My My Maya, whats happened here?
Can you imagine traveling to a new place as did the explorers to the New World..? expecting maybe a tribe of natives and stumbling upon a city of 100k people with agriculture, aquaculture and architecture to rival ones own civilization? I mean really… stop and think about how world altering this must have been. How humbling and frightening really. How many more of these foreigners were there after all?
This day and age we feel unbelievably intrepid when we have ventured far enough to encounter “primitive societies”, be they bands of desert nomads keeping alive ancient traditions in the Sahara, jungle tribes without electricity, etc. Shoot, anyone without an Ipod seems double-blink worthy. These cultures are viewed as industrially, technologically, and sometimes even theologically antiquated. As if time and god has forgotten these people, we surmise in our most self-aggrandized views. Or perhaps instead these few have escaped the “evils of modern life” as we put on our well worn hats of patronization. Pat pat pat. cute little culture. No ipods. heh heh. heh.
But not the same for these guys back during the early age of colonization. Regardless of how our society currently views the cultures that are off the grid, early European explorers to the new world when on their merry way, sailing the seas, hacking through jungle, and yes eyes always keen and hopeful for gold… when lo and behold, they came upon these civilizations where the cities were cities, surrounded by small towns, places of worship, with cultures pervasive over large amounts of land.Cortez and his men for instance, upon discovery of Mexico City, found massive infrastructure, buildings and architecture, canals for transport rivaling Venice, advanced science rivaling Italian and Greek thinkers, accurate calendars and maps, a written language, and a population that rivaled the largest cities on Earth at the time. Holy Crap indeed! It was hard to call these guys cute little cultures, or really think of colonization with the scurvy ridden ranks at hand. Thank god for smallpox though, right?
Standing here at Chichen Itza, a town thriving about 1000 years ago, I can’t help but thinking about those explorers that wiped out the civilizations through disease and slavery, and wiped out much of what they could have added to the world. This is a pretty large complex afterall, the part that we can see that has been reclaimed from the jungle brush. And this wasn’t the half of it, nor nearly the largest city. They were spread all over the yucatan peninsula… and farther… to belize, to honduras, and to Guatemala. Technically, it is believed that the Mayan culture actually started in Guatemala and moved outward. The point is, this was a huge civilization who pretty much up and disappeared in a quick fashion. And no, it wasn’t aliens.
My mind tends to extrapolate these facts forward… will one day some modern culture be visiting the ruins of the Empire State building and Grand Central Station on a tour pod?
Back to the basics here, Chichen Itza is about a 3 hour bus ride from your hotel in Cancun, and well worth it, though it will take the entire day, 7am to 7pm. The Mayans were pyramid builders and though not nearly as big or impressive as anything you’d find in Egypt as far as sheer magnitude, the precision and complexity of the buildings suggest the same exact advanced knowledge of geometry and astronomy. Things are aligned. A large difference in these pyramids is that they weren’t burial zones per se. They were about the afterlife, but they were more about the journey. Underneath each of these structures was a cave that generally had a cenote (waterfilled cave system, eventually emptying into the ocean, sometimes hundreds of miles away. The only place in the world with these cenotes is in this part of Mexico.) The idea of the Mayan afterlife system was that when you died, you went into the cave and floated around in there sucked through the tunnels until you reached the point where the fresh water mixed with the salt water… this was the cross-over point. Interesting right?
Now how these Mayans knew that this entire cave system existed is amazing, afterall, modern day divers with all the modern equipment have labeled the area extremely dangerous for dives as the system is vast, dark, cold, cavernous and easy to get lost in. Many many very experienced divers have died attempting to navigated these systems. Yet these Mayans pretty much had it right on, and were quite obsessed with it. They offered human and object sacrifices reasonably regularly, all of whom were plunged down into one or another of these watery graves. The sacrificees went willingly enough, as in this culture, as well as the Egyptians before them, they felt that their life on Earth was just a speck of a long and definitive afterlife. They weren’t just going into the light. They had some major plans. Those that were given to the gods were only of noble upper class blood, as it was an amazing honor.
Local lore has it that the culture vanished in an abrupt fashion, like poof. Gone. I am skeptical of this, and if I was a betting women, I can definitely imagine that European diseases probably did a good job of clearing the way, similar to its devastating effects in the Caribbean and the eastern coast of the US. Just a guess though. That and some mystical record keeping and you’ve got a pretty good theory to me. Who knows though. Maybe that fourth Indiana Jones movie had it right, and when we aren’t looking those pyramid convert to time space vortex yielding starships. Could be. I guess.
Tags: Cancun, Chichen Itza, Maya, Mayans, Mexico, Tag Index
jessicab