Maya Color: The Painted Villages of Mesoamerica

Elle Decor
A moving, visual exploration . . .


Detroit Free Press
This is the rare picture book with text as good as the photos.


San Francisco Examiner, May 17, 1998
More than merely a collection of beautiful photographs of the region. Just as it was for the first Mayan people who deified golden corn, color is symbolically significant for the Maya of Mexico and Central America, even today. Becom's photographs illustrate these beliefs and a vivid text brings ancient murals, shaman rituals, Days of the Dead festivals, blood red altars and painted tombs into sharp anthropological focus.


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Color - and the symbolic ways that the Maya of Mexico and Central America paint their homes, places of worship, and dwellings for their dead - is the focus of this beautiful and poignant new book. Through dazzling photographs, vivid travel tales, and the Maya's own poetic voices, readers will come to know the modern Maya as remarkable survivors who continue to sow their deified corn, commune with their gods, and paint life into their color-drenched village walls. Come along as the pair trek through a steamy jungle in search for ancient murals, join a highland shaman giving birth to the soul of a house, and crisscross the parched Yucatan Peninsula as villagers celebrate the Days of the Dead with dynamite, incense, flowers, rum, prayers, and paint. In the process they discover that the colors of a corn yellow house, a blood red altar, and a jade green tomb serve as a connective cord stretching back to the painted pyramids.


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