An introduction to the ancient Maya

 Who were the ancient Maya?

The Maya people are remembered for amazing creations, like their spectacular buildings and beautiful objects made from jade, a rare and valuable material.  

They also invented groundbreaking ideas that have helped shape the way we live our lives today. For example, it’s thought that the Maya invented the idea of 'zero'.

Maya people were able to do complex calculations, which allowed them to create very detailed and accurate calendars. They used these calendars for farming.  The late 19th century saw the beginning of the proper study of the Maya people. Cities, statues, artefacts, and cultural ornaments were uncovered, preserved, and collected.

Mayan Civilization

The evidence of a long-forgotten civilization was everywhere: Beneath a Spanish convent, underneath a street. Most of it was covered in vines and vegetation, reclaimed by the jungle. But as a pair of British-American explorers combed through the Yucatan Peninsula in the 1830s and 1840s, they soon became convinced the mysterious sites were major archaeological treasures.  

Discarded and abandoned, the function of these sites and artifacts—temples, pyramids, remnants of art, and even writing—was mostly unknown. Nonetheless, John Lloyd Stephens wrote in 1841 that they all seemed to be the work of the same group of people.  “Who these races were, whence they came, or who were their progenitors, I did not undertake to say, nor did I know,” he conceded.  

The ruins in question were the remnants of the Maya, a towering Mesoamerican civilization that had once covered much of Central America, from northern Belize through Guatemala and southern Mexico. Much more is now known about the group responsible for some of the greatest feats of its kind: Maya people cultivated the region’s first crops and domesticated its wildlife, built its first cities, and either created or refined almost every aspect of modern civilization. (Subscriber exclusive: In search of the lost empire of the Maya.)  

Though their descendants have preserved some of their culture’s traditions and lore, much about the Maya remains as mysterious today as it did centuries ago when their secrets were still hiding in plain sight.

Origins of the Maya 

The Maya civilisation began long ago in a place called Mesoamerica. This huge area is made up of Mexico and part of Central America. The Maya first developed their civilisation around 2000 BC (the Pre-classic period).  

This period from 250 AD to c900 AD is called the Classic period.  

In around 1600 AD (the postclassic period), the Maya were conquered and destroyed by the Spanish invaders.  During the Maya civilisation, Britain went through the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, including Stonehenge, to Roman Britain, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, and Tudor England.

While the origins of Maya culture remain murky, it’s thought to have first emerged between 7000 B.C. and 2000 B.C., when hunter-gatherers abandoned their nomadic habits and created more permanent settlements. Recent analyses suggest that those first settlers came from South America and likely developed their staple food, maize, by 4000 B.C. Maize cultivation dramatically changed the Maya’s trajectory, literally fueling the explosion of their society and culture.

These newcomers didn’t just plant corn: They also learned to prepare it for human consumption with nixtamalization, a process in which dried maize is soaked, then cooked in an alkaline solution that softens corn and renders it more digestible. The Maya would go on to cultivate other important vegetables like squash, cassava, and beans.  

The Maya seem to have developed alongside, and traded ideas with, the neighboring Olmec civilization, which some consider one of the most influential societies of ancient times. Researchers believe this is when the Maya adopted the ritual complexes for which they would become famous. Like the Olmec, the Maya soon focused on building cities around their ritual areas. These advancements in agriculture and urban development are now known as the Maya’s Preclassic period between 1500 and 200 B.C. (This massive Mayan ceremonial complex was discovered in "plain sight.")  

As the Maya built out their society even further, they laid the foundations for complex trade networks, advanced irrigation, water purification and farming techniques, warfare, sports, writing, and a complex calendar. The intricate calendar included three dating systems—one for the gods, one for civil life, and a third astronomical calendar known as the Long Count. The starting point of this third calendar was set at the legendary date of humans’ creation, corresponding to August 11, 3114 B.C. The Long Count calendar began a new cycle on December 21, 2012, leading to a myth that the world would end on that date. (Despite urban legends and longstanding misinterpretations of Maya lore, however, the shift in calendar cycle didn’t bring doomsday with it.)

Mayan society at its peak

During the Classic period (200-900 A.D.), the Maya civilization reached its peak. So did its architecture: the Maya refined its pyramid-like temples and grand buildings that appear to be palaces, though it’s unclear if they were actually used as elite residences or if they served some other function.  Among the most important Maya cities were Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Tikal, Copán, and Calakmul. But though the Maya shared a society, it was not an empire. Instead, city-states and local rulers vacillated between peaceful coexistence and wrestling for control. Some places, such as the village of Joya de Cerén, seem to have been run by collective rule instead of an elite overlord. (Read more about Palenque, a Mayan city that was a glorious center of power.)  

Maya architecture and art reflected deep-seated religious beliefs. The Maya embraced the belief of K’uh and k’uhul—that divinity could be found in all things, even inanimate objects. Once again, corn was vital to those beliefs: Among the most important Maya gods was Hun Hunahpu, the maize god, and Maya tradition held that the deities created humans first out of mud, then wood, then corn.

The Maya worshiped their gods with a variety of rituals. Among them were both human sacrifice and bloodletting—customs that capture modern imaginations. The Maya sport of pitz, a forerunner of soccer, had its own ritual implications: Researchers think losers of the game were sometimes sacrificed in recognition of the Maya sun and moon gods, who were said to have played the same game in the Maya creation myth, the Popol Vuh.

The Mayan Calendar and Culture. 

The Classic Maya built many of their temples and palaces in a stepped pyramid shape, decorating them with elaborate reliefs and inscriptions. These structures have earned the Maya their reputation as the great artists of Mesoamerica.  

Guided by their religious ritual, the Maya also made significant advances in mathematics and astronomy, including the use of the zero and the development of complex calendar systems like the Calendar Round, based on 365 days, and later, the Long Count Calendar, designed to last over 5,000 years.

Serious exploration of Classic Maya sites began in the 1830s. By the early to mid-20th century, a small portion of their system of hieroglyph writing had been deciphered, and more about their history and culture became known. Most of what historians know about the Maya comes from what remains of their architecture and art, including stone carvings and inscriptions on their buildings and monuments.  

The Maya also made paper from tree bark and wrote in books made from this paper, known as codices; four of these codices are known to have survived. They are also credited with some of the earliest uses of chocolate and of rubber.

Mayan Life in the Rainforest. 

One of the many intriguing things about the Maya was their ability to build a great civilization in a tropical rainforest climate. Traditionally, ancient peoples had flourished in drier climates, where the centralized management of water resources (through irrigation and other techniques) formed the basis of society. (This was the case for the Teotihuacan of highland Mexico, contemporaries of the Classic Maya.) In the southern Maya lowlands, however, there were few navigable rivers for trade and transport, as well as no obvious need for an irrigation system.  

By the late 20th century, researchers had concluded that the climate of the lowlands was, in fact, quite environmentally diverse. Though foreign invaders were disappointed by the region’s relative lack of silver and gold, the Maya took advantage of the area’s many natural resources, including limestone (for construction), the volcanic rock obsidian (for tools and weapons), and salt.  

The environment also held other treasures for the Maya, including jade, quetzal feathers (used to decorate the elaborate costumes of Maya nobility), and marine shells, which were used as trumpets in ceremonies and warfare.  

What Happened to the Maya? 

From the late eighth through the end of the ninth century, something unknown happened to shake the Maya civilization to its foundations. One by one, the Classic cities in the southern lowlands were abandoned, and by A.D. 900, Mayan civilization in that region had collapsed. The reason for this mysterious decline is unknown, though scholars have developed several competing theories.  

Some believe that by the ninth century, the Maya had exhausted the environment around them to the point that it could no longer sustain a very large population. Other Maya scholars argue that constant warfare among competing city-states led to the complicated military, family (by marriage), and trade alliances between them to break down, along with the traditional system of dynastic power.  

As the stature of the holy lords diminished, their complex traditions of rituals and ceremonies dissolved into chaos. Finally, some catastrophic environmental change, like an extremely long, intense period of drought, may have wiped out the Classic Maya civilization. Drought would have hit cities like Tikal especially hard, because rainwater there was necessary for drinking as well as for crop irrigation.

  All three of these factors, overpopulation and overuse of the land, endemic warfare, and drought, may have played a part in the downfall of the Maya in the southern lowlands. In the highlands of the Yucatan, a few Maya cities, such as Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Mayapán, continued to flourish in the Post-Classic Period (A.D. 900-1500). By the time the Spanish invaders arrived, however, most Maya were living in agricultural villages, their great cities hidden under a layer of verdant rainforest.  

Do the Maya Still Exist? 

Descendants of the Maya still live in Central America in modern-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and parts of Mexico.  The majority of modern-day Maya live in Guatemala, which is home to Tikal National Park, the site of the ruins of the ancient city of Tikal. Roughly 40 percent of Guatemalans are of Mayan descent.