Maya Yucatán: An Artist's Journey

Chapter Two: The Maya in Yucatán

The Arch and El Mirador, Labná. 17 chapter two The Maya in Yucatán Timeline of Mesoamerican Historic Periods. Created by the author. The Ancient Maya The largest of Maya sacred places are quite easy to see for they are the focal points of Chichén Itzá and Uxmal, the two chief tourist sites of the peninsula (not counting Tulum, the middling Postclassic site close to the resort playas of Cancún). These two large sites are by far the most visited in Yucatán State. In their time they were imperial cities, holding sway and forming alliances over large areas of the peninsula. Even so, the careers of these two cities with their famous pyramidtemples arose quite late in the Classic period.1 Across the peninsula other great cities held power earlier in the Classic period, and archaeological excavations of the past twenty years have uncovered many more Preclassic (or Formative) era cities—predating approximately AD 250—than were previously realized to have existed. Mesoamerica These period definitions, Preclassic (Formative), Classic, and Postclassic , can be applied generally to the larger cultural area called Mesoamerica of which ancient Yucatán was an important part. This area stretched from present-day central Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula north to the southwest region of the United States. To the south Belize and Guatemala and parts of Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica were all important areas of the Mesoamerican universe. 18 / Chapter Two The Maya in Yucatán / 19 Summit vista from El Castillo, Mayapán. 20 / Chapter Two Beginning at about 1000 BC with the Olmecs of the Gulf Coast of Tabasco and Veracruz, the civilized portion of this vast culture area held several common cultural attributes, among which were the 260-day ritual calendar, the Mesoamerican ball game, similar cosmic creation stories, maize agriculture, the three-stone hearth, and a vigesimal (base 20) numbering system. For three thousand years before the European contact, these cultures developed and shared common architecture, art, religious beliefs, and technology. One could say that even in the modern period they still hold these attributes in common. In Yucatán substantial cities arose during the Late Preclassic period from circa 300 BC to AD 250. The Early Classic period is from AD 250 to AD 600, and the Late Classic extends to about AD 900.2 Most scholars of the ancient Maya now also include a period they call the Terminal Classic surrounding that AD 900 date, which is also The Temple of the Magician, Uxmal. The Maya in Yucatán / 21 the time of the great cultural collapse in the Southern Lowlands. The collapse in the south and the disruption of the cultural status quo throughout Mesoamerica may have inspired major changes in art and cultural expression in the north, and Maya culture continued there while the southern regions saw a demographic collapse. At this time, at the end of the Classic era, almost all the southern cities fell into ruin and silence. Even today, a thousand years on, vast areas of the Southern Lowlands are still uninhabited, or are only recently seeing new populations. During the Terminal Classic and Postclassic periods, in contrast, the Yucatán saw an emergence of energetic city-states in the Puuc Hills of southwest Yucatán and the rise of a cosmopolitan imperial power at Chichén Itzá, followed in the Postclassic by the Mayapán confederation . By the Late Postclassic, however, the political and cultural Palace at Grupo Kuché, Kiuic. 22 / Chapter Two coherence of the north saw a decline just before the conquistadores came ashore for the first time on the continent. When tourists stand in the great plaza of Chichén Itzá to behold the famous El Castillo pyramid, they are gazing at a Postclassic Maya building. Tulum is also a Postclassic city—a beautiful ancient seaport on the Caribbean coast. These two most popular cities are what the great majority of tourists see when they visit the peninsula, and thus they experience only the last epoch of the ancient civilization. Most viewers miss the vast range and depth of ancient architecture in Yucatán. In contrast to those of the Postclassic, we do not see many of the earliest structures, those of the Preclassic, in cities founded prior to AD 250. Except in rare cases Preclassic buildings are buried and hiding within later construction. Recent archaeology seems to indicate that many cities...