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Maya
Architecture
See Dr.
Richard Hansen's Lecture in UFM, Preclassic Architecture, Mirador
Basin, Guatemala on Feb 5 2007
There has been
considerable discussion devoted to the question of the
alignment of Mesoamerican sites. In general the focus has
been upon the relationship of architectural features to
celestial phenomena which were important for
calendrical reasons, probably
related to
agriculture.
The Maya Architecture, as well as
their
Art, has been called
the richest of the New World
because of the great complexity of patterns and variety of media
expressions. Limestone structures, faced with lime stucco, were the
hallmark of ancient Maya architecture. Maya buildings were adorned with
carved friezes and roof combs in stone and stucco. With large quantities
of limestone and flint available,
 plaster and cement were easily
produced. This allowed the Mayans to build impressive temples, with
stepped pyramids. On the summits were thatched- roof temples, known as
"Triadic Groups". During the Classic, the Pyramid contained
one or two rooms with The Maya Arch and intricate Roof
combs, specially in
Tikal
and
Nakúm. They always build their cities and temples using
Astronomy mostly on an East to West alignment, but there are
some Early to Middle Pre Classic
examples of a Pleiades alignment in the
Pacific Lowlands at sites
such as:
Ujuxte,
Monte Alto and
Tak'alik Abaj.
The Vault and Arch was used also
in
Tombs, such as those in
Guaytán,
in the
eastern
Highlands and
Tikal or
Río Azul in the
Petén Lowlands.
Polol's
Preclassic Altar 1, and the absence of similar Cycle 7 monuments
in sites nearby, has generated speculation in regard to the
possibility of cyclical ritual destruction of monuments in the
Maya area. Whether the monument mutilation and destruction was a
cyclical ritual or not, other early
Petén
monuments in the have been found buried in the rubble of structures at
Tikal,
Uaxactún and
El Mirador.
What sets Altar 1 apart is that it was reset with a Late Classic
dedicatory cache in the context of Late Classic monuments and structures.
All the Maya cities were carefully planned in an East to West
orientation and with the major Temples forming a perfect
isocceles triangle, as has been documented in the
Preclassic Mirador Basin
as well as the Classic cities like
Tikal, Yaxhá,
Nakum, etc. The Olmecs by the way oriented their cities
North to South.
The Classic pyramids at
Tikal, in
Guatemala are turned to face
one another, and the rooms which are built at the top of the
pyramid have depressions in the stone walls that serve as
amplifiers of the voice which are broadcast in all directions.
At the top of the pyramid the Ahaw
acquired god-like qualities. The design of the Mayan architects
is expressed in its fullness. Due to the stone resonators, the
voice of a person at the top of one pyramid, speaking at a
normal volume, can be heard by another person standing at the
top of another pyramid some astonishing distance away. The
finishing touches of Stucco gave
the surface its full potential in the effect of reflecting and
transmitting the sound waves.
An essential material was the
Stucco (Luk' or Sas), that was
prepared with an organic adhesive extracted from the cortex of a
local tree named Holol, mixed with burned limestone, and
Sascab, a natural occurring mineral that does not need to be burned, for
mural paintings, this mixture was the inner layer and the
outer layer had a finer cooked Limestone mix with
Barita,
also a natural mineral that
is finer that the sascab. This mixture provided a long durability to the
decorations and paintings, as has been found in
San Bartolo, an important
finding, that support the recent discoveries in the
Mirador Basin, that the Pre Classic
Maya had fully developed the
Maya Culture, a millennium earlier
than previously thought. Previously, this technique was thought to be developed in the
Classic. The abundant use of this Stucco has been linked with
the
Maya Collapse,
both during the Pre Classic and Classic, because you will need
some 20 big trees in order to cook the limestone to obtain 1
square meter of stucco, furthermore, there is evidence that the
stucco layer become thinner in the Late Pre Classic and Late
Classic.
Uaxactún
was the first site excavated in the Southern Maya
Lowlands. Work there was
 instrumental in revealing the
richness of Maya sites and establishing the basic
chronological framework for the region. The Carnegie
Institution of Washington project of mapping and
excavation at Uaxactún from 1926 to 1937 revealed that the
central part of the site consists of a series of discrete
groups of monumental and elite residential architecture
(“palaces”) built on hills that were shaped and in some
cases increased in height to accommodate the buildings. They
identified eight such groups, designated A–H, and in the
process defined the standard form of
a Maya political
center. The abundance of “house mounds,” believed to
represent the remains of non elite residences, This work
produced the first evidence of Pre-Classic period occupation
in the lowlands, the most famous of which is the platform
known as Str. E-VII-Sub. A pyramid with a staircase on each
of its four sides and decorated with large stucco masks, it
supported a perishable building of ceremonial function. Str.
E-VII-Sub is the first reported example of what is now
recognized to be a well-established type of Late Pre-Classic
monumental architecture: The
Astronomic
alignment is known as "Group E" and is a
manner to classify the importance of any Maya Site, The Uaxactún materials also yield
evidence of household-level involvement in craft production.
Workshops of Ornaments or other objects made from
Jade,
(Cancuén,
Guaytán)
Obsidian
(Kaminal Juyú,
Cotzumalguapa,
Holmul) and shells occur frequently
since the Pre-Classic period in middens, burials, and cache deposits,
also quarries of limestone
as seen in Nakbé
too.
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Temple I Tikal |
The most
famous Classic Maya building is: Temple
I or "Temple of the Great Jaguar" in Tikal.
(This was built to contain the tomb of one of Tikal's best known rulers, "Hasaw
Chan Kawil", who ruled from AD 682-734.
Although it is not the largest in Tikal, being the largest
the Temple IV, or "Temple of the Two
Headed Serpent" the tomb of his son and successor
Yaxk'in
Ca'an Chac, and by
far, those from
the
El Mirador:
La Danta and El Tigre, (surprisingly these are from the Pre
Classic, some 1000 years earlier. In Fact The typically Pre Classic "Triadic
Pyramid" of La Danta, (Several
Platforms, with the highest, crowned with two small temples
facing each other and the tallest in the
|
 The
size of the second largest Pyramid in
El Mirador, El Tigre, can
be figured by putting it on top of
Tikal's
Central plaza. Its Base will engulf Temple I, II,
and the North Acrópolis. |
center), is the largest in the world.
In contrast to Egyptian pyramids, to which
they are often erroneously compared, Maya `step
pyramids` served numerous functions besides mortuary
ones, and were constructed not from large, solid stone blocks
but from smaller, cut stone blocks on top of a rubble-fill core.
Also, new temples would often be built on top of older ones,
encasing the older architecture within.
La Danta triadic Complex in El Mirador, the
largest in the world. Drawing by
Rutledge.
Without metal tools,
(They used Obsidian), beasts of burden, or even the wheel the
Mayans were able to construct vast cities across a
huge jungle landscape with an amazing degree of
architectural perfection and variety.
They were noted as well for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial
architecture, including temple-pyramids, palaces, plazas and
observatories
known as "Group E" after the Uaxactún complex.
The largest Palace in the Maya world is located in
Cancuén, with more than 200 rooms,
one of the oldest is the Tigrillo Group in
San Bartolo dated at 600
BC, also
notable is the "Acanaladuras Palace" or
"Group G" in
Tikal.
Evidence show that the early Maya architects were
using the corbel vault principle, which is an arch like structure with
sides that extend inward until they meet at the top. (The Maya
Arch).
 Another matchless feature of the Mayans was the use of
colorful murals.
It is also noted that most of the Maya
cities were built by being
divided into quarters by two avenues which cross-cut each other at right
angles. Roofs were flat and made with cedar beams overlaid with
 mortar.
The walls were plastered and painted with great gods and other
mythological features, such as the Pre-Classic
San Bartolo murals.
 Royal Tombs were often encased within or beneath Mayan structures and richly
decorated. the most renown are those from
Río Azul. the commoners buried their love ones beneath or in the back
of theirs houses, with objects that represent their office. Frequently new temples were built over existing structures.
The Mayans also expressed themselves
artistically. Their ceramics were made in a large variety of forms
and decorated with complex scenes, as well as, delicate works of art
from Jade, flint,
Obsidian, bone and shell, along with making decorated cotton
textiles. Even metal was used for ceremonial purposes. Items made
with metal include necklaces, bracelets and headdresses. It is evident that all of the large Pyramids built by the ancient Mayans
were built with large open areas, from which all the citizens
could view the religious ceremonies taking place on the platforms
elevated above the city.
The Maya always had their
Mythology
present while building temples,
 That is why the royal burials were placed
under the temples in natural or man made
caves (Ch'een) , representing the
underworld or Xibalbá, and the Pyramid represented the heavens, it is notably that
in cities with nearby Hills (Witz) , resembling pyramids like
in Cancuén (Karst towers), they don't built
those, instead Cancuén
has the largest Palace uncovered to date in the Americas.
A honeycombed roof comb towered above many structures, providing a base
for painted plaster that was the Maya equivalent of the billboard, The
finest outside Tikal are those from
Nakúm. In addition to temples, most
Maya sites had multi-roomed structures that probably served as royal
palaces as well as centers for government affairs. The enormous weight
of these crests forced the Maya to build them upon walls that were often
thicker than the narrow inner spaces of the
 temples they defined, a
structure known as a "corbelled
vault".
Historically significant events, such as accessions, the capture or
sacrifice of royal victims were recorded on stone Stelas, (Lakam
Tun)  , wooden
lintels (Pakab' ) ,
and tablets or panels (Pakb'u Tun), such as
those famous "Site Q", now known as
La Corona,
and the Lintel 3 from
Piedras Negras,
truly Masterpieces of the Classic.
The completion of the twenty year
Katún cycle, were celebrated by
building twin pyramid complex in the largest cities such as Tikal or
Yaxhá. Another feature of the Maya are the
Chultún a man made hole, with is walls
covered with stucco, where
they "hide" precious objects to them, an also to store food.
(see Topoxté)
Plazas:
The Plaza (K'iwik), is present in every settlement
of the Maya, most of the Stelas were placed there, maybe because
extensive gathering places were
a crucial concern in Maya city
planning. The largest Stela is the Stela E in
Quiriguá. The spaces were designed to accommodate a substantial part
of the entire kingdom's population. Large-scale theatrical events
gave physical reality to a community and helped to ground unstable
community identities in tangible forms through the use of symbolic
acts and objects, The centrality of rulers in communal events
suggests that the identities of a Maya community revolved around the
images of supreme political leaders. Large gatherings also
gave the elite an opportunity to impose their ideologies and
cultural values on the rest of society through performances.
Ball
Courts: (Pi'itz) Since the Preclassic this "I" or double "T"
shaped structures where present in any Major Maya Site, to play
their Sacred Sport.
The Truly Classic Maya ball
courts had sloping walls, with flat markers in the playing area and
observations areas.
Sweatbaths
In
Piedras Negras
and almost every other Maya cities in the Pre Classic, like Nakbé, Classic, and
Post Classic
Periods in Guatemala, in addition to palaces,
temples and ritual ball courts, archeologists have found there, eight
stone buildings that served as sweat baths or “pib' nah”,
for the Maya royalty, probably for sacred rituals as well as
healing purposes.
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Piedras Negras Sweat bath, st P 7
after Tatiana Proskuriakoff. |
This sweat baths have stone walls and ceilings
and are located in prominent places in the city. While archeologists
have found smaller sweat baths in Mesoamerica dating back to 1350
BC, Naranjo
in the Highlands, the Maya sweat baths in
Piedras Negras
have special
significance because of their locations and for the
royal rituals
thought to have taken place there. The royal sweat baths themselves
are similar to those found in private homes. The interior rooms had
low ceilings, a small doorway and a hearth for holding the heated
stones.
Water was poured onto the hot stones to create steam. A
small hole in the roof provided escape for the smoke and steam. An
archeology team restored one of the royal baths to working condition
and reported “temperatures reaching up to 200 degrees, leaving
participants feeling, oddly, refreshed and clean. Some
anthropologists believe that Maya rulers took the common practice of
sweat bath and raised it to a higher significance by building the
structures in prominent places near temples and the royal ball
courts. They were undoubtedly seen going in and out of the
sweat baths in a sort of “ritual politics.” Maya rulers performed
ritual purification ceremonies to appease the gods and secure the
well- being of their communities. There are several cities with this
Royal sweat baths in Mesoamerica, notably those in
El Baúl,
Yaxhá,
Tikal and
Aguateca.
The Chultunob are subterranean vaults with stucco walls used to keep
food and precious objects to their owners, examples of those are in
every Maya City, since the Pre Classic. See
Topoxté for a schematic
representation.
Chultún interior in Nakbé
The common Maya lived in perishable hay huts called
Nah,
 ,
(Home, Building), typically
in groups of four, facing each other
 and with an
stucco patio in
front, with tilted two sided
roof, that had at least 2 rooms and the floors were covered with
thin stucco platforms that were round during the Pre Classic, and later
become rectangular, they use the soil below those for familiar
burials, the back side was used as dumpsters, and then reused as
fertilizer. This dumpster are of great value to understand the every day
life of the commoners.
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