The Olmecs and Mayans: Ancient Civilizations of Mesoamerica
The Olmecs
The Olmec culture is considered the mother culture of Mesoamerica due to its importance and the range it reached in the pre-Columbian Mexican art scene. Their culture is characterized by the construction of altars and the carving of colossal stone heads with animalistic features, zoomorphic figurines that reveal a unique realistic style, and jade adornments. The most important center was La Venta, distinguished by its impressive monumental sculptures, low-relief carvings, and the use of brick buildings, which the Olmecs appear to have been the inventors of in America.
The Olmec civilization, despite extensive testimony, is still very poorly understood and remains one of the enigmas of pre-Columbian American history. They were the first Americans to develop a hieroglyphic script, create a calendar and an arithmetic system. From their writing, the word “history” can be seen.
The Jaguar god, worshipped by the Olmecs as a symbol of heaven and the underworld, was present everywhere, carved in the form of an animal or a semi-human character. The idea of associating man with animals is perpetuated in all Mesoamerican civilizations, up to the Aztecs.
The Maya
The Mayans were located in 3 main areas:
1. North
This area includes the states of Yucatán in its entirety and most of Campeche and Quintana Roo. The terrain is rocky and arid lowlands with a vast plain dominated by calcareous scrubland vegetation. The weather is warm and dry, regularly in excess. There are no surface rivers, but the ground is permeable and water is filtered rapidly, forming underground rivers that open into natural openings called “cenotes.”
2. Central Zone
This area spans from the Usumacinta and Grijalva rivers to the current state of Tabasco, to the eastern part of Honduras, including also the Petén, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Chiapas. The climate is hot and humid with abundant rainfall in the season. The vegetation is tropical.
3. South
This area includes the highlands and the coastal strip of the Pacific Ocean, with part of Chiapas, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The climate is temperate and cold in the mountains, with hot and humid areas, populated by dense pine and cypress trees mostly. There are heights in excess of 1500 meters above sea level.
Political Organization
The early Maya were grouped in small villages, distant from each other. Later, some ceremonial centers were built. The lives of these first inhabitants of the Maya area were entirely dependent on natural elements and the growing and harvesting of their crops. With a sedentary lifestyle and the continued practice of primitive agriculture, arose what at first was the simple worship of nature and elements related to planting, such as the sun, rain, wind, mountains, water, etc.
Society
The society in this period is still tribal in nature, that is, groups of families related by blood, sharing a culture, language, and territory. As agriculture becomes more complex, creating systems of irrigation and cultivation including product trade, such as cocoa and cotton, the population increased and ceremonial centers began to emerge. This also reinforced the hierarchy of social classes, resulting from the division of labor.
Economy
Agriculture
The Maya were primarily farmers, and their main crop was corn, using the technique of the “milpa,” currently used by Mayan peasants and was presumably the one used by their ancestors. The milpa technique involves cutting and burning the forest before planting. In recent years, doubts have been cast on this technique because it exhausts the soil and forces the farmer to move every two or three years in search of new lands. Likewise, they grew beans, cocoa, yams, squash, chile, avocado, cashew, guava, snuff, and cotton.
Hunting and Fishing
Mayans also remained hunters and found in forests, mountains, coastlines, and borders of estuaries large numbers of animals such as jaguars, deer, snakes, turtles, rabbits, and monkeys, using as instruments blowguns, bows and arrows, and traps, hooks, and shells.
Animal Domestication
They engaged in the domestication of animals such as dogs, turkeys, and birds such as ducks, pigeons, and bees, using honey and beeswax.
Science and Art
Their greatest achievements were the mathematical system that included a digit equal to zero, which was linked to a religious system and also used for astronomical observations.
Among the Maya, time was determined by a complex calendar system. The year began when the sun crossed the zenith on July 16 and had 365 days, 364 of them were grouped in 28 weeks of 13 days each, and the new year began on day 365. In addition, the 360-day year was divided into 18 months of 20 days each. The weeks and months passed sequentially and independently of each other. However, they started on the same day once every 260 days, which is both a multiple of 13 (for the week) and 20 (for the month). The Mayan calendar, although very complex, was the most accurate of those known until the appearance of the Gregorian calendar in the sixteenth century.
Another advance was writing. These people developed a method of hieroglyphic notation and recorded their mythology, history, and rituals in inscriptions carved and painted on stelae (stone blocks or pillars), on lintels and stairways, and other monumental remains. Records were also kept in codices made of amate (tree bark) and scrolls of animal skin.
Both in the scientific and in the artistic realms, the Maya lowlands rose to the highest level of perfection in these elements, some of them acquired when they were still in a nascent state of development, writing for example.
Religion
All Maya life was inspired by religion, hence the organization of the theocratic state. The Mayans worshipped the forces of nature. The main gods were:
- Hunab Ku (the creator), Lord of heaven and god of the day.
- Itzamná (son of Hunab Ku)
- Chac (the rain god and fertility of agriculture)
- Ah Puch (god of death)
- Yun Kaax (god of corn)
This shows that the Mayan culture was deeply religious. All Maya creations are based upon a religious worldview, as everything is conceived of divine origin and permeated by sacred energies that determine all events.
These energies are the gods who embody the forces of nature, like the stars and the rain (Chac), and they are also powers of death, like the gods that produce disease and even death. But these aspects also have animal deities: the Sun appears sometimes as a macaw or a jaguar, the rain like a snake, Death as a bat or an owl, etc.
The universe is made up of three horizontal planes: heaven, earth, and the underworld. In the sky, divided into thirteen layers or levels, are the stars, which are gods, like the moon (Ixchel) and Venus (Nohok Ek). Celestial space is represented by a deity called Itzamná, “the dragon,” which is represented as a feathered serpent with two heads or a dragon (a mixture of snake, bird, lizard, and deer). This god, who is the supreme symbol of Mayan religion, represents the fertilizing power of the cosmos, that breathes life into the entire universe. The earth is a flat plate floating on the water, but also conceived as a large crocodile or alligator, in which the vegetation grows on its back. The Yucatec Maya called it Chac Mumul Ain, “big muddy crocodile.”
big muddy crocodile.”