✔ Centered in the tropical lowlands of what is now called Guatemala ✔ Maya civilization is one of the most dominant indigenous societies of Meso-America and Central America before the 16th century Spanish conquest
Early Maya, 1800 B.C. to 250 A.D.
✔ In 1800 B.C., earliest Maya settlements were recorded (beginning of Preclassic or Formative Period) ✔ Earliest Maya were agricultural, growing crops such as corn, beans, squash and cassava ✔ During the Middle Pre-Classic Period, Maya farmers begin to expand their presence both in highland and lowland regions (rise of the first major Mesoamerican civilization took place) ✔ Mayans derived a number of religious and cultural traits as well as their number system and their famous calendar ✔ In addition to agriculture, Pre-Classic Maya also displayed more advanced cultural traits like pyramid-building, city construction and the inscribing of stone monuments
Cities of Stone: The Classic Maya, A.D. 250-900
✔ Called the Golden Age of the Maya empire ✔ Maya civilization spread to 40 cities and may have reached to 2,000,000 population at its peak ✔ Excavations have unearthed plazas, palaces, temples and pyramids as well as courts for playing the famous Maya ball game called “Ulama” ✔ They practiced primitive style of ‘slash and burn’ in agriculture and more advanced methods such as irrigation and terracing ✔ They are deeply religious and worshipped various gods such as the sun, moon, rain and corn ✔ They have kings or “kuhul ajaw” (holy lords) who claimed to be related to gods and mediators to people on Earth
Maya Arts and Culture
✔ Classic Maya built their temples and palaces in a stepped pyramid shape decorating them with elaborate reliefs and inscriptions ✔ This earned them the reputation as great artists of Mesoamerica ✔ Guided by their religious rituals, they made significant advances in mathematics and astronomy including the use of zero and the development of a complex calendar systems like Calendar Round based on 365 days and later the Long Count Calendar designed to last over 5000 years ✔ They also developed a system of writing called hieroglyph writing ✔ They also made paper from the bark and wrote in books made from this called ‘codices’ ✔ They are also credited with some of the earliest use of chocolate and rubber ✔ They also have the ability to build a great civilization in a tropical rainforest climate
Mysterious Decline of the Maya
✔ From the late 8th to the end of 9th century, an unknown incident happened under the Maya civilization ✔ The classic cities in the southern lowland were abandoned and by 900 A.D., Maya civilization in that region collapsed ✔ Scholars have developed several competing theories 1) by the 9th century, Maya had exhausted the environment to the point that it could no longer sustain the growing population 2)constant warfare among competing city-states led the complicated military, family(by marriage) and trade alliances between them break down along with the traditional system of dynastic power As the stature of the holy lords diminished, their complex tradition of rituals and ceremonies dissolved into chaos 3) Catastrophic environmental change due to extremely long intense period of drought may have caused the Maya civilization to be wiped out +all of these happened in the southern lowlands of the Maya +in the higher region, the Yucatan with its cities such as Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Mayapan have continued to flourish in the Post-Classic Period (A.D. 900-1500)
Do the Maya Still Exist?
✔ Most of the Mayan descendants still live in Central America in modern-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico ✔ Sixty percent of Guatemalans are of Mayan descent
Source:
The Mayan Civilization retrieved at www.stanford.edu on September 10, 2019