The Ancient Maya
who where the Ancient Maya? Well, the ancient Maya were a group of Native Americans that lived in central America.The Maya civilization was one of the biggest empires by a native peoples that Mesoamerica has every seen.The Maya were really good at things like agriculture, pottery, the making of calendars, I mean we have all heard of the Mayan calendar that said the world was going to end on December 21,2012, and mathematics, and left behind an amazing amount of large and spectacular architecture and symbolic artwork. Most of the great stone cities of the Maya were abandoned by 900 A.D., but no one is really sure what happened to make them leave. these great stone cities of the Maya were so well built that many of them are still around to this day, granted not nearly as many people live there today as back then. back at the height on Mayan Civilization there were as many as five thousand people living in each of the major cities, which means that the whole population of the mayan empire at its height was around two million people. At least that is the statistic given to me by history.com. The Mayans were also a polytheistic group, which means that they believe in more than one god, and to honor their gods they built these large stepped pyramid type temples known as ziggurats. They were a very religious group that had many gods that related to the things around them like the sun, the moon, and nature, and the highest member of society were religious leaders. My favorite thing about the Maya has to be there intentional body modification that they did to make themselves look more like their gods. You see the Maya believed that their gods had weirdly shaped heads, so to look more like them ancient maya would practice Head shaping. Head shaping is a form of intentional body deformation that focuses on changing the shape of the cranial vault into a desired shape. This practice was incredibly common in Mayan culture. It is recorded to be done as early as pre-classic times and continued to be a common practice through the post-classic age. In fact as time went on and techniques became more refined head shaping became even more popular. According the Dr. Vera Tiesler in her 1999 paper, “Head shaping and dental decoration among the ancient Maya: archaeological and cultural aspects,” the percentage of the population that head intentional cranial modification increased from 88.65% in the pre-classic age to a rate closer to 90% in the post-classical age. The practice was not gender specific either. Both male and females were equally subjected to it, and it was done at a very young age. When the person that was to have their head shaped was in their infancy they had something put on their head to make into the shape it was desired. This was done when the child was young because the skull has not fully fused and is still easily shaped. The end result was an elongated head that made you look like the gods. The Maya were an incredible group of people and did some really cool things and there are still plenty of cool things to learn about them.