10.4: The Maya

After settling at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula around 1000 BCE, the lowland Maya learned how to deal with drought, feed tens of thousands of people, and organize politically—all before 250 BCE.

The Late Classic period was one of tremendous growth. By 750 CE, the city of Tikal, in present-day Guatemala, had reached a population of 80,000, while the population of its rival Calakmul reached 50,000. To support these large populations, the Late Classic Maya had engineered a landscape that included water management projects, flattened ridge tops, and terraced hillsides. The population was fairly dense in cities and in the surrounding countryside. Leaders had tombs built in their honor, as well as imported luxury items like jade statues, feathers, cacao, and other items from the Mexican Highlands. These activities all demonstrate real sophistication.

The Late Classic Maya also had an advanced numerical annotation system of dots and bars and used zero. Maya writing began as pictographs and blended into quite artistic symbolism. In addition to more than seven hundred carved monuments, the culture produced wooden carvings, incised jades, and pottery.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Mayan Stela | Stela with Mayan Script, Anthropological Museum in Mexico City. Author: User “Wicki” Source: Wikimedia Commons License: Public Domain

Politically speaking, the Maya were never unified under one ruler or even a set of rulers. Instead, the Maya were a civilization that shared a set of cultural traits, a language family, but no single ruler or sense of common identity. Individual kingdoms rose and fell, but none was ever able to dominate the entire Maya area.

While their rule was perhaps not widespread, Maya rulers did hold tremendous power and prestige within their kingdoms. Rulers were kings at the top of a “steep” social hierarchy that was reinforced by religious beliefs. The king was a hereditary ruler chosen by the gods and a member of one of several elite bloodlines. Meanwhile, the priestly class organized a complex pantheon of both gods and deified ancestors.

Ancestor worship required ceremony and temple building, as well as a complex understanding of calendrics. Both the Maya and the Olmec understood time as “a set of repeating and interlocking cycles instead of the linear sequence of historical time.” (This concept is similar to today.) Long cycles alternated with short cycles. The long periods involved the repeated creations and destructions of the world in their creation stories—with an emphasis on repeated. Certain dates were more important than others because they were attached to good and bad events in the past. Calendar priests determined what those dates were and so had considerable power. They also could rewrite the course of events if this benefited the ruler.

Teotihuacán and the Toltec

To the north of the Maya culture area, the Valley of Mexico was the most “agriculturally desirable” zone in Mesoamerica. Climate was temperate, and rainfall was predictable—in contrast to the drenching rains of tropical Mesoamerica. Lesser amounts of rainfall required aqueducts, reservoirs, and canals if a city were to thrive. The city of Cuicuilco rose to prominence in the Valley of Mexico by 150 BCE, only to be badly damaged by a volcanic eruption around 400 CE. The subsequent decline of Cuicuilco allowed a competing city, Teotihuacán, to rise to prominence in the area.

By 550 CE, Teotihuacán was one of the six largest cities in the world, with a population of 125,000. It covered more than 7 square miles (20 square kilometers), had a marketplace, an administrative center, and several different types of housing. The largest buildings had both a functional and spiritual use. For example, the Pyramid of the Sun was built over a sacred cave likely connected with creation myths.

By the fourth century CE, Teotihuacán had the modern equivalent of neighborhoods. New houses were laid out on a rough grid with many homes organized into apartment compounds. The dwellings were constructed of volcanic rock, mortar, and wood for the roofs. The compounds also had a system of underfloor drains. Many of the dwellings were decorated with “polychrome wall murals” containing multiple religious themes and military themes, some depicting play or everyday life, while others being much more abstract.

To support its massive population, Teotihuacán needed to secure supplies and tribute from surrounding areas. Force was used to secure trade routes to the south, which provided access to goods as diverse as cacao beans, tropical bird feathers, salt, medicinal herbs, and honey. Once the city had become the region’s undisputed merchant power, its subsistence base increased to include the entire Basin of Mexico and some neighboring peoples like Tlazcala. Further, its political influences may even have extended into Maya kingdoms like Tikal.

Teotihuacán was able to sustain impressive growth and expansion for more than five centuries. Ultimately, its size and complexity contributed to its decline. At about 650 CE, roughly half of the city's public buildings and a number of temples, pyramids, and palaces were burned. Many were knocked down and torn apart. This action seems to have occurred as a result of attacks by internal and external groups, not invaders.

The Late Classic Maya would also experience a collapse of their cultural systems around 840 CE. Years of population growth, demands from the elite, and a period of prolonged drought occurred almost simultaneously. As a result of famine and infighting, nearly 85 percent of the population left the settlements. In many areas, abandoned farmlands were retaken by the forest.

Mesoamerica remained fertile and southern Mexico remained temperate, so a number of polities rose to prominence in the area after the Maya decline. One such region was Tula, in the Valley of Mexico. Tula would become the capital of the Toltecs, who saw the principal city grow to a population of 35,000 by 800 CE. Like all Mesoamerican cities at the time, it would expand its influence through trade. Toltec ceramics were found in regions ranging from Costa Rica to Guatemala. Toltec style I-shaped ball courts and rain dances were adopted by cultures like the Anasazi and Hohokam in modern-day Arizona and New Mexico (United States). Not only did the Hohokam build ball courts, but they also erected platform mounds and dug irrigation canals like those found in Mexico.

Perhaps influenced by the rapid decline of Teotihuacán, the Toltec wanted to rise to prominence quickly. The construction of Tula was hasty and conflict with neighbors went beyond typical captive taking or territorial gain. The Toltec viewed their conquest as a “sacred war”, where man would aid the gods in their fight against the powers of darkness.

Eventually, the Toltecs merged their sacred war with that of the northern Maya in the Puuc Hills of the Yucatán. Chichén would become the Toltec administrative center in the peninsula in the late tenth century, but they did not completely drive out the city’s Maya founders. In fact, the Itza Maya ruled the region under the Toltec and continued to do so well into the post-Columbian period.