...What Happened to the Mayan Civilization Abstract This essay explores two possibilities or theories, as to why the Mayan civilization eventually collapsed. While many theories surround this phenomenon, there is no distinct conclusion as to what exactly happened to the Mayan culture. However, archeologists have been able to attain some evidence, which has aided them to an approximation of time as to when the Mayan culture began its collapse or downfall. As the Mayan culture settled in an area where most human civilizations would normally find unsuitable or inhabitable, the Mayan people found ingenious ways to survive this harsh environment, and eventually prosper for many centuries. Unfortunately, as this rapidly growing culture became more advanced and powerful, struggle for more power and resources from different city-states caused the Mayans to frequently and viciously go to war with each other. Self destruction- a high probability! On the other hand, as the environment suffered a long period of drought, the absence of water supply hindered the Mayans to the basic necessities of life. With basic resources running low (especially lack of water supply), one can see why the Mayans warred among themselves, which would eventually cause their own extinction, and furthermore, why famine became so widespread. This is why these two particular theories regarding the collapse of the Mayan civilization are the most compelling to me. What Happened To The Mayan Civilization Warmongering...
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...The Mystery behind the End of Mayan Civilization Vanessa Espinoza Professor Perry World Cultures I Strayer University Mayan Mystery Civilizations all over, rose to become strong, powerful nations and descended due to many reasons. One civilization in particular, is the Mayans. The Mayan Empire began around 1800 B.C and lasted until around 900 A.D. Located in tropical environments, in what is now known as the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize and parts of México. The Mayan people were known for their advance levels of mathematics, astronomy, and they develop a calendar system based on 365 days that we use in present day. The Mayan people also created many elaborate cities with stoned pyramids that partially remain intact today. How can a great nation, who developed a complex system, and flourish for many centuries, just disappear; leaving many questions unanswered? What happened to the Mayans? This is one mystery that has many people asking questions about what happened to a large number of people without wondering if this could ever happen again. Two theories that could explain what happened to the Mayan people are: drought and climate changes lead to the demised of the Mayan culture, and/or warfare from neighboring cities or foreign invaders caused the Mayans to become extinct. Scientist Martin Medina-Elizalde and Eelco Rohling believe that the climate changes affected the rainfall causing droughts. Many others believe that invaders from other countries...
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...The Mystery behind the End of Mayan Civilization World Cultures I Mayan Mystery Civilizations all over, rose to become strong, powerful nations and descended due to many reasons. One civilization in particular, is the Mayans. The Mayan Empire began around 1800 B.C and lasted until around 900 A.D. Located in tropical environments, in what is now known as the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize and parts of México. The Mayan people were known for their advance levels of mathematics, astronomy, and they develop a calendar system based on 365 days that we use in present day. The Mayan people also created many elaborate cities with stoned pyramids that partially remain intact today. How can a great nation, who developed a complex system, and flourish for many centuries, just disappear; leaving many questions unanswered? What happened to the Mayans? This is one mystery that has many people asking questions about what happened to a large number of people without wondering if this could ever happen again. Two theories that could explain what happened to the Mayan people are: drought and climate changes lead to the demised of the Mayan culture, and/or warfare from neighboring cities or foreign invaders caused the Mayans to become extinct. Scientist Martin Medina-Elizalde and Eelco Rohling believe that the climate changes affected the rainfall causing droughts. Many others believe that invaders from other countries or cities over powered the Mayans. Climate changes If invaders...
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...Could you imagine the whole United States just disappearing? That is what happened to the Mayans. In a time span of only one hundred years the whole Maya population was wiped out, there are several theories about what the cause for this decline was. What anthropologists do know for sure is that the Mayans were an ancient mesoamerican civilization dating back to 250 B.C “made up of more than 19 million people”(smithsonian.com). Their empire centered in the tropical lowlands of what is now Guatemala. The Maya people reached their peak of power around the 6th century A.D. The Mayans were successful in many ways; History.com, a website dedicated to informing the public about important historical information, states, “The Maya excelled at agriculture,...
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...The Fall of the Mayan Empire Naomi M. Cranfield Prof. Hunsucker Hum 111 February 2, 2013 The Maya civilization was several independent city states which shared a cultural heritage of language, customs, dress, artistic style and material culture. They were located in the Central American continent, to include parts of Belize, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. It was an area of approximately 150,000 square miles. Some of the better known city states were Tikal, Calakmul, Caracol and Dos Pilas. There were several strong kings at those locations, but none of them ever truly conquered the others. The city states traded with one another, and they also warred with one another from time to time. The population has been estimated to have been millions. In the 1600s, the Spanish reported that there were approximately 600,000 people living in the Yucatan peninsula alone. Each of the larger cities probably had populations in excess of 100,000. That doesn't count the rural sectors that supported the larger cities. But what happened to such a large culture that they seemed to have disappeared in such a short span of time? There have been so many concepts as to why the Maya civilization fell, but one of the more interesting and in my opinion more plausible beliefs has to do with a severe change in climate. ("The rise and," 2004) “Tom Sever, NASA's only archeologist, has been using satellites to examine the Mayan ruins. Combining those data with conventional down-in-the-dirt...
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...Disappearance of the Mayan Civilization The disappearance of the Mayan Civilization has always been a very interesting mystery to me. What happened to the Mayan people? This question has baffled many scientists, researchers, as well as historians since they disappeared of the face of the earth it seems. NASA-funded researchers believe that the Mayans themselves are responsible for their own extinction. The Mayans were supposedly a great culture that constructed pyramids and pavilions throughout Mesoamerica beginning around A.D.300 and disappearing around A.D. 900 (Harvey, D.A. 1977). By around A.D. 900, the Mayan civilization was in steep decline. New building stopped and the pyramids and ball courts were gradually abandoned to the jungle. Around this time the lowland population dropped by around 90 percent. There has been a lot of debate about what caused the collapse of the classic-era Mayan culture. Research by Stuart and Harvey (1977) suggests that the burdens of ritual warfare between city-states became too much or that a great epidemic decimated the population. Usually cultures will slowly become extinct as a result of numerous battles and many times from famine. However the Mayans simply disappeared as a culture. Researchers believe that Mayans were in harmony with their environment, but they made common mistakes as does most other cultures. Deforesting of the land and vegetation caused suffering for the Mayan people in that they could not find food and...
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...I will tell you how similar and how different the Mayan religion is and one of the American religion. I will tell you what god’s or god they believed in. I will also tell you what they believed about their religion. I will also tell you some over thing about the Mayans and the Americans. Thats what im going to tell you about the American and the Mayan religion. The Mayan believed in the the Gods from their bible called the Popol Vuh one example of a God is the Sun God aka the God of Corn. The Mayan also did sacrifices to honor the Gods to keep the Mayan away from war, floods and over things to hurt the Mayan community which the sacrifices didn't help because all those things happened. They also did sacrifices to keep the sun rising because...
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...| Disappearance of the Mayan Civilization | | | Jerome A Brown Jr. | 2/4/2013 | | No one can say for certain what happened to the Mayan people, but theories abound and include varied possible alternatives to explain the abrupt and mysterious disappearance of the Mayan civilization. Many historians have questioned “how” or “why” the Mayan civilization disappeared after the 10th century; however there is no definitive answer to this question. One possible theory is the Mayan’s civilization grew to such an extent that they deforested so much of the region that it had significant climate changes, thereby forcing the Mayan people to immigrate to other regions (Server, 2004), this theory has some scientific background, and scientists have used satellites to study the topsoil of Central America. They found that right before the civilization collapse, the sediment had changed from tree pollen to weed pollen, suggesting there were no more trees in the area. The result of a treeless environment is the erosion of fertile topsoil, warmer climate, and a possible reduction of precipitation. Since the Mayans depended on water reservoirs from precipitation, this would have had a detrimental effect. Another theory surrounding the disappearance of the Mayan people is consistent droughts that took place preceding the tenth century and the reduction of civilization through various wars caused the Mayan civilization to dwindle down to virtual extinction...
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...The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life gave me insights to a lot of the belief systems the Mayans had back then. What I found really intriguing was that they had a story to explain how everything was. For example, something that really stood out to me was that the reason the rat has no hair in its tail is because Hunahpu and Xbalanque burned it because the animals were messing with their garden. Additionally, according to the book the rat’s eyes are the way they are because the boys were squeezing its head in order to get more information about their father. I could see how the Mayans could use this book as their “bible”, just like some religions do today to explain why life is a certain way. Another thing that really intrigue me was that there was a lot of similarities between the bible’s stories and the stories told in this book. For instance, the flood that killed all the mannequins or wood people is similar to...
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...Mayan Webquest http://ancientmayawebquest.weebly.com/index.html Gathering Questions 1. The ancient Maya were the only people in the Pre-Columbian America to develop what? hieroglyphics 2. Mesoamerica is considered by historians and archaeologists as one of the "well-springs" of civilization. What are some other "well-springs"? 3. What are the 3 major periods archaeologists have separated Maya history into? 4. What are the approximate years of the 3 periods? 5. What happened to the Maya as a people? the Maya Empire consisted of a number of powerful city-states spreading from southern Mexico to northern Honduras. 6. Where were the Maya primarily living? (In what modern-day countries?) 7. Name some of the more famous Maya sites 8. What are Maya "Codices"? folding books stemming from the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, 9. Why are there only 4 Maya codices today? What happened to the rest? 10. What mathematical milestone did the Maya achieve (that the Greeks and Romans did not?) 11. What is obsidian and what did the Maya use it for? 12. Who was "Pacal the Great"? He was king of the Maya kingdom of Palenque. Analysis Stage (3-5 sentence minimum response) 1. Briefly describe the term epigraphy. identifying graphemes clarifying their meaning classifying their uses according to dates and culture context. 2. Who was Linda Schele and what was her contribution to Mayan epigraphy? Linda Schele was an expert in the field of maya epigraphy. 3. Who is...
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...things in common.The comparisons and differences about the 3 different groups. The comparisons and differences that will be throughout the essay is the Economy,technology and lastly government. Economy First the differences for the Maya is that they had their own prized possession. The possession that the Mayans traded was called Jade, they also carved humans (like gods and animals).The gods helped the Maya trade. Jade was a rare gemstone. The Maya traded goods with people living to the South for jade. Also The economy was based on trade. They participated in long distant trade. Wealthy merchants traveled further. What the Aztecs difference is that they fished a lot more than the other two groups. They fished for abundant crayfish. Lastly...
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...No one can say for sure know what happened to the Mayan people and their civilization, but there are many theories that are out there that were researched by scientist and theologians. The first theory, which was researched by Jared Diamond an American evolutionary biologist, would be that the cities of the Mayans got over populated and the natural resources may have been stretched to the breaking point. The second theory was due to the climate, the drought and the rainfall. Penn State anthropologist Dr. Douglas Kennett stated that, researchers have concluded that the climate change overturned the long-term wet weather pattern in Yucatan Peninsula and Central America to severe famine (T, Internationl Busniess, 2012). Many researchers thought that the drought and the lack of rainfall were what wiped out the Mayan Civilization. David Hodell a geologist from the University of Florida feels that the impacting drought could have been due to the changing position of the sun, as finding from the lake the team selected for their study (T, Internationl Busniess, 2012). Between 660 and 100CE, the climate change shared dying trend with less rainfall and long droughts. Numerous studies have shown that there were many prolonged droughts around the time of the civilizations decline. Gerald Haug, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, found it worse than that. He did a year by year reconstruction of the lake sediments and it showed that the rainfall was abundant from 550 to...
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...Theories Behind the Disappearance of the Mayan Civilization Travis Epling Prof. Aprile Castagna Cappuzzo Introduction to Humanities 2 May 2014 Theories Behind the Disappearance of the Mayan Civilization There are many theories behind the decline of the Mayan Civilization. They range from over-population, war, famine, immigration, deforestation, climate change, and even aliens. When we say the disappearance of the Mayans we do not mean that the culture completely disappeared, we are talking about and extreme reduction in population. Tom Server believes as much as 90 to 95 percent of the population. Many of the major bustling cities of the Mayan Empire such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan were simply abandoned for, what appears to be, no reason. Many of these theories have been debunked over time with the development of new science technology that allows for more thorough of investigations of these ancient civilizations. The first theory we will visit will be the affects of deforestation which also encompasses part of the climate change theory. NASA archaeologist, Tom Sever(2004) states that , “The Mayan civilization in Mesoamerica was one of the densest populations in human history”. He believes that the population during the height of the Mayan Empire would have been between 1800 and 2600 people per square mile. In 2000, the population density of Los Angeles was around 2300 for a comparison. The extreme amount of people living in the area would have put...
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...become popular？ 1. The Mayan calendar says sun era will end on December 21, 2012. Many believers believe that the end of December 21, 2012 is the end of the world: a wandering planet will impact the earth, thus the whole world will be destroyed. According to ancient Mayan calendar, 2012’s winter solstice marks a 144000 days of the end of the cycle. This period began in the legendary Maya creation day, already repeated 12 times. And 13 times will come to an end in 2012, to complete a full 5200 creation cycle. There is a very short time before the end of the world coming; the rumor has become the hot topic of fiction films and television programs 2. Hollywood films and social network blow up the rumor of the end of the world: People’s fanaticism to "eschatology" stem from the Hollywood disaster film "2012". In the film, the Mayan prophecy: in the December 21, 2012, the fifth sun age coming, the sun will disappear, and the earth will violent shake, then the earth will be destroyed. Why do people so trust Mayan prophecy? Because of the mysterious Mayans were very proficient in astronomical figures. As early as 3000 years ago, they accurately calculated the time about revolution of the earth and running of other stars. The accuracy even surprised modern scientists 3. Frequent natural disasters increase people’s concern: The earth goes into seismic active period, so some people’s end guesses also warm up. On March 11, 2011, level 9.0 earthquake happened in Japan, triggering a tsunami...
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...of his village. It happened during the declining period of the Mayan tribe. In this movie, the Mayan society is in its breaking period, thus needing resources in order to support their social, political and spiritual needs. So, in order for them to survive, they need to scour hectares of forests to locate any valuable resources either from trees, caves, destroyed societies or plundering any weak societies around them. To know what kind of social theory it actually depicts, we need to look first in the different aspects of their society. In their social aspects, men are born to fight and rule while women are born to be slaves; therefore, males are important in this society. Men are used to hunt for the resources that were said earlier and they are dominant in this society. Without them, the society is nothing. In their political aspect, governing the tribe has a relation to their beliefs. Politics and Religion are fused together here because of the high priest and the emperor being partners in ruling the entire kingdom. They are responsible for the whole kingdom’s survival of the people and their beliefs. In their declining period, they emphasizes conflict theory because of their need to search resources by salvaging any other societies in order to support their needs. Dominant societies plunder smaller ones to survive so that no one will ever take away their resources or they will be used as resources. These characteristics are being resembled by the Mayans through its people...
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