Where is maya

Some cave sites are still used by the modern Maya in the Chiapas highlands. As Maya cities spread throughout the varied geography of Mesoamerica, site planning appears to have been minimal. Maya architecture tended to integrate a great degree of natural features, and their cities were built somewhat haphazardly, as dictated by the topography of each independent location.

For instance, some cities on the flat limestone plains of Mexico grew into great sprawling municipalities, while others built in the hills used the natural loft of its surroundings to raise their towers and temples to impressive heights. Maya art has been considered to be the most sophisticated and beautiful of the ancient New World. We have only hints of the advanced painting of the classic Maya; mostly what has survived are funerary pottery and other Maya ceramics, and a building at Bonampak holds ancient murals that survived by chance.

A beautiful turquoise blue color that has survived through the centuries due to its unique chemical characteristics is known as Maya Blue. The use of Maya Blue survived until the 16th century when the technique was lost.

Late Pre-classic murals of great artistic and iconographic perfection have been recently discovered. With the translation of the Maya script it was discovered that the Maya were one of the few civilizations where artists attached their name to their work.

The Maya writing system, often called hieroglyphs from a superficial resemblance to the Ancient Egypt writing system. It is the only writing system of the Pre-Columbian New World which is known to represent the spoken language of its community. In total, the script has more than a thousand different glyphs, and many appear only rarely or are confined to particular localities. At any one time, no more than around glyphs were in use.

Since its inception, the Maya script was in use up to the arrival of the Europeans, peaking during the Maya Classical Period. Although many Maya centers went into decline during or after this period, the skill and knowledge of Maya writing persisted amongst segments of the population, and the early Spanish conquistadors knew of individuals who could still read and write the script.

Unfortunately, the Spanish displayed little interest in it, and as a result of the dire affects the conquest had on Maya societies, the knowledge was subsequently lost. In common with the other Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya used a base 20 and base 5 numbering system. The Maya and their neighbors independently developed the concept of zero by 36 BCE before any society in the Eastern Hemisphere, so far as we know: it was not until the period of the Gupta empire of Ancient India that the concept of zero was first used.

Inscriptions show them on occasion working with sums up to the hundreds of millions and dates so large it would take several lines just to represent it. They produced extremely accurate astronomical observations; their charts of the movements of the moon and planets are equal or superior to those of any other civilization working from naked eye observation.

The Usumacinta River runs along the border of Mexico and Guatemala—river trips stop at ruins such as Piedras Negras, on the Guatemala side of the border. An American woman, Tammy Ridenour, has been running river trips and leading adventure tours in Guatemala for more than two decades, www.

Blood sports were important in the ancient Maya world. Many Maya cities contained a ball court where teams of the best athletes would try to vanquish each other.

The heavy, often soccer-size ball was made from hard rubber; some scholars think that human skulls were sometimes placed inside the balls. The games were cultural spectacles followed by human sacrifices. Not everyone thinks it was the losers who were offered to the gods.

A guide in Tikal firmly believes it was the winners. Some Maya pyramids were built to reflect astronomical events. This is caused by the angle of the sun hitting the nine main terraces. No one knows what caused the rapid decline of the Maya civilization. Starting in the eighth century and accelerating in the ninth, Maya cities suddenly declined; their people either died or retreated from these great metropolises. Cultures that had developed highly advanced irrigation, agriculture, astronomy, and building techniques, as well as intricate social structures, rapidly fell apart.

No one knows why. Among the theories: increased war among Maya city-states, overpopulation that led to environmental degradation such as depleted soil, and climate change resulting from deforestation. Other theories suggest that the enlargement of the ruling class of royalty and priests, and continued demand for temple extravagance, created an imbalance without enough productive workers.

Likely it was a combination of the above factors; we may never know. To see more of his writing, visit www. All rights reserved. The Maya civilization was never unified; instead it consisted of numerous small states, each centered on a city ruled by a king. Sometimes, a stronger Maya state would dominate a weaker state and demand tribute and labor from it. Nomadic hunter-gatherers had a presence in Central America for thousands of years. However, permanent village really took off when these people began cultivating maize in what archaeologists call the Preclassic period B.

This lead to the creation of early Maya cities. According to Coe, farming became more effective during this period, likely because of the breeding of more productive forms of maize, and perhaps more importantly, the introduction of the "nixtamal" process.

In this process, maize was soaked in lime, or something similar, and cooked, which "enormously increased the nutritional value of corn," Coe wrote. Maize complemented squash, bean, chili pepper and manioc or cassava , which were already being used by the Maya, researchers reported in in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

During this time, the Maya were likely influenced by the Olmecs, a civilization to the west of them in the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco.

The Olmec people may have initially devised the long-count calendar that the Maya would become famous for, Coe wrote. However, the discovery of a ceremonial site dated to B. The ceremonial compound dates back years before similar structures that were built by the Olmecs, suggesting that they did not inspire the Maya.

Archaeologists have found that early Maya cities were sometimes carefully planned. The city flourished between B. A system of writing that used symbols called glyphs to represent words or sounds was developed and frequently inscribed on buildings, steles, artifacts and books called codices. The Maya calendar system was complicated. This system also included what scholars call a "long-count" calendar that kept track of time by using different units, ranging in length from a single day to millions of years.

However, the long-count calendar did not predict the end of the world in The Maya calendar system shares many similarities with modern calendars, according to Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown, an archaeologist and associate professor at Athabasca University, an online university in Canada. When you understand the logic and mechanics behind these systems, their similarities aren't surprising, as they are both based on common observable natural phenomena," Peuramaki-Brown told All About History magazine.

The ancient Maya reached a peak between A. During this time which archaeologists call the Classic period, numerous Maya cities thrived throughout Central America. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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 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—where rainwater was necessary for drinking as well as for crop irrigation—especially hard. 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.

By the time the Spanish invaders arrived, however, most Maya were living in agricultural villages, their great cities buried under a layer of rainforest green.

The majority of them live in Guatemala, which is home to Tikal National Park, the site of the ruins of the ancient city of Tikal.