The Maya household was composed of several buildings, built around patios and courtyards. This was true for both the rich and the poor. The household was similar to a compound. Many different generations of the same family lived in the compound, each in their own rooms or building, connected by a series of courtyards and patios.

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The ancient Maya civilization occupied the eastern third of Mesoamerica, primarily the Yucatan Peninsula.

• Maya, the Mesoamerican Indians occupying a nearly continuous territory in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and northern Belize. Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America, the Maya possessed one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere. Learn more about the Maya here.
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The topography of the area greatly varied from volcanic mountains, which comprised the highlands in the South, to a porous limestone shelf, known as the Lowlands, in the central and northern regions. The southern portion of the Lowlands were covered by a rain forest with an average height of about 150 feet. Scattered savannas and swamps, or bajos, appeared sporadically, interrupting the dense forests. The northern Lowlands were also comprised of forests but they were drier than their southern counterparts, mainly growing small thorny trees. February to May was the dry season characterized by air that was intensely hot and uncomfortable. At this time of year, the fields had recently been cut and had to be burned in accordance with their slash and burn form of agriculture. The skies filled with a smoky grit, making the air even more unbearable until the rains came in late May to clear the murky atmosphere.

Many dangerous animals occupied this region of the peninsula including the jaguar, the caiman (a fierce crocodile), the bull shark, and many species of poisonous snakes. These animals had to be avoided as the Maya scavenged the forest for foods including deer turkey, peccaries, tapirs, rabbits, and large rodents such as the peca and the agouti. Many varieties of monkeys and quetzal also occupied the upper canopy. The climate of the Highlands greatly contrasted with that of the Lowlands as it was much cooler and drier.

Both the Highlands and the Lowlands were important to the presence of trade within the Mayan civilization. The lowlands primarily produced crops which were used for their own personal consumption, the principle cultigen being maize. They also grew squash, beans, chili peppers, amaranth, manioc, cacao, cotton for light cloth, and sisal for heavy cloth and rope.

The volcanic highlands, however, were the source of obsidian, jade, and other precious metals like cinnabar and hematite that the Mayans used to develop a lively trade. Although the lowlands were not the source of any of these commodities, they still played an important role as the origin of the transportation routes. The rainfall was as high as 160 inches per year in the Lowlands and the water that collected drained towards the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico in great river systems. These rivers, of which the Usumacinta and the Grijalva were of primary importance, were vital to the civilization as the form of transportation for both people and materials.

The Maya Culture

Contrary to popular beleif, the Mayan civilization was not one unified empire, but rather a multitude of separate entities with a common cultural background. Similar to the Greeks, they were religiously and artistically a nation, but politically sovereign states. As many as twenty such states existed on the Yucatan Peninsula, but although a woman has, on rare occasions, ascended to the ruling position, she has never acquired the title of 'mah kina'.

Mayan Writing

An elaborate system of writing was developed to record the transition of power through the generations. Maya writing was composed of recorded inscriptions on stone and wood and used within architecture. Folding tree books were made from fig tree bark and placed in royal tombs. Unfortunately, many of these books did not survive the humidity of the tropics or the invasion of the Spanish, who regarded the symbolic writing as the work of the devil.

Four books are known today:

The Dresden Codex
The Madud Codex
The Paris Codex
The Grolier Codex.

The priests followed the ruling class in importance and were instrumental in the recordings of history through the heiroglyphs. The two classes were closely linked and held a monopoly on learning, including writing. The heiroglyphs were formed through a combination of different signs which represented either whole words or single syllables. The information could be conveyed through inscriptions alone, but it was usually combined with pictures showing action to facilitate comprehension.

Political Organization

In both the priesthood and the ruling class, nepotism was apparently the prevailing system under which new members were chosen. Primogeniture was the form under which new kings were chosen as the king passed down his position to his son. After the birth of a heir, the kings performed a blood sacrifice by drawing blood from his own body as an offering to his ancestors. A human sacrifice was then offered at the time of a new king's installation in office. To be a king, one must have taken a captive in a war and that person is then used as the victim in his accession ceremony. This ritual is the most important of a king's life as it is the point at which he inherits the position as head of the lineage and leader of the city. The religious explanation that upheld the institution of kingship asserted that Maya rulers were necessary for continuance of the Universe.

Mayan Art

The art of the Maya, as with every civilization, is a reflection of their lifestyle and culture. The art was composed of delineation and painting upon paper and plaster, carvings in wood and stone, clay and stucco models, and terra cotta figurines from molds. The technical process of metal working was also highly developed but as the resources were scarce, they only created ornaments in this media. Many of the great programs of Maya art, inscriptions, and architecture were commissioned by Mayan kings to memorialize themselves and ensure their place in history. The prevailing subject of their art is not anonymous priests and unnamed gods but rather men and women of power that serve to recreate the history of the people. The works are a reflection of the society and its interaction with surrounding people.

One of the greatest shows of Mayan artistic ability and culture is the hieroglyphic stairway located at Copan. The stairway is an iconographical complex composed of statues, figures, and ramps in addition to the central stairway which together port ray many elements of Mayan society. An alter is present as well as many pictorial references of sacrifice and their gods. More importantly than all the imagery captured with in this monument, however, is the history of the royal descent depicted in the heiroglyphs and various statues. The figurine of a seated captive is also representative of Mayan society as it depicts someone in the process of a bloodletting ceremony, which included the accession to kingship. This figure is of high rank as depicted by his expensive earrings and intricately woven hip cloth. The rope collar which would usually mark this man as a captive, reveals that he is involved in a bloodletting rite. His genitals are exposed as he is just about to draw blood for the ceremony.

In the Indian communities, as it was with their Mayan ancestors, the basic staple diet is corn. The clothing worn is as it was in the past. It is relatively easy to determine the village in which the clothing was made by the the type of embroidery, color, design and shape. Mayan dialects of Qhuche, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, and Mam are still spoken today, although the majority of Indians also speak Spanish.

The following lists catalog the specific articles, stories, legends and research materials of this website.
American Indian Topics | American Indian Products | American Indian Tribes
Native American Topics | Indigenous Peoples’ Literature

There are a lot of things that didn’t kill the Mayans: asteroid strikes, planet-wide quakes, global cataclysms prophesied by shamans and etched into ancient calendars. What did wipe them out was likely something that is far less mystical, and indeed is entirely familiar to modern civilizations: climate change. If you want a look at what we could face in the decades and centuries ahead, look at what one of the world’s greatest cultures suffered a millennium ago. That’s the conclusion of a newly released study and what it lacks in Hollywood-friendly drama, it makes up in sound — and scary — science.

The arc of the Mayan rise and fall is well known: The civilization first took hold in 1,800 BC, in the Central American region that now includes and surrounds Guatemala. It grew slowly until about 250 A.D. At that point, a great expansion of the culture — known to archaeologists as the Classic Period — began and continued to 900 A.D., yielding the architectural, political and textual artifacts that have so mesmerized scientists. But a decline began around 800 A.D. and led to a final collapse about 300 years later.

The Mayan arc was hardly smooth and steady, and there were periods of turbulence and decline even during the golden era. The great settlement of El Mirador, which once might have been home to 100,000 people, collapsed around 300 A.D, for example. From the fifth to eighth centuries A.D., there was an explosion of the rich tablet texts that provided so many insights into how the Mayans lived and worked. Suddenly, however, starting in 775 A.D., the number of texts began to plunge by as much as 50%, a bellwether of a culture that was declining too.

(More: How the Drought of 2012 Will Make Your Food More Expensive)

There have been a lot of theories for what accounted for such cycles, with climate among the most-mentioned. The better the year-to-year weather — with plenty of rainfall and reasonably steady and predictable temperatures — the better crops do, and the more the culture and economy can expand. The texts have hinted at declines in productivity, perhaps climate-related, coinciding with generations of unrest, but there was never a precise way to confirm those writings. Analysis of lake sediments can yield a reliable reading of the levels of sulfur, oxygen isotopes and other atmospheric markers at various points in history, which reveal a lot about rainfall and other critical variables. But the Mayans themselves often unwittingly disturbed those sediments, with deforestation — including wide-scale burnings — and fishing.

Anthropologist Douglas Kennett of Penn State University, leader of an international team of researchers from the U.S., Belize, Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere thus decided to look at another, less vulnerable, source of evidence: stalagmites in caves. Some of the rainfall absorbed by the ground over the course of centuries will seep into caves and be incorporated into the drip-drip-drip of wet limestone that causes stalagmites to form. Oxygen isotopes entrained in the rain can provide an indicator of how wet a region was at any one point in history.

As Kennett and his colleagues reported in the current issue of Science, they focused their investigation on a cave in the jungles of Belize, which is within 1.5 km (.9 mi.) of one significant Mayan site and 19 mi. (30 km) of three others. In 2006, the scientists harvested a 22-in. (56-cm) stalagmite from deep within the cave. Knowing the rate at which stalagmites develop, they could calculate that the top 16.3 in. (415 mm) of it had been growing continuously since 40 B.C. Every 0.1 millimeter — or about four one-thousandths of an inch — corresponded to about 0.5 years. That’s an awfully fine-grained way to look at history, and the analysis led to some awfully detailed conclusions.

(More: Why the Drought Won’t Be Getting Better Anytime Soon — And Why This One Won’t Be the Last)

Droughts lasting at least a few decades each occurred from 200 to 1100 AD, and repeatedly coincided with struggles and upheaval in the Mayan culture. There were dry periods in the 640 to 660 window, for example, and there was also a lot of warfare in that period, which makes sense for a culture fighting over dwindling resources. Droughts from 820 to 870 similarly were associated with an outbreak of fighting, as well as the disintegration of local polities, or ruling bodies. The decline in historical texts began not long before another period of severe drying, and the collapse of the Mayan culture itself, directly corresponds to the most severe period of drying, from 1020 to 1100.

Broadly, explains Kennett, the most generous period of rainfall during the millennium or so the Mayans thrived was from 450 to 660. “This led to the proliferation of cities like Tikal, Copan and Carasol,” he says. “The new climate data show that this salubrious period was followed by a general drying trend…that triggered a decline in agricultural productivity and contributed to social fragmentation and political collapse.”

(More: When the Rains Stop)

The cause of the climate upheaval that claimed the Mayans was not, of course, human activity, since their culture thrived and died long before the industrial age. Instead it was caused by the combined effects of El Niño events and changes in the northeast and southeast equatorial winds known as the intertropical convergence zone. “The preceding conditions stimulating societal complexity and population expansion helped set the stage for later stress on [Mayan] societies and the fragmentation of political institutions.”

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This should not give comfort to the dwindling band of modern-day climate-change deniers likely to take the study as proof that the planet’s current climate woes are merely natural fluctuations. The Mayan drying trend played out over centuries, after all. What we’ve been experiencing is the more abrupt, short time-scale variety, a phenomenon that was first foreseen in climate models nearly 40 years ago, and has been unfolding pretty much on schedule and as predicted. The Mayans had no such power to forecast events and certainly couldn’t correct them. We can do both, and the lesson of the study is that we may pay mightily if we choose to take no action. No culture, as the vanished Mayans so starkly illustrate, is too big to fail.

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