maya.nmai.si.edu/maya-sun/maya-math-game 

Mayan Writing

http://www.famsi.org/research/pitts/MayaGlyphsBook1Sect1.pdf

http://www.crystalinks.com/mayanwriting.html

http://ancientculturesofsouthamerica.blogspot.com/2012/02/mayan-animal-hieroglyphic-glyphs-of_5356.html

http://shortstreet.net/Maya/Language_writing.pdf

Animal glyphs:  http://ancientculturesofsouthamerica.blogspot.com/2012/02/mayan-animal-hieroglyphic-glyphs-of_5356.html

God glyphs:  http://www.pauahtun.org/DesktopIcons/DriveLetter.html

Interactive explanation of Stela 3

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/decode-stela-3.html

description of Stela 51

Mayan Gods/Godesses

http://www.crystalinks.com/mayangods.html

http://ww.pauahtun.org/DesktopIcons/DriveLetter.html

Mayan Calendar

http://maya.nmai.si.edu/maya-sun/sun-corn-and-calendar

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-mayan.html

http://www.pauahtun.org/Calendar/tools.html

Equinox at Chichen Itza

We came to the first tier of La Danta pyramid, a high forested platform of cut stone and rock fill that was some 980 feet wide and 2,000 feet long and covered nearly 45 acres.

“We calculate that as many as 15 million man-days of labor were expended on La Danta,” Hansen said. “It took 12 men to carry each block—each one weighs about a thousand pounds....We’ve excavated nine quarries where the stones were cut, some 600 to 700 meters away.”

Before long we mounted another platform. It was about 33 feet high also and covered about four acres. The trail led to a set of steps that climbed to a third, 86-foot-high platform that served as the base for a triad of an impressive central pyramid flanked by two smaller pyramids—a formidable sight with its vertiginous staircase bisecting the west face.

“You don’t find the triadic pattern before about 300 B.C.” Hansen said of the three pyramids. Based upon conversations with present-day Maya spiritual leaders, researchers believe the three-point configuration represents a celestial hearth containing the fire of creation. The Maya thought three stars in the constellation Orion (Alnitak, Saiph and Rigel) were the hearth stones surrounding the fire—a nebula called M42, which is visible just below Orion’s belt.

Archaeology at El Mirador is often less about bringing the past to light than keeping it from collapsing: Hansen spent three years just stabilizing the walls of La Danta. He had experimented to find the optimal mortar mix of finely sifted clay, organic compounds, lime, crushed limestone and a form of gritty, decomposed limestone called “sascab.” And the archaeologists decided against clearing the trees entirely off the temples as had been done at Tikal because they had learned it was better to leave some shade to minimize the debilitating effects of the sun. Hansen and an engineer from Boeing had designed a vented polycarbonate shed roof that filtered ultraviolet light and protected some of the most delicate stucco carvings on the Jaguar Paw Temple from rain.

Report this ad

We hiked around the base of the upper platform and climbed a cantilevered wooden staircase that zigzagged up the near-vertical east face of La Danta, which plunged more than 230 feet to the jungle floor.

“Wow!” said Joanna.

The summit was the size of a decent home office. There was a surveyor’s bench mark embedded in the limestone, a fence to keep you from tumbling off the east precipice and a big leafy tree that from afar stood out like a tasseled toothpick pinned to a club sandwich. After concentrating so long on the ground, verifying that roots weren’t snakes, it was a great pleasure to lift my eyes to infinity. It was boggling to think we were standing on the labor of thousands of people from antiquity, and to imagine their vanished metropolis, the business of the city such as it might have been on a day like this; the spiritual and ideological imperatives that lifted these stones; the rituals that might have occurred at this sacred spot—everything from coronations to ceremonies in which priests and kings would draw blood from their genitals to spill onto paper and burn as a sacrifice to the gods.

To the west loomed the forested silhouettes of the Tigre Complex, where high on the pyramid Hansen and his team have found skeletons with obsidian arrow points in their ribs, possibly casualties of an Early Classic period battle that wiped out remnant inhabitants of the abandoned capital. Also visible were the outlines of the Monos and Leon pyramids, which along with Tigre and La Danta and the administrative complex known as the Central Acropolis, made up some of the oldest and largest concentrations of public architecture in all of Maya civilization.

I asked Hansen, if he could have anything, what would it be?

Report this ad

“Fifteen minutes,” he answered immediately. “Fifteen minutes here when the city was in its glory. Just to walk around and see what it was like. I’d give anything for that.”

In Maya cosmology the underworld is ruled by the Lords of Xibalba (shee-bal-BA). In April 1983, his fifth season at El Mirador, Hansen nearly met them. He boarded Professor Matheny’s single-engine Helio Courier H395 with his wife, Jody, and their daughter Micalena; he was carrying the only two copies of his master’s thesis, which he’d been working on at the camp, and cash for the camp workers’ payroll.

When the plane cleared the trees it was suddenly running with the wind, not into it as a windsock had indicated, and struggling for lift. About two miles from the airstrip, the tail hit a tree, the nose pitched down, the wings sheared off, the propeller chewed through the canopy until it snapped and the plane cartwheeled across the floor of the jungle. The H395 crashed to a stop in a tree five feet off the ground, fuel leaking everywhere. Hansen sat in his seat thinking he was dead.“Get out! Get out!” Jody yelled. As they scrambled clear, they heard a tremendous whoosh and were hurled to the ground as a fireball exploded behind them, cresting high above the trees. Everyone on board had survived.

“People say, ‘Is your life like Indiana Jones?’” Hansen recalled as he showed us around the crash site. “I say my life isn’t as boring. He always jumps out of the airplane before it crashes.”

Hansen took us to see what is probably the most beautiful and significant artwork found so far at El Mirador: the Central Acropolis frieze. In 2009, an Idaho State student archaeologist named J. Craig Argyle unearthed two 26-foot carved stucco panels showing the hero twins of Maya cosmology, Hunahpu and his brother Xbalanque. They are the main protagonists in the Popol Vuh, a sacred book of myths, history, traditions and the Maya story of how the world was created. The Popol Vuh recounts the adventures of the supernaturally gifted twins, who resurrected their father Hun-Hunahpu (who had lost his head in a ball game against the evil lords of the underworld). The stucco frieze depicts Hunahpu in a jaguar headdress swimming with the head of his father.

Report this ad

“To find this story in the Preclassic period is beyond belief,” Hansen said, pulling back a blue tarp that covered the frieze. “For many years it was thought that the Popol Vuh creation story had been contaminated by the Spanish priests who translated it—that the Indians had been influenced by Christianity. This frieze shows that the Maya account of creation was vibrantly established for thousands of years before the Spanish got here. It’s like finding the original copy of the Constitution. I was stunned.”

El Mirador today is part of the Mirador-Río Azul National Park, which itself is part of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, an 8,100-square-mile tract of rain forest in northern Guatemala. The reserve, established in 1990, has lost nearly half of its forests in just the past ten years. The protection afforded by the national park, which was set up at the same time, is marginal at best—it covers only a narrow swath of the northern basin along the Mexico border and includes only 3 or 4 of the 51 ancient Maya cities currently mapped. “The boundaries don’t respect the hydrological, geological, geographic, botanical or cultural borders of the basin,” Hansen said. “The park only saves a small area. We’re trying to save the whole system.”

Hansen and conservationists from Guatemala and around the world are hoping the government will declare the whole basin a roadless wilderness. Hansen hopes its ancient cities will attract ecotourism and provide livelihoods for local Guatemalans, who might otherwise turn to looting, poaching or the unsustainable promise of logging; despite short-term economic benefits, the industry undermines the long-term integrity of the ecosystem, as it leads to roads, cattle pastures and the destruction of habitat.

“We’re trying to give the poor campesinos [peasants] more than they have now,” Hansen said. “Every country needs wood and wood products. But the issue here is the potential for far greater economic benefits than can be generated [by logging]. There is a model that will work, and is far more lucrative economically, and has far better conservation results than anything in place now. It will need to be done right. If the area is declared a roadless wilderness, then tourists will be obligated to travel to the local communities rather than fly or drive directly to the sites. They will buy local artisan products, sandwiches, soft drinks and beers, and sleep in local microhotels, and hire local guides, cooks, mules, and rent local mountain bikes. The economic pie would get spread among the communities.”

He supports those uses of the El Mirador forest that are sustainable, such as the harvesting of renewable plant products: allspice; xate, the Chamaedorea palm leaves used in floral arrangements; bayal, for wicker baskets; and chicle, for chewing gum.

And, of course, he supports archaeology, which has already pumped millions of dollars into the local communities of the Petén, as the region is called. Some of the guards Hansen has hired are former looters. Most of the workers hired to help excavate the ancient cities participate in literacy classes run by the Mirador Basin Project, which has also provided local schools with computers and computer training, helped install water-purification filters in villages and trained local residents to be guides. The future of the basin ultimately depends on the local people and communities.

My last evening in El Mirador I stopped in the forest not far from the Jaguar Paw Temple, where Hansen had his potsherd epiphany. It was unsettling to think how thoroughly the Preclassic capital of the Maya and hundreds of thousands of people had been silenced by time and rampant nature. The sun was hurrying away, darkness rising. Ocellated turkeys were ascending to the trees for the night, their wings laboring against the plush air. Red-eyed tree frogs were beginning to sing. Curassow birds fussed in the canopies. You could hear the cool interjections of a spectacled owl; cicadas droning; the croak of toucans; lineated woodpeckers running their jackhammers; the grunts of spider monkeys and the fantastic aspirated roar of howler monkeys, which seemed to cross the basso profundo of an African lion with the sound of metal grinding on a lathe. It always amazes me how unsentimental nature is, resoundingly here now, unbound by the past apart from what is secretly conserved in genes. It’s left to us to listen for voices that can’t be heard, to imagine the dead in that note between the notes, as in those moments when the jungle cacophony dies away and the almost-audible strains of the underworld echo in the stillness and silence of the night, until the clamor of the living starts up again.

Chip Brown is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of two nonfiction books. Photojournalist Christian Ziegler specializes in science and nature subjects.

Uxmal

Pictures from 2018-2019

Temple of the Frescoes, Tulum