in the early 1960s and continues to the early 2000s. He is about 90 now (2012). He was a hands on person already with experience with photography and art conservation The main value of the book is not only the photographs, mostly peripheral to the few stelae pictures but the adventures. You also get an insiders view of Mayan archeology "academia" in particular that which starts at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and blends into the Peabody and the Corpus -stories of the famous Mayanists -Sir Eric Thompson and Titiana Proskouriakoff and his personal opinions.
Starts out with the largely undecipherable glyphic language in the early 60s-and misunderstood meaning of it all and ends with what is now a at least partially understood . Mostly it seems kingly histories. One thing I find important is his discussion about over-reconstructed ruins (Nobody reconstructs the glyphic recording on the stelae -they of course wouldn't know what to "write"). My own experience is a pile of stones in Coba labeled "Juego de Pelota" that was few years later was a pristine classic Mayan ball court. Or even worse a dirt mound in Muyil with a the remains of a room like structure at the peak becoming over the period of a few years a gorgeous temple pyramid with stepped sides that could not have possibly been re-imagined from the original as found. I think this happens mostly at tourist hot spot and not deep in the tangle.
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The Road to Ruins edition by Ian Graham Politics Social Sciences eBooks Reviews
Wonderful tale.
Qué gusto leer la historia de aventuras y descubrimientos de uno de los supervivientes de la vieja escuela británica de exploradores y científicos. Los ingleses se caracterizaron en el siglo XIX por llegar a todas partes y escudriñar todas las viejas civilizaciones, los mayas no fueron una excepción. Graham es el continuador de los Maudslay, Joyce, Thompson, su vida es una entrega total a la causa del viaje y el hallazgo, y lo que deja en su legado es enorme y merece el respeto y la consideración de todos los mayistas. En este libro lo cuenta, y es maravilloso.
Very interesting book.
The author constantly jumped around chronologically, which was a bit confusing, but the content was very intriguing and his sense of humor redeeming.
I just finished reading this amazing book an hour ago, and this will be my first review after more than 30 books about the Maya I have bought through .
When I found out more than a year ago that Ian Graham was writing his biography, The Road to Ruins, I went into every week to see if I could find it, when it finally appeared, I immediately pre ordered it.
I really enjoyed the way Ian Graham narrates his anecdotes and explorations, I really could feel the jungle around me, specially in those sites where he had to hike for days to get to.
I couldn't believe the big amount of famous people he mentions he met in his life, including Salvador Dali, and I was surprised after reading a lot of stuff I didn't know of people like Michael D. Coe, Juan Yadeun, Dolores Olmedo, and the governor from Yucatan in the 1970's Carlos Loret the Mola, between others. I was very happy to read that the first prehispanic temple the author visited was the Tepozteco in Tepoztlan, Morelos, Mexico, because this specific site is very special to me and I go there to visit it at least twice a year.
There is only one thing I was expecting to see in this book and I didn't, a complete list of all the Maya sites Graham has explored, I know he probably has visited more than three hundred different Maya sites, but in his book he only mentions the name of 47, and for some descriptions, I concluded two more names he doesn't mention, like Topoxte, as an avid Maya explorer myself, I really wanted to see how many of the 108 Maya sites I have visited, have been explored by Sir Ian Graham, one of my three favorite Maya explorers ever, along with John Lloyd Stephens and Alfred Percival Maudslay.
I am sure this book is going to help me a lot in my future trips to the Maya jungle!
I have just returned from a conference "Maya at the Playa" in Flagler Beach in Florida. Part of the program was an 'Lifetime Achievement Award' to Ian Graham by noted archaeologist Barbara Fash, George Stuart, David Stuart, Peter Mathews and Norman Hammond. These people all knew and worked with Ian Graham in past years and were able to add personel stories in addition to ones in his book. This is one of the most interesting books about archaeology in the Maya world since John L Stevens and Frederick Catherwoods " Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan" in the 1840's. The adventures of traveling in the jungle and and the amount of fortitude needed to photograph, uncover and faithfully draw the historical stone glyphs is amazing. Not only a few times, but over many years devoted to capturing these records of kings and sites in the midst of an amazing amount of looting still continuing in many areas. This is a large book, but it needs to be and I'll bet he could easily write another with more adventures. This man is responsible for a very large amount of what we know today about the ancient Maya.
Well it's a wonderful book especially if you are familiar with the subject of Mayan ruins and the areas of Guatemala and Mexico that's covered. Otherwise it might not resonate. Told largely as a series of what are essentially anecdotes; don't expect a continuous narrative. Ian Graham is mostly a photographer particularly of stelae for the purposes of iconography -the photographs in the book are all his so I suggest getting the original hardback version which I'm sure contains much better reproductions of the photos than the soft cover. Only the latter is available from directly used copies, somewhat expensive are available through and others. However, I found a website that offered new copies at a price only slightly more that the soft-cover so look around. From a posted review I found that it contained color photographs of the " fire-walk' at Chamula. Although hardly a rare event occurring every year in February in front of hundreds of tourists and of course local people I've never seen photographs of it before. Understandable since the general scuttlebutt was you would be assaulted if you took pictures, a tradition -perhaps not really for Graham got his photos. The soft cover contains these in black and white. Also if you plan to read in bed get the ; the book editions are thick and heavy, not easy for bed reading. From my point of view an audio version would not be of much use.
Ian Graham was a mildly eccentric Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin, educated footloose kind of guy (that is reading the book} from a well to do and well connected English and Scottish family who became obsessed with photographing and otherwise capturing the details of the glyphs on Mayan stelea. He starts his studies on a free lance basis with thoughts of a coffee table book but eventually becomes an established Mayanist making his way into archeology through a kind of back door. He retires from the field as director of the Corpus of Maya Heiroglyphic Inscription program, a still ongoing program at the Peabody Museum, Harvard, particularly important because it provides the material for studying Mayan iconography. His work really begins in the early 1960s and continues to the early 2000s. He is about 90 now (2012). He was a hands on person already with experience with photography and art conservation The main value of the book is not only the photographs, mostly peripheral to the few stelae pictures but the adventures. You also get an insiders view of Mayan archeology "academia" in particular that which starts at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and blends into the Peabody and the Corpus -stories of the famous Mayanists -Sir Eric Thompson and Titiana Proskouriakoff and his personal opinions.
Starts out with the largely undecipherable glyphic language in the early 60s-and misunderstood meaning of it all and ends with what is now a at least partially understood . Mostly it seems kingly histories. One thing I find important is his discussion about over-reconstructed ruins (Nobody reconstructs the glyphic recording on the stelae -they of course wouldn't know what to "write"). My own experience is a pile of stones in Coba labeled "Juego de Pelota" that was few years later was a pristine classic Mayan ball court. Or even worse a dirt mound in Muyil with a the remains of a room like structure at the peak becoming over the period of a few years a gorgeous temple pyramid with stepped sides that could not have possibly been re-imagined from the original as found. I think this happens mostly at tourist hot spot and not deep in the tangle.
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