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3 the Rise of Maya Civilization

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3 the Rise of Maya Civilization 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 1 INTRODUCTION The Maya are hardly a vanished people, for they number around five million souls, the largest single block of American Indians north of Peru. Most have adjusted with remarkable tenacity to the encroachments of Spanish American civilization, although over the past few decades these have taken an increasingly violent and repressive form, characterized of late by drug trafficking, displacement, migration abroad, and, in places, gang activity. Yet the Maya endure with dignity, and a growing sense of joint purpose; if in the past they did not view themselves as one group, a pan-Maya identity is stronger now than ever before. Besides their numbers and cultural integrity, the Maya are remarkable for an extraordinary geographic cohesion. Unlike other more scattered indigenous peoples within Mexico and Central America, at the time of the Spanish Conquest the Maya were confined (with the exception of the Wastek) to a single, unbroken area that includes all of the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, parts of the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas, and the western portion of Honduras and El Salvador [1]. There are few parts of the world where there is such a good “fit” between language and culture: a line drawn around the Mayan-speaking peoples would contain all those archaeological remains and hieroglyphic texts assigned to the ancient Maya civilization. Such homogeneity in the midst of a miscellany of tongues and peoples testifies to their relative security from invasions by other native groups – the Aztecs, for instance, never extended their empire to include any part of Maya territory, although they had important trading relationships with them. It would be an error, though, to think of these peoples as existing in some kind of vacuum. An earlier generation of archaeologists, which included the late Sylvanus Morley of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, thought of the Maya as great innovators, and in fact culture-givers to the rest of the peoples of Mexico and Central America. A later generation came to view this fundamentally “Mayacentric” outlook as wrong, believing that the ancient Maya had received much more from the non-Maya Mexican civilizations than they had given. We must now admit that Morley may have been more right than wrong, for reasons that will be made clear in this book. The point to remember is that the Maya were probably always in contact with their sister civilizations in this part of the New World, and that these peoples all profoundly influenced each other throughout their development; this will become abundantly clear when we examine the relations between the Early Classic Maya and the great city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico. 1 Major topographical features and culture areas of the Maya region. In pre-Spanish times the Maya belonged to the geographical area christened “Mesoamerica” by anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff. The northern frontier coincided approximately with the limits of aboriginal farming in Mexico, the desiccated plateau beyond holding only the possibility of humble collecting and hunting. To the southeast, the Mesoamerican border ran from the Caribbean to the Pacific across what is now Honduras and El Salvador, although in late pre-Conquest times it is apparent that north-westernmost Costa Rica was Mesoamerican in culture. This southeastern frontier generally divided the Maya from peoples of foreign tongue who had different kinds of settlement and material culture. All the Mesoamerican Indians shared a number of traits which were more or less peculiar to them and absent or rare elsewhere in the New World: hieroglyphic writing, books of fig- bark paper or deerskin that were folded like screens, a complex calendar, knowledge of the movements of the planets (especially Venus) against the dynamic background of the stars, a game played with a rubber ball in a special court, highly specialized markets, human sacrifice by head or heart removal, an emphasis upon self-sacrifice by blood drawn from the ears, tongue, or penis, and a highly complex, pantheistic religion which included nature divinities as well as deities emblematic of royal descent. All Mesoamerican religions imagined a cosmic cycle of creation and destruction, and a universe with specific colors and gods assigned to the four cardinal points and to the center. This was an area with close interaction and settled life going back for millennia, and remaining vibrant up to the Conquest and later. While there are profound differences between the subsistence base of the lowlands and that of the highlands, the ancient foursome of maize, beans, chile peppers, and squash formed then, as it still does, the basis of the Mesoamerican diet. Of course these foods were widely spread elsewhere, from the southwestern United States to Peru and Argentina in pre-Conquest times; wherever native cultures had moved beyond a level of seminomadic lifeways. In Mesoamerica, nonetheless, the preparation of maize is highly distinctive: the hard, ripe kernels are boiled in a mixture of water and white lime, producing a kind of hominy (nixtamal) which is then ground into unleavened dough on a quern (metate) with a handstone (mano), later to be fashioned into steamed tamales or into the flat cakes known by the Spanish term tortillas. The latter, perhaps introduced into the Maya area in late pre- Conquest times from Mexico, are characteristically toasted on a clay griddle (comal) which rests upon a three-stone hearth. The importance of the nixtamal process cannot be overstressed. Maize is naturally deficient in essential amino acids and in niacin (a member of the vitamin B complex). A population whose diet consisted solely of untreated maize would be malnourished and particularly prone to developing pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease which can cause dementia and even death. Cooking with lime (in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest) or with ashes (in North America) enhances the balance of essential amino acids and frees the otherwise unavailable niacin. Without the invention of this technique, no settled life in Mesoamerica would have been possible. The development of more productive varieties of maize seems also to have triggered large-scale increases in population, a topic to be explored in Chapters 2 and 3. Given the similarities among the diverse cultures of Mesoamerica, one can only conclude that its peoples must share a common origin, so far back in time that it may never be brought to light by archaeology. Yet there is some consensus among archaeologists that the Olmecs of southern Mexico had elaborated many of these traits beginning over 3,000 years ago, and that much of complex culture in Mesoamerica has an Olmec origin. It is also reasonable to assume that there must have been an active interchange of ideas and things among the Mesoamerican elite over many centuries, a state of affairs which can be documented in the Terminal Classic epoch thanks to recent research; this in itself would tend to bring about cultural homogeneity. It was out of such a matrix of cultural innovation and contact that Maya civilization was born. THE SETTING There can be few parts of the globe as geographically diverse as Mesoamerica, which includes almost every ecological extreme from the snow-swept heights of volcanoes to parched deserts and to rain-drenched jungle [2]. The Maya area is situated in the southeastern corner of this topsy-turvy land, and is somewhat less varied than the larger unit of which it is a part. High-altitude tundra is not found, and deserts are confined to narrow stretches along the upper Río Negro and middle Río Motagua.
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