A recent article in USA Today was headlined, "Archaeologists Find New Clues Why the Maya Left." Of course, that is a bit misleading, since the Maya people never really left. They've been pushed around for hundreds of years, a practice that still happens today, but they are still around and perhaps a stronger cultural force than they have been in many years. Several million Maya still live in Mexico and in Central American countries such as El Salvador. And they aren't planning on going anywhere soon. Dr. Rani Alexander can verify that.
Alexander is a professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University, where she has worked for the last 14 years, returning to New Mexico after stints at Columbia University and Northern Illinois University. Her chosen field of study regarding Mayan culture assures us that even years after their conquest by the Spanish, the Mayan people are still making their homes in Mexico and elsewhere. That's also what earned her work coverage in that USA Today article.
Alexander, whose field of expertise includes "Mesoamerica, the post-AD1450 archaeology of the Yucatn peninsula, colonialism and ethnohistory, archaeological households and site structure, agrarian ecology, fauna analysis and quantitative analytical methods," according to her vitae, has been interested in the people of the Yucatn for quite some time.
"It started when my father took us on a vacation to the Yucatn when I was 11 years old," she recalls. "It's also partly the fault of some professors at Tulane."
A native of New Orleans, Alexander received degrees in ethnohistory and linguistics at Tulane University there; her doctorate comes from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is married to a fellow archaeologist, who is currently digging for something else — namely, funding for NMSU scholars, as he works in development at this time. He stays in touch with his real interest, though, as "all of our vacations include some type of archaeology," Alexander adds.
"It's good to try and figure out what you want to do, and I knew it had to be a field science, since I wanted to be outside," Alexander goes on. "Historic archaeology is very different in Mesoamerica, as there are many different lives to explore. There are a lot of new questions from history when you look at archaeology and vice versa."
Alexander was last in Mexico this past summer, where she is continuing research work in an area around the village of Ebtun. That project began several years ago after she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship. She explains, "There are four 'sister' communities around Ebtun, which were created by forced resettlement after the Spanish conquest. Many of the residents are Mayan speaking (there are about 20 Mayan dialects, and Yucatec is thought to be the most common) and are certainly an interesting part of history."
In a paper she submitted to the International Journal of Historical Archeology, Alexander notes that these "traditional communities have not remained technologically static over the last 500 years. Cultural traditions are not blindly handed down and passively followed over long time frames; rather they are continuously reconfigured as past practices are reinterpreted and modified to meet contemporary demands."
So, contrary to what some might think, the Maya continued to evolve as a culture and society, in spite of the demands made by the advance of time.
Aided in her research by an extraordinary book first published in 1939 by Ralph Roys, Alexander's field work has had many interesting discoveries using his detailed work in part as a sort of field guide. Roys' book, The Titles of Ebtun, translates Mayan- and Spanish-language documents that show many of the titles to the land held by individual Mayas from 1600 to 1833.
Traces of Mayan culture can be found as far as back as 1800 BC, perhaps longer, if radiocarbon testing is accurate. It is thought that they were one of the most culturally advanced and prolific civilizations in the world.
Along with having a fully developed written language, one of only three known from ancient times (the others being Mesopotamian and Chinese), the Mayan people were also well versed in early astronomy and were the first to use the mathematical concept of zero, perhaps as early as 350 AD. It was many years afterward that Arabian scholars translated a similar Hindu text to rediscover the concept, which is now commonplace worldwide.
Other notable achievements of Mayan culture include advances in early medicine. They used hair for suturing in order to stitch wounds, casts to help heal broken limbs, jade as a material for prostheses, and iron pyrite to fill cavities in teeth.
Agriculturally, the Maya were also well ahead of the times. It is believed that they used raised fields, terracing and shifting cultivation, which loosely defined is a form of crop rotation, wherein a plot of land is fairly well used up before being abandoned, thus allowing it to rejuvenate over time before it is again used for crops. Maize, squash, beans and chile are known to have been Mayan staples, with traces of cotton and sunflowers also having been found by researchers.
And perhaps best of all, the Maya are considered the first society to ever use the cacao plant for food, including a delicious-sounding hot chocolate-type drink called xocolatl. It was made and consumed by all levels of people, from rich to poor.
Pyramids, temples and human sacrifice all played roles in Mayan society and religion as well. Today, research continues on the people of this civilization, who, like many other native cultures of the Americas, were disassembled by conquest, starting in the 1500s.
Alexander says, "The culture was every bit as complex as that of 16th century Spain. Different technologies with different capabilities existed, but of course the Maya did not have animal traction, wheels or ocean-going capabilities. After the conquest, there was a 90% decline in the population in part because of diseases introduced by the Spanish such as yellow fever and smallpox."
But they have made a remarkable and strong comeback. That doesn't mean, though, that others — the Mexican government and outside investors from Japan, the United States and Canada — aren't leaving well enough alone in current times.
Alexander's research in the Yucatn has allowed her to become all too familiar with a new scam that has cheated the Maya out of land, money and natural resources. Additionally, an influx of tourism in the region is raising some concerns, and perhaps some hackles as well.
"If you can keep hold of your land, that gives you many more options, but the ravages of capitalism help keep one away from that," Alexander says. She relates the story of the Felipe Carrillo Puerto Thermal Power Plant located west of the city of Cancun, pretty much in the back yard of the towns that are part of Alexander's principal study.
To understand the background of the plant's impact on the Mayan people there, it helps to go way back to a Talking Cross, which Alexander has authored a paper on.
"There was a caste war in the 19th century and it was one of the most successful native uprisings in the new world that ever took place," she goes on. "It started in approximately 1847 and lasted until about 1901, when the Mexican Revolution began. It mostly had to do with expectations that were unfulfilled (such as the betterment of economic opportunity and social justice practices) after Mexican independence took place in 1821. The people rose up and tried to eliminate the Spanish from the (Yucatn) Peninsula. It was more of a class war than anything else, which was based on the desire for greater autonomy, but there were other reasons as well. It nearly succeeded until a cross was found."
The mysterious cross that she refers to was found at the edge of a cenote. Similar to karsts, cenotes are made of limestone shelves, which achieve the formation of natural water wells when the limestone collapses, somewhat like an underwater sinkhole. Cenotes were often outfitted with a noria, a type of waterwheel that would pump water to the surface.
"When the limestone collapses to an aquifer, it becomes a cenote, and is the principal source of water in the Yucatn. And of course the people live near water, which has enormous cultural significance to the Mayan people. Well, when the Spaniards came, they forced the people to live in towns with street grids, churches and of course a plaza." That meant moving the Maya away from the cenotes and an important part of their life and culture.
The mystical cross, which soon had its own priesthood and religious practices surrounding it, was taken to a church, where it was discovered that it could "talk." It became known as the Talking Cross and it would "tell" who should attack and who should be killed, among other things. The Talking Cross was of course the work of an early ventriloquist, and Alexander wryly observes that the cross doesn't "speak" anymore.
During the 1920s and 1930s, more violence raged through the Yucatn. The area around Ebtun was again divided up, with much of the land going to new communities after that ill-defined social revolution.
In the 1990s, the latest threat to the Maya of the Ebtun area arose with the neo-liberal reforms prepared by the Mexican government that allowed communities to sell land. Earlier, the farmers of the area had been given ejidos, or communal land, which was soon becoming endangered because of the so-called reforms.
The people of the Ebtun area most often identify their occupation as that of a campesino or peasant farmer, and land, of course, was the mainstay of the entire social and cultural network of the area.
"Somehow some of the land was 'legally' sold for the plant, and much of that land had Ebtun's cenotes," says Alexander.
Drilling began, running right through the cenotes, which were then covered with cement and had a pressure pump put atop the cement. The people of the area receive no financial compensation from the owners of the power plant.
Alexander says, "Now Ebtun residents cannot visit traditional cultural places and the archaeological sites that exist around the cenotes are also off limits. The impact of this is just such a great paradox."
Alexander is a font of knowledge about Mayan culture and history. But she shares that if she had to study elsewhere, it would be in the Cathar region of France, another area discovered via vacation.
"That would do," she says with a slight smile. "It has all the elements of a great cultural change and drama with archaeological and documented evidence, and I like working with those."
She also has some thoughts on the best-known subject of Mayan society lately — the folks who have been trumpeting that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012. That date marks the end of the current Mayan Long Count Calendar, something that the Maya have not used themselves for hundreds of years. The "Mayan Prophecy" is what the doomsday scenario is often called.
"It is a misunderstanding," Alexander says. "Basically, what will happen is that it will be the first day of Baktun, which is like a millennium."
A Baktun takes in 144,000 days, which equates to about 400 tropical years. The Maya incorporated a myriad of different calendars, and it is a bit unclear why anyone who did a bit of research would think that such a "prophecy" even exists.
"If the calendar were still used, it would be a big deal" — at least in terms of celebrations, if not apocalypse, Alexander adds. "But it is just another version of Y2K."
Author: Jeff Berg | Source: Desert Exposure [October 02, 2010]