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In addition to being a sport, it had a religious significance. Although there were many versions of the game, it was always played on a court shaped like a capital I. Two teams would compete against each other to get a large rubber ball through a stone ring. The ball had to be kept off the ground using only knees, elbows, or hips, never the handas or feet. Prisoners of war were forced to play ulama, and the losers may have been put to death. The largest ball court has been found at Chichen Itza in Mexico.

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A temple is a building that people use for worshipping gods or for other religious purposes. The houses of worship in many ancient religions were called temples. Hinduism, Buddhism, and several other religions today also have temples. The architecture, or building style, of temples varies from place to place.
By: Hedieh Fahami

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The Maya built observatories, or buildings to study astronomy, so their priests could study the stars. Maya astronomers figured out that a year is about 365 years long. They also learned about the cycles of the moon and how to predict eclipses.  Based on their discoveries, the Maya developed calendars. They had a religious calendar to plan religious events.The Maya used a different calendar for agriculture, which had symbols for different months tied to farming activities such as farming and harvesting. The Maya calendar was more accurate than the calendar used in Europe at the time. The Maya created a number system that included some new concepts in math. For example, the Maya were among the first people with a symbol for zero. They used their number system to record important dates in their history
By:Maria Fernanda,Hedieh Fahami,Shideh Moayed.

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Achievements on Writing and Oral traditions.

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Achievements on Writing and Oral traditions.

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The Maya developed a writing system; similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Symbols represented both objects and sounds. The Maya created records, especially about the achievements of their kings, by carving symbols into large stone tablets. They also wrote in bark-paper books. Stories and poetry passed down orally from one generation to the next. After the Spanish arrived, Maya legends and history were written in a book called The Popol Vuh. This book provides valuable information about the Maya.

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1. Increased warfare brought the end of the Maya Classic  Age. { Competition between cities for land may have increased. This competition could have led to even more warfare than before.

2. As cities grew, perhaps the Maya couldn’t grow enough food to feed everyone. Growing the same crops year after year might have left the soil too weak for farming.

3. Climate might have played a role in the collapse of Maya civilization. The region suffered from a long dry period and droughts for about 150 years. A drier climate and droughts would have made it hard to grow enough food to feed everyone in the cities.

By: Hedieh Fahami

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In our opinion the most important Mayan achievement is the building of temples and great cities without using modern machinery because they are still standing among us and many of these temples and buildings are considered  UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and we think that without all these buildings we wouldn't know much about the Maya and their culture and traditions because many information about them is encrypted on these buildings.
By: Maria Fernanda, Shideh Moayed, Hedieh Fahami

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Some of the best known Maya art is their sculpture  And their jade and gold jewelry. They carved stone sculptures of kings and Gods of their cities. Maya cities showed the talent of their architects and Builders . The Maya built cities without the use of metal tools. They didn’t have wheeled vehicles to carry supplies either. Workers used obsidian tools to cut limestone into blocks. Workers rolled the giant blokes  over logs and lifted them to ropes to carry them. It took many workers to build Maya cities, perhaps the most recognizable Maya achievement.
By: Maria Fernanda Rodriguez

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*The Palenque Mayan ruins once hold great political power.
*Only site in Mayan culture that allowed women to rule.
* UNESCO World Heritage Site
* The total area of the archeological site is 1780 hectares, 09 areas and 49 square meters and 1,400 buildings have been recorded, of which only about 10% have been explored.

By: Maria Fernanda Rodriguez Medina

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The Maya Empire, centered in the tropical lowlands of what is now Guatemala, reached the peak of its power and influence around the sixth century A.D. The Maya excelled at agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, calendar-making and mathematics, and left behind an astonishing amount of impressive architecture and symbolic artwork. Most of the great stone cities of the Maya were abandoned by A.D. 900, however, and since the 19th century scholars have debated what might have caused this dramatic decline.

Locating the Maya

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.

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.

Cities of Stone: 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.

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.

Maya Arts 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.

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.

Mysterious Decline of 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, Maya 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-where rainwater was necessary for drinking as well as for crop irrigation-especially hard.

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 buried under a layer of rainforest green.

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 them live in Guatemala, which is home to Tikal National Park, the site of the ruins of the ancient city of Tikal. Sixty percent of Guatemalans are of Mayan descent.
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Source

The Mayan Civilization. Stanford.edu.

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The Maya Empire, centered in the tropical lowlands of what is now Guatemala, reached the peak of its power and influence around the sixth century A.D. The Maya excelled at agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, calendar-making and mathematics, and left behind an astonishing amount of impressive architecture and symbolic artwork.

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The lower class supported the class with food and labor, but the upper class also helped the lower class. For example, upper class Maya led the religious ceremonies that were vital to the daily life for all classes of society.
By: Shideh Moayed

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* The upper class of Maya society included different groups of people. The king held the highest point in society. Priests, warriors, and merchants were also part of the upper class. Kings led battles and were often involved in religious ceremonies. Rulers had beautiful clothing and jewelry. Kings wore feather headdresses and capes of cotton, jaguar skins, and feathers. The people at the bottom of the Mayan social ladder were the farmers and slaves. These two groups made up the base of the power pyramid of the Mayas. Most people in Mayan civilization were farmers, but their rights in society were not much better than those of slaves. Slaves were usually captured enemies or criminals from within the Mayan citizenry.
By: Shideh Moayed

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* The Maya worshipped many gods related to the aspects of their daily life.

*The Maya believed their kings communicated with Gods.
* The Maya believed that the gods could be helpful or harmful, so people tried to please them so they could prevent disasters or the end of the world.
*The Maya believed that they needed blood to please the gods.
* Every person offered blood to the gods by piercing their tongue or skin.
*The Maya sometimes held special ceremonies to give blood at events such as births, weddings and funerals.
* On special occasions when they thought they needed more blood, they made human sacrifices.
* For human sacrifices, they used prisoners captured in battle
*A priest would offer human hearts to stone carvings of gods.
*These sacrifices usually took place in a temple.
By: Maria Fernanda Rodriguez