The Mayas

1. The Mayas

2. The origin & where they live now • Mayans are originally from Guatemala. The majority of Guatemala’s population is Mayan Indian. Most Mayans live in villages and towns in the country’s highlands. From town to town Mayan groups speak slightly different languages and create unique art. • The Mayas built great cities such as Copán in the present day country of Honduras and Tikal in present day Guatemala. Mayan cities were religious centers. Large pyramid shaped temples often stood in the middle of Mayan cities. The Mayas worshiped their gods there and performed rituals including human sacrifice or the offering of human life to their gods.

3. The Mayas Map

4. Their basic beliefs • Mayan religion was characterized by the worship of Nature gods, especially the gods of sun, rain and corn, a priestly class, the importance of astronomy and astrology, rituals of human sacrifice and the building of elaborate pyramidical temple. • Some aspects of Mayan religion survive today among the Mayan Indians of Mexico and central America who practice a combination of traditional religion and roman catholism. The remaining Mayas were conquered by the Spanish and converted to roman catholism. • The present day Mayan peoples are spread mainly across southern Mexico with small numbers in Guatemala and Belize. They practice a religion that combines roman catholism with Mayan cosmology, deities, and domestic rituals.

5. Arts and traditions • The Mayan society was a strict theocratic hierarchy, where the priests held great power for their connection with the gods. Warfare played an essential part of Mayan society, and they did practice human sacrifice. It is believed that they sacrificed captured enemy warriors and ball players as well as people of their own tribe, going willingly to the World of the Gods. Many offerings and sacrifices, human and others, have been found in cenotes, the fresh water sinkholes found throughout the Yucatán. • The priests and royalty also performed auto-sacrifice, for example by piercing a body part to offer their own blood. One popular bloodletting ceremony, shown on many examples of Mayan art, was to pierce their own tongue and thread a thin rope through the hole, thus letting the blood run down the rope. • The tradition of offering alcohol or blood to the Gods is still in pratice in many places around the Mayan World. Maya hand woven traditional clothing can reveal the wearers identity as a belonging to a certain linguistic group, her origin from a specific place, or place in a religious hierarchy.

6. More Arts and Traditions • In most Mayan villages, women weave cloth for their family's clothing or for ceremonial, artistic, and, increasingly, commercial purposes Mayan women weave the design of the universe into their cloth. Like prayers, the designs woven speak to the gods to convey wishes or reflect the glory of the universe. An embroidered scorpion calls down the rain. Cotton symbolizes clouds. A diamond represents the world. The number thirteen recalls the sun's course through the sky and underworld. Elaborate geometric designs repeated on each piece map the organization of the Mayan cosmos.

7. The Mayans Encounters with the Europeans • The early inhabitants of the Caribbean and Central America were the Arawaks and the Caribs, who were skilled hunters, fishermen, and farmers. The Arawak people learned the skill of farming about 9,000 A.D. through cultivating wild seed fruits and roots and growing crops of maize, yams, cassava, cotton, and tobacco. The Maya people developed complex civilizations in Central America and Mexico, thousands of years before Europeans arrived in the region. • The Maya civilization took thousands of years to develop, and reached its height between 250 A.D. and 900 A.D. These ancient peoples were farmers and thrived on crops of beans, corn, cocoa, squash, and chile peppers. The Maya were also proficient potters and cloth makers. They made beautiful clay pots that they hardened with fire. They wove fabrics from the cotton that they farmed and dyed the cloth with bright patterns. The multi-faceted Maya were also great stone workers, making jewelry from jade, gold, silver, copper, and bronze, as well as erecting various architectural wonders including plazas, palaces, public buildings, temples, and sculptures of their gods and heroes.

8. The Mayans Encounters with the Europeans continued… • The Spanish began conquering Central American countries, including Guatemala and Honduras, and devastating the Maya settlements. Spaniards tried to gain control of the Maya of Chetumal, which was the capital of a large Maya area in Belize, but the Maya people opposed the Spanish invasion with methods that included burning Spanish buildings, making the capital a refuge for the Maya in other areas who were trying to escape the Spaniards. • The Spanish never gained control of the Maya who resided in Belize. Still, the Spanish took their toll on the Mayas. Before the Spanish invasion, the Maya population numbered about 400,000. Afterward, the number of Maya people in the region dropped about 86 percent due to war and European diseases. • When the British came to Belize, the Maya were no longer living on the coast, and there are no recorded encounters between the two cultures until the late 18th century. In the 18th century, the Spanish forced the British out of the land, but never inhabited it, so the British returned to Belize and expanded their settlements and logwood trade.

9. The Mayans Encounters with the Europeans continued… • As the British moved deeper into Belize, they inevitably came in contact with the Maya. The Maya were pushed back into the forests, but did not surrender easily. In 1866 Marcos Canul, the leader of the Mayans, led a revolt against a British mahogany camp and captured British prisoners. He demanded ransom for the hostages as well as payment for the land that the British had stolen. The British retorted by burning the Maya crops and destroying their villages and food supplies in hopes of starving them out of the region. But within five years the Mayans had rebuilt their villages and replanted their crops. They continued attacking the British settlements until the death of Canul.

10. How their lives were affected by European colonist. • Beginning around 1960, a civil war raged in Guatemala for more than 30 years. First an elected leader who favored land reform was overthrown by the military. Then government military forces fought rebel groups that were living I the highlands. Thousands of civilians were killed, and many others fled the country., The Mayas suffered during the civil war. In hundreds of villages throughout Guatemala, soldiers came to claim the Mayas land. Many Mayas lost all of their belongs and were forced out of there villages.

11. Problems the Mayans face today in the modern world • The Maya today number about six million people, making them the largest single block of indigenous peoples north of Peru. many Maya communities have succeeded in preserving their identity and their ways. This is partly because, throughout their history, the Maya have been confined to a single unbroken area including parts of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the western edges of Honduras and El Salvador. • In 1996 agreements were signed promising that indigenous communities would be rebuilt. However not all of the agreements have been followed. Violations of human rights by the government increased again in 2000, and many Guatemala's protested in the streets. The fight for the rights of the Mayas and for all of the ordinary people of Guatemala continues today.

12. How climate shaped mayans culture • What caused the collapse of the great Maya civilization? • A long time of dry climate, enlarged by three intense droughts, led to the end of the Maya society. Climate change is to reason for one of the worst collapses in human history. • Then, almost in an instant, a society of some 15 million people imploded, leaving deserted cities, trade routes, and immense pyramids in ruins. The sudden demise is one of the greatest archeological mysteries of our time.

13. How Mayans culture changed as a result of European conquest • The Mexican invasion of the Mayas in the Yucatan occurred in the century that followed the end of the Classic Period for the Mayas.  There is 800 miles that separates the groups and this meant long and difficult travel for the Mexican Toltecs.  Toltec art and architecture is seen first in the late 900s at Chichen Itza, a Mayan city that had flourished during the Classic Period.  According to Maya records, the Toltec rule of Chichen Itza lasted for two centuries and as a result, the Maya way of life was altered considerably.  The Toltecs brought with them many new religious cults and beliefs such as the worship of Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan, the feather-serpent god.  This is important because after the Mexicans gained control of the Mayas at Chichen Itza, this god became a part of the new architecture that accompanied the arrival of the Toltecs and it proves that the Toltecs did in fact change the Mayan way of life.  The invaders also brought very militaristic attitudes with them and this was also reflected in the new Maya art as warriors began to be depicted more frequently.  • Although the Itza’s controlled virtually every aspect of the new Mayan society, after 200 years of their rule, a famous character in Mayan history wiped out the Itza’s almost single handedly.  Hunac Ceel, also called Cauich, became the ruler after a ceremony in which sacrifices were made to the rain gods. Ceel became the ruler of the area and in no time drove the ruler of Chichen Itza and his followers from the city.  This new leadership that was started by Ceel controlled the Yucatan and surrounding areas for two and a half centuries and there were numerous changes that resulted. 

14. By: Nande Bolton The end