![]() ![]() As such, religious beliefs and deities seem to have differed somewhat. The civilization consisted of a number of disparate city-states, rather than a single, unified empire. Collectively, these sources reveal shifts and variations in Maya belief.Įven during the Maya Classic period, the heyday of this civilization during the first millennium A.D., Maya theology likely varied from place to place. This includes information from Maya glyphs, artwork, surviving Maya texts like the Dresden Codex, later works like the Popol Vuh and Maya people who still observe traditional religious ceremonies. We know about Maya religion today from a number of sources. And today, hundreds of years after the Spanish came to the New World, Maya people in Central America and Mexico practice a religion that draws from these traditional beliefs as well as Christianity. ![]() Based on differences in deities carved into stone or adorning temples, it seems likely that different Maya city-states held slightly different beliefs. It’s important to remember, too, that Maya religion was not always the same across different time periods or regions. Numerous deities populated the Maya pantheon, including gods for physical elements like rain and demigod-like heroes who fought for the good of humanity. As with the ancient Greeks, their many gods were seen as beings who once walked among their people, and who created (or brought about the creation of) humans. In the end, some in the public sphere might repeatedly call for humanists and social scientists to get more STEM, but if anything, this most recent article on the Mayan drought and particularly how it has subsequently been reported tell us just the opposite - that STEM needs more humanities and social science.This Maya culture also saw the physical world as intimately interwoven with the spiritual one. After all, you have to be aware of those assumptions and where they come from in order to fight against them. Anderson is sure that the authors of the original Science article would likely be horrified to see their work being used in such a way, yet here we are. Today, millions of people live throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize who are the direct biological descendants of the ancient Maya, many of whom still speak one of the 30 or so Maya languages as their native tongue."ĭiscover has corrected their post (although it still claims the Maya "vanished") and Dr. There were large-scale Maya political entities when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century and the conquest of the last independent Maya kingdom didn't happen until the 18th century. Not only did the Maya not disappear, but they rebounded. To say the Maya 'disappeared' is a 19th-century claim that says the contemporary indigenous inhabitants of Central America couldn't possibly be related to such crafty and industrious people who could build such architecture. " Discover ran an piece claiming we finally know why the Maya 'disappeared.' But that's a loaded word here. How people wrote about the past in the past still haunts us today and this holds true here as well. Mexico (Photo by: myLoupe/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) ![]() Most likely, it was a number of factors that caused the decline, with the environment being only 1 of them. Anderson, by focusing exclusively on "proving" there was a severe drought this article doesn't account for the problems in linking the drought to a prolonged 200-year decline - a period that's far too long for just 1 thing to be the cause. Evidence has been building for about 20 years to suggest there were significant droughts during this period, so this new study supports those who want to point to drought as the primary mover in the collapse."īut it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know, or " it's better resolution on a phenomena that we already had good evidence to say occurred." According to Dr. ![]() 800 CE and continues in some places until about 1000 CE. So, the collapse is now seen as an extended phenomena that seems to begin ca. "we’ve learned more and more about this period with additional excavations and paleo climate data. Anderson, a trained archeologist at Radford University who specializes in Mesoamerica and who also works to debunk pseudoarcheology, told me via email that scholars have known about the collapse of Mayan Civilization for about 100 years. ![]()
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