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Who were the Maya? Decoding the ancient civilization's secrets

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Who were the Maya? Decoding the ancient civilization's secrets

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The evidence of a long-forgotten civilization was everywhere: Beneath a Spanish convent. Underneath a street. Most of it was covered in vines and vegetation, reclaimed by the jungle. But as a pair of British-American explorers combed through the Yucatan Peninsula in the 1830s and 1840s, they soon became convinced the mysterious sites were major archaeological treasures.

Discarded and abandoned, the function of these sites and artifacts-temples, pyramids, remnants of art and even writing-was mostly unknown. Nonetheless, wrote John Lloyd Stephens in 1841, they all seemed to be the work of the same group of people.

"Who these races were, whence they came, or who were their progenitors, I did not undertake to say, nor did I know," he conceded.

The ruins in question were the remnants of the Maya, a towering Mesoamerican civilization that had once covered much of Central America, from northern Belize through Guatemala and southern Mexico. Much more is now known about the group responsible for some of the greatest feats of its kind: Maya people cultivated the region's first crops and domesticated its wildlife, built its first cities, and either created or refined almost every aspect of modern civilization. (Subscriber exclusive: In search of the lost empire of the Maya.)

Though their descendants have preserved some of their culture's traditions and lore, much about the Maya remains as mysterious today as it did centuries ago when their secrets were still hiding in plain sight.

Origins of the Maya

While the origins of Maya culture remain murky, it's thought to have first emerged between 7000 B.C. and 2000 B.C., when hunter-gatherers abandoned their nomadic habits and created more permanent settlements. Recent analyses suggest that those first settlers came from South America and likely developed their staple food, maize, by 4000 B.C. Maize cultivation dramatically changed the Maya's trajectory, literally fueling the explosion of their society and culture.

These newcomers didn't just plant corn: They also learned to prepare it for human consumption with nixtamalization, a process in which dried maize is soaked, then cooked in an alkaline solution that softens corn and renders it more digestible. The Maya would go on to cultivate other important vegetables like squash, cassava, and beans.

The Maya seem to have developed alongside, and traded ideas with, the neighboring Olmec civilization, which some consider one of the most influential societies of ancient times. Researchers believe this is when the Maya adopted the ritual complexes for which they would become famous. Like the Olmec, the Maya soon focused on building cities around their ritual areas. These advancements in agriculture and urban development are now known as the Maya's Preclassic period between 1500 and 200 B.C. (This massive Mayan ceremonial complex was discovered in "plain sight.")

As the Maya built out their society even further, they laid the foundations for complex trade networks, advanced irrigation, water purification and farming techniques, warfare, sports, writing, and a complex calendar. The intricate calendar included three dating systems-one for the gods, one for civil life, and a third astronomical calendar known as the Long Count. The starting point of this third calendar was set at the legendary date of humans' creation, corresponding to August 11, 3114 B.C. The Long Count calendar began a new cycle on December 21, 2012, leading to a myth that the world would end on that date. (Despite urban legends and longstanding misinterpretations of Maya lore, however, the shift in calendar cycle didn't bring doomsday with it.)

Mayan society at its peak

During the Classic period (200-900 A.D.), the Maya civilization reached its peak. So did its architecture: the Maya refined its pyramid-like temples and grand buildings that appear to be palaces, though it's unclear if they were actually used as elite residences or if they served some other function.

Among the most important Maya cities were Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Tikal, Copán, and Calakmul. But though the Maya shared a society, it was not an empire. Instead, city-states and local rulers vacillated between peaceful coexistence and wrestling for control. Some places, such as the village of Joya de Cerén, seem to have been run by collective rule instead of an elite overlord. (Read more about Palenque, a Mayan city that was a glorious center of power.)

Maya architecture and art reflected deep-seated religious beliefs. The Maya embraced the belief of K'uh and k'uhul-that divinity could be found in all things, even inanimate objects. Once again, corn was vital to those beliefs: Among the most important Maya gods was Hun Hunahpu, the maize god, and Maya tradition held that the deities created humans first out of mud, then wood, then corn.

The Maya worshiped their gods with a variety of rituals. Among them were both human sacrifice and bloodletting-customs that capture modern imaginations. The Maya sport of pitz, a forerunner of soccer, had its own ritual implications: Researchers think losers of the game were sometimes sacrificed in recognition of the Maya sun and moon gods, who were said to have played the same game in the Maya creation myth, the Popol Vuh.

How the Maya civilization collapsed

Although some northern cities continued to flourish, the majority of Maya centers began to collapse during the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. Inter-city relations soured, warfare increased, trade declined, and the death rate rose.

Theories as to the civilization's demise vary. One hypothesis, backed by climate simulations, is that a long drought-combined with slash-and-burn farming techniques that destroyed the forests upon which the Maya relied- are what brought disaster to their doorstep. Suddenly, once wealthy city centers became deserted wastelands as some Maya died and others scattered to a variety of more fertile, mountainous lands to the south. As once massive cities like Chichén Itza fell, cities like Mayapán rose in prominence. Other Maya people abandoned cities altogether, settling into small villages instead.

Though the Maya people persisted, the downfall of Maya civilization left those who remained vulnerable to the pressures of European colonization beginning in the 1500s. By the time Spain fully conquered the Maya around 1524, the majority of the Maya's most important cities had already been abandoned.

Meanwhile, the newly arrived Spanish explorers paid little attention to the ruins that lay scattered throughout their colonies even as they seized Maya lands and forced its Indigenous people to convert to Christianity.

Rediscovering the Maya

It wasn't until the 1840s that the Maya were "rediscovered" by explorers and researchers who were intrigued by the hints of the civilization they had left behind. American attorney and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood led a series of archaeological expeditions to Central America, where they mapped and documented Maya sites.

Though the existence of ruins in the area was known, many Europeans assumed that Indigenous Central Americans were primitive and unintelligent and had not created the historic artifacts beneath their feet. Stephens and Catherwood wanted to prove them wrong and establish both the worth of the sites and the identities of their creators.

Despite being convinced of the former glory of the Maya, the two researchers also tried to profit from what they found, even attempting to purchase entire Maya cities and transport them to a New York museum. Nonetheless, their work forced the world to take notice of Maya civilization and lay a foundation for future archaeological discoveries.

Today, the field of Maya archaeology is flourishing, and modern excavations have revealed everything from ruins to religious relics in the jungle that once reclaimed them. Scholars are still attempting to discover more about the Maya, their ambitious rise, and mysterious fall. (How researchers used lasers to discover a Mayan pyramid in Tikal.)

While archaeological relics may be all that's left of their past, the Maya still exist in the present. More than six million Maya descendants live in modern Central America, where more than 30 languages stemming from ancient Mayan are still spoken. These descendants also keep many Mayan agricultural, religious, and land management traditions alive-a sign of their culture's resilience in the face of centuries of challenge and change.

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Who were the Maya? Decoding the ancient civilization's secrets

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The pyramid-building society reigned over much of Central America until it collapsed. Today, its descendants keep many traditions alive-a sign of resilience.

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Maya, Mesoamerican Indians occupying a nearly continuous territory in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and northern Belize. In the early 21st century some 30 Mayan languages were spoken by more than five million people, most of whom were bilingual in Spanish. Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America, the Maya possessed one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere ( see pre-Columbian civilizations: The earliest Maya civilization of the lowlands). They practiced agriculture, built great stone buildings and pyramid temples, worked gold and copper, and used a form of hieroglyphic writing that has now largely been deciphered.

As early as 1500 bce the Maya had settled in villages and had developed an agriculture based on the cultivation of corn (maize), beans, and squash; by 600 ce cassava (sweet manioc) was also grown. ( See also origins of agriculture: Early development: The Americas.) They began to build ceremonial centres, and by 200 ce these had developed into cities containing temples, pyramids, palaces, courts for playing ball, and plazas. The ancient Maya quarried immense quantities of building stone (usually limestone), which they cut by using harder stones such as chert. They practiced mainly slash-and-burn agriculture, but they used advanced techniques of irrigation and terracing. They also developed a system of hieroglyphic writing and highly sophisticated calendrical and astronomical systems. The Maya made paper from the inner bark of wild fig trees and wrote their hieroglyphs on books made from this paper. Those books are called codices. The Maya also developed an elaborate and beautiful tradition of sculpture and relief carving. Architectural works and stone inscriptions and reliefs are the chief sources of knowledge about the early Maya. Early Mayan culture showed the influence of the earlier Olmec civilization.

The rise of the Maya began about 250 ce, and what is known to archaeologists as the Classic Period of Mayan culture lasted until about 900 ce. At its height, Mayan civilization consisted of more than 40 cities, each with a population between 5,000 and 50,000. Among the principal cities were Tikal, Uaxactún, Copán, Bonampak, Dos Pilas, Calakmul, Palenque, and Río Bec. The peak Mayan population may have reached two million people, most of whom were settled in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala. After 900 ce, however, the Classic Maya civilization declined precipitously, leaving the great cities and ceremonial centres vacant and overgrown with jungle vegetation. Some scholars have suggested that armed conflicts and the exhaustion of agricultural land were responsible for the sudden decline. Discoveries in the 21st century led scholars to posit a number of additional reasons for the destruction of Mayan civilization. One cause was probably the war-related disruption of river and land trade routes. Other contributors may have been deforestation and drought. During the Post-Classic Period (900-1519), cities such as Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and Mayapán in the Yucatán Peninsula continued to flourish for several centuries after the great lowland cities had become depopulated. By the time the Spaniards conquered the area in the early 16th century, most of the Maya had become village-dwelling agriculturists who practiced the religious rites of their forebears.

The major extant Mayan cities and ceremonial centres feature a variety of pyramidal temples or palaces overlain with limestone blocks and richly ornamented with narrative, ceremonial, and astronomical reliefs and inscriptions that have ensured the stature of Mayan art as premier among Native American cultures. But the true nature of Mayan society, the meaning of its hieroglyphics, and the chronicle of its history remained unknown to scholars for centuries after the Spaniards discovered the ancient Mayan building sites.

Systematic explorations of Mayan sites were first undertaken in the 1830s, and a small portion of the writing system was deciphered in the early and mid-20th century. Those discoveries shed some light on Mayan religion, which was based on a pantheon of nature gods, including those of the Sun, the Moon, rain, and corn. A priestly class was responsible for an elaborate cycle of rituals and ceremonies. Closely related to Mayan religion-indeed, inextricable from it-was the impressive development of mathematics and astronomy. In mathematics, positional notation and the use of the zero represented a pinnacle of intellectual achievement. Mayan astronomy underlay a complex calendrical system involving an accurately determined solar year (18 months of 20 days each, plus a 5-day period considered unlucky by the Mayans), a sacred calendar of 260 days (13 cycles of 20 named days), and a variety of longer cycles culminating in the Long Count, a continuous marking of time, based on a zero date in 3113 bce. Mayan astronomers compiled precise tables of positions for the Moon and Venus and were able to accurately predict solar eclipses.

On the basis of these discoveries, scholars in the mid-20th century mistakenly thought that Mayan society was composed of a priestly class of peaceful stargazers and calendar keepers supported by a devout peasantry. The Maya were thought to be utterly absorbed in their religious and cultural pursuits, in favourable contrast to the more warlike and sanguinary indigenous empires of central Mexico. But the progressive decipherment of nearly all of the Mayan hieroglyphic writing has provided a truer if less-elevating picture of Mayan society and culture. Many of the hieroglyphs depict the histories of the Mayan dynastic rulers, who waged war on rival Mayan cities and took their aristocrats captive. Those captives were then tortured, mutilated, and sacrificed to the gods. Indeed, torture and human sacrifice were fundamental religious rituals of Mayan society; they were thought to guarantee fertility, demonstrate piety, and propitiate the gods, and, if such practices were neglected, cosmic disorder and chaos were thought to result. The drawing of human blood was thought to nourish the gods and was thus necessary for achieving contact with them; hence, the Mayan rulers, as the intermediaries between the Mayan people and the gods, had to undergo ritual bloodletting and self-torture.

The present-day Mayan peoples can be divided on linguistic and geographic grounds into the following groups: the Yucatec Maya, inhabiting Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and extending into northern Belize and northeastern Guatemala; the Lacandón, very few in number, occupying a territory in southern Mexico between the Usumacinta River and the Guatemalan border, with small numbers in Guatemala and Belize; the K'ichean-speaking peoples of the eastern and central highlands of Guatemala (Q'eqchi', Poqomchi', Poqomam, Uspanteko, K'iche', Kaqchikel, Tz'utujil, Sakapulteko [Sacapultec], and Sipacapa [Sipacapeño]); the Mamean peoples of the western Guatemalan highlands (Mam, Teco [Tektiteko], Awakateko, and Ixil); the Q'anjobalan peoples of Huehuetenango and adjacent parts of Mexico (Motocintlec [Mocho'], Tuzantec, Jakalteko, Akateko, Tojolabal, and Chuj); the Tzotzil and Tzeltal peoples of Chiapas in southern Mexico; the Cholan peoples, including the Chontal and Chol speakers in northern Chiapas and Tabasco and the linguistically related Chortí of the extreme eastern part of Guatemala; and the Huastec of northern Veracruz and adjoining San Luís Potosí in east-central Mexico. The chief division in Mayan cultural types is between highland and lowland cultures. Yucatec, Lacandón, and Chontal-Chol are lowland groups. The Huastec, a linguistically and geographically separated group living in Veracruz and San Luis Potosí, who never were Mayan culturally, and the other Mayan peoples live in highlands across Guatemala.

Contemporary Maya are basically agricultural, raising crops of corn, beans, and squash. They live in communities organized around central villages, which may be permanently occupied but more commonly are community centres with public buildings and houses that generally stand vacant; the people of the community live on farm homesteads except during fiestas and markets. Dress is largely traditional, particularly for women; men are more likely to wear modern ready-made clothing. Domestic spinning and weaving, once common, are becoming rare, and most clothing is made of factory-woven cloth. Cultivation is with the hoe and, where the soil is tough, the digging stick. The Yucatec usually keep pigs and chickens and, rarely, oxen that are used for farming. Industries are few, and crafts are oriented toward domestic needs. Usually some cash crop or item of local manufacture is produced for sale outside the region in order to provide cash for items not otherwise obtainable.

Most Maya are nominal Roman Catholics-though, beginning in the late 20th century, many converted to Evangelical Protestantism. Their Christianity, however, is generally overlaid upon the native religion. Its cosmology is typically Mayan, and Christian figures are commonly identified with Mayan deities. Public religion is basically Christian, with masses and saint's day celebrations. The native pre-Columbian religion is observed in domestic rites.

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Maya, the Mesoamerican Indians occupying a nearly continuous territory in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and northern Belize. Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America, the Maya possessed one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere. Learn more about the Maya here.

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Where Did the Maya Live?

The Maya civilization was one of the most dominant Indigenous societies of Mesoamerica (a term used to describe Mexico and Central America before the 16th century Spanish conquest).

Unlike other scattered Indigenous populations of Mesoamerica, the Maya were centered in one geographical block covering all of the Yucatan Peninsula and modern-day Guatemala; Belize and parts of the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas; and the western part of Honduras and El Salvador. This concentration showed that the Maya remained relatively secure from invasion by other Mesoamerican peoples.

Did you know? Among the earliest Maya a single language existed, but by the Preclassic Period a great linguistic diversity developed among the various Maya peoples. In modern-day Mexico and Central America, around 5 million people speak some 70 Maya languages; most of them are bilingual in Spanish.

Within that expanse, the Maya lived in three separate sub-areas with distinct environmental and cultural differences: the northern Maya lowlands on the Yucatan Peninsula; the southern lowlands in the Peten district of northern Guatemala and adjacent portions of Mexico, Belize and western Honduras; and the southern Maya highlands, in the mountainous region of southern Guatemala.

Most famously, the Maya of the southern lowland region reached their peak during the Classic Period of Maya civilization (A.D. 250 to 900), and built the great stone cities and monuments that have fascinated explorers and scholars of the region to this day.

Early Maya, 1800 B.C. to A.D. 250

The earliest Maya settlements date to around 1800 B.C., or the beginning of what is called the Preclassic or Formative Period. The earliest Maya were agricultural, growing crops such as corn (maize), beans, squash and cassava (manioc). During the Middle Preclassic Period, which lasted until about 300 B.C., Maya farmers began to expand their presence both in the highland and lowland regions.

The Middle Preclassic Period also saw the rise of the first major Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmecs. Like other Mesamerican peoples, such as the Zapotec, Totonac, Teotihuacán and Aztec, the Maya derived a number of religious and cultural traits-as well as their number system and their famous calendar-from the Olmec.

In addition to agriculture, the Preclassic Maya also displayed more advanced cultural traits like pyramid-building, city construction and the inscribing of stone monuments.

The Late Preclassic city of Mirador, in the northern Peten, was one of the greatest cities ever built in the pre-Columbian Americas. Its size dwarfed the Classic Maya capital of Tikal, and its existence proves that the Maya flourished centuries before the Classic Period.

Mayan Pyramids of the Classic Maya, A.D. 250-900

The Classic Period, which began around A.D. 250, was the golden age of the Maya Empire. Classic Maya civilization grew to some 40 cities, including Tikal, Uaxactún, Copán, Bonampak, Dos Pilas, Calakmul, Palenque and Río Bec; each city held a population of between 5,000 and 50,000 people. At its peak, the Maya population may have reached 2,000,000 or as many as 10,000,000.

Excavations of Maya sites have unearthed plazas, palaces, temples and pyramids, as well as courts for playing the famous Maya ball game ulama, all ritually and politically significant to Maya culture. Maya cities were surrounded and supported by a large population of farmers. Though the Maya practiced a primitive type of "slash-and-burn" agriculture, they also displayed evidence of more advanced farming methods, such as irrigation and terracing.

The Maya were deeply religious, and worshiped various gods related to nature, including the gods of the sun, the moon, rain and corn. At the top of Maya society were the kings, or "kuhul ajaw" (holy lords), who claimed to be related to gods and followed a hereditary succession. They were thought to serve as mediators between the gods and people on earth, and performed the elaborate religious ceremonies and rituals so important to the Maya culture.

The Mayan Calendar and Culture

The Classic Maya built many of their temples and palaces in a stepped pyramid shape, decorating them with elaborate reliefs and inscriptions. These structures have earned the Maya their reputation as the great artists of Mesoamerica.

Guided by their religious ritual, the Maya also made significant advances in mathematics and astronomy, including the use of the zero and the development of complex calendar systems like the Calendar Round, based on 365 days, and later, the Long Count Calendar, designed to last over 5,000 years.

Serious exploration of Classic Maya sites began in the 1830s. By the early to mid-20th century, a small portion of their system of hieroglyph writing had been deciphered, and more about their history and culture became known. Most of what historians know about the Maya comes from what remains of their architecture and art, including stone carvings and inscriptions on their buildings and monuments.

The Maya also made paper from tree bark and wrote in books made from this paper, known as codices; four of these codices are known to have survived. They are also credited with some of the earliest uses of chocolate and of rubber.

Maya Life in the Rainforest

One of the many intriguing things about the Maya was their ability to build a great civilization in a tropical rainforest climate. Traditionally, ancient peoples had flourished in drier climates, where the centralized management of water resources (through irrigation and other techniques) formed the basis of society. (This was the case for the Teotihuacan of highland Mexico, contemporaries of the Classic Maya.) In the southern Maya lowlands, however, there were few navigable rivers for trade and transport, as well as no obvious need for an irrigation system.

By the late 20th century, researchers had concluded that the climate of the lowlands was in fact quite environmentally diverse. Though foreign invaders were disappointed by the region's relative lack of silver and gold, the Maya took advantage of the area's many natural resources, including limestone (for construction), the volcanic rock obsidian (for tools and weapons) and salt.

The environment also held other treasures for the Maya, including jade, quetzal feathers (used to decorate the elaborate costumes of Maya nobility) and marine shells, which were used as trumpets in ceremonies and warfare.

What Happened to the Maya?

From the late eighth through the end of the ninth century, something unknown happened to shake the Maya civilization to its foundations. One by one, the Classic cities in the southern lowlands were abandoned, and by A.D. 900, Mayan civilization in that region had collapsed. The reason for this mysterious decline is unknown, though scholars have developed several competing theories.

Some believe that by the ninth century the Maya had exhausted the environment around them to the point that it could no longer sustain a very large population. Other Maya scholars argue that constant warfare among competing city-states led the complicated military, family (by marriage) and trade alliances between them to break down, along with the traditional system of dynastic power.

As the stature of the holy lords diminished, their complex traditions of rituals and ceremonies dissolved into chaos. Finally, some catastrophic environmental change - like an extremely long, intense period of drought - may have wiped out the Classic Maya civilization. Drought would have hit cities like Tikal especially hard, because rainwater there was necessary for drinking as well as for crop irrigation.

All three of these factors - overpopulation and overuse of the land, endemic warfare and drought - may have played a part in the downfall of the Maya in the southern lowlands. In the highlands of the Yucatan, a few Maya cities, such as Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Mayapán, continued to flourish in the Post-Classic Period (A.D. 900-1500). By the time the Spanish invaders arrived, however, most Maya were living in agricultural villages, their great cities hidden under a layer of verdant rainforest.

Do the Maya Still Exist?

Descendants of the Maya still live in Central America in modern-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico.

The majority of modern-day Maya live in Guatemala, which is home to Tikal National Park, the site of the ruins of the ancient city of Tikal. Roughly 40 percent of Guatemalans are of Mayan descent.

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Mayan Civilization: Calendar, Pyramids & Ruins| HISTORY

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The Maya, a civilization of Indigenous people in Central America, created a complex Mayan calendar and massive pyramids before their empire collapsed into ruins.

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