Friday Nights at NOMA opens the museum’s doors for many interesting activities throughout the year: live music, movies, children’s activities, and more.

• 5 to 8 pm: Art on the Spot
• 5:30 – 8:30 p.m.: Music by the Arpa Quartet
• 6 pm: “Monumental Landscapes: How the Maya Shaped Their World,” a lecture by Dr. Arlen Chase

As the keynote event of the 14th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium, Dr. Arlen Chase will discuss exciting new research from the ancient Maya city of Caracol, Belize. This event is free to NOMA members (admission prices to apply for other visitors) and open to the public, along with a reception following the talk on NOMA’s third floor. For more information about the 14th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium, titled “Monumental Landscapes: How the Maya Shaped Their World,” please visit the university’s website.

Music for the night is by the Arpa Quartet, a Latin jazz group, from 5:30 – 8:30.

ABOUT DR. ARLEN CHASE AND ARCHAEOLOGY IN CARACOL, BELIZE

At A.D. 650 the city of Caracol, Belize, covered more than 200 square kilometers and was economically and socially integrated through a dendritic road system that connected the city’s edges with its central hub, an architectural complex rising some 143 feet above its adjacent plaza. The inhabitants of the city, numbering at least 100,000 people, resided in over 9,000 residential groups. These household groups produced goods for broader distribution and shared in a distinctive Caracol cultural and religious identity; their residential units were also intermixed with extensive agricultural terracing that served their subsistence needs. Public architecture and plazas were localized at causeway termini and junctions throughout the city and served administrative and economic purposes. When examined holistically, Caracol’s impact on the ancient Maya world was substantial. The city constituted a monumental ancient Maya landscape not only for its site size and population, the scale of its agricultural terraforming, and the ritual integration of its its populace, but also for its interaction with, and at least temporary incorporation of, other Maya sites within its political sphere (specifically Naranjo and Tikal in Guatemala). Thus, while a relative “latecomer” among Maya centers, Caracol is a paramount example of how the Maya could and did shape their world.

Arlen F. Chase (Ph.D. 1983, University of Pennsylvania) joined the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in August 2016 as a professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts. For the previous 32 years of his career, he was at the University of Central Florida where he last served as an associate dean in the College of Sciences and as a Pegasus Professor in Anthropology. His research interests focus on archaeological method and theory in the Maya area with particular emphasis on contextual, settlement, and ceramic analysis and secondary interests on urbanism, ethnicity, and epigraphic interpretation. For 33 years he has co-directed annual excavations at Caracol, Belize; before that he worked on a seven-year project at Santa Rita Corozal, Belize. He has also carried out fieldwork in the countries of Guatemala and Mexico as well as in Arizona and Pennsylvania in the United States. He has authored over 150 articles and book chapters. His writings may be found at www.caracol.org.