The Mayas: A Private Passion

By H. Allenger

While many of us tour archaeological and historical sites and then relegate this to our memories, H. Allenger has provided us with a fascinating account of the Mayan sites he has visited, giving us the lasting impressions these places imparted on him and informing us of the known facts about them. His description of what he has seen and learned

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Regency Publishers, US
• Release date: Mar 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781957724751

H. Allenger

H. Allenger earned a BA in public administration and an MA in International Relations. After thirty-one years with the Seattle School District, he is now retired and pursuing his true passions, which include archaeology, history, mythology, and writing. He currently resides in Seattle, Washington, and enjoys travelling the world.

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Copyright © 2022 by H. Allenger.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author and publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN: 978-1-957724-74-4 (Paperback Edition)

ISBN: 978-1-957724-73-7 (Hardcover Edition)

ISBN: 978-1-957724-75-1 (E-book Edition)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022905186

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All my life, since I was first introduced to the Mayas while still in grade school in Glendive, Montana, when my father brought home a ‘Book of Marvels’ from the city library which featured pictures of Chichen Itza, I have been fascinated by this civilization. I think what first attracted me to them was the seemingly alien look of their architecture, unlike any other I was familiar with, and this appeal has only grown for me over time, so that the more I learned about them, and the more of their sites I visited, the greater has become my interest in them. I knew then, from early on, that I would spend much of my lifetime studying them and seeing firsthand their magnificent achievements. This book is the result of this passion of mine and therefore an accumulation of my personal views of the places I have been to, what thoughts ran through me as I was there, and the impressions I was left with upon seeing what I did. I will not try to detract from the knowledge of the archaeologists and other experts, to whom I am very grateful for their discoveries and information, who have spent their life’s work in research and know considerably more about the subject at hand than I do. I will, however, when I think it appropriate, add their insights to my own observations in order to provide the reader with the best knowledge base on what we know about this compelling civilization. As this is a highly personalized account of the Mayan sites I have seen, I will rank them in order of preference in which I regard them.

A Brief Background on the Maya

The people we call the Mayas are based on a linguistic categorization, that is, they are included as a language group. They may be of different tribes and speak in various dialects, but they are united by a common tongue and would most likely have understood each other no matter what region they lived in within their sphere of occupation. This area comprised much of present-day eastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, western Honduras and El Salvador and fall into two distinct regions: a highlands region of mountainous terrain and a lowlands region of coastal flats and gently rolling hills, nearly all if it heavily forested with dense jungles. Temperatures vary from extremely hot, although not that humid, in the lowlands for much of the year to more temperate and even cold nights in the highlands. It is seemingly an unlikely place that would spawn a great civilization, the jungles posing a significant barrier to both agricultural growth and city development, and yet that is where the Mayas flourished, a noteworthy achievement itself.

Mayan civilization is divided into three segments: the pre-classic, the classic, and the post-classic, which in turn are each subdivided into early, late, and terminal periods. The period of greatest fascination to us, which appears to have been the time of their greatest creativity in artistry and architecture, writing, urbanization, and social interaction, is the classic period, roughly from about 250 AD to around 900 AD. This is the period that ended in the so-called‘collapse’ of the Mayan civilization in which a multitude of cities were abandoned, never to be re-occupied. Collapse may be misnomer, suggesting a suddenness of the decline, when in fact it was protracted over more than one hundred years. But the decline was all-encompassing, reaching to city after city, a phenomenon that has mystified archaeologists and historians to this day and has given an aura of perplexment to the Mayans that is both fascinating and compelling. It is difficult to fathom how a great, densely populated and urbanized society can just vanish into a mere shadow of its former self -a mystery that is both tantalizing and astonishing. That may be the reason why the Mayas hold such an interest to us, beckoning us to learn more about them and to assess how their decline has relevance to our own conditions.

The Mayan civilization was comprised, like ancient Greece, of powerful city states, each dominated by a central major urban center that was typically surrounded by several satellite centers under its control. It was never an empire, as defined in the western sense, that is, where the authority and administration of a state rests from one source, an emperor. These city-states often were in conflict with one another, most likely to seize control of a major trade network involving rivers and lands, resorting to warfare to achieve their ends. The most powerful of these were the cities that today are among the largest ones to be seen, whose ruins remain the most impressive and draw the biggest tourist crowds.

People moved into the regions that would eventually comprise the area of Central America from around 8,000 to 3,000 BC. The earliest known Mayan site was found in Belize at Cuello, which has been dated to 2400 BC. Settlements became more frequent around 1600 BC, considered to be the start of the pre-classic period, and were more scattered, extending from the central highlands of Guatemala to northern Yucatan. The classic Period began around 250 AD and ended around 900 AD. This was the time frame in which the civilization flourished with the construction of most of the cities that we now look upon with wonder, admiring their architecture and artistry. Creativity was at its best then, highlighted by the glyph writing that appeared present at nearly all the sites. The sheer number of sites is staggering; Population density must have been crammed. with many of the cities connected by stone roadways called sacbes, primarily, it is believed, to enhance trading.

The Mayas were the inheritors of an even older civilization that preceded theirs, that of the Olmecs. This civilization developed from 1700 BC to 200 AD and laid the groundwork for many of the basic architectural features common at Mayan sites, such as pyramids and open plaza, typically aligned along a north-south axis, and even some rudimentary aspects of their glyph writing. Subsequently, they created a style of their own that has remained remarkably consistent throughout their occupational zones in the broadest sense. By that I mean their structures, built of the limestone prevalent in the region, have a similarity identifying them distinctly as Mayan, and