Visiting the Mayans

When we decided to take an all-inclusive holiday on the Mayan Riviera, we wanted to see more of the Mayans than the waiters and maids, so we signed up for some tours to some of the amazing archeological sites in the area: Chichen Itza, Tulum and Cobá. The tours included being picked up at the hotel, driven around in buses at high speed to the various sites, lunch and sometimes beer, and usually a dip in a cenote, the deep, interconnected, natural pools of pure cool turquoise water that dot the landscape, seemingly carved, perfectly round, out of the limestone rock that covers the whole of the Yucatan peninsula. Of course, the centrepiece of each tour was a guided visit to the archeological site, which provided a great deal of information about the Mayan civilization and the ruins that are now almost all that is left of it, the conquering Spaniards having burned the hundreds of books in which everything had been carefully recorded, believing them to be connected to devil-worship.

We had expected that by taking three tours, with some material inevitably repeated, we would be able better to fix the main aspects of the Mayan culture in our old memory circuits. As it turned out, a combination of factors resulted in this not being the case, so the following account is probably peppered with errors. This is partly because my memories of the dates and events we were told about are often at odds with Ana's recollections, and I am not usually right all the time. As well though, each guide gave out pieces of information which did not immediately appear to be compatible with what we'd learned from the other guides, or with what the same guide had said a few minutes before, or with logic and common sense.

Our first guide, Roberto, an abbreviated form of whose name, Beto, was hung around all our necks before we were allowed to leave the bus at Chichen Itza, was excellent. He had an amazing command of dates and celestial movements and Mayan history and culture. It turned out he had attended special seminars at Chichen Itza, offered by the federal Tourism authorities in conjunction with the National Archeological and Anthropological Institute. He was also very clear, his English almost perfect apart from an attractively trilled r, and he had a pedagogical facility which most of my university colleagues, including myself, would have given their eye-teeth to possess.

From Roberto, standing in the huge stone ball-park at Chichen Itza, we learned about the ball games which have been used by the Mayans as religious ceremonies since many hundreds of years before Christ. Each “game”, we learned, was in fact a reenactment of the creation of the world, when the Mayans had to go down to the underworld to get things going, so to speak, and to this end had played and won a ball game against the gods. We learned that the ball in the reenactments was made of rubber and bounced a lot, that the players could only use their buttocks to hit it and get it through one of the impossibly high stone hoops placed on the walls, though some think they might also have used knees, elbows and shoulders, and we learned about the three theories of what happened at the end of the game: maybe the captain of the winning team was decapitated, as a blood sacrifice, or maybe it was the captain of the losing team, or maybe no one was really sacrificed, the whole reenactment being symbolic, so that the sacrifice itself was also symbolic.

Pointing out that Mayan was still spoken today by the local inhabitants, Beto taught us to say Bashka Walik (hi) and a couple of other words I've forgotten, and reminded us that the Mayans were only one of 68 ethnic groups in this amazing country of Mexico, most with their own languages. He showed us how the heads of Mayan infants were flattened by putting them into a sort of wooden vice for some months after birth, and that the resulting cranial deformation had somehow become a mutation so that many Mayans even today have flattened heads, even though they no longer use wooden vices on their children. Roberto was also the one who showed us how Mayan houses were built, gesturing with impeccable timing at two that appeared fleetingly on one side of the bus as we hurtled down the freeway. He explained that the thatched roofs were very sturdy, completely waterproof, except when it rains (no, no, it's a joke), and only needed replacing every 20 years or so. It is because Mayan houses are so completely biodegradable, with the roofs made of palm thatch and the walls made of sticks through which the wind can pass (it's very hot here, even in winter), that none of the houses from the classical or later periods remain. Only the thousands and thousands of temples, pyramids and other ceremonial and defensive buildings and walls, made out of stone, are still littered around the countryside, all over the Mayan territory, which covers the Yucatan peninsula, Chiapas, Tabasco, Honduras, Belize and Guatemala, a huge area.

Our second guide, Susana, at Tulum, was herself Mayan. She spoke clearly but extremely quickly and from her we found out a lot more surprising things about the Mayans. She told us unequivocally that the losing team captain in ball games was killed off as a human sacrifice. She told us that Mayans with flattened heads were not around any more because only nobles had flattened their children's heads, and all the nobles were killed by the Spaniards. When she told us the thatched roofs used on the workers' houses only lasted ten or twelve years, we ignored the discrepancy and asked her what sort of palms were used, and she waved around her arm helpfully to take in two or three different sorts of tree and said, oh it was just palm leaves like these, ordinary palm leaves.

Tulum was a much smaller city than Chichen Itza, with only about 5000 inhabitants, and was founded quite late, in fact it was still there when the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century, whereas Chichen Itza had been abandoned centuries before. Tulum was an astronomical centre, not a religious one, and there were no pyramids, just a castle, and a few other buildings with essentially astronomical purposes. Tulum is also on the sea, and has a beautiful beach.

Susana spoke at length about the human sacrifices performed at Tulum, though they were few and far between, apparently just once every 52 years, which corresponds to the length of time the combined lunar and solar cycles need to complete. The sacrifices were mostly self inflicted, she said, performed by priests and nobles on themselves. They would wait for an eclipse and then in front of the people would insert an obsidian knife into their genitals, catch the blood on a piece of paper (Roberto had told us they had bark, but hey...), and then set fire to it, the smoke ascending and apparently stopping the eclipse. The nobles and priests had tables that allowed them to predict the eclipses and other astronomical events, but the people didn't, so they were impressed and the nobles were able to maintain their power.

According to Susana, whose real name was May, she said, Tulum was an important trading centre and the most important port on the Caribbean side of Mexico, because it is situated at the only break in the great barrier reef that runs all the way up the coast. Ships would sail up the reef until they saw the break, only a few hundred yards wide, and then turn in to land and trade. Like the rest of this part of the Yucatan, she said, Tulum had no agriculture, the land being too poor. There were only a few inches of topsoil on top of the limestone, which is why the trees in the tropical rainforest are disappointingly small and stunted. Everything had to be brought from hundreds of kilometres away, from the other side of the peninsula, near Merida and Campeche. And since the Mayans had discovered the wheel but not used it for transportation, people had to walk, and everything had to be brought in on people's backs.

Our third guide was Arsenio, another Mayan. He was actually born in a Mayan village 25 kilometres away from Cobá, itself kind of lost in the middle of the jungle, and moved to Cobá where he learned Spanish and is now learning English. Arsenio, being from around Cobá, appeared not to have very warm feelings about Chichen Itza, which of course is much better known. Arsenio insisted a lot, then, on what made Cobá better, especially the fact that it was much much bigger than Chichen Itza. In fact, while Chichen Itza had several dozen temples and pyramids, Cobá had six thousand, and hundreds of thousands of other structures in stone. 98 percent of these structures have yet to be rescued from the jungle which grew over all the Mayan sites once they had been abandoned. Cobá, he said, had at its height more than 50,000 inhabitants and covered over 70 square kilometres. It was the second largest city in the Mayan empire, after a place in Guatemala. From Arsenio we were surprised to learn that the Mayans had built causeways, a bit like Roman roads, out to the four cardinal points from the central watchtower in Cobá. He made a circle in the dust to show how, from Cobá, one road went 100 kilometres straight to Chichen Itza, another 70 kilometres to Tulum, and two others similar distances north and south. The causeways were elevated, because of flooding in the rainy season, rising between one and six metres above the surrounding ground, and they were built of stone with rubble filling. He then drew a much larger circle encompassing Chichen Itza, Tulum and the other ends of the causeways and said 70 square kilometres, all this belonged to Cobá, which we found a little confusing.

According to Arsenio, Chichen Itza had been taken over by Toltecs after the Mayas, something that Roberto had never mentioned, and it was the Toltecs who had indulged in human sacrifices. The Mayas had never gone in for that sort of thing, he assured us, they were, and still are, a civilized people. We were also a little bemused by his explanation of how one of the pyramids at Cobá had been built. It had nine levels, and each level had been added on top of the other at 52 year intervals, corresponding to one of the astronomical cycles we already knew about. This seemed strange. Unlike Roberto, Arsenio also seemed to have a big problem with dates. This pyramid was discovered in 1984, he said, but restoration work began in 1979.

Arsenio, who was definitely a real Mayan, chattering away to fellow Mayans on the site in fluent Maya, taught us to say Becha Bel, which means hi, and also told us that the thatched roofs lasted from ten to twelve years (compared to the 20 years of Roberto). He proudly put the number of ethnic groups in Mexico at 49, whereas we still believed there were 68.

Mexico is of course the place chewing gum (chicle) is originally from. The Wrigley company made a fortune by adding lots of sugar and selling it worldwide, until they finally discovered an artificial way to produce it, but here real chicle is still available on trees. Arsenio squatted down under a chicle tree and showed us how to squeeze the white stuff from a little nut thing, stir it on a leaf, and produce white chewing gum. Later, when we visited his native village, a nice American girl handed out little pieces of white Wrigley's to the little brown children, not having understood Arsenio's explanations and not noticing apparently that their parents, and indeed some of the children themselves, were already busy chewing the real stuff and had to spit it out to dutifully munch on the foreign product.

The visit to the village, Chanchen, apparently one the few traditional Mayan villages still keeping to the ancient ways, was very instructive. There are 25 families, all with a dozen children, married at 15 or 16, and they live in a sort of collective, completely self-sufficient, one family specializing in growing corn, another in basket weaving, another growing herbs, etc. They trade among themselves to get what they need. This of course is slightly at odds with what Susana had told us about there being no agriculture, which we had had a hard time believing anyway. We asked about schools for the children. When Arsenio was growing up, there were none, he said (he seemed to be about 30 years old). We learned from the elders, from all this (waving his hand around to indicate the trees, the houses, the stones). But now there is a primary school, yes. But it isn't mandatory. In fact, as he'd told us, no one in the village spoke any Spanish. The women tried to sell us a few dresses, but communicated in gestures and Mayan which we couldn't understand.

One of the nice things about the guides was the jokes they told. Jokes told by guides can be very bad, but these people were really funny, so much so that we wondered at one point if they didn't all subscribe to some distribution list of funny things to say to tourists, although it's true they all seemed to have different jokes. Roberto said, as we drove past the cathedral in Valladolid: The people on the right side of the bus can look up and see the façade which was built in the 17th Century. The people on the left side of the bus can look over and see the people on the right side looking up at the façade. Arsenio showed us a large iguana on a tree, saying it was a male. It's easy to tell, he said. The males move their head in a nodding motion, up and down. The females move their heads from side to side. He showed us a Mayan papyrus (Roberto had told us that papyrus was Egyptian, whereas Mayans used tree bark), with a hierarchical set of pictures of the people, priests at the top, then nobles, then the higher professions like astronomers, then the middle class, carpenters, traders, tour guides... and finally the slaves and the agricultural workers. Not all the jokes were funny of course. Susana showed us an ancient stone structure that looked as if it was about to fall over. You may wonder why it's like that, she said. It's just that we Mexicans love tequila. This was one of the lamest tequila jokes, of which there were many.

Pictures of the visits can be found on this page.