All conference sessions will take place in the Fillmore Quad, Ellicott Complex, on the university's North Campus, with the exception of a dinner, to be held April 25 in the University Inn and Conference Center, 2401 North Forest Road, Amherst.

Details related to conference registration, program and related events, scholarly context and participants can be obtained from the conference Web site at http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/english/conferences/1998/mayan/ or by calling Donna Serwinski at 645-3422.

The conference will address issues of cultural, historical, linguistic and archaeological importance that have a bearing on political issues related to contemporary Mayan life in Central America.

Although many assume that the Mayan culture is extinct, it is, in fact, a complex contemporary indigenous American culture numbering 6 million people who speak 29 Mayan languages. They live in a vast, 325,000-square-kilometer region covering parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. The area is coterminous with all the archaeological remains of the pre-Columbian Mayan civilization that evolved for 3,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. That civilization has continued to grow and change since European contact.

In the last two decades, the Mayan peoples have initiated a movement of political and cultural restoration whose concerns reflect the region's great variations in environment; the depth of its historical occupation; the ideological, aesthetic and ethical principles of different Mayan cultural groups; the economic and political repression of the indigenous peoples, and many other issues. The 1993 Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, for example, was a movement that arose among the Mayan people of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

The variation of these concerns has contributed to the splintering of scholarly discourse on Mayan culture because that discussion now covers such a broad range of cultural, artistic, religious, political, environmental and economic issues, not to mention many historical periods and geographies.

The Buffalo conference will attempt to address this problem by bringing together major scholars from several disciplines to focus on some of the most intriguing historical, theoretical, and ethnographic gaps in the existing scholarship on both historical and contemporary Mayan culture.

Conference organizers are Dennis Tedlock, James McNulty Professor of English at UB, and Barbara Tedlock, UB professor of anthropology. Both are widely respected scholars of Mayan life and culture and co-editors-in-chief of the American Anthropologist, a journal of the American Anthropological Association.

The conference will be sponsored by the Conversations in the Disciplines Program funded by the State University of New York, the UB Faculty of Arts and Letters, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the McNulty Professorship, and the university's Poetry and Rare Books Collection.

It will present the world premiere of "Man of Rabinal: A Mayan Drama of Human Sacrifice," a Quiché Mayan play produced in English for the first time from a translation directly from the Maya Quiché by Dennis Tedlock. Directed by Cuban performance artist and poet Leandro Soto, it will be performed at 8 p.m. April 25 in the Katharine Cornell Theatre in the Ellicott Complex.

The play, banned for idolatry many times between 1593 and 1770, offers a point from which to observe the differences between the religious and ethical concerns of the early Mayans and those of the Catholic Church and the governments over which it long held sway, that ruled Mayan life.

David Pendergast, vice president of collections and research at the Royal Ontario Museum, will present the conference's keynote address at 1:30 p.m. April 26 in Room 170 in Fillmore Quad. Field director of the museum's archaeological expedition to a number of Mayan ruins in Mexico and Belize, Pendergast is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of 214 publications, 196 of which deal with the ancient Maya and have been published in North America, Mexico, Belize and Europe.

Mayan Conference speakers

- Gary Gossen, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY Albany, and one of the world's foremost Mayan scholars. The author of "Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition," he co-edited "Symbols and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community" and "Ethnographic Encounters in Southern Mesoamerica."

- Dennis Tedlock, an anthropologist, ethnopoeticist and translator who has written several important ethnographic studies embracing the religion, sociolinguistics, hermeneutics and mythopoetics of indigenous peoples. He also is distinguished for his transcriptions and translations of oral performances by indigenous peoples.

Among his books are "Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life" (1985), for which he won the PEN Translation Prize for Poetry; "Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indian," nominated for the National Book Award in translation, and "Breath on the Mirror: Voices and Visions of the Living Mayan," a collection of his translations and interpolations of stories and myths from Mayan Indian groups.

With Jerome Rothenberg, Tedlock founded and co-edited Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics, the first magazine of the world's tribal poetics. He is co-editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, the journal of the American Anthropological Association.

- Barbara Tedlock, whose research and writing focus on psychological anthropology, symbolic and cognitive anthropology, anthropology of art and aesthetics, ethnomedicine, the American Southwest and Mesoamerica. Co-editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, she is the author of books and articles on the Mayan and Zuni cultures and on the anthropological and psychological interpretations of dreaming.

- Anthropologist June Nash, Distinguished Professor at City University of New York and a renowned authority on gender and political economy in Latin America. She is the author of "In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Maya Community" and for 30 years has conducted research among Mayans in Chiapas, Mexico. Her familiarity with the political and economic transformations in Chiapas shapes her acute understanding of the Zapatista uprising.

Also presenting will be Virginia Miller, professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an expert in the pre-historic art and iconography of Yucatan Mexico; Victor Montejo, assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of California at Davis, and author of "Testimony: The Death of a Guatemalan Village," and Cassandra Bill, research fellow at the Middle American Research Institute, Tulane University, who specialties include ceramic analysis and the Mayan codices found in Belize.

Also, Geoffrey Braswell, UB assistant professor of anthropology, who has conducted lithic and settlement pattern studies in highland Guatemala and El Salvador; Enrique Sam Colop, a Quiché Mayan linguist and ethnopoeticist who has written extensively on the history of poetic expression in ancient Mayan texts and its relationship to contemporary Mayan poetry in the context of cultural revitalization, and linguist Louanna Furbee, professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, who has documented a new religious movement among the Mayans of Chiapas