Maya Expert Answers Maya Civilization Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Dr. Ed Barnhard, let's answer some

questions

from the Internet. This is the Mayan

support

in Bill Ren. The music asks why the Mayans tied boards to their babies' heads. The Mayans put boards on their babies' heads to shape their skulls. Babies' heads are very soft and they put those boards there to make it elongate toward the top. We think what they were trying to do is make the skull look more like a corn husk because the Mayans of course were corn people, only elite people were allowed to squeeze their baby's neck. heads this way and in public a head and an adult that looked more pointed that openly meant that that person was of high status.

I always thought there must be Mayan peasants who were secretly squeezing their children's heads and I'm just saying, I don't know, he just grew up like that, he seems to be going places, doesn't he in ssj? Sergio says I appreciate the indigenous representation in Black Panther, but kulan, a literal Mayan deity who takes a big L from a 19-year-old. old lady, come on, he could have taken her, let her go, that's what heroes really do. Kulon is the Mayan word for ketal coad or the Feathered Serpent and his costume was direct, but Kul Khan was known not only for his power but also for his wisdom, his Grace and his good government, this character was right and I can say that a my Mayan friends really liked him so he hit the mark with real Mayan people and in astronic he asks why the Mayans made their calendar look like an Oreo from the beginning, it's not even the Mayan calendar, it's the Aztec calendar.

The stone is also called Aztec cosmology. The Mayan stone also had that 260-day calendar that we see in the Aztec calendar. Airing. Now you may wonder why 260 days are 260 days. N9 months is the human gestation period it is our first cycle from conception to birth no other

civilization

on the planet did this and I think it is a particularly beautiful and unique cycle for humans the Mayans made the most elaborate calendar system they use in the ancient world typically five different cycles just to tell you what day it is they tell us the lunar cycle they were definitely obsessed with time one of the original archaeologists in the area J Eric Thompson said they are just esoteric worshipers of time because clearly the texts were mainly about about time cycles in Nick Bloom asks what the first clothes were Trend maybe Mayan sandals I bet those things were in fashion back in the day well they made some cool sandals that's right we can see them in ceramic pots like this one this guy , TRUE?

They have a nice deal at the top here. Her entire wardrobe is great. She has a jade skirt. It has this hatch pattern. They wear tunics. The Mayans were stylish in super powerful armor. Ask anyone else angry because the Mayans were wrong and the world. Ends in 2012 H no, I personally like to continue here, it turns out that the Mayans are talking about a starting day of their calendar in the year 3.14 14 BC, specifically August 13, they say it is the last day of the third creation . and the beginning of the fourth creation, so if we do the math and like your car's odometer the last time the calendar changed and reset, we move our odometer forward from 3114 BC.

C. and we arrive at the year 2012, specifically on December 21, that is where we arrive. That 2012 12 thing for people like me who review texts related to the Mayan calendar, there are some key texts that make it clear that it won't be in 2012, it will be in the year 4,772 in Tigerwood, it sucks, ask how the Mayans are doing. and the Aztecs equally well, the Mayans and the Aztecs share many similarities the Aztecs were an empire the Mayans were independent city states the Aztecs focused a lot on war of conquest and sacrifice the Mayans didn't really sacrifice that much did they self sacrifice the Kings actually bled in public as an act of protecting the people and to please the gods?

The dogs move in silence and ask what the Mayans did for fun. They had a sport they loved. We simply call it the Mayan ball game. Some people call it Poca, we can thank the Mayans for making rubber, but they didn't make it to last and their underwear was made for play. They made balls like this. I made this ball with rubber latex. trees and the sulfur from morning glory seeds used balls much larger than these and built real sports fields. From above they look like a capital letter, so they had a lane in the middle and there was a center line. and then two places out of bounds and the teams would face each other on the center line and bounce these giant, hard super balls off a slanted wall back and forth, like they were tennis balls or a volleyball trick, but no.

They could touch them with their hands. or their feet, they had to use their hips or their chest. Some versions of the ball string also had rings on each side and if you passed it through the ring it was game over, 3500 years ago was when this game started when they arrived. For the Aztecs, each Aztec city had its own football team, as the main bosses are the Dallas Cowboys. Sometimes when two cities argued, instead of going to war, they could settle it through a ball game, they had large crowds watching and especially rich people. They were able to sit nearby and it was their job to throw things like jewelry Treasures, things that were gifts for the winning team, if a rich person tried to run away right before the game ended the team had the right to run them over and attack them. and take away their jewelry, it is not true that the winners of the Mayan ball game were sacrificed, it would be quite difficult to find good players in Terrace West, ask who was sacrificed to the Mayan gods, it was mostly people.

They were warriors captured in some kind of ceremonial battle, they went to these little wars that were kind of elites against elites, they stabbed them in the leg and dragged them back to be sacrificed on top of an Aztec temple. sacrificed almost anyone in mdv Nasser asks if a young schoolboy really found a lost Mayan city or just a field. A boy in Canada about 16 years old was using Mayan maps and codes and identified what he believed was a Mayan city now in that city. In reality, it wasn't what he thought it was, but there is real potential to find Mayan cities and now with the advent of the liar, we are finding them faster than ever.

Google Earth is updated all the time and as people move into it. areas of the jungle and cut down the trees, suddenly revealing these temples, what I tend to look for are irregular or unnatural geometric shapes or arrangements. Mayan pyramids are usually arranged in groups around plazas, so if you see a hill with a square in front of it and two other square hills around it, there's a good chance it's actually man-made. The city I found I think I called masna was in the 1990s so I didn't have the pleasure of all this great new

tech

nology I used. a topographic map I looked at the area and I asked myself if I were Mayan where I would want to live so I looked for the highest mountain in the area when I found that I saw two small mountains right next to it and I immediately said the bat in my apartment in Austin, Texas, yes I was Mayan, I would build a city there and two years later, after hacking there with the gang and machetes, I was right there, standing on top of a 70 foot tall pyramid looking down. square with a ball string was something I never really thought would happen to me CU.

I was only 25 years old and this was supposed to be my life's goal in some way. I stood on the top of that temple and said well. God, what am I going to do now in Wayward? Jim asks, at least the Mayans' money really grew on trees. You mean cocoa of course, chocolate beans and yes the Mayans used them at least as a standard in their barter system. They are easy to dry and carry They are small When the Aztecs used it as currency There was also a fake ring There were people who made small ceramic seeds and made them look like chocolate beans when they were really fakes and they were Aztec police who walked around the market looking for counterfeiters and they burst them with their ceramic beans.

Chocolate was the drink of the elite. It was a pleasure. It was something they made foam. They put chili in it. Never sugar. It was a spicy drink. It was only grown in the Mayan area. It was something about that tropical forest that allowed the cocoa grew chocolate in Ole wua asks the chronological period of my

civilization

, in reality you could go back 10,000 years, but it is something that seems nice to us. All the conservatives agree that it would be 2,000 years, so the Mayan world really begins, then we get to the year 200 AD, their current era, that's when we really have the classic Mayan civilization, they start building their giant cities in the jungles of northern Guatemala.

The classic continues for a full 400 years, we have dynasties of kings, we have fully elaborate hieroglyphics and they tell us their story, they carve it into monuments that continue until about 800 AD. and a very short period begins that we call the classic terminal. the transition, everyone is moving through the cities are being abandoned, new ones are starting, but it is set in the final period and the postclassical period goes from around the year 900 to the time of Spanish contact somewhere around the year 1500, maybe even a little earlier in JP. njiru asks what the difference is between the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids.

On the one hand, the pyramid found on the Giza plateau is the tallest pyramid on the planet, it is 150 m high, the tallest Mayan pyramid is approximately 68 m, so only a third of that size for the Egyptians . They built those pyramids from the beginning, built specifically as tombs, the Mayans, the kings would use the temple in their lifetime and then when they died the temple would be modernized, excavated and their tomb would be placed inside when it comes to who built the most of the pyramids. mayia Excel Virtually everyone on the planet has seen all the Egyptian pyramids, there are around 140 of them that we will not find anymore.

The Mayans built thousands of pyramids and there are definitely thousands more hidden under the jungle, so if one culture owns the name and right to Pyramid Builder it is the Mayans, not the Egyptians in r King Wood asks what tools the Mayans used. The Mayans were not a metal-using culture. None of their tools were made of metal when it came to building things like their temple tools. They were made of church, we also call it flint, it is a harder stone and they would shape it into axes and those axes could cut the softer limestone into any shape they wanted for a finer cut.

They used obsidian. Obsidian is a volcanic glass that never turns opaque. i took pieces of obsidian from a dig and cut my finger on the glass, it lasts forever and is very very sharp in fg1 1133 question: do you think aliens helped the aztec and

maya

n empires? No, if they did, we would have all kinds. of evidence of

tech

nologies cooler than stone and temples. I really feel like a question in that sense is once again belittling the abilities of people who didn't originate from Western society, so no, I think they did it on their own on Android.

Pharaoh asks King pakal. He is a former alien astronaut. The lid of King Pakal's sarcophagus shows the man leaning backwards surrounded by glyphs and symbols. What do you see when you look at that well? I definitely don't see an alien spaceship. What I see is King Pakal at the moment of death of him falling. the world tree into the skeletal jaws of the underworld where he will descend and eventually rise to meet his ancestors and the gods in heaven pakal was the most important king in the history of the city of pelen in which he became king he died at the age of 12 at the venerable age of 80 but he brought that city to its peak his sarcophagus is honoring the greatest King in the history of pan and it is not a spaceship in D Perry 9113 asks in your opinion what is the The best Mayan ruin, Pen Pelen, is definitely my favorite Mayan ruin and it's because I spent a lot of time there.

I spent three years of my life making a site map. Anything in Orange is a building we have actually excavated or researched all the buildings. In Gray, archeology has never touched, so you can see how little we've excavated of this city, there were probably less than 10,000 people living there at any one time, but despite that small population, it was the heyday of engineering. of Mayan scientific and artistic knowledge. They made a kind of coral arch and a kind of cement that was stronger than anywhere else in the Mayan world. One of the great buildings on this site is the palace.

It has a three-story tower. Nowhere else in the Mayan world has something like this been attempted. tower and in a testament to how well they did it it still stands today that city was abandoned 12,200 years ago and yet the tower lasted all those rainy seasons and has not settled more than 2 cmin a thousand years in Ross Sandlands asks if indigenous people in North America have any type of writing like that developed by the Mayans. Yes, there were certainly other writings, especially in Mesoamerica, the zapex thex, but no one did it like the Mayans. The distinctive characteristic of Mayan writing is that it reflects the spoken word.

There are actually symbols that mean sounds. This is a section of a page from one of our four surviving Mayan books. Their writing system was one of only four in the entire history of the world that was an original writing system and we have the Mesopotamian, which In the CA form, we have Egyptian Chinese writing, those are our four, but the Mayans are distinguished in all of the Americas as the only civilization that did so on this side of the world. Each of these glyphs is a word and is usually divided into syllables. the first symbol here that looks like a comb that's the word ooh here these up say ma this says C so they're both combinations of vowel syllables so um Makadespelt umak what's your burial this is death God these are telling us if it's a good day or a bad day to do something it's a good day to plant my corn or it's a bad day and this first glyph here that says or its burial is a kind of ISM Mayan collo to say no, it's a bad day to do that and the bars and the dots here are the different days, these are the names of the days and they take a long strip of bark from a tree and then they fold it up like an accordion, then they paint it with limestone paste and stucco, they open everything up and maybe a book is 10 feet long, they turn it over and read the other side and then they pick it up accordion style and put it down. back in their suitcases in Trish King 6 asks what does Mayan sound like we have the great benefit of having millions of Mayans still speaking their language on the planet the largest of those language groups is the Yucatech Mayan and there are around 5 million people who speak Yucatech If you'd like to hear a good example of this, I'd recommend the somewhat dubious movie Apocalypto, here's some of that.

In fact, they made an effort to get the actors to talk. Real Maya, there are a series of sounds they will make. that have a stop at the end TZ apostrophe and that's the Yucch Mayan word for fire is and that's K Apostrophe a k apostrophe one thing that Apocalypto exaggerated was human sacrifice that was really a thing of the Aztecs when the Mayans met the Aztecs , I suppose. They delved a little deeper into human sacrifice, but scenes of people being murdered one after another on top of Mayan temples is not how the Mayans filmed at the Rat Lab Museum.

It makes you wonder how the ancient Mayans built such large cities far away. of the lakes or the Tial rivers is a great example, there are no rivers near Tial, but what they did was extract all the stone they needed to build the city, the quarries became reservoirs, they covered them with stucco, so They were like giant swimming pools, the plazas between the In the temples they lashed them only a degree, so with every rain that fell, all those plazas channeled water into their reservoirs, which he calls Kings. They love to put water on their headdresses, in a way that the Mayans have always sensed if the water is fresh enough. lies are a very fragile plant if the water is contaminated they do not grow there so if there is water on the surface it is pure water when I made the map of bread I could see that there was a sewage system running through the neighborhoods that they passed through using gravity, probably It also had makeshift toilets that drew fresh water from above and sent the gray water down and into the larger river system, far away from the city.

Rob Law wants to know brother, how did the Mayans discover the stars? Ancient astronomy is what we call horizon-based. A priest stood in one place every night and watched what rose and set, what day it rose and set, and where on the horizon it set. If you did that over and over again you would begin to recognize the cycles of the planets, the moon and the sun, an astronomer could spend his entire life recording cycles and then pass that data on to the Next Generation and after a few Generations they became very Good at that, the ancient Mayans also oriented their buildings to interact with the cycles. del Sol, the most famous of them is El Castillo and Chichin Chichin has this great pyramid in the middle and it is oriented just so that at the equinox, when the sun sets, the shadow of its terraces is projected on the balustrade of one of its stairs.

The shadows look like the undulating body of a snake descending the stairs with a gentle touch. 25 ask anyone here in xland who understands

maya

n mathematics. Yes the Mayans had only three symbols, they had a dot meaning one, they had a slash meaning five and then They had the all important zero as a shell for zero, but they could also use a flower so if you wanted to write the number seven you would use a colon, one, one and then a five. Let's say we want to add the numbers three plus 5. that would be eight the way we would write it, but that eight has nothing to do with three and five, but look when you do that in Maya, if I take three, which is three dots and I add five to it, which is a bar, it becomes a bar with three dots on top of it.

It is this real symbol plus this real symbol is equal to the eight symbol. The Mayans managed to make a more elegant mathematical system than that of the Western world. is so proud, M Brianna asks, but where do the Mayans go? Actually the Mayans are still here, by my calculations there are around 15 million Mayans still on the planet. Yes, they said the contact was pursued. Their culture ended in many ways and 12 infectious diseases wiped out probably 90% of them, but their community continues and has grown. In fact, for the last 500 years, many of the Mayans live here in the United States, in the corner convenience store.

If that nice little Mexican woman is less than 5'2, she's probably Mayan. There is a big misunderstanding about The Disappearance of the Mayans about 700 years earlier, when the Classic Period Mayans abandoned their cities, moved away, didn't die, didn't disappear, weren't picked up by aliens, so those are all the

questions

for today, Thanks for joining me. mayan

support