This book provides a comparative study of the earliest urban civilisations of the Maya lowlands and the Greek mainland. The focus lies on the art styles of the Late Preclassic lowland Maya and Mycenaean Greece.
Building on research from previous comparative studies, the approach used here seeks to combine more traditional iconographic approaches with more recent models on metaphor and the social agency of things.
By comparing Maya and Mycenaean art styles through the three aspects of metaphor, semiotics and praxis, their differences and similarities are made clear. The book shows art to have played a more active role in the development of the earliest urban civilisations, rather than passively reflecting economic and political trends. In that way, the social role of art provides a key to understanding the relations between the different factors in the development of the two societies, as they played out at different temporal and geographical scales. To understand this, the notion of distinct Maya and Mycenaean 'material worlds', involving both
materials and ideas, is proposed, with consequences for models about the earliest urban civilisations in general.
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