Ancient Civilizations of the Americas by Anna Guengerich 1.22.2015

Wow standing ovation thanks okay well welcome back to week two of civilizations of the ancient America's we're gonna be talking about the Maya today are you working on the lights or can we get a few more the light stone thanks okay so we're going to talk about a lot of beautiful things sure you guys are a little bit familiar with some of the art and architecture at the ancient Maya especially made famous by National Geographic and so on to start off the course I have a little pet peeve which is everyone always talks about the mysterious Maya you know the mysterious video got at least three different book covers came up on a quick Google search of the serious Maya and i'm here to talk today and let you know that the mep tamiya aren't really that mysterious they don't have to be that mysterious and this isn't just kind of a minor annoyance it gets back to the issue i talked about last week we're instead of giving credit to Native American people's we find that there's something unexplainable that we have to look for other other sources of these achievements you know like the alien whole alien thing and whatnot so this perpetuates this idea when in reality we have a lot of powerful tools like archaeology for understanding these people and it you know it we need to give them credit for for what they were able to achieve in the past in fact the Maya stand out among all of the cultures of I'm talking about in this course because they have one of the longest histories of study researchers began work in the Maya area as early as the late 19th century particularly creating some beautiful engravings like this one over here by Kathir and others and thereby definitely by the early 20th century there was a good amount of scientific archaeology being carried out in the Maya area so to put this in perspective this is actually among some of the earliest archaeology being carried out in the world and this was definitely on a par with research in ancient Egypt to someone we think about the the discovery of King Tut's tomb for example in the 1920s similar research has already been carried out in the Maya region so the Maya have been studied for very long time by this point much of this early research was carried out by scholars from North American universities think Ivy League has been termed the idea of the gentleman scholar research so I had a very elite perspective and much of this research was focused on the accomplishments of Maya elites so the architecture of city centers very high high art work and so on so the ideas that here is that there's been a lot of research going on in the Maya region in contrast to many of the other civilizations that will be talking about through through the course of this class sorry ok so to put the Maya in a bit of a regional context and in terms of time and place the Maya were part of a broader cultural region known as may so America and I referred or I use the term may so America several times in the last course but I want to clarify what we mean by that so Mesoamerica stretched through Mexico and through various countries of Central America and all in it subsumed many different cultures so the Maya also the Aztecs number of other different ones to that I'll mention later today and even though each of these cultures if it was very different they shared a number of attributes in common including the ball game talk more about the ball game later they all created a books made of paper they carried out different forms of sacrifice as part of their religious practices they also focus on astronomical knowledge they placed a high value on that and in particular they all short shared a similar diet particularly lately based on maize as well as beans and squash so tortillas and tamales we're eating all across the maze of American region so to clear things up a bit this green blob here that says well what we were talking about last week at the Aztec so the Aztecs were right in the center here more or less in central highland mexico's so this course are going to move over to this big brown area primarily occupying the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and then running up into the Highlands down here so the countries in question would be Mexico Belize Guatemala Honduras and to a small extent el salvador too and in terms of time the Aztec the Aztec empire flourished much later after ad 1300 in contrast with the Maya were going back in time a bit to between AD 300 to 900 more or less so the Maya civilization rose and fell before the Aztec even came about so you have kind of a rough timeline of dates that are killed just more or less agree on for the rise and fall of different civilizations of may so America so the Maya culture was a product of influences from a number of different civilizations that came before them or emerged at the same time more or less so it's important to put all these cultures in context as products of long legacies that developed within particular areas like me so America this is an idea we'll come back to when we get to South America as well so one of the important predecessor cultures as it were to the Maya were the Olmec the Olmecs flourished more or less than 1300 to 600 BC so I have them circled here at the left side of this timeline the Olmec if we go back to the map the Olmec lived in this very narrow constricted part of Mexico the Isthmus of Mexico so near the Maya era area in the rainforest for sure there's a lot to be understood still about the Olmec what they're most famous for are these incredibly large carved stone heads these are often carved out of volcanic rock like basalt and weighed up to 60 tons so they're truly enormous they're carved in a very naturalistic style so they look definitely like individuals and the current thinking is that these were portraits of rulers of the Olmec the Olmec had important ritual centers for instance levente and Tabasco and these had earthen pyramids they have plazas and they were surrounded by columns so this is already in early tradition with monumental architecture and there in addition to the large stone heads over there they're also famous for these green stone Jade sculptures a central motif that often appears as this is what's called a where Jaguar kinda like a werewolf so a human Jaguar hybrid so definitely supernatural elements were very salient in there are two so those were the Olmec very close to the Maya area a second important group that contributed to the rise of Maya culture was called Teotihuacan little bit off the edge here so if any of you have been to Mexico City you may have visited Teotihuacan it's an easy day trip from Mexico City teotihuacán was one of the most important urban centers of the ancient work of the ancient new world it came to power and around the ad 880 100's and flourished through the 600's the city was laid out in an enormous grid as extremely orderly and very well-organized down the center of the city ran a large thoroughfare you can see a little bit in this picture called the Avenue of the Dead at one end was a very large pyramid called the pyramid of the moon-- at the other end was the Pyramid of the Sun which you can see here teotihuacán was responsible for developing this form of pyramid that we classically think of and we think of the Maya and other cultures of Mesoamerica with the the inclined plane and the flat part this kind of stepped form here so this was these were some of the first instances of this style called touloup tablero is the name for it in Spanish this city very large so you kind of think that it falls in the same urban tradition as Tenochtitlan which we talked about last week the capital of the Aztecs you know again it had tens of thousands perhaps a hundred thousand people and again it was one of the biggest cities in the world during this time period so timoteo tuacahn developed a number of cultural institutions that the Maya incorporated later and that might have been influential in their rise to power notably religious imagery and religious beliefs but they also intervened in other ways in the Maya world notably in terms of Maya politics and we're going to hear more about the role of two about Teotihuacan later on so the main idea here is that there are a number of different predecessor cultures that contributed to the Maya so the Maya and Aztecs stand out but as I mentioned at the beginning of last week we could be discussing any number of these as well they have all been studied a great deal okay so I'm going to do a little segue and before we get into the heart of the Maya and talk about a very important topic that really lays the groundwork for everything that we're discussing in this course which is the question of how we know about the past and this is an important question because the ways in which we know these about these events and these practices of ancient peoples set the set the stage for the kinds of things the kinds of stories that we can tell about them so there are some things that it's just very difficult to ever get at so we have to understand that when we talk about the Maya or that or the Aztec the ways in which we learn about them influence these histories that we can tell so there's going to sound different from from the Inca from ancient china from ancient Rome and so on so one of the the first ways that we can access the past here is through the recordings written by Europeans that came to the new world so obviously the structured a lot of what we know about the Aztecs you know I referred to a lot of these chroniclers in the class last week so we have these for many different culture is for the outside for the Maya for the Inca for North America as well these are obviously a very rich source of information because they're eyewitness accounts of literate peoples who are able to describe the things that they saw in that they encountered when they came to the new world but they also have a lot of problems and historians have to be extremely cautious and how they read and how they interpret these texts for one thing there's also there's just the problem of translation linguistic but also the idea that Europeans didn't necessarily understand the things they saw or they made analogies with things they're familiar with that might not have done very spot on a second problem is that they're often biased by the ideas of elites you know who were the literate class in many of these ancient groups so they very much influence or reflect the the interests of the elites the world experiences of the elites and don't necessarily capture the experiences of people like commoners like women and so on and then a third very important point is that many of these were extremely biased because they were written for very particular ends you know so they were written to achieve a goal they weren't just you know disinterested recordings of what what went on many of our for example many of our the things that we know about religious practices in new world cultures were written down by Spanish priests or other priests who are trying to create kind of a handbook to eliminate to identify and to eliminate these practices to understand when native peoples were worshiping other gods and then be able to get rid of those practices so they're actually hostile to the things that they were recording so we really have to take all of this with a very big grain of salt and historians have developed many ways to do that in a number of cases we're also fortunate to have native text written by indigenous peoples themselves mainly this refers to people of Mesoamerica and especially to the Mayas we're going to hear about texts throughout this course today the Maya actually developed a writing system that was able to record spoken spoken speech very precisely it was based on syllables whereas the the system that we use today is based on written English is based on individual sounds rather than whole syllables but it was just as flexible as you know as our system of writing now other peoples of Mason America like the Aztecs had a less developed sense system of writing for instance it was it was more representational so when you wanted to depict you know the concept of a temple you draw a little picture of a temple so it was less abstract and it wasn't quite able to capture the range of of information that written Mayan was able to do now that nevertheless it provides an important sense of information and in Mesoamerica these writing was recorded in stone you know like you see on the right but also in these paper books that were made of a tree bark when we get down to the Inca will encounter another system of writing called the quipu this was a system of knotted cords people still today are in the process of trying to figure out or trying to decipher the riddle of the quipu so we're lagging a bit behind the Maya and disregard this was another very complex system of recording information unfortunately for many peoples of the the ancient new world these these these means fail because they did not have writing systems of their own and in this in this regard we have to use archaeology in order to access these you know the lives of people of non literate people's fortunately archaeologists have a lot of ways to do this and a lot of strategies so we've had quite a bit of success in the past hundred years or so I want to point out another important element of how archaeologists work this is called the principle of ethnographic analogy because archaeology is a very difficult thing to do it seems very straightforward you know to the general public often that you dig up a pot and then it's kind of speaks for itself you know you can you know oh we've got pot or we've got a hearth or whatever but it's extremely complicated this is why archaeology is one of the degrees that takes the longest to get to get a PhD it often takes ten years or more because there's these extremely developed strategies in order to interpret the path so you have to understand the significance of where you found the pot what objects it was placed with what people it was placed with where it occurred within the history of that culture you know if it was in a house it wasn't a temple and so on all these things can mean something different and they can mean something different in every culture so you have to develop a lot of principles to make sure that you're really understanding what comes out of the ground here so ethnographic analogy as a very useful one and a very powerful one when I say ethnography what we mean by that is the study of contemporary peoples in the study of contemporary cultures so when we use ethnographic analogy that means using practices that contemporary people too often traditional peoples use today in order to make sense of what we dig up in the past so one example here would be this practice of grinding corn on the mono and metate this would be a traditional practice in Mesoamerica even in the American Southwest so imagine if you're the first archaeologists that dug up one of these one of these things you might not know what it is you just see these two pieces but then you can look to the women grinding corn today and see oh this is how they're using it and then you know extrapolate from the present to the past to make sense of this object and then we see those for other things too like this traditional form of weaving and andys which is still used today or you can think of different beliefs and mythologies and celebrations ritual practices and so on so ethnographic analogy is not perfect because obviously people change over time but this is one powerful way to decipher the past and to recognize the living people's are often the custodians of these very long shins okay so moving back to the Maya I promise we're going to get to the big beautiful and exciting stuff as we move in but I want to start with something very basic to my life and to the Maya culture and this is the house nah in the Mayan and Mayan languages so the nah the house was at the center of Maya order of my understandings of the world the basic pattern of Maya households was that they're organized around this patio group this open space where family members would share activities right in here so each patio group was occupied by related members of the household the way this worked is that a couple would come into a new area build their own house and then as their children grew up and married and started their own families than they would you know build next next door and then another set of offspring might build next door and then the cycle would just continue this way so you have the set of related family members and often on one side of this patio group was a shrine where the family members would come together and and worship household deities they would also bury the bones of their ancestors such as the couple that founded the household originally they would continue to use the small household shrine to venerate them my archaeology is really outstanding in the ways that archaeologists have been able to understand household life everyday life lives of the commoners and so on Mayan estar really among leaders in world archaeology in this regard so we've been able to understand a lot about what Maya people did on an everyday basis and the structure of their lives in this regard the house is also important as we're going to see later and that it's set a model for elite culture for the understandings of the royal family as well so in the cities of the Maya the palace complexes were laid out on the same pattern as these humble abodes of every day they were arranged around a courtyard and then we see that Elise also participated in these rituals of venerating their own ancestors in this case their ancestors were often the kings of dynasties the founding kings of dynasties and they were buried not in humble shrines but in enormous temples where they were their tombs were placed inside so at the scale of the royal family it's kind of like an ordinary household just scaled up and this was very important because I'm sorry because it set a pattern or kind of a way that was acceptable for for ordinary Maya people to be part of this bigger political system so when you're king and his royal family lived in very much the same way in the same kind of spatial layout when they held the same values of the ancestors venerating their own line this made sense to people is that comprehensive and it didn't differentiate the elites and set them apart as something entirely different instead it was something that people shared in common throughout all all ranks of society so we'll come back to that a bit more how display it out at the elites level and here you see some images of Maya households they ranged in terms of their their the architecture the architecture often correspondent with classes so the most humble houses would have been like this just made up of six and covered with with mud or plaster of that sort as you moved up in terms of wealth and rank they often had bases made of stone and then eventually when you got to the top ranks of society people's houses were made entirely of stone and often ornately developed but it's notable that there weren't strong there weren't ranked ranks of classes like we saw with the Ouse text so what the Aztecs they were very stratified kinds of positions that people held in society the Maya were not quite like that there were definitely class differences but it was more gradual ranging from the lowest to the highest and as you saw there was a sense of commonality of values that Queen these ranks too okay we have one extraordinary source of knowledge about everyday life of the Maya which is the site of l sedan hoiiday student this is a site that is located in el salvador and it has been called the pompeii of the Americas because it was also destroyed by a volcano and buried in ash so you might be getting the sense that this happened a lot in the past and this is a great source of information this is actually extremely rare in world history I don't know offhand how many examples there were but probably less than five in the entire world where this kind of thing happened and where we have extraordinary level of preservation now what's notable about this is that many of the ordinary villages you know not being as durable and large and developed as Maya cities didn't preserve as well so this really provides a wonderful window onto the lives of everyday Maya people and the level of detail is such that we can even pinpoint when the city was or I'm sorry women when the village the small village was actually destroyed because you see pots sitting next to ours half full of food as people were eating their evening meal I know so you can you top this incredible vision of people sitting down to dinner seeing the clouds of ash coming and then being able to get up and run out of their town but without their valuables they didn't have time to sit there and take what mattered most of them so everything was left in place so you know it's really a snapshot a snapshot of everyday life and we get you know images of houses that are much more complete than the ones we saw just before they're even rows of maize and other crops still standing in the field so sir dan was an incredible window on to my life um can you say your question I'll get back to it at then I'll come back to you first okay so finally getting up into the bigger the bigger domains of Maya Maya culture here so Maya cities one important thing to recognize about the ayuh in contrast to the Aztec as we saw last week is that there was never any Maya Empire so when we talked about the Aztec there was a main city at the apex of this whole realm to those two notes deal on it to note it all and control this whole extensive area the Maya system of political organization and of spatial organization was quite different my apologies were each small cities so you might call them city-states in a certain way so they each controlled their own territory their own populations and they were all different from each other and there was not one single preeminent one above all the others the city-state's interacted by means of warfare of quests for domination and for supremacy between themselves they also were allied in some cases royal alliances between different family member or family members of different city-states were very important so a better model to think about the Maya might be the the city-state's of medieval or Renaissance Italy you know the period in which Machiavelli roads you understand these these intrigues and these politics played out across the whole broader area so the city-state's shared cultural aspects but they were all politically independent so this is a great contrast from the centralization the kind of top-down system that the Aztecs had so originally when these gentlemen scholars of the early 20th century late 19th century we're studying the Maya they focused on the great accomplishments at the city center so they were focusing on the art and the architecture these temples and palaces and so on and having this constrained focus led them to develop the idea that these cities were actually not very populated so that they they coined the term of the vacant ceremonial center and they believed that the bulk of the Maya population lived outside in the countryside archaeologists have by this time spectacularly upturns this idea and we now know that Maya cities were very densely occupied and very large the largest of them had in the tens of thousands of people in their populations Maya cities looked very different from the image that we get from photos of them today so now they look very austere in there they're made of white limestone but originally they would have been covered with plaster and often painted and very bright colors almost maybe garish a bit to the modern I the center of these cities were planned and often represented important cosmological principles for instance they've reproduced the layout of the universe as the Maya stood it in terms of significant directions pyramids were understood as man-made mountains and they often had or were they were understood up caves at their Center as sometimes they were built over caves which were sacred places once you got outside the ceremonial core is the city though there was less of a sense of organization and they seemed to have grown organically as people moved into the city so they're much less ordered you know compared to you know what do you think back to Tenochtitlan with this gridded layout one characteristic of Maya cities is that they were very different in terms of the rural and the urban distinction so there's a real blurring between the city core and that the the hinterlands we might say at the center of the city was was the the temple core and then as you progressively moved out there was still content continued to be dense populations but these might be called a kind of Garden City because the people people's houses were often interspersed with the areas where they raised crops with their agriculture with their garden so the density decreases you moved away from the city center but there's never this complete break there it was instead of gradually gradual tapering off so cities really became interspersed with gardens with agriculture in their layout and as you move from one city center to the other you got this tapering off and then a gradual increase again as you moved on to the next city center so there really weren't empty areas in the landscape it was all being exploited by Maya people to sustain themselves yeah so I'll run through some of these cities because many of them are well known many of them have been developed and presented for tourism so I would suspect that some of you in the audience have been to some of these places Palenque is very well known for its unusual architecture this this kind of tower here is fairly unique within Maya Maya cities it was a smaller city it was not one of the most important at the time but it is especially well known for a tomb that was found there of the ruler of Lord Pakal who reigned in the 7th century Lord Pacal has one of the longest rains of any recorded ruler in world history almost 70 years he came to the throne at age 12 and we have this information due to the texts written down by the Maya these stone inscriptions about their ruler the the reigns of their rulers so Lord Pacal was buried in a tomb that was deep inside the complex that you see up here he was buried with this beautiful Jade death mask that covered his face and he was buried in a tomb covered in very elaborate iconographic representations so a brief search on the internet may show up this image and say the Lord Pacal is ascending in an alien spaceship up to the skies see you're gonna hear about the aliens a lot hate that but actually we have a fairly good sense of what we're seeing here this sort of cross shape at the center is the world tree at the center of the Maya universe and then these you shaved images are the jaws of the underworld serpent bringing Lord Pacal down to the underworld and he's in this odd position that might be a suggestive of rebirth he's also represented as the young maze God reflecting again the importance of maze to the Maya in their lives and in their diet okay t call was a much larger city and more important in the Maya political landscape to call is located in Guatemala Palenque osram from Mexico I should have said takala was one of the major players in Maya history is a very important city it's a very recognizable city the pyramids are extremely steep and they have this distinctive feature on top called a roof comb let me go back here okay so over here we see this form of arch that's very distinctive of Maya architecture it's called a false arch because it doesn't have that round portion at the top so it's not then why did not actually develop a real art but they use this this false arch in a very distinctive way and it's very representative of my architecture and then when you get to places like T call it's actually further accentuated with this particular roof comb feature to give it its own unique look if any of you are familiar with Star Wars you may recognize the site from the end of Return of the Jedi when they're on the planet with the Ewoks flying over yeah so to call up early in its history it encountered series of unfortunate events if you remember Teotihuacan the place with the Avenue of the Dead and the pyramid of the Sun in central Mexico so teotihuacán was you know meddling in these early my apologies as they coalesced Teotihuacan actually conquered T call and placed a teotihuacán o on the throne at an early point in its history later on he called flourished and became very important but also became embroiled in politics and conflicts with other city-states and was burned at one point ok so it's big rival was this site colic mole which is located in Mexico both to Colin colic mole had very large populations around 50,000 something in the tens of thousands more or less so the struggle between T call and colic mole increasingly became very heated and began to dominate the Maya world towards the end of the Maya the Maya you know flirt the period in which the Maya flourish so we're going to come back to this issue of the conflict between cydia states colic mole is still covered much of the sites still covered in dense forests and we a lot of archaeology remains to be done here so we see it you know a range of extends to which different city states have been excavated but I'm but fortunately we have a great sense of these very small deeper these very detailed histories due to the power of the written text that we have of the Maya one element that it was at the heart of many of these cities was the ball court and I suspect that some of you are familiar with the Maya ball game this was not actually restricted just to the Maya as I mentioned at the beginning of the class peoples across may so America played about the ball game it may even if extended into the Caribbean 2 so this was a very widespread cultural institution the idea of the ballgame the way it was played is that there were two teams of players and they would try to move this rubber ball between different sides the court with the with the caveat that you couldn't use your hands so you might think of it as a cross between soccer and like hacky sack but with a very very big heavy hacky sack so this rubber ball here made from the SAP of the rubber tree was very heavy something on the order of 10 pounds or so so if you're hitting it with your elbow you know it's good to be a very dangerous thing this is not like a kickball here so players were very heavily padded they had special protective gear often quite elaborate protective gear and towards the end of the the Maya reign as things began to change they developed an additional part of the game which is where you're supposed to get the ball through a hoop on the wall probably located about 15 feet about the ground or so this was not originally part of the ball game so the ball game had very strong ritual elements to it the movement of the ball across the court was understood as the passage of the Sun across the sky there's also the common perception that ball players were sacrificed either the winning or the losing team we know the sacrifice played some element in the playing of the ballgame but it's not exactly clear how often this happened when it happened who exactly was killed so there's not a element of truth but yet to be clarified but the ball game was not just about ritual and you know cosmological understandings it was also a very exciting event and a very lively thing bedding was involved in a big way so people came here to to to be entertained in a way and it's important to recognize I think that a lot of archaeology loses this element of fun of people just being you know enjoying their everyday lives just like we do now so this is one instance where we see that it wouldn't be a totally off analogy to compare it to the way we enjoy sports in modern society to and a cool point here is that this is not the only time in this class that we're going to see the importance of sports as a cultural phenomenon we'll come back to that later on i'll leave the i'll leave that the name of that civilization as a surprise to get to later okay so Maya cities were built mainly on maize so the agricultural plots that surrounded the cities that you know everyone had next to their own household mainly were growing maize in a big way maze was one of the most important accomplishments of ancient made so American people so we you know we might think the most impressive part of Maya civilization where you know it's the architecture the city's the temples maze was actually you know in terms of impact on world history it definitely surpasses that and it rivals any crop in the world the domestication of maize is still poorly understood scientists botanists archaeologists all have been trying for a long time to figure out where it came from and how without complete success so the most common idea at the moment is that here's a modern maize Cobb this little scrawny green thing on the left it's called tayo cinta this is a wild plant that's found in Mexico today so most people think that maze you know this beautiful delicious thing came from this tiny little thing how this happened how was domesticated remains a mystery you know it would have been much much harder to get between these two points than with weed or other major staple crops of the world so this remains a matter of investigation and really an extraordinary accomplishment almost certainly the most the most impressive example of genetic engineering of crops carried out anywhere in the world and and maize actually you know we're most familiar with this kind of nice white cob today but when you look here you see the range of different kinds of maize that people I ate and people continue to eat throughout Mexico so there were you know hundreds thousands of varietals really you know what what would be called you know in today's languages you know heritage heritage varietals but to these people they were there everyday staple and they were all for different uses they were from different regions so they were culturally distinctive to different ethnic groups and environments and whereas the Aztecs were eating tortillas further east in the Maya area tamales were the major staple instead either way the processing of maize took up much of an ordinary Maya woman day so once the mains was harvested it had to be ground and this took a very long time took many hours to grind enough maze to feed a family then once it was ground yet to make it into dough and then cook the dough tortillas took even longer than the tamales to make so really much of people's everyday round in their lives was just focused on maize and maze was also very culturally important to refer to the maze God earlier he was one of the more important my deities and people also believed that they were made of maize too you know in the judeo-christian tradition human beings are made out of earth out of soil in the my aversion people were actually made of maize dough ok so if maze was what sustained the maya city then the institution of the maya ruler was what was at the heart of the maya city the Maya rulers title listen carefully so I'm going to only going to say this once was the hula hoe so the might have an extremely developed vision of what rulership was and this you know if you think about it this is true of all different cultures in the world you know we have a different understanding of what government is how it operates what authority it has and it sits in place in in cosmology really so if you think about a medieval Europe say there was the institution of the divinely appointed king so europeans didn't really see or interact with the king much you know think louis the 14th in his in Versailles talked away and yet he was divinely appointed so there's this particular vision of what the ruler was who the king was the maya king was first and foremost an intercessor with the divine so the maya king was not disappointed by the divine but he had to actually interact with the deities and then mediate between the deities and the populace traditionally this kind of role is thought I just thought to have shamanic qualities so the idea of the shaman was very much at work here in traditional societies shamans often go into altered states of consciousness trances they're able to access the spirit world and bring back that knowledge to heal or to help the people that they're serving shamans are a part of my addition today and it's thought that before the development before the rise of hi Maya culture that shamans were also one of the most common forms of ritual common elements of spiritual beliefs so the Maya King came from this tradition and grand eyes it the Maya Kings role took this to a whole new level Maya rule and the institution of rulership has been described by some anthropologists as a theatre state meaning that the was a lot about spectacles so the whole mind the whole reason for existence of the Maya city was the service kind of a stage for the ruler to play out these acts of intercession with the divine this is why you have these extraordinarily elaborate costumes that the Maya King war with Quetzal feathers Jaguar pelts you know huge J jewelry and so on because there's about the visual elements you just get this you know if you can imagine people gathered in the plaza watching the King surrounded by smoke there's a smell of incense the blaring of trumpets and horns in these great rituals taking place on the pyramid as the King actually interacts with with the deities here so this was a you know we're all where this was the fount of the great art and architecture of the Maya was this role of the Maya ruler at the center of this theater this theater of power so the Kings power was based on ideology here one of the main kinds of rituals that the King engaged in and trying to reach the divine was sacrifice Maya sacrifice that was very different from what we heard about for Al's tech sacrifice whereas for the Aztecs sacrifice was human sacrifice taking of other people's lives for the Maya sacrifice was otto sacrifice so individuals shed their own blood in these acts of communication with with the deities this took place at the level of the household you know coming back to this parallel relationship between the leads and between commoners so when household members went to the shrines to venerate their own ancestors they would prick their fingers and so on shed a little blood as a gift of this life force the buyer elite the rulers took this to a whole new level though so all kinds of body parts that poked out were game to being pricked and shedding blood I think you can see where this is going there you know ears lips fingers men to other areas in this Stila you can see one example of a Maya queen a queen of Yash chillin she has not only pierced her tongue but she's drawing a rope through the hole to increase the the flow of blood coming out what happens that if the blood falls down on this bundled up paper and then the paper would be burned and as the smoke arose it would reach the heavens so coming back to this idea of the theater state there's really this incredible visual and experiential element to these these processes so i should point if you can see their little spines to on this cord to so really a very visceral experience then once she's you know been shedding blood she's in great pain and you know experiencing blood loss then she's able to achieve this trance and have a vision of a warrior coming out of a serpent here coming out of the jobs of the serpent so this gives you kind of a sense of what went on in these rituals and and the takeaway point of the the maya institution of my rule is that it was based on ideology and on beliefs it was not based over control of the economy you know the maya king was not bureaucratic he was not collecting grain or managing agriculture and you know instead people were doing that on their own so what what the rulers did control were the kinds of goods the fine goods that they relied on to continue these spectacles you know so fine ceramics a fine pieces of obsidian and other stone that were carved into very intricate shapes and things of that nature the birds of tropical feathers and so on one other thing I should point out is you know the significance that this is a woman here too Maya women often enjoyed a very high prestige and that's in their society the Queen was important to the reckoning of descent in royal lineages so descent came not just through the king but also through the Queen as well and we even have inscriptions that note the rule of Maya queen so they themselves were rulers and their own right and some instances okay so a one other element of this institution of the theater state of the elaborate pneus of the art and the rituals at the heart of the Maya city was also a focus on knowledge on astronomy mathematics Collender Ock's and so on so I noted before the Maya were one of were actually the only culture of the new world that had a fully that had a writing system fully able to capture a spoken language these paper documents are called codexes they were made of birch bark paper and then they were folded up you know like an accordion and unfolded these are extraordinary source of information on on my knowledge so whereas the the written texts were largely sorry the text written in stone were largely recording the the accomplishments of Maya rulers the histories of city-states and so on these paper codex's are often repositories for information on on astronomy and other kinds of knowledge too ok so the my system of mathematics was equally developed the Maya were among the world's leading mathematicians in prior to the modern era one of the greatest accomplishments of the Maya was zero with nothing the Maya were the first group in the entire world to develop the concept of zero which is you know central to modern mathematics Europeans by contrast never invented the zero they took it from the Indian subcontinent where it was developed later on for those of you who are mathematically inclined this graphic gives you some sense of how the Maya number system was was written out so each of these dots represents 11 digit and then the bar represents 5 so it adds up in a fairly straightforward way a lot easier for calculating than the the Roman counting system you know with the ex's eyes and v's the my employed a base 20 counting system ours of course is base 10 so you know this is logical to think about it humans have ten fingers the Maya just counted the toes too in addition to the fingers with this mathematical knowledge they were able to track in great detail the passage of the moon and the Sun of the stars and the constellations Venus was a very important celestial figure for the Maya and so they had a special calendar that tracked the cycles of Venus and calendars in general were it's hard to it's hard to stress their importance to Maya thought Maya knowledge they were extremely complex and we could undoubtedly hold a whole oh sure class just on the Maya calendar if you're into that so very briefly try to capture some the main concepts that they so notably they had different kinds of calendars and Amaya understood they understood the calendar not just as a tracking of time but they understood this its significance and it was invested with meaning so each date each cycle of time how did different significance each number had a name was associated with a different deity each day had a different deity too and there were auspicious days and less auspicious days to do things so it's more a system like when we think of the the horoscope you know in our own society astrology or the Chinese calendar something like that it was very heavily invested with meaning so in a way you could understand i'm going to try to put up an analogy here to make this a bit comprehensible so our system to is is cyclical in a way so you've got january-february march you know up to december and then it starts again with january so you could see that as a cycle within each month you start with one two three four up to 31 and then you start with one again so our calendar too has this interlocking of different cycles as they go around so the Maya had this to accept that they had a lot more cycles that were interlocking so they had a solar calendar which was 365 days this was the hob the hob calendar here so this would be parallel to our own yearly calendar was a little less random it was 18 months there were 20 days each and then at the end of the month was a five-day period which was very unlucky and you weren't supposed to do anything important at that time so that's the solar calendar they also had a ritual calendar which was 260 days again made of regular 20-month days so these were used for divination and the ways in which these two overlapped led to the calendar round and the calendar round only repeated every 52 years so you know once you get the same each of these rolled around and 11 the same pairings of days and calendar aligned up again that would happen old it won't only once every fifty two years so this whole period of 52 was also very significant and at the end of this time period they were important celebrations and rituals that took place in addition to these cyclical calendars there was also a linear calendar like the Julian calendar for us you know ad 1 2 3 4 5 that just goes in a sequence and the Maya had figured out a day in which the world began which was August thirteenth 3114 BC were not really sure the significance of that date in particular but that was the beginning of the long count and a long count enabled the Maya to write out the kind of history in their stone inscriptions that is amenable to Western narratives of history know so this King rained then this king and this King and this King and this king whereas if time were solely cyclical it would be hard to know if he reigned in this cycle or in the similar time in the previous cycle so it was very complex and no discussion Michael endura complete without getting back to 2012 not quite as urgent now as this would have been two years ago or three years ago to discuss but I want to explain what this was because it was you know the last time that the Maya were really in the public consciousness in a strange way so what 2012 was it was the end it was one of these periods that signified the the completion of two interlocking cycles in this case it was the end of the thirteenth box tune of Maya history there have been so there been 13 baktuns each lasting 395 years so it was the end of one of these cycles it would have been a very important time for the Maya given the significance placed on these cycles and and on their ending of the cycles but once again I was the 13th out of many it was not it didn't have any particular significance actually compared to the others and what it definitely was not was the end of the world my attacks referred two dates long past 2012 and really the whole reason that it came about was there was one particular text that was found at one side in Mexico that references something vaguely catastrophic happening at this time period but this was not a commonly held belief across the Maya world so sorry check back in later for the next prediction of doomsday the Maya culture itself did collapse and this is an interesting case study to compare with what we know the Aztec collapse and how that civilization ended because it was quite different Maya collapse is one of the favorite subjects of those who called my mysterious the serious Maya how did they collapse how could this wonderful incredible civilization have fallen apart when I was flourishing in such an incredible way so you know back again to the mysterious thing there's a lot to understand about the Maya collapse and our knowledge of it is very partial still at this point but you know as a thought experiment and think about ancient Rome and imagine that we had the kind of textual records that we do of the Maya you know so Frank chat room we have huge volumes of written material so we know a lot about you know what was going on at the time but if we only had archaeology to rely on and these very partial texts that were written about kings they'll be a lot harder to get into all the very complex interlocking factors that led to Rome's collapse so really this isn't part of product of how we know about the Maya our confusion here can be resolved and we just you know need to do more research so so if any of you have any of you seen apocalypto Mel Gibson's movie yeah I don't really know it was fun a little over the top so he has this particular vision of the doom of the Maya yeah this is very a pocket epochal elliptic vision of moral decay you know and everyday people are being oppressed by you know the Maya overlords these slaves are being passed to the limestone quarry you know so that's very well and good he has his own view on that but you know archaeologists have a bit to say too so the first question is what collapsed exactly you know so when we say collapse what collapsed because Maya people are still here today the Spanish encountered the Maya when they came so if they were going you know if they're still continuing than what was missing what disappeared so what collapse was the system of the theater state of I'll say digan the hula how the ruler that all disappeared with the Maya collapse and everything with it so the idea of the the ritual economy of these fine goods being circulated between city-states the politics and conflicts between these major superpowers the funerary cults the Steelers and the temples that celebrated the ruler himself those were all Wed disappeared some factors that seem to have led to this collapse particularly include this increasing levels of conflicts between city-states so warfare became increasingly prevalent part of everyday life there seems to have been some increase some demographic pressure population was it with increasing it seems to be the case you know leading to stress on agriculture and whatnot and the Maya ruler given that his authority was resting on ideology not on control of these external infrastructural factors meant that he had a limited ability to address these problems so the system was falling apart at the seams and there really wasn't any top-down solution to keep it all together that's you know in a very tiny nutshell current state of thinking on this another factor to consider here is that the maya cultural area was very different it was made of many city-states in different environmental regions each with their own stories so collapse happened differently to each of the city-state's it wasn't just one massive central phenomena like we saw with the Aztecs you know so when the Spanish captured two notes did lon that was it for the Aztecs the Maya decline was more gradual it played out differently in each case and in fact some city-states actually rose to power and were able to flourish during this period of gradual overall decay for instance many of the polities in the north like chichen itza actually saw their Apogee during this time period during what is known as the post classic period they seem to have been built their power base on very different factors other than the sacred ruler their power may have been grounded in things like economic control there might have been less centralization of power different ruling families together ruling the city there seems to have been an increase in trade particularly trade around the coast at this time so to each other it saw in short has a very different look from the cities that we saw before you know back with this very different kind of temples freestanding central temple here with the vissa this is the snake that appears on the equinox each year you know this Observatory part of this architectural difference architectural diversity may have been related to different cultural influences as different cultural groups throughout Mexico where coalescing at this time there might have been some degree of ethnic diversity in the city another city that developed at this time was called Tulum if any of you have been to Cancun you may have visited this on a day trip it was not a terribly important city but it did have some monumental architecture it was a port city and a center of trade so probably flourished on that it's at this beautiful location overlooking you know the blue Caribbean waters but the architecture is not nearly and hate to say it but it's you know definitely not as is what we saw before so there was you know great monumental construction still going on in this time period but the nature of Power had changed and many of the central cultural traditions had changed a great deal a great detail but these cities were still flourishing the Spanish actually when they arrived in Mexico they saw Tulum they met its you know its rulers face to face okay so we often talk about the collapse of the new world societies and in general it's represented as you know an unmitigated disaster you know for native peoples the maya have you know we can tell the story of their collapse and certainly they became subjugated by the spanish later on you know 500 years after their own collapse with these cities that were still around came to be conquered by the Spanish but in a way this wasn't really a conquest in the same way that we would think of for the Aztecs for the Incas and for many other people we can think of the Maya as anyway still being uncalled for a because they were not a flourishing civil you know a huge flourishing civilization at the time there wasn't as much to collapse and the Spanish had a difficult time in penetrating this this rain forested area too so some of the Maya fled and there were actually groups of Maya like the LA condone Maya in far southern Mexico just kind of fled into the jungle and well into the 20th century maintained a traditional style of life this whole area also has as a tradition of resistance to the colonial powers that are still embodied in the central mexican state as you know so if we think of the country of Mexico as being a legacy of the Spanish there's always been at this resistance to central Mexico so during mexican independence for example the maya area tried to gain its own I'm sorry let me backtrack during independence from Spain the Maya air try to gain its own independent separate from central Mexico leading to a conflict the last of some 80 years well into the beginning of the 20th century there were these kind of outposts of government as some semi-autonomous region here and then one other expression of this would be the soffit eastham movement that's based in Chiapas in far southern Mexico which is still around today it sort of came to international visibility in 1994 when it engaged in armed conflict with the Mexican military but it's still around today and it's still trying to present this alternate semi-autonomous state within the bigger context of mexican society and the suppity to self adhesives are mainly made up of Maya people and other indigenous people too so in a way there's you know the stillness legacy not entirely conquered still this kind of Maya presence in the area okay so in conclusion my archaeology has been a leader in many areas of world archaeology so- have focused on many things and brought it to the attention of archaeologists working in other parts of the world for instance in our knowledge of households in everyday life and in the decoding of pig raphy and text and also in thoroughness by this point we have a really good understanding of all the regional differences within the Maya landscape so we've got a good now the idea here is that even though we have such a great database and it's growing all the time and you know the Maya are less mysterious and over at this point there still remains so much to me known and it's just a testament to how much archaeology house house has yet to go so we've learned so much but there's still many many questions to remain resolved that we can address and we will be addressing know as time unfolds ok so this point I'm going to leave it open for questions and I mean the the gentleman it that had the one in the middle of the class your person line mmhmm yeah I that place is in El Salvador and I was I didn't mention it's kind of on the fringes of the Maya world yeah and you're definitely right there was you know like i said the Maya were coming out of a long tradition of civilization and stone architecture so they were in the middle of that okay mammoth corner yeah that's a good question it probably varies from place to place I mean they have oh thanks for the reminder yes the question is whether the Maya today still have a strong oral tradition of hi Maya civilization from this period I don't think there's much of a tradition going all the way back to this time period you know keep in mind this was over a thousand years ago at this point so I think a lot of the traditions probably deal with the colonial legacy you know possibly even back to like the period with to loom and Chichen Itza is talking about at the end yeah so they definitely do have a very rich oral history which does relate on to actual historical events but I think I'd be a bit far to assume that they have any memory of this kind of thing any direct memory mamun friend okay the question is how the Mayans were related to Native American cultures and in North America right with the Medicine Wheel and things like that well we're going to get to that bit later on in the course I know you get to the study of ok so then I'll move on gentleman at the back yeah that's a good question so when I let me repeat the question the question is how the economy worked how the pyramids got built where the labor came from if it was slaves yeah it was not slave labor it was most likely Mayan farmers you know during a lull in the agricultural season you know helping to build these pyramids the question of why everyday people why commoners would in bulk contribute their labors two things that ostensibly don't really seem to benefit them is one of the resounding questions of archaeology throughout the world because this happened time and again so when we talk about you know I was trying to emphasize the connection that people saw between their own household and the elites at the top that's one answer that people have come up with is that you know they saw rulers as themselves just you know one rung up the ladder so you know is comprehensible to be part of this bigger system and also there was the idea that the ruler was working with the divine on behalf of the people so you know you would ostensibly get some benefit from being part of this system so the Maya did have slaves but not on the kind of scale that would have allowed the creation of the of the pyramids man right there yeah um well it was on a small scale probably some of the slaves to to be honest this hasn't been studied in as much detail as with the Aztecs you know because it was more small-scale it hasn't been made a major emphasis of research yeah yeah mm-hmm right yes you're right about that there was not there was definitely not human sacrifice was not elaborated it was not as ideologically central I was with the Aztecs it didn't have all these extremely specific and unique forms that we saw with the Aztecs okay okay so the question would be whether the long development of the Maya gave them more time to develop written texts apart yeah well so part of you know as we go through comparing these different civilizations I hope to address that question in a bit more detail you know why some civilizations rose more quickly and collapse more quickly and the case of the Maya the writing system was already being developed probably with the old neck and probably before the Maya so it was one of the mix of many different factors you're correct in saying that the Maya were much more long-lived the Aztec or the Inca and that may also have been in part related to the political structure it being decentralized with all these different city states so instead of just you know there wasn't just one to rise and fall but a lot of different ones would rise and fall making the whole compound culture that much longer does not address the question and then I got to move over here gentleman back there a stone dome yes yeah and go back to that yeah this one we've went well I'm not exactly sure what the interior this building is made up and it would not have been a dome because they didn't have the arch like the Romans it was probably a variant of that false arch this building is actually has been described as an observatory and an astronomical observatory given its round shape and it was fairly unusual I'm not sure if there are many examples of this yeah but it would not have been an actual true dome okay now i'm here i am going to be honest with you I don't know about the origin of Guatemala City and a lot of Latin American cities were founded by the Spanish obviously and I don't to my knowledge there was not a Maya city that predated it if that's your question let me refer you to an expert the expert of Wikipedia is not regard I actually don't know yes the gentleman it back in the corner is time okay come comment come up to the or I'll be in the back of room and discuss okay thank you see you next week

Channel: Vanderbilt University

Views: 18,829

Rating: 4.388535 out of 5

Keywords: Vanderbilt University, ancient, Americas (Region), Civilization (Quotation Subject)

Id: no2Iq8M3GOU

Length: 75min 58sec (4558 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 23 2015