The Maya Tropical Forest: People, Parks, and Ancient CIties

2 History of the Maya Tropical Forest

 2 History of the Maya Tropical Forest The New Land’s Form Legend has it that when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés first returned to Spain from the New World in the early sixteenth century, the king asked him what this new land looked like. Cortés reached for a sheet of parchment, crumpled it into a ball, and partially smoothed it out on the table before him. Pointing to the convoluted ridges and folds of the paper, he said, “This is the new land’s form.” But Cortés already knew that there was more to this region of the world than crumpled mountains and steep river valleys. He had also encountered wild expanses of tropical rainforest, wetland savannas, and short, dry scrub forest growing on the flat limestone shelf of the Yucatán Peninsula. In 1525 Cortés had set out from the Valley of Mexico toward the Caribbean coastal settlement of Nito, near the mouth of the Río Dulce in modern-day Guatemala. The captain Cortés had sent to conquer that region had rebelled with all his ships and soldiers, and Cortés was determined to punish the man in person. Cortés left Mexico City for the coast with 230 Spanish infantry and cavalry and 3,500 Indian warriors from the Valley of Mexico. Traveling southeast by ship, he disembarked in Maya territory in present-day Tabasco. Pushing toward Nito, his army spent week after week cutting their way through immense, flat stretches of tropical forest, suffering “hunger, bruises , illnesses, hard roads, worse lodgings, and other insupportable trials,” according to the Spanish chronicler Juan de Villagutiérrez (Means 1917:17). As Cortés struggled along this route through the land of the Maya, he encountered small family settlements dispersed in the forest and the island History  19 city of Nohpeten, where thousands of Itza Maya still worshipped a pantheon of ancient gods in giant stone temples. Hacking a pathway through the forest, Cortés also stumbled over the ruins of ancient Maya cities, most of which by the time of his adventure had already been abandoned for more than six centuries. These ruins were the stone remnants of the Classic Maya civilization, which flourished in southeastern Mexico and northern Central America for almost a thousand years. When their civilization disintegrated around AD 900, the Classic Maya left behind a legacy of mythology, technology, and ecology that was still very much alive in the time of Cortés’s travels and that today continues to echo down the canyons of a dozen centuries of New World history. The Rise of Maya Civilization While the land itself divides the Maya region into highlands and lowlands, it was left to the archaeologists and historians to divide human time into map 2. Major archaeological sites of the Maya Tropical Forest 20  the maya tropical forest five periods of Maya history: the Preclassic (1500 BC–AD 200), Classic (AD 200–900), Postclassic (AD 900–1521), Colonial (1521–1821), and Modern (1821–present). Sometime after 5000 BC, groups in the Maya region began to turn from hunting and gathering to a more settled life in village communities, supported by agriculture that included maize (corn), squash, avocados, chili peppers, and beans. The earliest of these sites appeared along the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, in the region known today as the Soconusco . By the period between 2500 and 2000 BC, the villagers began to produce well-made clay pottery, and by 1000 BC almost all of the Maya region was inhabited by villagers living in family compounds similar to those that can still be found in the Maya region today. Houses were built around a framework of wood poles with walls of poles or stones slathered with mud—a technique called wattle and daub. Roofs of palm or thatched grass were lashed together with vines, leaving wings that extended out over the walls to keep out the torrential tropical rains (Gallenkamp 1987:60–61). This earliest era of Maya history, called the Preclassic or Formative period (1500 BC–AD 200), also saw the development of the first Maya pyramids—low, flat-topped earthen platforms with a simple Maya house perched on top and used for religious ceremonies. Mayanist Charles Gallenkamp notes that gradually, through the centuries, “this religious architecture became more elaborate, incorporating masonry, sculptural embellishments , and stairways; and important temples were arranged around...