Where is maya located

However, the Maya are an indigenous group tied both to their distant past as well as to events of the last several hundred years," wrote Richard Leventhal, Carlos Chan Espinosa and Cristina Coc in the April edition of Expedition magazine , a peer-reviewed magazine from the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

The Popol Vuh was written between and , according to Britannica , during the protracted conquest of the region by Spanish forces. The stories in the Popol Vuh tell how the forefather gods Tepew and Q'ukumatz "brought forth the earth from a watery void, and endowed it with animals and plants. Creating sentient beings proved more difficult, but eventually humans were created, including the hero twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who embarked on a series of adventures, which included defeating the lords of the underworld.

Their journey climaxed with the resurrection of their father, the maize god. The late Robert Sharer, who was a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, noted in his book " Daily Life in Maya Civilization " Greenwood Press, that the ancient Maya believed everything "was imbued in different degrees with an unseen power or sacred quality," called k'uh, which meant "divine or sacredness.

Caves played a special role in Maya religion, as they were seen as entranceways to the underworld. Sharer noted that the ancient Maya followed a number of deities, the most important of which was Itzamnaaj. Other ancient Maya deities included the sun god K'inich Ajaw, the rain and storm god Chaak and the lightning deity K'awiil, among many others.

The Maya believed that each person had a "life force," and that draining a person's blood in a temple could give some of this life force to a god. In , archaeologists identified an arrowhead containing the blood of a person who may have participated in a blood-letting ceremony. In times when water was scarce, Maya kings and priests would hold incense-scattering ceremonies that they believed could provide wind and rain.

In , archaeologists in Belize discovered a Maya pendant inscribed with 30 hieroglyphs that researchers believe was used in these ceremonies, Live Science previously reported. Hallucinogenic substances were also used in religious ceremonies to help the Maya try to contact spirits and seek advice on how to deal with problems or situations.

Ancient Maya religion also included stories of dangerous creatures such as the sea monster Sipak. Fossilized teeth from the extinct sharks Carcharodon megalodon were used as sacred offerings at several Maya sites, and research suggests that stories involving Sipak were inspired by the fossilized remains of these massive, extinct sharks. According to Sharer, human sacrifices were made on special occasions. The victims were often prisoners of war, he noted.

Additionally, near the site's ball court, there is a panel that shows a person being sacrificed. This may depict a ball-player from either the winning or losing team being killed after a game. Sharer noted that record keeping was an important part of the Maya world and was essential for agriculture, astronomy and prophecy.

Additionally, by "recording the movements of the sky deities sun, moon, planets, and stars , they developed accurate calendars that could be used for prophecy," Sharer wrote.

For instance, some cities on the flat limestone plains of Mexico grew into great sprawling municipalities, while others built in the hills used the natural loft of its surroundings to raise their towers and temples to impressive heights.

Maya art has been considered to be the most sophisticated and beautiful of the ancient New World. We have only hints of the advanced painting of the classic Maya; mostly what has survived are funerary pottery and other Maya ceramics, and a building at Bonampak holds ancient murals that survived by chance.

A beautiful turquoise blue color that has survived through the centuries due to its unique chemical characteristics is known as Maya Blue. The use of Maya Blue survived until the 16th century when the technique was lost.

Late Pre-classic murals of great artistic and iconographic perfection have been recently discovered. With the translation of the Maya script it was discovered that the Maya were one of the few civilizations where artists attached their name to their work.

The Maya writing system, often called hieroglyphs from a superficial resemblance to the Ancient Egypt writing system. It is the only writing system of the Pre-Columbian New World which is known to represent the spoken language of its community.

In total, the script has more than a thousand different glyphs, and many appear only rarely or are confined to particular localities. At any one time, no more than around glyphs were in use. Since its inception, the Maya script was in use up to the arrival of the Europeans, peaking during the Maya Classical Period. Although many Maya centers went into decline during or after this period, the skill and knowledge of Maya writing persisted amongst segments of the population, and the early Spanish conquistadors knew of individuals who could still read and write the script.

Unfortunately, the Spanish displayed little interest in it, and as a result of the dire affects the conquest had on Maya societies, the knowledge was subsequently lost. In common with the other Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya used a base 20 and base 5 numbering system. The Maya and their neighbors independently developed the concept of zero by 36 BCE before any society in the Eastern Hemisphere, so far as we know: it was not until the period of the Gupta empire of Ancient India that the concept of zero was first used.

Inscriptions show them on occasion working with sums up to the hundreds of millions and dates so large it would take several lines just to represent it. They produced extremely accurate astronomical observations; their charts of the movements of the moon and planets are equal or superior to those of any other civilization working from naked eye observation.

In common with the other Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya had also measured the length of the solar year to a high degree of accuracy, far more accurately than that used in Europe as the basis of the Gregorian calendar. A typical Classic Maya polity was a small hierarchical state headed by a hereditary ruler.

Such kingdoms were usually no more than a capital city with its neighborhood and several lesser towns, although there were greater kingdoms, which controlled larger territories and extended patronage over smaller polities. Coba is a Yucatan peninsula jungle-buried city, located in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. Coba is located around two lagoons. A series of elevated stone and plaster roads radiate from the central site to various smaller sites near and far.

Some of these causeways go east to the Caribbean coast, and the longest runs over kilometres 62 mi westwards to the site of Yaxuna. The bulk of Coba's major construction seems to have been made in the middle and late Classic period. It was the capital city of a major Classic period kingdom from the 5th to 9th centuries AD. The city developed a distinctive sculptural style within the tradition of the lowland Maya, perhaps to emphasize the Maya ethnicity of the city's rulers. The city suffered a major political disaster in AD Maya history can be characterized as cycles of rise and fall: city-states rose in prominence and fell into decline, only to be replaced by others.

It could also be described as one of continuity and change, guided by a religion that remains the foundation of their culture. For those who follow the ancient Maya traditions, the belief in the influence of the cosmos on human lives and the necessity of paying homage to the gods through rituals continues to find expression in a modern hybrid Christian-Maya faith.