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The Peten and the Maya Lowlands the Mirador Region San Bartolo from Preclassic to Classic in the Maya Lowlands

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The Peten and the Maya Lowlands the Mirador Region San Bartolo from Preclassic to Classic in the Maya Lowlands Other titles of interest published by Thames & Hudson include: Breaking the Maya Code Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs Angkor and the Khmer Civilization India: A Short History The Incas The Aztecs See our websites www.thamesandhudson.com www.thamesandhudsonusa.com CONTENTS Preface Chronological table 1 INTRODUCTION The setting Natural resources Areas Periods Peoples and languages Climate change and its cultural impact 2 THE EARLIEST MAYA Early hunters Archaic collectors and cultivators Early Preclassic villages The Middle Preclassic expansion Preclassic Kaminaljuyu The Maya lowlands 3 THE RISE OF MAYA CIVILIZATION The birth of the calendar Izapa and the Pacific Coast The Hero Twins and the Creation of the World (box) Kaminaljuyu and the Maya highlands The Peten and the Maya lowlands The Mirador region San Bartolo From Preclassic to Classic in the Maya lowlands 4 CLASSIC SPLENDOR: THE EARLY PERIOD Defining the Early Classic Teotihuacan: military giant The Esperanza culture Cerén: a New World Pompeii? Tzakol culture in the Central Area Copan in the Early Classic The Northern Area 5 CLASSIC SPLENDOR: THE LATE PERIOD Classic sites in the Central Area Copan and Quirigua Tikal Calakmul Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, and Bonampak The Petexbatun Palenque Comalcalco and Tonina Classic sites in the Northern Area: Río Bec, Chenes, and Coba Art of the Late Classic 6 THE TERMINAL CLASSIC The Great Collapse Ceibal and the Putun Maya Puuc sites in the Northern Area The Terminal Classic at Chichen Itza Ek’ Balam The Cotzumalhuapa problem The end of an era 7 THE POSTCLASSIC The Toltec invasion and Chichen Itza The Itza and the city of Mayapan The independent states of Yucatan The Central Area in the Postclassic Maya-Mexican dynasties in the Southern Area The Spanish Conquest 8 MAYA LIFE ON THE EVE OF THE CONQUEST The farm and the chase Industry and commerce The life cycle Society and politics 9 MAYA THOUGHT AND CULTURE Being religious Ordering the universe Gods and spirits Numbers and the calendar The sun and the moon The celestial wanderers and the stars The nature of Maya writing History graven in stone The Great Game A possessed world 10 THE ENDURING MAYA The new Spanish order The highland Maya, yesterday and today The Tsotsil Maya of Zinacantan The Yukateko Maya The War of the Castes The Maya of Chan Kom The Lakandon Uprising in Chiapas The great terror The Maya future Visiting the Maya Area Dynastic Rulers of Classic Maya Cities Further Reading Sources of Illustrations Index 3 THE RISE OF MAYA CIVILIZATION To archaeologists, it once seemed a very long step from the village or small civic-religious centers that we have thus far been considering to the awe-inspiring achievements of the Classic Maya, but we now realize that this advance took place in what we know of as the Late Preclassic. The more we know about that period, which lasted from about 400 or 300 BC to AD 250, the more complex and developed it seems. From the point of view of social and cultural evolution, the Late Preclassic really is a kind of “proto-Classic,” in which all of the traits usually ascribed to the Classic Maya are present, with the exception of vaulted stone architecture and a high elaboration of calendar and script on stone monuments. Initially, the Maya highlands and lowlands (excluding the Pacific coast) were remarkably backward and provincial compared with the extraordinary and precocious civilization of Mexico’s Olmec heartland. It will be remembered from the last chapter that at a time when the San Lorenzo Olmec were carving and moving multi-ton stone monuments, the Yucatan Peninsula was sparsely inhabited by preceramic peoples following an essentially Archaic way of life, centered on hunting and gathering, with some maize and manioc horticulture. Only after 1000 BC did they have villages and pottery, with small temples and their platforms appearing just before 900 BC [20]. As the Olmec civilization went into a steep decline c. 400 BC, rapid changes took place in the Maya area. This timing cannot be coincidental but, as explained in the last chapter, its meaning is unclear. What we do know is that, as populations rose, the southern lowlands of the peninsula became the new “hotspot” for complexity in Mesoamerica, resulting in the construction of immense cities, particularly in the Peten’s so-called Mirador “Basin” (which is really an upland). Concurrently, we see in this epoch the beginnings of Maya hieroglyphic writing and the calendar, perhaps to record the doings of kings and dynasties – a problematic topic, since we still cannot read the very earliest Maya inscriptions beyond the dates. As for the origins of Late Preclassic Maya civilization, all indications are that the fons et origo was Olmec. That ancient and now-dead culture of the fertile Veracruz–Tabasco plain appears to have been as familiar to, and respected by, the early Maya as Classical Greece and Rome are to ourselves (we shall see direct evidence for this at San Bartolo). In art, in religion, in state complexity, and perhaps even in the calendar and astronomy, Olmec models were transferred to the Maya through direct interaction or by means of intermediary groups in Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. There is a consistent theme in such interactions, from this period until the time of Spanish contact: if the ancient Mexicans saw the Maya region as a land of great wealth in jades, feathers, and chocolate, the Maya looked to the west, in what is now Mexico, as the enduring locus of civilization. The only exception might be the Late Preclassic, when the immense pyramids of the Maya may have inspired similar examples in central Mexico, including those at the great city of Teotihuacan. 20 Sites of the Late Preclassic period. Underlined sites have giant architectural masks. How are we to define the word “civilization”? How do the civilized differ from the barbaric? Archaeologists have usually dodged this question by offering lists of traits which they think to be important. Cities are one criterion. The late V. G. Childe thought that writing should be another, but the obviously advanced Inca of Peru were completely non-literate, or had only string notations, khipu, whose function seems largely numerical or mnemonic. Civilization, in fact, is different in degree rather than in kind from what precedes it, but has certainly been achieved by the time that state institutions, large-scale public works, temple buildings, and widespread, unified art styles have appeared. With few exceptions, the complex state apparatus demands some form of record-keeping, and writing has usually been the answer: so has the invention of a more-or-less accurate means of keeping time. Yet all civilizations are in themselves unique. The Classic Maya of the lowlands had a very elaborate calendar; writing; temple-pyramids and palaces of limestone masonry with vaulted rooms; architectural layouts emphasizing buildings arranged around plazas with rows of stone stelae lined up before some; and a highly sophisticated art style expressed in bas-reliefs and in wall paintings. These traits are now known to have been developed in the Late Preclassic period. THE BIRTH OF THE CALENDAR Some system of recording time is essential to all higher cultures – to fix critical events in the lives of the persons ruling the state, to guide the agricultural and ceremonial year, and to record celestial motions. The Calendar Round of 52 years was present among all Mesoamericans, including the Maya, and is presumably of very great age. It consists of two permutating cycles. One is of 260 days, representing the intermeshing of a sequence of the numbers 1 through 13 with 20 named days [21]; these names varied from culture to culture in Mesoamerica but often had the same animal or mythic associations. Among the Maya, the 260-day count was fundamental. It was sometimes called by the ersatz term tzolk’in, the actual Maya label perhaps being 13 tuk. The cycle began with 1 Imix, followed by 2 Ik’, 3 Ak’bal, 4 K’an, until 13 Ben had been reached; the day following was Ix, with the coefficient 1 again, leading to 2 Men, and so on. The last day of the 260-day cycle would be 13 Ajaw, and it would repeat once again commencing with 1 Imix. An important point: scholars use Yukateko names for most of the days, a convention that does not necessarily reflect how they were pronounced in other parts of the Maya world. How the 260-day calendar even came into being remains an enigma – it is eerily close to the nine-month span of human gestation – but the use to which it was put is clear. Every single day had its own omens and associations, and the inexorable march of the 20 days acted as a kind of perpetual fortune-telling machine guiding the destinies of the Maya and all the peoples of Mexico. It still survives in unchanged form among some indigenous peoples in southern Mexico and the Maya highlands, under the care of calendar priests. 21 Schematic representation of the 260-day count. The day-names are in Yukateko Maya. Meshing with the 260-day count is a “Vague Year” or Ha’b of 365 days, so called because the actual length of the solar year is about a quarter-day more, a circumstance that leads us to intercalate one day every four years to keep our calendar in march with the sun. Although the Maya were perfectly aware that the Ha’b was shorter than the tropical year, they did not change the calendar accordingly. Within the Ha’b, there were 18 named “months” of 20 days each [22], with a much- dreaded interval of 5 unlucky days added at the end.
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