The Mayans

From 1800 B.C to 900 A.D.

The earliest Mayan settlements were called "The Preclassic or Formative Period". They were agricultural, growing crops such as corn (maize), beans, squash, and cassava (manioc).

The Middle Preclassic Peroid also saw the rise of the first major Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmacs. They derived from a number of religious and cultural traits- as well as their number system and their 365 day calendar from the Olmac. They also displayed more advanced cultural traits like pyramid building, city construction, and the inscribing of stone monuments.

The Late Pre-classic city of Mirador, in the northern Peten, was one of the greatest cities ever built in Pre-Colombian Americas. Miradorbasin.com states "The Mirador-Calakmul Basin is more than an environmental wonder. It is also the cradle of one of the greatest ancient societies in the world. Anthropological and archaeological research suggest that the Mirador Basin is the literal birthplace of Maya civilization and is home to many of the largest and earliest Maya cities, boasting impressive ancient architecture and other cultural remains. These sites have great significance to our understanding of the human story and the ancestral legacy of Guatemalan culture and history."

At its peak, the Mayan population may have reached 2,000,000. The Mayan were deeply religious and worshiped various gods related to nature, including the gods of the sun, the moon, rain, and corn. At the beginning of the Mayan Civilization there was only one language but by the end of the civilization there were over seventy dialects.

From the late eighth through the end of the ninth century something unknown happened to shake the Maya civilization to its foundation. Mayan cities were starting to be abandoned for unknown reasons. Some scholars believe that they may have exhausted their environment around them to the point that it could no longer sustain them. Some say that it was the constant warfare. Finally, some catastrophic change- like an extremely long, intensive period of drought may have finished them.

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mayan ceramics

1-A-O

Although the Maya are known for creating a multitude of art, they are best known for for their pottery. Pottery became a ceramic canvas for the Maya to tell stories. However, the ceramics were not just created for looks. They were used for a plethora of daily activities, such as storage of food and beverages. There were three main types of ceramics used in daily life: bowls, plates, and cylinders. They were often monochrome, meaning that only one type of mineral slip was used.

-C.Boettcher

Mayan Beads

Found in new Building

In the earliest period of Mayan civilization, metal was hard to come by so the Mayans creates jewelry out of bone from jaguar teeth and claws, stones, feathers, and various colorful shells. Both men and women were known to wear much of the same jewelry with the exception of lip and nose plugs.

M. Clark

The Mayan viewed life after death as a dismal world fraught with peril and darkness and their burial rights centered on the soul in the right path toward freedom from the underworld. The dead were buried with maize placed in their mouth as a symbol of the rebirth of their soul and also as nourished for the soul's journey through the dark lands of Xibalba, the nether world also known as Metnal. Bodies were positioned in graves underground, as in Mesopotamia, to allow easy access to Xibalba and were aligned in accordance with the directions of the Mayan paradise (north or west). As the color red was associated with death, corpses were sprinkled with shavings of red mineral cinnabar and were then wrapped in cotton for burial. The Mayan afterlife was a terrifying place of demons that could as easily harm one as help one in the soul's journey toward paradise and perhaps the cinnabar was thought to disguise the soul as one of these infernal spirits and so help the individual in their journey through the afterlife.

M. Clark

National Geographic reported that to the Maya specific caves were of great importance; a part of a mystical underworld. According to Discover Magazine, the Mayan even made sacrifices in important caves. Only for about the last 60 years have archaeologists paid any attention to the caves snaking under the Mayan world of Central America. Hieroglyphs impressive pyramids and cities seemed to be the important aspects of a culture that seemed to sit over a rich maze of limestone caves merely by accident. The importance of caves was first discovered when a guide found a room full of Mayan vases in Balankanché, a cave near Chichén Itzá in 1959.

Since that time, hundreds of caves with Mayan artifacts have been discovered. Virtually every cave in Belize has some association with the Maya and even water filled sinkholes or cenotes (essentially flooded vertical caves) have been found to contain artifacts dropped from above as offerings. Art Daily reports that over 300 of the 1000 caves and cenotes in the Puuc region of the Yucatan have been registered with the National Institute of Anthropology and History, making them part of 2,000 archaeological sites in the area. Just this month, archaeologists announced the discovery of another cave full of important artifacts, this time underneath Chichén Itzá itself.

M. Clark

https://www.earth.com/news/mayan-artifacts-cave-chichen-itza/

Mayan Ceramics

Newly acquired pieces

Maya ceramic artists were highly educated members of the elite. They used slip paint, a mixture of finely ground pigment, clay, and water, to decorate their pottery with images of rituals, myths, geometric motifs, and hieroglyphs. Ceramics were used as tableware, currency, symbols of status, and as offerings to the dead. Clay pots were also made for cooking and storing food. M. Clark

https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/maya/mmj01eng.html

Mayan History

Newly acquired pieces

Water had very special and symbolic meaning in ancient Mayans beliefs," Krzemień said. "It was thought to be the medium [or] door to the underground world, [the] world of death," where the gods lived, she said.

As a result of these beliefs, the ancient Mayans sacrificed animals and sometimes humans to their gods in lakes and in flooded limestone sinkholes known as cenotes, which are common in the region

M. Clark