The Maya have always held a special fascination for me. I was lucky enough to have lived in Guatemala and Honduras and have visited a number of the great Maya sites in Mexico.


The Maya are all the more fascinating to many because so little is known about them compared to some of the other ancient societies. Much of our understanding of the Maya is fairly recent. In fact, the "code" to the written language was only cracked 20 years ago and many sites, both major and minor, are still being excavated. It is a tragedy of civilization that so much of the written evidence of the Maya was destroyed during the Spanish Conquest. The early accounts of these cities by the Spanish explorers went largely ignored and many sites only began to be rediscovered in the 19th century. Part of the reason may have been that the Maya did not use or value gold to the same extent as the Europeans, which combined with their lack of easy accessibility must have been a disincentive for the early explorers. Most of these explorers tried to understand this society in the context of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, somehow searching for a link when there was none. Padre Bartolome las Casas, a voice of conscience and human rights, argued that the Maya compared very favorably with Greco-Roman civilization, were eminently rational beings and fulfilled every one of Aristotle's requirements for the good life. He further argued that the Greeks and Romans were inferior to the Maya in a number of important areas.



Mayan society originated about 2600 B.C in parts of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Central America. The Pre-Classic (1500 BC-300 A.D) and Classic (300-900 A.D) phases of Maya history saw the rise of great city-states. The Maya were recognized as the dominant civilization of the time. Despite local differences, Mayan culture appears to have been remarkably consistent throughout the region. A centralized empire under a single monarch would have been impossible due to the lack of an infrastructure of roads or waterways to connect such an empire, though substantial trade networks allowed their cities to flourish. Their cities were not generally fortified until the Post-Classical period in the northern areas, giving rise to the idea that war was a minor concern. The discovery of the murals at Bonampak in Mexico indicated that the Maya were much more concerned with war than previously thought. An interesting find is the site at Tonina, which was ruled by a more warlike leader, and supposedly served as a center for execution of prisoners of war. The Mayan city-states appear to have been organized into regions dominated by major cities like Palenque, Chichen Itza and Copan, with smaller cities presumably serving more specific functions. Their decline and disappearance remains a mystery. Starting in 900 A.D. the southern cities were suddenly abandoned. Some of the northern cities survived into the 16th Century partly because they were assimilated into the Toltec empire. It is known that by the time of the first contact with the Spaniards the Maya had already been in decline, though no compelling explanation for their disappearance is generally accepted.

The Temple of the Warriors-Chichen Itza
Mayan Photo Adventures
©1997 by John C. Mureiko
Used by Permission