Talk:Monte Alto culture

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[edit] Merge

Two pages about the same thing- Monte Alto Culture and Monte Alto culture. Monte Alto Culture is a better article, while Monte Alto culture is properly named. Perhaps we should merge extra material from the latter into this one, and then rename it. -- Oaxaca dan 20:57, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Curiously both were started by friend Auth.Maya around the same time. Anyways, for now I think to do this by copying the text at Monte Alto culture to this talk pg for later revision and merging, and moving the Monte Alto Culture article over the top of the "little c" one.

I guess that at some future point there'd be scope to have separate articles, one on the specific site itself, the other on the general culture, its description and influences.--cjllw | TALK 02:12, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Text from original Monte Alto culture article, pending revision and merger

Copying below the text formerly at the original article, to be reviewed to see if anything here can be merged into the replacement /post-move version:

Monte Alto is a pre-Columbian site, located in the Pacific Lowlands of the modern department of Escuintla, Guatemala[1]. A large predominately Late Formative regional center thoroughly investigated by Shook and Parsons in 1969-70 or 68-69 (Parsons, 1976; 1981; Popenoe de Hatch, 1989a; Shook and Hatch, 1981). There is a light Early to Middle Formative presence but significantly less than either El Bálsamo or Los Cerritos-Sur located about 10 km west and east of Monte Alto respectively. There is also a substantial Early Classic occupation but it is largely localized at Structure 6, a large platform located to the northeast. Monte Alto is noted for its boulder sculptures (heads and potbellies). Two general styles of sculpture stem from the Monte Alto site one representing a human head, and the other, a human body. Since both the heads and the bodies are rather crudely shaped from large, rounded basaltic boulders, the subjects have a decidedly corpulent appearance. Because they seem to be male figures, they have been termed "fat boys" or "barrigones", in the archaeological literature. The monuments have been found to have magnetics properties and could be the earliest sculptures with such properties in the world, that were wrongly named pre-Olmec, although the size is the only resemblance.[2] Parsons (1976) states that more than a dozen tabular shaped stone stelas were found as well as two stone altars. Shook (1971) reports that 15 plain stelas were recorded at Monte Alto and that one alignment of three large plain stelae erected in a north south line could have served astronomical purposes as a means for recording days and the position of the sun for agricultural purposes. Shook, noted that the azimuth from the principal pyramid to the south stela marked the winter solstice on December 21. The sun rose over the central stela on February 19 which at the time meant little to him. Popenoe de Hatch became interested in the problem recently and stated that February 19 at midnight marks the eastern elongation of Eta Draconis during the Late Preclassic period (Popenoe de Hatch, 2000). According to Hatch, Eta Draconis shows unusual stability and that from 1800 B.C. to A.D. 500 the annual date of its meridian midnight transit varied less than one day (Popenoe de Hatch, 1975). She has shown that alignments of certain monuments at Takalik Abaj also mark the eastern elongation of Eta Draconis at various periods during Takalik Abaj’s existence.[3] Monte Alto (UTM 722341E, 1573508N Popenoe de Hatch, Marion in: New Frontiers in the Archaeology of the Pacific Coast of Southern Mesoamerica. Frederick Bove and Lynette Heller, eds. pp. 25-42 Anthropological Research Papers, 39

--cjllw | TALK 02:15, 30 March 2007 (UTC)