Hello, this is Sailor Venus, your local archaeologist! When I am not your role-playing director, I can be found in the forests of Belize looking for really cool stuff left by ancient peoples. I do this so I can learn more about those people, such as who they were and what they did in their spare time to make a living and have fun. My research has focused on the Maya of Mesoamerica. Sit back and read some interesting facts!

You may have heard the Maya mentioned a lot a few years back, because misinterpretations of their calendar system started a fairly big uproar about the end of the world. As you know, it didn’t happen, but we’ll talk about that later. The Maya were a diverse, really big culture that spanned across Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. There’s a map below if you don’t know where those places are. That’s a lot of ground to cover! As you can imagine, not all of the Maya were the same, but archaeologists recognize this group of people shared many cultural elements, like their calendar system. In fact, the Maya are still around today and their descendants live in the countries I mentioned above. However, I am going to focus on the Maya who lived from roughly 2000 B.C.E to 1500 A.D.


Let’s visit our first archaeological site on today’s tour: Tikal.

Tikal

You’ll find this site in Guatemala. Tikal is likely the most well-known of the Maya archaeological sites. You’ve probably seen it before, especially because portions of it were actually seen in Star Wars films. Tikal is well known for a reason, because it was very powerful during its prime. In fact, archaeologists know much of the politics and warfare in this region during this time depended on whether you counted Tikal or Calakmul (another really powerful site) as your ally.



The major buildings in the core of Tikal are connected by huge roads called ‘sacbe.’ Other archaeological sites have sacbe, too. These roads helped connect distant areas of a site and made travel easier. The majority of excavations and research have taken place in the North Acropolis. The North Acropolis has eight funerary temples built over a 300-year period. What’s really neat about the Maya is that they loved to build on top of other buildings. So, let’s say a new leader wanted to build an even bigger pyramid. Instead of tearing the old one down, he’d build on top of the old one. So, it’s kind of like those toys where you have a doll inside of a doll inside of a doll, except you have a building on top of an old building built on top of an even older building. Of course, this makes digging them rather complicated for the archaeologists!


The North Acropolis during a ceremony.

Stela 16. Stela are stone monuments the Maya built to commemorate rulers and special events.

A greenstone mask from Burial 85.

Chichen Itza

Chichen Itza, in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, is also another popular tourist destination. By the time Chichen Itza was built, many things had changed. Living in the interior of Mesoamerica (like where Tikal is located) was no longer popular, the political system no longer favored divine kings, and the Gulf Coast began to boom economically. Chichen Itza took advantage of the weakening influence in the interior and that city established itself as a powerful center. Chichen Itza became one of the largest Maya cites.


The Castillo - Do you see the snake?

The architecture and art from Tikal and Chichen Itza even look different. The style found at Chichen Itza is in the ‘Puuc’ style, which favors decorative mosaics near the top of buildings. Let’s talk about some of those buildings. The Caracol is a unique round structure placed on top of two rectangular structures. Round temples were often associated with the wind-deity aspect of Quetzalcoatl (K’uk’ulcan). It has a stairway in this structure resembles a snail shell, hence its name in Spanish. Some of the windows in this building line up with important astronomical events, such as the equinox.

The Caracol

Another interesting feature in Chichen Itza are the ballcourts. The Maya used the ballcourts to play a game with a rubber ball. The specifics of this ballgame are not clearly understood by archaeologists, but it required some heavy padding and, perhaps, some figurative or literal death. The rubber ball they used would have been a lot heavier and denser than what we are used to today! Chichen Itza has more ballcourts and the largest of any Maya center.



Jaguar Throne found in El Castillo pyramid.

Ceren

Ceren, in El Salvador, is every archaeologist’s dream. This site was buried by volcanic ash (like Pompeii) and, as a consequence, has extraordinary preservation. The wet, humid environment in Central America is not very great for preservation, so usually only the hardiest of materials (like stone) survive after long periods of time. But, look at that picture below! The volcanic ash preserved even the carefully tilled rows of a maize field and the holes of each maize plant. The impressions of plants left behind in the volcanic ash told, without a doubt, archaeologists that the Maya cultivated maize, beans, squash, agave, cacao, chiles, cotton, malanga, and manioc.

Ceren was a farming village. These types of ‘commoner’ sites can sometimes be harder to identify and understand archaeologically, because the inhabitants didn’t have the means to leave lots and lots of expensive or big stuff. Archaeologists suspect many commoner houses were actually made of perishable materials, like clay and wood. These are the types of materials that decompose really quickly in Central America, so archaeologists sometimes have a hard time finding these houses. At Ceren, the volcanic ash preserved these types of houses, even the thatch roofing! Perhaps the volcanic eruption happened quickly, because many of the people left behind their things. This is really neat, too, because we can see what they were doing when the eruption happened.

The Other Stuff
Hope you enjoyed the tour! As I explained at the very beginning, I am an archaeologist and I study these types of sites every summer. I am going to tell you a little bit about what I do every summer, so you have an idea of what an archaeologist does.

So, first, I have to figure out what I want to study. Archaeology is the study of ancient humans, so I could study nearly anything! Instead, I focus on craft production and architecture. So, I study the houses the Maya built and the things they made to be sold to other people. After I figure out what I want to study, I have to design a research plan that says exactly what I will do. This research plan will say where I want to dig, what I hope to accomplish by digging there, and what I will do with the stuff I dig up. Then, of course, I have to find a way to pay for all of that to happen!

Finally, I’m in Belize! Sometimes, I stay in a log-building in the middle of a forest preserve with no running water or electricity other times I stay in an old eco hostel near a large village. No matter where I stay I manage to find parasites, poisonous insects, and poisonous trees. But, not to worry! This just means I need to itch or other unfortunate things a lot when I am digging. ^.^

Here is where I dig! Xunantunich is a medium-sized archaeological site in Belize. It is a fairly popular tourist destination. All you need to do is cross a ferry, ride up a hill, and you are in an amazing, cleared site with tons of things to do and explore. Don’t worry, you won’t have to deal with anything that’ll bite, because the area is cleared where you’d be going.
I conduct my research at Group E, a portion of Xunantunich that was built really early before the rest of the site. So, the Maya built Group E, left Group E to build the big part of Xunantunich, and then some of them came back later to build houses amongst their deceased ancestors. That last group of people are who I am studying. I want to know why they came back and what they were doing.

The ferry to cross the river to Xunantunich.

Usually, I have some undergraduate students or locals who live in the village to help me out. They do a lot of the digging while I write almost all of the notes (last season – about 70 pages worth of notes). The students are learning how to be archaeologists from me and from the locals. Some of the locals have been paid to help out at archaeological sites longer than I have been alive! They know a lot. There are many different methods to conduct archaeological research and not all of it relies on digging. My stuff, though, did rely a lot on digging. This is how we do it.

Remember how I said the Maya liked to build on top of stuff? That means we have to dig carefully or we’ll get confused. So, a typical method is to control how deep you dig and where you dig, so you can easily identify stuff later. Since we are more worried about where we find things, rather than the things themselves, we have to dig fairly slowly. When you find something really important, like a burial, then you have to dig even more slowly and spend more of your time taking notes. Notes are really important, because once you dig something up… you can’t undo it.



Usually half-way through the day we eat lunch. Lunch in the field is usually something out of a can. I would recommend canned corned beef with hot sauce, mustard, and crackers. There’s also one canned meat that has the same consistency as refried beans, so you can munch on that with tortilla chips. The local workers? Yeah, they are smarter and bring home-cooked meals.

Then, we dig some more. After all the digging and recording is done, I take all that stuff back to basecamp to analyze it. The most common things I find are broken pieces of pottery, stone tools, or the trash from making stone tools. All of that stuff usually has to be cleaned first with water and gentle brushing. When all my materials are dry, then I need to separate them, count them, and weigh them. I’ll separate them according to how I want to study them. For example, those broken pieces of ceramic pots are separated according to what part of the pot they came from and whether or not it is a broken piece of ceramic that can tell me what type of part it was and when it was made. Depending on what knowledge I want to gain, I may focus on a certain aspect of the material I collected. For example, one of my fellow researchers wants to study how ceramic pots were used in feasts. She spent a lot of time putting the broken pieces of ceramic back together. Then, she’d measure and draw whatever portion of the ‘puzzle’ she was able to recreate.



Eventually, I leave Belize (most likely without any of the stuff I collected during my digging. It is very bad form to take such stuff back to your home country without permission, because essentially you are stealing someone’s heritage). When I get home, I have to do less exciting stuff. Like… writing 130+ pages about everything I just told you and what I learned from it. ^.^

One of the other archaeologists at Xunantunich is doing a really neat project involving the Castillo!

Basically, she is going to create a lot of 3-D images of this giant building during different periods of time to see how it was constructed. Check it out!
Virtual Archaeological Reconstruction

Remember all that talk about the world ending in 2012? Yeah, the world and we are still here, so we know that didn't happen. The Maya knew it wouldn't happen either. Let me explain their calendar system, so you have a better idea of what I am talking about.

Be warned that the calendar systems are complicated and there's a lot of information.

The Maya used two calendars: the 260 day ritual calendar known as the Tzolk'in and the 365 day solar calendar known as the Jaab' or Haab.  

The 365 day solar calendar had 18 months that was 20 days long. The 19th month, known as the Wayeb, was considered unlucky, because it was only five days long.

The 260 day ritual calendar was used for naming and divination. The numbers 1 through 13 were coefficients for 20 day names.

When the two calendar systems (Tzolk'in and the Jaab') were combined, the system is known as the Calendar Round. Every day of the calendar is a combination of the two calendar systems. It would take 52 years for the two calendars to match back up again within the calendar round (i.e. it would take 52 years for the specific day K'an 1 Pop to happen again). This calendar system is cyclical.

The Classic Maya developed a third calendar system called the Long Count, which counted back from a fixed point in time (the beginning of creation or approximately August 13, 3114 B.C.E. or 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 K’umk’u. ). The Long Count is linear and continuous. One Great Cycle may end, but another Great Cycle always begins. This is the system that the 2012 stuff refers to. The 13th Great Cycle ends December 21, 2012 (depending on your interpretation). The 14th Great Cycle ends March 26, 2407. The 15th Great Cycle ends June 28, 2801. So yeah, it keeps going (I'm not going to list any more Great Cycles, because well... there is no stopping point and I don't want to write a continuous, never-ending list) and would have been considered a momentous occasion.

Okay, the next bit is more complicated, but try to refer to the picture.



That image is a Maya long count calendar date. The initial series introducing glyph (the first one right at top that takes up both slots A and B) signals that a long count date is about to begin. It is read left to right, two columns at a time.

(Second Row) The glyph on the left is a Baktun. The glyph on the right is a Katun.
(Third Row) The glyph on the left is a Tun. The glyph on the right is a Uinal.
(Fourth Row) The glyph on the left is a Kin. The glyph on the right refers to a day from the ritual calendar.
(Fifth Row) The first and second glyph (right and left) refer to a Lord of the Night title.
(Sixth Row) The first and second glyph (right and left) refer to a Lunar series.
(Seventh Row) The glyph on the left refers to a Lunar series. The glyph on the right refers to the day from the solar calendar.

Now you know how to read the basics of a long count calendar date!

You know how contemporary calendars 'end' each year, but a new one begins? (2013 recently ended, but 2014 started) That's what the Maya were essentially talking about, not the end of the world.

Now, I am going to teach you a little bit about how to read a Maya glyph, so you can brag even more.

The Maya counted numbers with dots and bars. The picture above explains their counting system. Each dot represents a count of 1 while each bar represents a count of 5. Go back to the second and third row from the picture of the long count and see if you can read the numbers that are being talked about.