Quinn Shapiro

Morgan Andaluz

English 100

26 November 2018

Mayan Culture Today

As humans, one thing that we almost all have in common is our search for meaning in

ourselves. However, most of the time, we look for it in our own communities. We stay in our

bubble where everything feels familiar and comfortable. We fail to venture into the unknown and

explore other’s meanings. We shy away from disagreement as if we are a new kid in middle

school in fear of exclusion. This limits us to a singular point of view, only one way of thinking.

To flourish, a society needs let go of their egos and listen to what others have to say. Many years

before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the mesoamericans flourished and became

one of the most advanced civilizations for their time.

In 2000 B.C.E., the Mayans emerged from the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

They were one of the first civilizations in the Americas, located in the lowlands of modern day

Guatemala. One of their first settlements is called El Mirador. Surrounded by one hundred and

fifty foot tall breadnut and picadillo trees, the city is filled with architectural wonders. Leading to

the city is a sacbe, or white road, six to twenty feet high and seventy to two hundred feet across.

It is one of the first freeway systems ever developed, connecting Mirador with a nearby city

called Nakbe. Rising from the jungle is the crown jewel of Mirador: La Danta. One of the tallest

pyramids in the world, it stands at two hundred and thirty feet. It is more massive than even the

pyramid at Giza, made from ninety-nine million cubic feet of rock. Several other pyramids were
built, all with a similar “triadic” design, unique to the Mayans. This style consists of a central

structure flanked by two smaller, inward-facing structures. (Smithsonian) (Richard Hansen)

The Mayans believed that divine forces had power over everything, including space and

time. This meant that they put a lot of effort into pleasing the gods, which meant that sacrifices

would be made(Sharer, traxler, page 100). Among their favorite to hand over were the lives of

enemy kings, who were thought of as the most potent sacrifice, and did so by decapitation. In

fact, according to Matthew Looper, in AD 738, ​K'ak' Tiliw Chan Yopaat captured and

decapitated his overlord Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil (Looper). Their structure of the cosmos was

similar to many religions that are around today: separated into the thirteen levels of the heavens,

nine levels of the underworld, and the mortal world sitting in between. The Mayans incorporated

religion in almost every aspect of their lives.

In 2006, Apocalypto, a movie about the crumbling Mayan empire came out. It depicted

them as a violent people falling into anarchy due failing crops and dieing citizens; brutal

sacrificial rituals and bloody battles helped to showcase this. However, the movie failed to

capture the architecture, art, language, mathematics, astronomy, and mythology of the Mayans.

In a way, it was similar to the blockbuster “Jaws.” Despite the obviously hyperbolous shark

attacks, it still created a fearful culture around sharks. On average, there is only one fatality due

to sharks every two years in the United States. Out of the millions of people who spend their

vacations at the beach and wading in the water, the chances of getting killed by a shark seems

pretty low. So why are so many people afraid of them? Similar to this, when I asked my friend

about the Mayans, the first thing that he thought of was the savage human sacrifices, instead of

the innovative politics, calendar, and hieroglyphics.

 As David Webster from Pennsylvania State University said, “Seen in such comparative

perspective, the built environment of the Classic Maya is especially impressive. It is sobering to

realize how much remains missing or unknown in the archaeological records of other early great

civilizations. One searches the literature in vain for a single excavated Uruk period house in the

first cities of southern Sumer or the well-preserved and complete layout of a single Old Kingdom

Egyptian town. While colleagues in the valley of Mexico struggle to estimate the sizes of ancient

communities from surface scatters of potsherds, Maya archaeologists investigate thousands of

individual household features still exposed on the surface of the cultural landscapes they study.

Without putting a spade in the ground, Mayanists can map the basic features, and often the

details, of huge royal centers, and these are not plain, unembellished, and anonymous places like

Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the great cities of the Indus Valley. Rather, the Classic Maya left us

centers filled with art and writing, rich and highly personalized in historical implication. Much of

this symbolic material, moreover, remains superbly contextualized. Only in the coastal deserts of

the Central Andes and in the American Southwest do the records of ancient built environments

approximate in accessibility, quality, and quantity that of the Maya lowlands. This

embarrassment of architectural riches offers great opportunities as well as great responsibilities.

If archaeologists anywhere can use the built environment to make sense of the past, we can. We,

more than archaeologists virtually anywhere else, should be innovative in our approaches to the

past environment. What follows is partly an assessment of how well we have lived up to this

responsibility. At Chichen Itza (1924–1936), the most ambitious of these projects, work “focused

on the excavation, restoration, and recording of the architecture and associated sculpture,

inscriptions, and artwork” (Black n.d.: 83). Restoration was overtly calculated to attract tourists.
Art and monuments aside, the main intent of the Chichen Itza effort was to link architectural

patterns to ethnohistoric accounts of the Maya “new empire” and incursions of Nahua speakers.

Attempts.”

at large-scale mapping were largely confined to the site core after archaeologists

recognized that smaller structures extended out indefinitely from

the center.