Insight Guides Staff - Guatemala, Belize and Yucatan - Insight Guides

Introduction: The Maya World

The magnificent architecture and cultural brilliance of the ancient Maya are attracting a growing tide of visitors.

Three thousand years ago, the early Maya were already well established in the region, settling in numbers in the Mirador Basin, as well as along the Pacific coast between Mexico and El Salvador. They concentrated on farming, developing intensive agriculture techniques, and made rudimentary pottery. The first stone civic and religious buildings were erected around 750 BC in the heart of the region at Nakb, close to the modern borders where Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize meet today.

Gradually these settlements expanded and flourished, and formed a loosely connected network of city-states centered around groups of awesome temple-pyramids, decorated with fine murals and carved stelae. The ruins at Chichn Itz, Uxmal, Palenque, Copn, Tikal, Calakmul, and El Mirador are some of the most impressive archeological remains in the Americas.

Maya civilization

The Maya were the masters, or rather the worshipers, of time. Every day and every daily routine, from the birth of a child to the planting of a crop, had its sacred procedure. Even royal marriages and wars would be planned around propitious dates in the calendar, when the appropriate deity was in ascendance in the heavens.

And then suddenly, sometime around AD 900, the whole Maya civilization collapsed, almost a chain reaction that saw every major city deserted throughout the region. Magnificent temples and palaces were desecrated or were abandoned to the encroaching jungle. The priestly hierarchy fell from grace and the people dispersed. Theories explaining this tragic end are still being offered: drought, invasion, or epidemic disease. Recent studies indicate that over-exploitation of land created an environmental collapse, a theory that has been backed up by strong evidence at Copn in Honduras, one of the best studied of all the Maya sites.

One fallacy should be exposed, however. The Maya as a people did not disappear. More than 6 million still live in Guatemala alone. They are still spread over a similar territory as during the peak of their culture, and many still maintain the same beliefs and traditions as their ancestors. Others, however, have become assimilated into modern society. The Spanish Conquest and subsequent historical upheavals have decimated their numbers and hounded many more into cultural submission.

The terror returned between the late 1960s and the 1980s in Guatemala, with a vicious civil war between the state and guerrilla armies one of the bloodiest periods of the regions history. Many thousands of Maya villagers died, and human rights investigators are still working to establish the truth.

People and cultures

Latino (ladino) culture dominates the Maya region, and competes with the USA for cultural hegemony. Influence from the rest of the Latin world is very evident, especially its music. You will be lambasted with rhythms from all over the continent in the buses, bars, and clubs as merengue tunes from the Dominican Republic, salsa from Colombia, reggaetn from Puerto Rico, and Hispanic hip-hop from California add lyrical joy, sorrow, and social comment to everyday life.

The regions elite is largely of white, European origin and concentrated within a select group of families. Sometimes called criollos , this oligarchy retains ties with Spain, but also increasingly with Miami and the USAs Latino diaspora.

Indigenous Maya culture is much less flamboyant, and in traditional villages dancing is something that is reserved for fiestas. The musical soundtrack is above all the hauntingly hypnotic melodies of the xylophone-like marimba.

The third important cultural leverage is from the Caribbean, and in most of the Central American coastal towns the offshore influence is very evident. In Belize thunderous reggae bass lines direct from Jamaica shake the dancehall, while the inimitably reflective wit and harmonies of Trinidadian calypso fill the airwaves.