The purpose of this thesis is to describe and document parentage statements and paired stela found on Maya monuments or portable objects. While the existence of parentage statements, within the Maya text, has been known since the late 1970s, no thesis or major research project has ever been published pertaining to this class of glyphs within the Maya script. In 1977 Christopher Jones is credited with the discovery of parentage statements in Maya hieroglyphic texts (Jones 1977). His discovery was followed by a detailed analysis of parentage statements by Floyd Lounsbury, Peter Mathews, and Linda Schele (1977). They introduced most of the known parentage statements and detailed their use in the hieroglyphic texts. While their work, which introduced parentage statements, in general, is cited regularly as the all-encompassing source of information about parentage statements, it remains unpublished. This thesis provides a source for all new and previous work done on parentage statements and insight into possibly why parentage statements were used by the Classic Maya. An analysis of 253 archaeological sites containing a total of 2473 glyphic monuments was conducted as part of this thesis. Justin Kerr's online vase and photo collections were also checked for parentage statements on portable objects and ceramic vessels. Parentage statements were found on 225 monuments and 70 portable objects bringing the total to 295 different monuments with parentage statements. Each parentage statement is identified and transcribed phonetically. The usage of each parentage statement and its variants are then mapped through time. Also introduced in this thesis is the death of a parent glyph commonly known as the Winged Capped Ajaw Death Phrase. An analysis of its usage demonstrates that it refers to the death of a parent. Paired stelae were analyzed as another possible form of parentage statements. This thesis tests three hypotheses on why parentage statements were used. They included ancestor worship, political legitimacy, and heir designation. The weaknesses and strengths of each hypothesis are demonstrated through case studies. Lastly, the appendices include source material for each site and monument researched as part of this thesis.

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that the Maya snake emblem glyph is associated with religious specialists, instead of geographic locations, as emblem glyphs are typically understood to be. The inscriptions and the media on which the snake emblem glyph occurs will be analyzed to determine the role or function of the "Lord of the Snake." Temporal and spatial data has also been collected to aid in understanding the enigmatic glyph. The snake emblem glyph has recently been identified as originating from a broad area containing the sites of El Peru and La Corona in Guatemala, and Dzibanche, Mexico, a departure from the longstanding choice of Calakmul, Mexico. Unprovenanced snake emblem glyph texts have been cataloged under a "Site Q" designation ('Q' for the Spanish word Que, meaning "which") by Peter Mathews. Site Q is thus not securely identified geographically, which confounds efforts to designate a particular site as the snake emblem glyph site. Other problems with the snake emblem glyph, such as its geographically wide dispersal, hint that it is not a title of a particular city or region. Yet another problem is "a proper fit" between the individuals listed on unprovenanced material and individuals named at sites associated with the snake emblem glyph. It is argued that the interpretation of the snake emblem glyph differs from how emblem glyphs are presently understood. Rather than representing a physical location, the snake emblem glyph represents a mythological place or "state," containing members who legitimize their lineage (association) through ritual events such as communication with supernaturals via the vision serpent. The specialists perform rituals, scatterings, are ballplayers, and witness events. They are rarely associated with accession, which by current interpretation is implicitly tied to emblem glyphs.

The Jaguar Baby vessels belong to a large corpus of Late Classic Maya pictorial ceramics dubbed Codex-style pottery and originating from archaeological sites, such as El Mirador and Nakbe, in the north-central area of Peten, Guatemala, where they were made for a brief period shortly before and/or after the turn of the eighth century AD. Through strategic juxtapositions of images and words, the vessels convey the story of a rain god and a death spirit who, in the darkness between the sun’s setting and dawn, sacrifice an infant, a jaguar, or an infant with jaguar traits on a mountain in the midst of water, as an offering during the conjuring of an elderly deity. New evidence from a fragmentary Codex-style vessel recovered from the site of Calakmul in the southern half of Campeche, Mexico, suggests that the sacrifice is part of a pre-accession ritual serving to endow royal heirs with the ability to conjure, which, in turn, was integral to assuming the throne. / text

Vast progress has been made in detecting rates of tropical deforestation, yet the relationship between visible patterns of forest change, multi-scalar human processes and the underlying drivers associated with them is poorly understood. Building on satellite imagery, a household livelihood survey and semi-structured interviews, this research scrutinised changes of forest cover from the mid-1990s to 2015 in a municipality located in southeastern Mexico and investigated the proximate causes and underlying drivers of change at the household and community levels. Emerging evidence indicated that, contrary to the persistent narrative of deforestation for the region, forest cover change is highly dynamic including periods of deforestation and forest recovery. Moreover, a close examination of 24 communities showed forest cover gained terrain, while the agricultural frontier retracted. Drawing on a comparison between the household survey and previous analyses, it could be inferred that forest resurgence was produced by the decrease in the farming area and the increase in the abandonment of farming activities by some communities. Associated with the adaptation of households was the development of formal and informal institutions at the community level in response to macro-global forces linked to the implementation of forest conservation strategies, environmental degradation, market liberalization and increased urbanization. Overall, this research adds not only to our understanding of the complexity of land-use and cover change in emerging globalized economies but also exemplifies the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of tropical forest systems, which challenges partial models of deforestation and policies designed to reduce it. The research may be focused on a narrow region of the globe, nevertheless, the insights and recommendation provided may be useful to further forest conservation schemes in other tropical regions.