The Maya

Ancient Peoples and Places

by Michael D. Coe

"The gold standard of introductory books on the ancient Maya." —Expedition

The Maya has long been established as the best, most readable introduction to the New World’s greatest ancient civilization. Coe and Houston update this classic by distilling the latest scholarship for the general reader and student.



This new edition incorporates the most recent archaeological and epigraphic research, which continues to proceed at a fast pace. Among the finest new discoveries are spectacular stucco sculptures at El Zotz and Holmul, which reveal surprising aspects of Maya royalty and the founding of dynasties. Dramatic refinements in our understanding of the pace of developments of the Maya civilization have led scholars to perceive a pattern of rapid bursts of building and political formation. Other finds include the discovery of the earliest known occupant of the region, the Hoyo Negro girl, recovered from an underwater cavern in the Yucatan peninsula, along with new evidence for the first architecture at Ceibal.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Archaeology, Indigenous, Art, Ancient History

465 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Michael Douglas Coe was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, epigrapher, and author. He is known for his research on pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya, and was among the foremost Mayanists of the late twentieth century.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Survival Through Tradition

Unlike most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Maya still exist as a large population. But while Mayans are survivors, their civilisation has not been. The development of their spectacular urban centres, their complex ritual practices, and their unique art came to an abrupt halt in the 9th century CE after a continuous run of cultural and political successes over the previous millennium. The Maya more or less disappeared as all but a linguistic/cultural entity. They weren’t invaded; they didn’t succumb to some novel disease (as they would en masse after the Spanish occupation seven hundred years later). They just stopped as an organised political, military, and economic force in the world.

One modern theoretical construct helps to explain why the Mayan civilisation disappeared, and, more important, what is necessary to preserve what remains of the Mayan culture. The fundamental principle of cybernetics is that when the complexity of the environment exceeds that of any natural or man-made system, the environment will ultimately destroy the system. This is called the Law of Requisite Variety and it identifies not an actual power but rather a potential for survival. The greater the number of possible responses to environmental change, the greater the chance of staying alive, not simply as individuals, but also as societies, cultures, and civilisations.

On their own, human beings - those frail, sensitive, weak creatures with persistent back problems - don’t have the requisite variety to exist very long in any environment at all. But they have a compensatory magic power. They talk incessantly. They gossip, chat, argue, brag, lie, sing, rumourmonger, and prattle. And through this incessant talk they create the key to their adaptive success: tradition, that is to say, the unquestioned lore of how things are done, the rules and regulations of how to live, routines about how to stay healthy, and, ultimately, how to survive. A set of interacting traditions is one reasonable definition of a culture. Robust cultures formulate new traditions from the existing cultural melange. Less robust cultures merely die.

By definition no one knows the source of any particular tradition. In reality tradition is nothing but inter-generational gossip. Nor does anyone really know why or how tradition ‘works’ to keep us alive. Tradition is not concerned with documented or scientific facts, but rather with shared experiences that are lost in time. And because tradition refers to a potential rather than a demonstrable ‘thing,’ it can’t be proven. Tradition works right up until the moment it doesn’t. It then ends its usefulness, usually catastrophically. The culture becomes fragile as the institutions that embody traditions falter.

Coe identifies a central tradition in the history of the Maya, one that can be easily overlooked because of its mundaneness. In Mayan this tradition is called nixtamal, the process by which maize is prepared for human consumption. Nixtamal involves mixing boiled maize with white lime before it is ground into flour. This process makes the vitamin B contained in the maize kernels available when it is consumed by human beings. A deficiency in vitamin B is known to cause numerous maladies from beri-beri to dementia. So for maize to become a staple in the Mayan diet, nixtamal is a critical tradition.

The obvious question is where did this tradition come from? The ancient Mayans presumably had no knowledge or scientific understanding of the human hormonal system. And the empirical connection between un-limed maize-eating and, say, early onset dementia is one that is unlikely to be determined by observation given the time lag, perhaps over decades, for the appearance of symptoms. Surely no preparer of maize in any ancient Mayan household ever knew the long term consequences of nixtamal; they just followed the routine. This tradition was firmly and universally established and was a contributing factor to the creation and continued existence of the Mayan civilisation.

The same kind of mystery of origin occurs with many other Mayan traditions. The cultivation of maize itself is one of them. Selective breeding of plants is not a natural process by definition. It requires great patience over very long periods to produce sustainable improvements without introducing defects (like susceptibility to disease or pests). Yet highly successful breeding of maize was accomplished over centuries by the Maya who transformed a lowland grass called teosinte into a viable food crop. The Maya did this with no knowledge of genetics and no written records (at least initially) of previous experience. Archaeological evidence based on the size of cobs shows that the process was more or less continuous throughout the Maya area. Once again tradition rules.

So too with so many other traditions. The slash and burn farming of maize required in the Yucatan, for example, demanded fallow periods of up to 20 years to recover soil fertility in burned over forest fields. This experience was somehow passed on with no ‘science’ or logs or other records behind it. Similarly, obsidian tools, the “iron of Mesoamerica,” were worked in exactly the same way over centuries and can be used to track the movements and trading patterns of individual Mayan groups as a matter of cultural routine. Even writing, the earliest of which is around 300 BCE, is a tradition, perhaps the ultimate tradition when it comes to increasing adaptive potential because it allows record keeping and documentation of other traditions.* Traditions were in a real sense the source of Mayan longevity and creativity as a civilisation.

But tradition, as so many others aside from the Mayas have discovered, is fickle. It works until it doesn’t. Mayan tradition was grounded in maize. Maize underlay all other traditions. The incredibly long drought from 820 to 870 CE was an environmental change that the maize traditions were simply incapable of responding to. The routines learned by rote and passed on through generations broke down. New traditions were obviously required. The civilisation perished; but the culture remained active in a very specific sense, namely in the creation of new traditions which increased the potential to respond to environmental change.

It is their cultural strength that has allowed the Mayan to adapt to the new civilisations in which they find themselves, sometimes in surprisingly innovative ways. The maize preparation traditions are still relevant, of course, but other traditions are necessary to provide the requisite variety for survival. So, for example, to avoid the humiliation of the Spanish caste system, many Mayans simply avoided it entirely in remote enclaves, thus preserving both language and culture within an oppressive regime. Many Mayans reacted to intense missionary activities from the Catholic Church by accepting the new religion but integrating it with their traditional divine pantheon into a creative syncretism. This seems almost inevitable as the Mayan and Christian scriptures agree on many key points, including the divine displeasure with the ‘proto-type’ humans and their annihilation by flood.

More recently, Faced with systematic persecution - the Guatemalan Civil War lasted 36 years in the latter half of the 20th century and was directed primarily against the Mayan population by the government - many Mayans moved across international borders. From Guatemala to Mexico, as they had done earlier from Mexico to Belize to avoid enslavement - and then back again as the situation demanded. These may seem somewhat extreme adaptations but are actually what the ancient Maya did as well - so not really a new but rather a renewed tradition.

So, while the civilisation disappeared much of the culture did not. ‘Mayanism,’ if such a term is allowed, adapted and survived. Many if not most of the major Mayan languages are still alive. Even the complex Mayan calendar and number system is in use by some groups (as an aside the Mayans place the creation of the world at 3114 BCE, not far off the Christian 17th century Christian estimate by Bishop Ussher of 4004 BCE, which was slightly earlier than that of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton).

Despite the efforts of the Spanish and the Church to destroy Mayan texts, a sufficient number survived - in scrolls as well as monumental inscriptions - in order to decipher and translate important documents. Among these is the Popal Vuh, the Mayan account of creation and the divine presence, with its interesting parallels and alternatives to Judaic sacred scriptures. In a way, through translation and global publication, the Popal Vuh has become an incipient world tradition. Perhaps it contains some hints about how to avoid worldwide environmental catastrophe.

The Mayan uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1993 was perhaps a part of yet another tradition of Mayan resistance, also associated with the long Civil War in Guatemala. In many ways these conflicts are a continuation of the half-century Caste War in the 19th century which was fought by the Yucatan Mayas against the domineering white population. It appears that, like the Kurds, some of the peoples of the Caucuses mountains, and in the Kashmir, the Mayas are developing a routine of violent disobedience to governments, a recovery, perhaps, of the tradition of the ancient Maya warrior-kings. And this recovered tradition shows at least some signs of adaptive possibility. In May of 2021, for example, the Mexican President made an unprecedented statement to the Mayan people:

"We apologize to the Mayan people for the terrible abuses committed by individuals and national and foreign powers during the Conquest, the three centuries of colonial rule and the two centuries of independent Mexico,"

What such an apology means in practice is another matter of course. But the statement means at minimum that the Mayan culture is finally recognised as a valid political issue.

Yet another tradition, unwelcome by many, is the ancient wisdom of entheogenics. The Mayans have several thousand years experience of hallucinogenic, psychedelic, and narcotic drug use (not to mention tobacco, which was first cultivated by the Maya, or the alcoholic drinks called pulque and balaché), all typically associated with religious ritual. There is even a god of drugs, Xochipilli, the Corn Flower Prince, whose magnificent statue sits in the National Museum of Mexico draped in a variety of calming and invigorating plants and mushrooms. While there is no publicised drug problem among the Maya themselves, they nevertheless have a serious and growing issue that may be the ultimate challenge for their cultural adaptability.

The so-called Mayan Riviera around the modern Mexican resort area of Cancun, and the sparsely populated ‘Mayan Biosphere Reserve’ in Guatemala are reputed to now be controlled by the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel - the first area for sales, the latter as safe transit sites for aircraft which are packed with cocaine. The threat to the Maya comes not from the drugs directly but from the traffickers who burn large swathes of forest and import cattle to keep vegetation down on runways. It would seem merely a matter of time before the Cancun drug ‘colony’ spreads to the local population. Unless the United States stops it’s farcical war on drugs, Mayans may not have the requisite variety to survive in the modern world.

* Or perhaps the Mayan number system can be considered the ultimate tradition. Like other ancient number systems, it is base-20. But it also incorporates a sort of silent zero which allows the very efficient expression of even very large numbers through multiplication and easy addition. Such a system is obviously far superior to that of Roman numerals which are a mathematical nightmare. It also has advantages over base-10 Arabic numerals in that the symbolism is binary - a dot and a dash.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.

There’s no denying that Michael Coe is one of the foremost scholars of the Mayan world, and that this is known for being a prime text to introduce people to the Mayan world in an academic sense (rather than a frivolous ‘clearly they were inspired by aliens’ or other such conspiracy theory sense). The volume is beautifully illustrated with photographs and diagrams, and Coe and Houston are painstakingly clear in explaining the lie of the land, the boundaries of Maya influence, the history of the places that contributed to their development as a cohesive people, and the broad reach of their civilisation.

But. There was something dry about this — and though you might be inclined to put that down to this being non-fiction, I read a very similar book on the Incas just a little later and found it riveting. Even the dullest details of stone placed upon stone can be livened up by an understanding of the people, and I didn’t really find that here. I’ve also got Coe’s book on deciphering the Mayan script, and I’m hoping that brings things to life a little more.

The sign of a good non-fiction book, for me, is that I have an endless store of things to share about it at the end. Coe and Houston’s book didn’t get there, for me. It’s still a great primer if you want to go deeper into understanding the Maya, and it’s worth looking at for the collection of images alone, but… it’s not the most entertaining book I’ve ever brought home from the library.

[Ozymandias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who Is This Book For?
I picked this book up because it’s reputed to be the best primer on Maya civilization. I teach world history and I like to be knowledgeable about what I teach. Plus I know my textbook is hopelessly out of date given how rapidly Maya studies have grown since we first started cracking the language in the ’80s. Even a single decade can be a huge deal, so if you do get this book make sure you get the newest edition (that’s the 10th as of 2023). I feel like having a thorough background in history and an academic mindset makes me the perfect audience for this book. But I’m not sure whether that’s true or not as this book seems designed for something more than just a general introduction.

Part of the issue of course is that my interests are primarily historical. I use a lot of archaeological evidence in my work, but it remains for me a tool to fit into a historical overview. The Maya aren’t like that. There are a few texts, but no work of history and no narrative of the life and times of the Mayan people. The longest surviving Maya text by far was recovered from the steps of the pyramid of Copan and is about 2500 glyphs long. For comparison, this paragraph alone is 1000 characters long, although Maya glyphs can capture slightly more than Latin characters can. Imagine if everything you knew about the Maya came from the first three paragraphs here. How much could you really know? I teach using the Res Gestae Divi Augusti – Augustus’ autobiography engraved on temples in a similar manner – but it is around 2500 words long. My point when using it is that this is a narrow and tendentious piece of propaganda which (while it includes many valuable facts) would lead to an utterly mistaken view of the Roman Empire that we can only recognize using other sources. Without those sources to check against, what little you can decipher from even briefer mentions cannot be anything but unreliable.

What that leaves us with is archaeology. Almost everything we know about the Maya comes from that. What’s the difference between archaeology and history you might ask? Part of it is the questions asked and how they talk about the subject. Archaeology’s chief concern is with material culture. Archaeologists examine the artifacts of ancient civilizations and tell us about their daily lives, trade, farming practices, class differentiation, architecture, artwork, etc. Archaeology is focused on specific sites: exploring everything known about the structure of one area and how it all interacted. It can tell you how specific buildings were built, how religion was visually represented, how people defined public/private spaces. While this gives us a glimpse of the physical nature of existence to understand the meaning of these artifacts to the people who made them or a sense of how they relate to society more broadly you need textual sources.

It's a very different experience for me: having read this book I can talk a fair amount about the pyramid-temples at the heart of Mayan cities. I can tell you that the cities were dispersed and only loosely centralized. I can’t tell you much about legends outside a few gods like the Maize God and his hero twins. I can talk quite a bit about human sacrifices, although there’s no dedicated section on it. But I can’t tell you how the cities interacted with each other, apart from the fairly regular warfare. Some of them were in alliances (often unequal). Were these shifting alliances like the Greek city-states? Were these cities similar to city-states in government or social structure? Many of the kings made marriage alliances with neighboring cities. How did that work? Did the elites feel a sense of kinship? How did that impact their willingness, nay, eagerness to gruesomely sacrifice their fellow elites of rival cities? How were aristocracies established? There was talk of foreign-imposed dynasties, but how was that managed? Was trade state-run or a private enterprise? How did people relate to the city and to each other? Who were the individuals involved in running society and what were their goals and ambitions for their state? These are all the sorts of questions I build my understanding of a society around and they’re all absent here.

If I’m honest, even as a historian, a straight textual study without knowledge of any material culture is pretty useless. Imagine trying to understand the Romans without their ubiquitous marble statues or monuments like the Colosseum. But even more useless to me is material culture without a textual framework to make sense of it. Imagine if the Colosseum was all we had of Rome: you’d have to conclude that the Romans were a game-loving people who built their lives around sports of some description. I can’t help but think about how close that explanation is to our actual understanding of the Mesoamerican ball game. We know basically nothing. Without some sort of narrative account there’s no way to put your finds in context. I read a lot of Roman archaeology and while I can’t always speak in detail about their methodology, it elaborates on and explains the past in coordination with historical accounts. Without timelines, political/social structures, memoirs, literature, religious texts, etc. how can you create a model of Maya society? We do have science in the form of astronomy and mathematics, but that’s about it. And from this people argued confidently for decades that the Maya were just peaceful astronomers worshipping the passage of time. We know that was wrong now that we can read their stelae, but our foundations are still built on sand and all it would take is a single source to topple them.

This of course is not the book’s fault. While it may be frustrating, the evidence for the Maya is what it is and it would be unfair to judge this book on what it lacks the sources to cover instead of how it handles what information it has. It certainly includes a lot of information, even to the point of feeling overstuffed. But one of the most distinctive aspects is its refusal to speculate. This ‘just the facts’ approach means that the book won’t speculate about the psychological, religious, social, or political nature of the Maya states. Which leaves us pretty much with a guide to the sites themselves. We read a lot about tombs and artwork (often lovingly illustrated) but don’t journey far beyond that.

This book was originally published in 1966, a time well before the Maya glyphs were deciphered. While it certainly does make use of Maya writings it remains a fact that it is simply incorporating them into an existing structure instead of making them a foundational part of the story. The written sources it does include are mainly mathematical – the type of information deciphered before the first edition. Individual names are occasionally mentioned now but they remain mere ciphers. Perhaps that is part of what I found so frustrating – the types of information I find fundamental are scattered throughout in small segments rather than front and center, combined with the archaeology to give a multidisciplinary approach to the key questions. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far I find the approach in The Lost Chronicles of the Maya Kings more effective at incorporating textual sources. It’s not intended to be quite so universal a guide to the Maya as this book, but it shows that this approach can be done when it is intended from the beginning. And it can answer some of my basic questions on how society was organized.

I am a little unsure about who this book was designed for. It’s marketed as an introduction for beginners, but it dives very quickly into some complicated matters that seem to assume a background knowledge. The Mayan calendar, for example, is a very complex tool. It had two different calendars, one 260-day religious calendar and a second 365-day solar calendar. Rather than defining dates by day, month and year, the Mayans listed the religious and solar dates together. Starting with both on day one, there will not be a duplicate pair for 52 years. This 52-year span is called the Calendar Round and any dates longer than this use what they call the Long Count – the regular date plus the number of Calendar Rounds since the year 3114 BC (don’t ask why that year – short answer is nobody knows). You see how complicated that is? But hopefully I’ve made clear how it works. Here’s how the book explains that same concept:

The cycle began with 1 Imix, followed by 2 Ik’, 3 Ak’bal, 4 K’an, until 13 Ben had been reached; the day following was Ix, with the coefficient 1 again, leading to 2 Men, and so on. The last day of the 260-day cycle would be 13 Ajaw, and it would repeat once again commencing with 1 Imix. An important point: scholars use Yukateko names for most of the days, a convention that does not necessarily reflect how they were pronounced in other parts of the Maya world…

Meshing with the 260-day count is a “Vague Year” or ha’b of 365 days. so called because the actual length of the solar year is about a quarter-day more, circumstance that leads us to intercalate one day every four years to keep our calendar in march with the sun. Although the Maya were perfectly aware that the ha’b was shorter than the tropical year, they did not change the calendar accordingly. Within the ha’b, there were eighteen named “months” of twenty days each…, with a much-dreaded interval of five unlucky days added at the end. The Maya New Year started with 1 Pop, the next day being 2 Pop, etc. The final day of the month, however, carried not the coefficient 20, but a sign indicating either its “edge of” or the “seating” of the month to follow, in line with the Maya philosophy that the influence of any particular span of time is felt before it actually begins and persists somewhat beyond its apparent termination. “Seating” also implied a placement in office.

From this it follows that a particular day in the 260-day count, such as 1 K’an, also had a position in the ha’b, for instance 2 Pop. A day designated as 1 K’an 2 Pop could not return until fifty-two ha’b (18,980 days) had passed… This is the Calendar Round, and it is the only annual time count possessed by the highland populations of Mexico, one that obviously has its disadvantages where events taking place over a span of more than fifty-two years are concerned.

Although it is usually assumed to be Maya, the Long Count was widely distributed in Classic and earlier times in the lowland country of Mesoamerica; but it was most highly refined by the Maya of the Central Area. This is really another kind of permutation count, except that the cycles used are so large that, unlike the Calendar Round, any event within the span of historical time could be fixed without fear of ambiguity. Instead of taking the Vague Year as the basis for the Long Count, the Maya and other societies employed the tun, a period of 360 days. The Long Count cycles are:
20 k’ins – 1 winal or 20 days
18 winals – 1 tun or 360 days
20 tuns – 1 k’atun or 7,200 days
20 k’atuns – 1 bak’tun or 144,000 days

Long Count dates inscribed by the Maya on their monuments consist of the above cycles listed from top to bottom in descending order of magnitude, each with its numerical coefficient, and all to be added up so as to express the number of days elapsed since the end of the last but one Great Cycle, a period of thirteen bak’tuns. the ending of which fell on the date 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u. The starting point of the last Great Cycle corresponded to August 14, 3114 BC (Gregorian calendar), and its ending point to December 24, AD 2012. Thus, a Long Count date conventionally written as 9.10.19.5.11 10 Chuwen 4 Kumk’u would be:
9 bak’tuns – 1,296,000 days
10 k’atuns – 72,000 days
19 tuns – 6,840 days
5 winals – 100 days
11 k’ins – 11 days
or 1,374,951 days since the close of the previous Great Cycle, reaching the Calendar Round position 10 Chuwen 4 Kumk’u. Again, to ensure consistency, scholars use labels for these units of time that do not always match those of the Classic period. The bak’tun was actually read pih or pik, and, in a switch sure to confuse modern readers, the tun was really called ha’b!

I genuinely don’t know if I could have worked out what it was saying had I not already known the basics.

So who is this written for? I feel it’s rather too complex for an introduction to Maya culture. It works best when thought of as a textbook – something assigned to archaeology students taking classes on Maya civilization. It has plenty of references you can use to check back on what was being taught in class. The teacher will thus do most of the instruction and this book would be mainly a reference book. In such a role it would likely serve very well since it is filled with a constant barrage of facts stuffed into small passages. The glossy pages, recurring editions, and frequent full-color images (perhaps ¼ the book consists of images) mean that this would fit in well with other textbooks I’ve used. The one person it really doesn’t seemed designed to accommodate is a beginner reading on their own. Which is who it is being marketed to (I found it on sale at the Maya exhibit in the Met). Deeply curious.

Truthfully, even leaving aside that this was an archaeology textbook and not a historical one there were a whole lot of areas where I found that coverage was insufficient. Human sacrifice is the big one as it’s everywhere in Maya society, but while the term keeps popping up I never had a real sense for the motivation or justification for it. The book said that humanity owed the gods a debt for their lives and could only repay it through sacrifice, but that is a cold and clinical statement rather than an effort to capture the emotional nature of Maya spirituality. There was no real effort made to reconstruct the political relationships between states. Military affairs are ignored almost entirely except for what they did to captives. The Mesoamerican ball courts are oddly sidelined until after the collapse, possibly because the authors don’t want to get drawn into different cultures. Social structure is covered somewhat, but only very generally. The Maya worldview is outlined but I feel like it could have been done better, especially as there turns out to be a lot of evidence from the post-collapse Maya peoples. And there are a great many facts mentioned that raise all new questions. Why, for example, were there no walls in a region with such endemic warfare?

So what does the book cover instead? It’s all material culture. Apart from one chapter on Maya Thought and Culture its all looking at specific locations/artifacts. I know a lot more about specific Maya cities and how buildings were organized, but is this all we can say with certainty about the Maya? I’m not sure, but I feel there are a lot more questions that can be asked, even if we’re uncertain of the answers. My next book is one on The Incas and I can already see that it is at least asking the questions that I want to know. The Incas are different of course in that they encountered the Spanish (who documented them) but there are limits to their evidence too – the Incas had no written language of their own for example. As the current book makes clear that many aspects of Maya civilization continued into the Spanish era through the present day it seems extremely strange that insights from that era are not brought more to bear on the Classical period. We don’t even spend all that long on the Classic Maya for a book dedicated to them. Only 136 pages (about half the book) cover Classical civilization, with other chapters being dedicated to the geography of the region, the predecessors to the Mayans, the successor states, and the Maya after the Spanish conquest. Does this addition of studies on the modern Maya (new to this edition I believe) account for the reluctance to repeat such material in the sections on the Classical Maya? Unfortunate if so.

Maya studies are clearly antithetical to my interests in that they seem almost deliberately devoid of information about any questions I’d want to ask. That is of course strictly my personal reaction to Maya history and I have tried not to let it color too much my views on this book. It’s a limitation, deal with it, how well does the book do with what it has? But even acknowledging our limited information, I still consider there to be something lacking. I can’t ignore the fact that I came out of reading this with no clear idea of who the Maya were as a people. What were their hopes and dreams? How did they relate to each other and to the other peoples of Mesoamerica? The lack of speculation or obvious interest in these central questions frustrated me. Even a simple ‘we cannot say’ would have helped. The book still seems like it would be a good textbook for a class on the Maya, particularly one which covered all of Mesoamerica and therefore gave something of the comparative approach this book lacks. The pictures remain fantastic. It also helped me mark down a number of sites to visit if I can ever get to Mexico, and maybe if I was using the book like a tour guide I’d be getting more use out of it. As it stands I think I’m still on the lookout for a good introduction to Maya studies.

[Jacques Coulardeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Greatness of the Maya before ethnocide and genocide

The main interest of this book is that it follows the standard history of the Maya from beginning to end and city after city. The index is then very useful to follow one particular city or one particular reference. Each case is both described in what has survived, in what we can know about them and what has been said about them too. The bringing up together of the whole subject in some synthetic approach on some questions is at the end of the book and it is both useful because very synthetic and frustrating because very skimpy.

This synthesis though gives us some elements about the language, the writing system, the mathematics, the calendars, the four codices and a fast survey of what happened after the arrival of the Spaniards and what has been the fate of the Mayas since this arrival. The authors are clear, and they qualify this fate as being “ethnocide and genocide on a grand scale.” The two massive crimes against humanity are of a different nature. Ethnocide targets the destruction of the culture of a people to force them into deculturation and then into acculturation in a culture that has little to do with their original culture. The book though insists on the fact the various Spanish and then Ladino people who imposed that ethnocide could easily succeed because of the many common points between Maya religion and Christianity. The book insists on the fact that the Maya main god, the Maize God, is very similar to Jesus because he is put to death every year after the harvest for the winter and it is resurrected every spring from the very maize kernels or grains. For the Maya, maize is not a simple plant, but it is a person, a divine being that must be sacrificed every year to be able to be reborn the following year. Genocide, on the other hand, is the killing of as many members of this group, the Maya, as possible in the shortest time possible.

Maybe the book does not insist enough on the fact that this divine sacrifice has deep roots in a more general mythology, particularly the Popol Vuh and the Divine Twins. The rebirth of the Maize god is to be obtained with the sacrifice of animals, but especially self-sacrifice with bloodletting, and human sacrifice. The book insists on the fact the sacrificed human beings were war prisoners, slaves, and orphans or handicapped children. I am not sure this is enough. Such human sacrifices or self-sacrifices created a demographic problem that might have partly been the result of some kind of dealing with overpopulation with sexual self-sacrifice for men that resulted in some kind of contraception, with the sacrifice of males that resulted in less sexual male partners, and with the sacrifice of orphans and handicapped children that led to both eugenics and the reduction of male sexual procreators. It must be clearly said that such practices targeted men and practically only men, carried out by male priests and helpers, and this male domination is a typical trait of post-Ice Age agriculture. A last remark on this topic is that it does not – and I guess it cannot – indicate the real origin of such a vast practice, though it seems to have been contained within some limits by the Maya, whereas it was brought to some extreme levels by the Aztecs. It is yet remarkable that such massive human sacrifices were a common trait of all south and Meso American civilization from what is today Peru to Mexico. The author should also have insisted on the fact that such practices were absolutely marginal among northern American Indians. The debate about John Smith and Pocahontas is typical: John Smith was put through a procedure of integration in the tribe Pocahontas represented and not in any way menaced in his life. Only his outsider’s life was symbolically killed for his tribe-member’s life to be delivered by Pocahontas herself who was an initiated priestess.

The second question this synthesis brings up is that of the Maya language that we only know through its writing system. This writing system is only available in surviving inscriptions in stone or in wall paintings or on all kinds of tools, utensils, and objects for everyday life or for body embellishment: pots, cups, plates, boxes, etc., plus jewels and all sorts of beads or rings. The book cannot answer how long it took the Maya to devise and develop this written language and it cannot answer the simple question of how long Maya language had been in existence before the Maya society invented the writing system that needed an elite body of writing scribes. The fact that the Spaniards destroyed all the books the Maya had, except four that managed to escape that ethnocidal action, is depriving us of the necessary information about the past, the mythology, the history, etc., of the Maya. The timeline generally given is based too much on what we have at our disposal which is only what has survived and was produced in a highly advanced society. A human society does not decide to build pyramids and massive temples and vast cities in one generation (30 years). The only thing we know is that such massive constructions only appeared after the peak of the Ice Age and it took many thousand years for the social organizations that would build these constructions to emerge and stabilize. But what must be studied today is the timeline of such constructions. Satellite-viewing has revealed the same type of constructions exists in the high valley of Amazonia. Are they older than the Maya pyramids or younger? Are they the proof this stone constructing civilization went up north from the south or down south from the north? In the second hypothesis, where did they come from since we do not find such stone constructions in Northern America?

The object of this book is not to explore the language itself. So, do not expect a lot of detail. This remark can be extended to what is said about the mathematics and the calendars of the Maya. The Tzolkin calendar, in particular, is not explained in its “ritual” dimension since it is supposed to enable the priests to announce and order the various rites including human sacrifices in the social timeline of everyday life. But that’s not the object of the book. You will have to look for more information and I must admit that the role of Venus who is the embodiment of the second most important God, Kukulkan (the Maya version of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent), who is a God who was sacrificed and whose Second Coming is announced from the East on some kind of ship. The Spaniards were wrongly understood by some like the Aztecs as being the Second Coming of Quetzalcoatl. Note this Second Coming is not clearly indicated as being a common point with Christianity and the Second Coming of Jesus bringing Doomsday, the Apocalypse, and the Last Judgment. In fact, such parallel visions should bring us to the question of how in so distant places on earth civilizations that were so un-connected could devise such parallel visions. What made Maya or Mesoamerican mythologies produce patterns that are so parallel and similar to those produced by Biblical writers and even before them Zoroastrian or Sumerian Mesopotamian writers. There is no direct connection between these two geographical and historical zones and periods. So, do humans have some mental frame that is the same all over the world and hence has a unique source? Note this “second coming pattern” can be found in many cultures and civilizations in very distant times, at least times that provide us with some surviving testimony.

So, to conclude on this very interesting and very well-illustrated book, let’s say you will have a lot of work still to do to answer the questions I have put forward.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

[Nikoleta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Μια ιδανικη εισαγωγη για οσους θελουν να γνωρισουν τον μεγαλυτερο αρχαιο πολιτισμου του Νεοτερου Κοσμου, τους μυστηριωδεις Μαγια.

[Edgarr Alien Pooh · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I read this book because the Maya have always been an interest of mine as have many other periods of history. I also read this book as reference material for a book I am writing.

Michael Coe writes a generally faced paced and easy to read text that may well be better suited to a high school history lesson than a read for interest's sake. Primarily he covers off the movements of the Mayan tribes around Mesoamerica and the different periods they belong to. He does this well and makes clear points.

The downfall I found with this book is that I was looking for more meatiness. I wanted in depth discussion on beliefs, rituals, and Gods. I wanted detailed descriptions of sites and temples and all other buildings but there were none. Coe seems to rely on
the many photographs in the book to 'show' and the photos are plentiful and great. I wanted an in depth analysis of the Mayan Calendar and the doomsday prophecy. The calendar was discussed but when Coe edged towards the guessed alignments with Venus and Mars and their impact on the Mayan people, he shied away again.

To me, it was like he wanted to be taken as a ""serious"" historian only and those areas of presumption and hearsay are best left to others like the great Graham Hancock - everyone needs to read Fingerprints of the Gods. The book does not deal in any way with myths and spirituality, it is a following of the nomadic tribes, a brief over view of conflicts and a greater look at timelines.

I must again mention the photographs, some are brilliant. I am not downplaying the significance of this book but I can say I was hoping for more."

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the best of the introductory books I've read about the Maya. Coe is a clear and engaging writer, excellent as a popularist. Newer editions are much updated as the Mayan script has since been decyphered. For an account of that see his 'Breaking the Mayan Code'.

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

an overview of Maya civilization----from the Sixties
Far from being a Maya scholar, I'm just a reader interested in ancient civilizations, one who visited Copan decades ago, but hasn't forgotten it. I bought this book many years back, but never got around to reading it till now. I read Arthur Demarest's "Ancient Maya" first. That volume provides a much more up-to-date view of the Mayas, one in which many new techniques have been used, DNA understood, more Mayan writing deciphered, and a picture in which forty more years of research could be taken advantage of. However, I'm not going to rubbish Coe's work here. It's still interesting and the 83 black and white photos or illustrations at the back are outstanding. Coe's writing style is more readable than Demarest's. He wrote the book as part of a very large, useful series (Ancient Peoples and Places)but this edition is naturally now dated. He concentrates very intensively on the art and architecture of the Mayas, rather than their daily life (less than ten pages), agriculture, political history, etc. A reader can find interesting material on Maya thought and writing, and their calendars. A lot more is known today than you can find here, so while Coe's work is definitely worth a glance because of the illustrations, it must rate only three stars now, though back in the 1960s, I would have given it five.

[M.G. Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always like to have a factual book on the go at the same time as a fiction and though books like this are generally often more work than pleasure, I must say that this was a pleasurable read as an introduction to a subject I previously knew very little about.

Quite possibly the most comprehensive book written on The Maya to date. It reads well both for a general audience and for scholarly readers. I bought this on recommendation of one of my University lecturers in preparation for my honeymoon to Mexico because I had not studied Meso-America either as part of my academic studies nor for pleasure.

Coe has constructed a volume rich in illustration, description, plenty of maps, explanations that are easy on the eye and covering the sum total of Maya history from the earliest settlers to the European conquest. He uses a backdrop that we from a European heritage would understand by putting it in context of world events. It also looks at modern ideals of the Maya and how their culture permeates today.

This is a superb introduction for any student of Maya history and Archaeology written by one of its foremost scholars

See more book reviews at my blog

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific book with lots of captivating images. Clear and concise.

I took a few classes from Houston 25 years ago--he's a brilliant teacher. I still remember his lectures--and his impossible quizzes.

Apparently we've learned a lot about the Maya since I took those classes so long ago. It was a delight to read through this book and get an idea of what we have learned about one of the most interesting civilizations of history.

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buy.

Rarely have a read an author who instills so much confidence in their subject matter. Coe is undeniably an expert on the Maya and it shines through. Although I at first hesitated at the design and layout of this book, which seemed more like a textbook, I was pleasantly surprised by the flow. Highly recommend.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book for review. While it is more like a text book, if you ever want to know more about the Maya, this is the book to have.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Coe's "The Maya" is an excellent introductory work to the history of the Mayan peoples, their civilization and their culture. Being very rigorous and clear, it would be an ideal textbook for use in any first or second year undergraduate course on pre-Columbian Mexico. Professor Coe describes all of the major archeological excavations on Maya sites since the end of World War I. In each case, he explains how previous theories were either strengthened or undermined. He then outlines the new theories that emerged and comments on their weak points. Coe spends a great deal of time attacking the findings of Sir Eric Thompson who in the 1950s and 1960s was considered to be the leading expert on Mayan civilization.
Coe describes how the aerial surveys and excavations of the second half of the 20th century have provided fascinating details on Mayan demographics and urban development. Thompson had proposed that the temple areas were largely uninhabited ceremonial sites. However, the topographic surveys performed since have determined that the temples were ringed by large number of mounds upon which the peasants would have placed their dwellings and thus the temple complexes urban centres. At least 40 cities are known to have existed. Three may have had populations in excess of 100,000.
The Mayan population reached a peak of 7 to 11 million in the 8th century. (Thompson had proposed an estimate of 3 million in the 1950s.) Coe credits the nixtamal process used by Mayans for this growth. In the nixtamal process the maize kernels before being milled were boiled in a mixture of white lime and water which ensured that the flour which was subsequently produced was high in amino acids and niacin which protected Mayans against pellagra. The result was strong demographic growth.
Ultimately the population increased to the point where it exceeded the capacity of the soil and a sharp decline of population began in the 10th century. Like Thompson, Coe notes that the Mayan system of agriculture operated on a "cut-and-burn" system whereby the Mayans would burn an area, plant for two years before departing and returning in ten years. Neither Coe nor Thompson blame the demographic crisis on the cut-and-burn practices but both recognize that the population level reached in the 8th century was unsustainable given the basic quality of the soil in the Mayan territory.
Coe differs greatly from Thompson on his view of religion in Mayan civilization. Thompson argued that at its height (in the so-called "Classic Period"), the Mayan city states were theocracies. Coe vehemently asserts that the Mayan city states were not theocracies and the priests did not rule but rather performed ceremonies, wrote the inscriptions in glyphs (a.k.a. hieroglyph or pictograph) and calculated dates. Thompson attributes the decline in Mayan civilization to the fact that Mexican invaders seized control of the Mayan territory and installed a class of military nobles as rulers. Coe attributes the decline of Mayan civilization to the demographic collapse caused by soil depletion.
Coe is most interested in intellectual issues. His section on the Mayan Calendar system is outstanding. He is at his very best in explaining how linguists have decoded the Mayan glyphs and thus greatly enhanced our knowledge of the history of the Mayan peoples. Thompson for many years insisted that the glyphs were untranslatable symbols although he did abandon this position late in his career.
There is a strong consensus in the academic community that Coe is right on all issues where he differs from Thompson. I do however have some minor reserves about Coe's book. Coe in places uses the term "nobles" to refer to the caste of civic rulers. However, since property was communal this would be a misuse of the word "noble" which signifies a landed aristocrat. The book contains many interesting pictures of Mayan buildings but Coe has little of interest to say about Mayan architecture. His comments on pottery are similarly sparse and unenlightening. Coe says very little about Mayan religion despite the fact that it clearly played a large role in Mayan society. Here the reason could be that Coe wanted to stick to issues that could be addressed using archeological evidence while the sources on Mayan religion are documents written by missionaries.

[Sarah - All The Book Blog Names Are Taken · Rating 2 out of 5]

My Blog: The Book Nook ---> http://allthebookblognamesaretaken.bl...

It's always a bummer when I think I am really interested in a topic and then after one book about said topic, I am completely unsure if my interest is waning or if the writing is just that dry/dull/etc.

In this case, I think it is that the writing is just that dry and I felt like I was reading a textbook. Now, before you say, "But it's non-fiction!" I should point out that I read non-fiction almost exclusively these days and have for quite some time. And this...I just could not get interested in it. Even the pictures started to look the same after a while, and that in itself is sort of depressing, because usually maps and pictures are a welcome relief when the writing is too bogged down by the author's extensive knowledge. I realize that one would like their non-fiction writers to be knowledgeable and I appreciate the fact that Coe is beyond well-versed in his knowledge of the Maya. However, there is just SO MUCH that it is almost too much. Perhaps the problem is I have very little background knowledge of my own and thus my very shaky foundation can't hold what was delivered in this text. Unfortunately, due to its dryness, that foundation is not much sturdier now that I've finished the book than it was before.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coe gives a good overview of the Mayans. Though he refers to the Mayans as one ethnic group, the book describes their great diversity, as might be expected from a people who lived across Guatemala, Belize, central Mexico, and the Yucatan. Coe divides Mayan history into several periods, beginning with the Archaic (3,000-1,000 BCE) and ending with the post-Classic (A.D. 925-1500) with the Spanish invasion and conquest, the effect of which has been the obliteration (or incorporation) of Mayan culture. Coe’s last chapter summarizes how this practice continues to this day.

The richness of this culture is seen in the Mayan ruins, particularly the ceremonial centers spread throughout this large area, but Coe’s descriptions come across more or less as a listing without much of an attempt to explain the reasons for them and their significance. Given that the pre-Columbian Mayan culture evolved totally void of contact with the cultures of Asia and Europe, it is interesting to speculate about what pre-Columbian cultural practices (religious beliefs and practices, etc.) reveal about human nature.

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely dense - think of this as a textbook - but apparently the most comprehensive collection of information about the Maya. So says Jared Diamond, who says so in the "Further Reading" section of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I learned a lot but it was slow going.

Fun trivia: you know that 2012 bs? (ETA: we've all forgotten this but there were some nutjobs who thought the world was going to end in 2012.) It's this guy's fault. In an earlier edition of this book, he idly pointed out that the Mayan calendar is cyclical and a cycle ends in 2012; conspiracy theorists took it from there. In this edition he comments on it, with a combination of shame and amusement.

[Loran (Inked with Curiosity) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Maya was a textbook I read for my Archaeology of Mexico class and I actually read the entire thing! (I am very proud of this... haha) I thought that the book was informative and also simple enough where a student or a leisure reader could pick it up and have no trouble getting into it. The book was full of beautiful pictures, some full-color and was also very comprehensive in its subject matter. Coe deftly takes you through the entirety of the Maya Empire and I can honestly say I learned a lot and had a pretty decent time reading the book. I'm sure the newer editions have even more current information so if you can afford it as a student and you love this subject I'd say its worth buying the newest edition.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are at all interested in the Mayan culture, this book is for you. Well written and organized with many maps, pictures and illustrations this books explains life in the Yucatan, Guatamala and Belize area where the Maya lived. This covers from about 3000BC to about 1500 and a little history about present day life there. Try to get the latest edition possible of this book, because things are constantly being discovered there. I want to go there sometime.

[Ricardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm read this in preparation for the lecture I have to give on SAS this May, and I'm very impressed with how thorough and accessible it is. I also like that Coe is up-front about what is unknown and/or debatable, and gives differing opinions about controversial questions.

[Janel Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reference book. It needs to be read several times and perhaps not in chronological order to try to assimilate the culture. In a nerd like fashion, I marked maps with Orange tabs, other topics with other colors

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interested in the Maya people of ancient Mesoamerica? Great maps, timelines, and information that is easy to find through the index. I've used this as a quoted resource in 4 books that I've written.

[Valena Arguello · Rating 5 out of 5]

No they do not believe in a 2012 doomsday lol!

[Dejanira Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Michael Coe!! He came to a talk with David Stuart(Which was amazing!). We didn't even know he'd be there, especially since I live in such a small town/area!

[Laika · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second proper history book of the year, and significantly better than the first! This existed on the happy intersection of ‘the r/AskHistorian’s big list of recommenced works on Goodreads’ and ‘stuff my public library inexplicably has a copy of’. It’s dense and more than a bit dry reading, enough that I read it over the course of a week as a side-dish to more digestible fiction. Still, fascinating read, and a book that left more far better informed about the subject than when I started it.

The book is more or less what it says on the tin – a survey of the history of the Maya (or at least the current state of what’s known about it). The book opens with an explanation of the Maya language family, the relevant geography, the characteristics of the high- and lowlands, and the division into northern, central and southern area the field seems to use generally. The better part of it is then arranged chronologically, beginning with the Archaic Period, through the Pre-Classic and Classic, then then Collapse and the Post-Classic. The Spanish Conquest and history since gets a very abbreviated epilogue, ending with a few micro-anthropologies of different contemporary villages and then a five-page travellers’ guide to the most important sites and how to access them.

It’s all, as I said, quite dense – the sort of book where every paragraph adds at least one new important fact and very little time is spent on repetition or review. Combined with the usually very dry, expository tone, it feels much more like a textbook to be read with a lecturer or group to break down and dig into each section than something that was really written to be read alone and for pleasure. Which you know, makes sense, given that this is the tenth edition of a book originally written several decades before I was born.

Now, I say this is a history book, but that’s honestly a bit of a kludge – better to say it’s an archaeology book or, failing that, about anthropology and historiography. There is very little narativizing, and it is very much told from the point of view of the present. That is, the sections are organized chronologically, but within them the unit of analysis is the archaeological site, with every supposition explained as emerging from the analysis of some ruin or artifact or fragment of text. Far more time is spent on the architecture and layout of Mayan cities than the people who actually lived within them, simply because the author’s have so much more to say about them.

It’s only really in the chapters on the Classic (and, to a much lesser extent, post-classic) periods that the book goes from theorizing about building and pottery styles to speaking more confidently about royal courts and high politics and dynastic grandeur, and above all the attempts to give specific particular people a sense of personality and personal biographies that you generally expect out of a pop history book. Which does make sense, given that those are the only periods where we really have enough textual evidence to confidently name and ascribe significance to any particular people – overwhelmingly dynasts and war-leaders, because of course those are the (almost invariably) men who constructed stelae and covered the walls of temples with testaments of their own greatness.

This means that you do get more of a look into nuts and bolts of knowledge production that you do in most histories – a passage about the development of chocolate drinks as elite consumption is framed with the discovery of cocoa residue on preclassic ceramic vessels, one about human sacrifice by the discovery of skeletal remains in cenotes near major architectural sites, that sort of thing. Similarly, just about every single discovery or theory is credited to one or a few specific academics who initially made it. Which will be either incredibly interesting or the dullest thing in the world, depending on one’s tastes.


The text is mostly incredibly dry and expository in tone, which makes the points where a real sense of personality and subjective opinion leaks through interesting. And endearing, at least to me, but I just find there to be something instantly likeable about the sort of academic myopia which considers human sacrifice and mass famine from the point of view of the universe but is roused to passionate rage by suburban sprawl building over unexamined archaeological sites.

I knew little enough about the specifics of Maya civilization going into this that just relaying everything that struck me reading this would turn this review into a novella. But the way that lowland urbanization and agriculture were based around, not rivers like just about every other culture I’ve read on, but cenotes (and artificially constructed simulacra thereof) in the limestone to capture enough rainwater to last through the dry season was just fascinating. The fact that, the region’s reputation for inexhaustible lushness notwithstanding, the soil the Maya relied upon was very thin and in most cases totally degraded after just a few years of agriculture as well. (Speaking of, the theorizing about how diet changed over the ages and how this related to population movements and density was just fascinating).

The book really wasn’t that interested in the specifics of mythology or divine pantheons beyond how they showed up on engravings and ornamentation – there’s no bestiary of gods or anything – but there’s enough of that ornamentation for it to be a recurring topic anyway. I admit I still find the fact that there’s this great primordial pre-classic god-monster which in the modern era is just called ‘Principle Bird Deity’ deeply amusing.

The book is deeply interested in the Maya calendar and time-keeping. Along with the monumental architecture it’s pretty clearly the thing that the authors find most impressive and awe-inspiring about Classical Mayan culture. There’s enough time dedicated to explaining it that I even pretty much understood how the different counts and levels of timekeeping interacted by the end of the book.

One beat the book kept coming back to (which I admit suits my biases quite well) is that there’s just no sense in the Maya were ever isolated or pristine. Cultural influence coming down from the Valley of Mexico waxed and waned, but on some level it was constant – Mesoamerica was a coherent cultural unit, and the similarities in philosophy and culture (not to mention material goods) between cultures within it are too blatant to ignore. The book theorizes that the population levels reached in the Yucatan before the Spanish Conquest really couldn’t have been supported by local maize agriculture, and instead cities were probably sustained by harvesting and exporting from the salt flats (among the best in the Americas) they controlled access to.

Even beyond trade, there’s several points where ruling dynasties were toppled or installed by armies ranging down from Mexico. The Olmecs and Toltecs make repeated appearances. Even the conquistadors conquest of the Highlands was really only possible because the few hundred Spaniards who got all the credit were marching alongside several thousand indigenous allies.

Speaking of – it’s really only an aside to an epilogue, but given I mostly know the Anglo-American history here, it did kind of strike me how...traditionally imperialist the Spanish were, compared to the more-or-less explicitly genocidal rhetoric I’m used to. If you were an indigenous potentate or ruler enthusiastically selling out to the Spanish Crown was significantly more likely to actually work out for you than trusting a treaty with the US of A, anyway (well, for a while. Smallpox comes for everyone),

Then again, the book does mention that the newly independent Mexican and Central American states in the 19th century were actually significantly worse for the Maya than the Bourbons had been (with things reaching their nadir with the genocidal violence of the 1980s in Guatemala), so maybe that’s it.

Anyway, the book is illustrated, and absolutely chock full of truly beautiful photography and prints on just about every other page. Even if you never actually read it, it would be a great coffee table book.

[Clay Kallam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before considering the merits of the ninth edition of "The Maya," do this thought experiment: Imagine you start work at age 22 at a large multinational corporation that produces a critical resource for modern civilization -- combustion engines, say. By the time you're 62, 90% of the people who worked for the corporation have died from a series of plagues that your culture has no cure for.

Now, what's left? Can the company still produce combustion engines? How close is the quality compared to what is was before the die-off? Since 90% of the entire population has also died, what is the market for the engines? How has the culture of the company changed, given the grief, the pain and the dislocation caused by the plagues?

In short, what would be left of a culture or civilization if 90% of its population died in a 50- or 100-year span?

That, of course, is exactly what happened to the complex, intertwined and rich cultures and civilizations of North America once European diseases were introduced. In the space of a generation or two, families, cities and nations were devastated, and cultural collapse was unavoidable. When the Spanish finally arrived in force, the diseases had done most of their work for them, and what resistance that remained was a shell of what was there before.

With that in mind, reading "The Maya," a richly illustrated and surprisingly well-written short history of Mayan culture and development, is a window into a vanished world, a world with a theology as complicated as Christianity, a world with political machinations as deadly as the modern Middle East, a world with art as beautiful and delicate as anything from Southeast Asia.

It is hard for us, given the Western invaders need to classify those it subjugated, enslaved and did its best to erase, as savages, to realize just how advanced and "civilized," for lack of a better word, the Maya were in their glory -- which is why "The Maya," which is presumably a college textbook, is so valuable and so interesting. And at the same time, the story of the Maya is a story full of mystery, a story steeped in environmental question marks and a story that ends in confusion and disaster 600 years before the arrival of the Spanish.

I decided to read about the Maya after listening to Edwin Barnhart's wonderful course, "Ancient Civilizations of North America," through the Great Courses, and the combination has reaffirmed my longheld belief that our Western conviction that our modern culture, our modern ways, our modern arts, are inherently and vastly superior to those of other places or of the past is completely wrongheaded. People are people, and for the past 10,000 years, at the least, they have created beauty and terror in equal measure. We are more advanced technically, certainly, than the Maya, and more knowledgeable about the world in general, but we still go to war, still treat the poor poorly, still pay close attention to ball games and still cannot deal with the fundamental problems that threaten the existence of our culture.

Reading “The Maya,” and looking at the intricate, elaborate art, considering the incredible architectural and engineering achievements (without the use of metal), and even thinking only about the mathematical complexity of the Long Count, it is impossible to hold on to the belief that we are somehow far better, far more accomplished, far more “civilized.” Yes, the Maya were cruel and yes, their history is full of conquest and bloodshed – but is ours any different? And, if disease had not ravaged all of North America, would those immigrants and soldiers of fortune from Europe really have colonized and conquered this vast territory and thus justified the European arrogance we all carry within us?

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t know much about ancient Mayan culture, so I picked up this slightly dated book to educate myself. It is considered one of the better books on the Maya, though it’s not up to date with the latest findings, such as the discovery through LIDAR last year of 60,000 new Mayan structures revealing that Mayan society was more complex and interconnected than realized and that Mayan cities were much, much larger than previously understood and therefore the Mayan population must have been many times larger than previously known.

The book reviews what is known of Mayan history from 1800 BCE through to the modern Maya of the 1970s, with the Classic Maya culture existing between 250 to 925 CE. It tracks the evolution of Mayan culture from its origins in the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala and along the region’s Pacific coast to the incorporation of Christian beliefs and practices into the indigenous Mayan religion. The book covers Mayan art, architecture, culture, economy, political structure, religion, language / writing, and its famed calendar.

The Olmec culture, which existed on the Gulf coast of Mexico between 1200 to 400 BCE, was an influence on Mayan culture. Surprisingly, the author suggests that due to many similarities between Mayan and East Asian culture, particularly their calendars, it is likely that there was contact between the two sometime prior to the Classical era of the Maya, though this idea is highly disputed among archaeologists. Teotihuacan was a war prone city state near modern day Mexico City that conquered Tikal in 378 CE and heavily influenced Mayan culture. Around 600 CE, Teotihuacan had been destroyed and its empire was over and a major disruption of Mayan cities occurred about the same time, but what exactly happened is not well understood.

Societal collapse in the southern lowlands of Mayan civilization began in the latter part of the 8th century CE and was complete by the early 10th century. The collapse is believed to have been caused by a combination of endemic internecine warfare, overpopulation and the accompanying environmental collapse linked to mass deforestation, and prolonged drought. As the classic Maya collapsed, many cities were invaded by Mexicans from the north, including eventually the Toltecs, who made Chichen their capital. After the Toltecs collapsed in 1224 CE, the Itza moved in and took over (thus the Itza in Chichen Itza).

The Maya believed time is cyclical and that our world is repeatedly destroyed and created anew. Their famed calendar is based on this cyclical belief. Astrology and numerology were a strong part of Mayan culture, with many temples aligned to the stars and important decisions being made based on the position of Venus or Mars in the night sky. War and human sacrifice was also a big part of the culture, as was - I was surprised to learn - flattening of the head.

The book concludes with a review of more modern history. The oppression Mayan’s have suffered since the Spanish conquest, including the suffering during the U.S. backed civil war in Guatemala. But the author highlights how Mayan culture still persists today and has strong ties to its very ancient cultural heritage.

This book is a textbook of sorts, so you can’t expect too much excitement from it, but it is a good introduction to the basics of Mayan history and civilization.

[Jon Lisle-Summers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly the standard text for beginning to discover the Maya and their incredible civilisation(s). The subject has changed and expanded rapidly since this was first written precisely because good people like Michael Coe helped to push start the process of decipherment, simply by switching on people's curiosity about what the Maya were saying when they were inscribing their buildings, stelae and their artifacts. The emerging meanings were to change our view of the Maya for worse and the better. Sure, they had a super-complex spiritual view of their reality but they were no peace-loving "hippies".
I reached this book via a Spanish sailor by the name of Gonzalo Guerrero whilst idling away an hour or two in my local library(now closed). Bernal Diaz' Conquest Of New Spain and Prescot's trilogy of the Cortez expedition mentioned an earlier expedition which had come to grief off the coast of the Yucatan with tantalising glimpses of a man, one of two eventual survivors (the other, a priest, Aguilar), all the others having been.sacrificed. Somehow, he rose to become a war leader, cacique, tattooed, cheeks and tongue scarred from blood sacrifice, with a wife and children. He fought the Spanish invaders until killed in action against them some years later.
Fascinated, I sought out Michael Coe's excellent general primer and then moved on to another of his books, Cracking The Maya Code, a proper Indiana Jones tale, full of wreckers, wanderers and eccentrics, one of my favourite books of all time.

[Andres · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Review of the 2011 8th edition*

Just like Coe's Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, this is a straightforward, information packed book on the history of the Maya peoples and culture. It starts from their unknown historical ancestors and works its way up to their modern descendants, with plenty of beautiful photos to help one get a sense of the amazing variety of skill these amazing people possessed: from the tiniest, meticulously carved items, to the mountain sized pyramids that are still being found and uncovered in the jungles, to their incredible script used to capture their language.

And just as with the other book, while the information is always interesting, its delivery can make it a frustrating experience. Elegant writing isn't Coe's strong suit and his particular style affects the flow of reading rather like a cobblestone street affects a walk---one misstep too many and you may give up. I really finished this is in about a week of actual reading, but I confess I spent more time dreading the actual reading than not. The information is wonderful, and I learned quite a lot, but it can be a bit of a struggle unless you're absolutely enraptured by the subject.

At the end Coe gives information about the modern day Maya and their struggles but it seems nothing later than 1995 is mentioned. Seeing as how this edition is 16 years after this, I wish he had included a more updated update.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relax - there's no test!

This is a consummate introductory overview of Maya history, society, and the archaeological record. If you have even a passing interest in the Maya, this is highly recommended. If you are planning on visiting a site, you owe it to yourself to read a book or two prior to your visit, and this one is a great choice.

There are portions that may bore you. Not interested in the responsibilities of the particular offices of contemporary hybrid Christian-Mayan theology in practice? Skim it (it's way near the end). If all the pottery tends to look the same, ok, breeze through those sections. But if you want to appreciate the scope, the accomplishments, and all the things that make the Maya fascinating, pick up this book.

Also note the editions and the style. This work has been repeatedly revised through the years as new discoveries and developments continue to shape what we know about the culture; be sure to get the latest edition. The style is fairly academic but written for a general audience by a couple of outstanding authorities on the subject matter. This is the real deal!

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents a good general overview of Maya history and culture, including geography, architecture, linguistics, diet, mythology, and calendar. It's nicely illustrated as well, mostly with black and white photos, but there were several pages of color inserts as well. Coe doesn't delve too deeply into any one city's history but builds a picture of the Maya era as a whole. Although the focus is on the Preclassic, Classic, and post-Classic eras, up to around 1200 AD, Coe also includes a chapter at the end on the modern Maya people and what their future may be. As an appendix there's a brief section on visiting Maya sites that I found very informative (considering that I plan on visiting some Maya sites in the near future). Recommended.