Explain Two Ways That Visitors Can Experience Ancient Mayan Culture in the

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Maya, Mesoamerican Indians occupying a well-nigh continuous territory in southern United mexican states, 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 Castilian conquest of United mexican states and Central America, the Maya possessed one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere (run across pre-Columbian civilizations: The earliest Maya civilisation of the lowlands). They expert agriculture, built not bad stone buildings and pyramid temples, worked gold and copper, and used a grade of hieroglyphic writing that has now largely been deciphered.

As early as 1500 bce the Maya had settled in villages and had developed an agronomics 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 evolution: The Americas.) They began to build ceremonial centres, and past 200 ce these had adult into cities containing temples, pyramids, palaces, courts for playing ball, and plazas. The aboriginal Maya quarried immense quantities of building rock (usually limestone), which they cut by using harder stones such as chert. They practiced mainly slash-and-burn agriculture, just 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 newspaper 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 too developed an elaborate and beautiful tradition of sculpture and relief carving. Architectural works and stone inscriptions and reliefs are the primary sources of knowledge near the early Maya. Early Mayan culture showed the influence of the before Olmec civilisation.

Madrid Codex

The corn god (left) and the pelting god, Chac, drawing from the Madrid Codex (Codex Tro-Cortesianus), one of the Mayan sacred books; in the Museo de América, Madrid.

Courtesy of the Museo de America, Madrid

Follow archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli in an expedition to the archaeological dig site Cival and notice information nearly the Mayans

An archaeological digging in Guatemala providing data nigh the Maya.

Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, MainzEncounter all videos for this article

The rise of the Maya began nearly 250 ce, and what is known to archaeologists as the Archetype Period of Mayan civilisation lasted until well-nigh 900 ce. At its elevation, Mayan civilization consisted of more than twoscore cities, each with a population between 5,000 and l,000. Amongst the principal cities were Tikal, Uaxactún, Copán, Bonampak, Dos Pilas, Calakmul, Palenque, and Río Bec. The peak Mayan population may take reached two million people, most of whom were settled in the lowlands of what is at present Guatemala. Later on 900 ce, however, the Classic Maya civilization declined precipitously, leaving the great cities and formalism centres vacant and overgrown with jungle vegetation. Some scholars have suggested that armed conflicts and the burnout of agronomical state were responsible for the sudden decline. Discoveries in the 21st century led scholars to posit a number of boosted reasons for the destruction of Mayan civilisation. One cause was probably the war-related disruption of river and state trade routes. Other contributors may have been deforestation and drought. During the Post-Archetype Menses (900–1519), cities such as Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and Mayapán in the Yucatán Peninsula connected to flourish for several centuries after the corking lowland cities had become depopulated. By the time the Spaniards conquered the expanse in the early 16th century, virtually of the Maya had become village-dwelling agriculturists who practiced the religious rites of their forebears.

Mayan fresco from Bonampak, original c. 800 ce, reconstruction by Antonio Tejeda; in Chiapas, Mexico.

Ygunza/FPG

The major extant Mayan cities and formalism centres feature a diversity of pyramidal temples or palaces overlain with limestone blocks and richly ornamented with narrative, formalism, and astronomical reliefs and inscriptions that accept ensured the stature of Mayan art as premier amongst Native American cultures. Only the truthful nature of Mayan guild, the pregnant of its hieroglyphics, and the chronicle of its history remained unknown to scholars for centuries after the Spaniards discovered the ancient Mayan edifice sites.

Systematic explorations of Mayan sites were showtime undertaken in the 1830s, and a small portion of the writing organisation was deciphered in the early and mid-20th century. Those discoveries shed some light on Mayan organized 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 organized religion—indeed, inextricable from it—was the impressive development of mathematics and astronomy. In mathematics, positional notation and the utilize of the zero represented a elevation of intellectual accomplishment. Mayan astronomy underlay a complex calendrical system involving an accurately determined solar year (18 months of 20 days each, plus a v-twenty-four hours period considered unlucky past the Mayans), a sacred calendar of 260 days (thirteen cycles of 20 named days), and a multifariousness of longer cycles culminating in the Long Count, a continuous marking of time, based on a null 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 past a devout peasantry. The Maya were thought to be utterly captivated in their religious and cultural pursuits, in favourable contrast to the more warlike and sanguinary indigenous empires of cardinal 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 draw 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 being sacrifice were primal 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 claret was idea to nourish the gods and was thus necessary for achieving contact with them; hence, the Mayan rulers, equally the intermediaries between the Mayan people and the gods, had to undergo ritual bloodletting and cocky-torture.

Late Classic Mayan limestone relief showing a bloodletting ritual performed by the king of Yaxchilán, Shield Jaguar Ii, and his wife, Lady One thousand'ab'al Xook; in the British Museum, London. The king holds a flaming torch over his wife, who is pulling a thorny rope through her tongue.

© Swisshippo/Fotolia

The present-twenty-four hour period Mayan peoples can be divided on linguistic and geographic grounds into the following groups: the Yucatec Maya, inhabiting United mexican states's Yucatán Peninsula and extending into northern Belize and northeastern Guatemala; the Lacandón, very few in number, occupying a territory in southern United mexican states between the Usumacinta River and the Guatemalan border, with pocket-sized numbers in Guatemala and Belize; the One thousand'ichean-speaking peoples of the eastern and primal highlands of Republic of guatemala (Q'eqchi', Poqomchi', Poqomam, Uspanteko, Yard'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 United mexican states (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 role of Guatemala; and the Huastec of northern Veracruz and bordering San Luís Potosí in due east-primal Mexico. The primary partitioning in Mayan cultural types is betwixt 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 primal villages, which may be permanently occupied but more ordinarily are community centres with public buildings and houses that mostly stand vacant; the people of the customs live on farm homesteads except during fiestas and markets. Dress is largely traditional, specially for women; men are more likely to wear modernistic prepare-fabricated clothing. Domestic spinning and weaving, once mutual, are condign rare, and most wearable is made of manufacturing plant-woven cloth. Cultivation is with the hoe and, where the soil is tough, the digging stick. The Yucatec usually proceed 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 industry is produced for sale outside the region in order to provide cash for items not otherwise obtainable.

Well-nigh Maya are nominal Roman Catholics—though, beginning in the late 20th century, many converted to Evangelical Protestantism. Their Christianity, however, is mostly 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'southward mean solar day celebrations. The native pre-Columbian religion is observed in domestic rites.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was well-nigh recently revised and updated by Amy McKenna.

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Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Maya-people

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