The Maya: Civilization is Found in the New World

By Earl Hunsinger

From the time the first Europeans landed in the new world, the native peoples were viewed as primitive savages. While the hundreds of distinct cultures that they encountered in the Americas were certainly different from anything they had left behind in Europe, it could be argued from numerous standpoints that these cultures were not primitive in the sense of being crude or simple. Sadly, for some, the Eurocentric view of the simple savage of that time has persisted down to our day. Books, movies, and television shows have contributed to this stereotype. Consider, though, just one example of the rich and complex cultures that once existed in this part of the world—an example of a civilization carved from the hot, humid jungles of Central America.

The ancient Maya have been called one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere. They were a people who first settled in the lowlands of what is now northern Guatemala perhaps a thousand years before Christ walked the earth. Their culture eventually covered what are now the countries of Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.

By 750 C.E., 80,000 people lived in Tikal, the largest of their cities, with 50,000 inhabitants in the second largest and dozens of other subordinate cities in the empire. This is especially impressive when you compare these numbers to London, which even by the 16th century only had about 50,000 inhabitants. The Maya were master stone carvers, building their cities and temples out of limestone and mortar. Ruins of these architectural accomplishments can be seen to this day, including visually impressive stepped pyramids reminiscent of ancient Egypt.

They also excelled in the fields of painting, pottery, sculpture, mathematics, and astronomy. They developed complex, highly accurate calendars and an advanced writing system that used more than 800 hieroglyphic characters. Only in the 20th century were scholars able to get a clear understanding of the meaning of these hieroglyphs, after realizing that they combined both symbols for words and symbols for sounds. In addition to carving inscriptions on stone slabs and pillars, the Maya used actual books. After sheets of paper were made from the inner bark of wild fig trees and folded together, they were covered with jaguar skin to form a book. Unfortunately for scholars, during the Spanish conquest of the 16th century, a Catholic Friar supervised the burning of hundreds of these books. Today only four are known to have survived.

The Maya people were very religious, worshipping a multitude of gods. At times their religious observances included body piercing. This included piercing the earlobes, lower extremities, and the tongue. Sacrifice was also an important part of their worship. "They frequently practiced it upon a variety of animals," writes Dr. Max Shein in his book The Precolumbian Child, "but the supreme sacrifice was that of human life. The victims of these rites were enemy soldiers and slaves, but also free-born children of both sexes."

So then, were the Maya primitive savages? The word "savage" can be defined as cruel or pitiless, and human sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of your own children, can certainly be considered cruel and pitiless. The same could be said for warfare, which was common among the Maya. Yet whether for religious, political, economic, racist, or other reasons, warfare and the wholesale killing of civilians are an integral part of the history of most of the world’s nations, extending down to our day.

The Maya were certainly not primitive savages in the sense of having a simple or crude culture. In many ways they deserve to be called one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere. Yet they were only one of the hundreds of unique peoples that early European explorers met when they reached the new world, peoples that in some cases varied as much from each other as they did from those of other lands.

This article gives only a brief overview of the ancient and complex Maya culture. To learn more about the Maya civilization, see "Romance versus Reality In the Ancient Maya Civilization" by Richard E. Adams, and the Smithsonian.com article, Secrets of the Maya: Deciphering Tikal.