Bodies of Maize, Eaters of Grain: Comparing Material Worlds, Metaphor and the Agency of Art in the Preclassic Maya and Mycenaean Early Civilisations

Marcus Jan Bajema compares the material worlds of two societies rarely placed side by side: the Preclassic Maya and Mycenaean Greece. Using metaphor, materiality and the agency of art as analytical tools, he asks how objects and substances participated in the ways early complex societies understood people, bodies and their surrounding worlds.

The comparison is deliberately cross-cultural rather than an attempt to derive one civilisation from the other. For Aegean readers, the Mycenaean material forms one substantive half of a broader theoretical argument, while the Maya evidence provides a contrasting archaeological case. Comparative method is central to the volume, making it most useful for advanced readers testing interpretations of Mycenaean material culture against other early civilisations.