Ancient Maya
The lost civilization
By Georgia
Mayan farmers lived in homesteads or small houses near their farms. They built their houses from poles bounded together and used palm leaves to line their roof. Mayans living in the country side would travel off to cities in order to celebrate festivals and important events.
Some artifacts and scripts say that temples and pyrimids were rebuilt every 52 years in synchronization with the Maya Long Count Calendar.
Ceremonial Platforms were traditionally four metre high limestone platforms where religious rights were performed. These platforms were usually decorated by large carved figures, altars and izompantli, (a stake used to display defeated mesoamerican ballgame players or victims heads.)
Cerimonial Platforms
Palaces
Architecture
Palaces were heavily decorated large buildings. These buildings usually sat around the center of the city or the housing of the main population. These buildings had many chambers inside and were required to contain at least one courtyard.
Pyrimids and Temples
The most important temples usually sat atop of Mayan pyramids as this was considered the closest place to heaven. The temples rarely contained burial sites. Some of these temples stood over 200 feet tall. The temple's roof combs were engraved with leaders and rulers names so they could be seen from afar to those approaching the city.
Observatories
As the Mayan were keen astronomers, they built observatories to help them track the movement of planets, stars and moons. Some of the observatories where round whilst others were different shapes.
The Mayans were skilled architects, building great cities of stone that remain even a thousand years after their civilization collapsed. The Maya built temples, pyramids, walls, palaces, residences and structured farming systems.
Ballcourts
Mayans used a farming technique similar to the Inca civilization where "terraces" were cut into the hillsides to make usable plots.
Field stone walls were used when level land was scarce and rare in the Maya highlands. The irrigated terraces contained volcanic soil and were capable of producing crops with minimal mantinance.
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Ballcourts used for playing a religios ball game were built on a grand scale and enclosed ramps, ceremonial platforms and temples. The ballcourt itself is shapped as a capital I and can be found in nearly all Mayan cities.
Terrace Architecture for Farming
Skilled Mayan architects built huge limestone pyramids with temples on top as well as large, low buildings where nobles and other rulers lived.
Many of these buildings had ornaments called roof combs, which extended from the highest point of the roof. These combs gave the building extra height and saphistication.
Since the begining of the Mayan civilization, there had been large water problems. Because of the location of the Mayan cities rain was scarce. In order to fix this, the Mayans developed a water managment system. Rain would be caught in wells or large gutters around the city and then transported into underground storage systems. This meant that all the rain was used over long peroids of time. The Mayans also traded goods for water as well as developing wells and water catchers to use in rivers. Seventy-five percent of the rainfall was collected over six month peroids and the Mayans were left half of the year with no rain.
Some important temples in major cities had steps on all four sides. The total number of steps was 365 (including the entrance). This was to reflect the number of days in a year.
The ancient Mayans also built a 63 metre long suspension bridge to cross a wide river.
Mayan buildings would often be plastered and occasionally painted red. These walls then are covered in paintings of gods, battles and Hieroglyphs.
