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The Maya worshiped their gods with a variety of rituals. Henderson Memorial Fund / Bridgeman Images Right: A ceramic and painted statue of a seated bearded Mayan man, created in the civilization’s late Classic period, c. So did its architecture: the Maya refined its pyramid-like temples and grand buildings that appear to be palaces, though it’s unclear if they were actually used as elite residences or if they served some other function. (Despite urban legends and longstanding misinterpretations of Maya lore, however, the shift in calendar cycle didn’t bring doomsday with it.) Mayan society at its peakĭuring the Classic period (200-900 A.D.), the Maya civilization reached its peak. The Long Count calendar began a new cycle on December 21, 2012, leading to a myth that the world would end on that date.

The starting point of this third calendar was set at the legendary date of humans’ creation, corresponding to AugB.C. The intricate calendar included three dating systems-one for the gods, one for civil life, and a third astronomical calendar known as the Long Count.

')Īs the Maya built out their society even further, they laid the foundations for complex trade networks, advanced irrigation, water purification and farming techniques, warfare, sports, writing, and a complex calendar. ( This massive Mayan ceremonial complex was discovered in 'plain sight.

These advancements in agriculture and urban development are now known as the Maya’s Preclassic period between 1500 and 200 B.C. Like the Olmec, the Maya soon focused on building cities around their ritual areas. Researchers believe this is when the Maya adopted the ritual complexes for which they would become famous. The Maya seem to have developed alongside, and traded ideas with, the neighboring Olmec civilization, which some consider one of the most influential societies of ancient times. The Maya would go on to cultivate other important vegetables like squash, cassava, and beans. These newcomers didn’t just plant corn: They also learned to prepare it for human consumption with nixtamalization, a process in which dried maize is soaked, then cooked in an alkaline solution that softens corn and renders it more digestible. Maize cultivation dramatically changed the Maya’s trajectory, literally fueling the explosion of their society and culture. Recent analyses suggest that those first settlers came from South America and likely developed their staple food, maize, by 4000 B.C.

and 2000 B.C., when hunter-gatherers abandoned their nomadic habits and created more permanent settlements. While the origins of Maya culture remain murky, it’s thought to have first emerged between 7000 B.C. Though their descendants have preserved some of their culture’s traditions and lore, much about the Maya remains as mysterious today as it did centuries ago when their secrets were still hiding in plain sight. ( Subscriber exclusive: In search of the lost empire of the Maya.) Much more is now known about the group responsible for some of the greatest feats of its kind: Maya people cultivated the region’s first crops and domesticated its wildlife, built its first cities, and either created or refined almost every aspect of modern civilization. The ruins in question were the remnants of the Maya, a towering Mesoamerican civilization that had once covered much of Central America, from northern Belize through Guatemala and southern Mexico. “Who these races were, whence they came, or who were their progenitors, I did not undertake to say, nor did I know,” he conceded. Nonetheless, wrote John Lloyd Stephens in 1841, they all seemed to be the work of the same group of people. But as a pair of British-American explorers combed through the Yucatan Peninsula in the 1830s and 1840s, they soon became convinced the mysterious sites were major archaeological treasures.ĭiscarded and abandoned, the function of these sites and artifacts-temples, pyramids, remnants of art and even writing-was mostly unknown. Most of it was covered in vines and vegetation, reclaimed by the jungle. The evidence of a long-forgotten civilization was everywhere: Beneath a Spanish convent.

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