商品簡介
This biography, the first published of Alfred Maudslay (1850-1931), describes an extraordinary man and his pioneering achievements in revealing the previously little-known culture of the ancient Maya. His life was full of exotic experiences, including a period spent in the South Seas as a junior Colonial Office official, but he did not find his true vocation until the age of thirty-one when he arrived in Guatemala.
Maudslay then played a crucial role in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing. He made painstaking recordings of inscriptions, plaster casts of large stone monuments and accurate maps of sites. His five great volumes of photographs, drawings, plants and text, published a century ago as part of a vast compendium entitled the Biologia Centrali-Americana, remain today an essential foundation of Maya studies. Perhaps his greatest legacy is his magnificent collection of glass-negative photographs, many of which are reproduced in this book.
