The Mayan Civilization

The Maya built enormous and elaborate stone temples, stela, and other stone structures within their cities. It was unknown for some time how exactly they managed to quarry and move these large stones due to the fact at the time it was not known what tools they possessed or how they were transported because the Maya did not use the wheel. Many of the large structures in ancient Maya cities in Central America were constructed from limestone blocks. It was important to determine the process by which the Maya built these structures, and the effort put forth, in order to estimate the labor force, the overall population in the area, the resources used, and how the environment was affected. James C. Woods and Gene L. Titmus from the Herrett Museum, working with the RAINPEG (Regional Archaeological Investigations in the Northern Peten, Guatemala) Project set out to known Mayan quarries, such as Nakbe, to investigate how these limestone blocks were quarried. Woods and Titmus found a large amount of broken, flaked stone bifaces that they concluded were used to cut and shape the limestone blocks. The two replicated their hypothesis about the cutting process by testing it with similar bifaces hafted on spears, which cut the limestone fairly easily. Thus, in the process of testing discovered their resulting toolmarks matched almost exactly to that of those in the ancient Maya quarries. They continued to repeat their process for several stones so to roughly calculate the labor, resources, and time required to construct the huge Maya structures. After their calculations were reviewed they came to the conclusion that a work force of nearly one thousand working half of each year over a period of up to four centuries would have been necessary to pr...

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...ke pattern, raising the fields out of the water and creating canals between them. The soil dredged from the canals was then recycled by adding it to the fields to maintain their fertility. These same canals were colonized by turtles and fish, which supplied the Maya with another food source. They Maya did extensively use the swidden system, but in addition also used a number of wild resources, such as deer and fruits for food. This balanced use of various techniques provided a unified system that was highly productive and worked well without destroying the rainforests. Our understanding of Maya agriculture is still incomplete, but more and more aspects are being uncovered due to the work of archaeologists and other various scientists (Sutton 354-355).

Works Cited

Mark Q. Sutton Archaeology: The Science of the Human Past, 4th Edition

Charles Phillips Aztec & Maya