History and Origin Deep within the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala and extending into the limestone
shelf of the Yucatán peninsula lie the fabled temples and palaces of the Maya. While Europe still slumbered in the midst of the Dark Ages, these innovative people had charted the heavens, evolved the only true writing system native to the Americas and were masters of mathematics and calendrics. Their legacy in stone, which has survived in a spectacular fashion at places such as Palenque, Tikal, Tulum, Chichén Itzá, Copán and Uxmal, lives on as do the seven million descendants of the classic Maya civilization.
The Maya are probably the best known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica. Originating around 2600 B.C., they rose to prominence around A.D. 250 in present-day
southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras. The Maya were noted as well for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture, including temple-pyramids, palaces and observatories, all built without metal tools. They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical rain
forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizeable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater. The Maya were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples.
Geography and Language The Rivers: A series of rivers originates in the mountains and flows towards the Pacific Ocean on the west coast, and towards the Gulf of Mexico in the southern Petén lowlands. These rivers served as passageways for canoes to travel from one city to another. These rivers provide water for human consumption and access to trade routes. In the northern Yucatán lowlands, however, there are no major rivers.
The Rain Forest: Apart from the volcanic glacier mountains, most of Mesoamerica is covered by a dense rain forest. A rain forest resembles a greenhouse, providing warmth, sunlight, and water, and producing an enormous variety of plants. The soil in rain forests is thin and poor. In order to survive, tropical trees and plants have developed highly efficient root systems that absorb nutrients from dead plants before they are washed away.
The Soil: The best soils are found in the southern highland valleys where volcanic eruptions have enriched the earth. The spring-like climate and fertile valleys made this a popular place to settle, despite the threat of volcanoes.
While the Mayan-speaking peoples spread across these regions shared many similarities, their geographical dispersal resulted in the evolution of numerous languages, which are related but sufficiently distinctive to prevent different Maya groups today from understanding one another.
Society
Scholars today are still trying to reconstruct the family tree of the Mayan languages and there are different interpretations, but it is generally felt that four or five language groups had emerged by the Middle Preclassic period (900-300 B.C.).
The first people to occupy the Yucatán Peninsula were hunters and gatherers who arrived some 11,000 years ago. These nomadic people lived in small family bands. Around 2500 B.C. they started cultivating maize and abandoned a nomadic way of life to settle in villages surrounded by cornfields. The Maya created arable land and planted maize and secondary crops such as beans, squash, and tobacco. In the highlands to the west, they terraced the slopes on mountainsides, in the lowlands, they cleared the jungle for planting. After a period of two years, they moved their fields to new locations, allowing the old fields to lie fallow for ten years before reusing them.
They lived in small villages consisting of household compounds occupied by extended families. The ancient farming methods and family traditions have persistedover the centuries and continue to be followed in many rural communities today. By the Middle Preclassic period Olmec beliefs and ideas about hierarchical methods of organizing society had probably infiltrated the Maya population. Within each Maya kingdom, society was organized hierarchically, including kings, nobles, teachers, scribes, warriors, architects, administrators, craftsmen, merchants, labourers, and farmers. Besides the capital, outlying subsidiary sites ranged from sizeable towns down to hamlets and extended-family farming compounds.
(to be continued…..)