Museums of the Yucatan Peninsula

Mayan man born of corn

The Mayan Civilization perplexes. An indigenous people struggling for survival on a riverless limestone peninsula develops a fully sophisticated society, with high level mastery in architecture and intriguing art, with written language, complex calendars and mathematical sophistication but based on animism, human sacrifice and a sado-masochistic relationship with their gods. That civilization is more or less eradicated by the Spanish and then discovered centuries later, overgrown by jungle, mysterious even to its own descendants. It has no roots or branches in the cultures of Europe or Asia. The question that every archeological site and museum on the Yucatan Peninsula poses is: Who are we, the Maya?

Stele of a Mayan noble

We traveled the Yucatan Peninsula from Cancun in the northeast, to Merida and Campeche in the west, and back across the south to southeastern Chetumal, visiting archeological sites and museums, trying to understand.

Jade funeral mask

Cancun's elegant museum spirals up out of the archeological site of San Miguelito. It is a theatrical universe of stories told mostly in Spanish and in three dimensions: for example, a hologram projects cave dwellers working rhythmically on their arrowheads. It enlivens the already powerful masks and stone carvings and pottery that have been collected from archeological sites, the stories of a 2000 year old (nearly as old as we are!) civilization that interacted so vividly with the powerful spirits around it. Power, blood, sacrifice and death are the subjects of an aesthetic radically different from ours, with an animality and dense power that is not part of our canon. The Mayan corn god danced in his feathery cosmos, whirling through the thickness of earth's fruits. Incense burners and totems stack stylized monsters, men, dragons and birds. The dead are buried with jade masks and jade fans for cod pieces. 

Turtle man, Dzibilchaltun

It shows the Mayans as springing from the bloody competition of nature, eventually trading in large networks throughout Mesoamerica, and finally defeated by overexploitation of their land and peoples. And it was a civilization that tracked time, past and future--we saw a stone tablet with the whorls of hieroglyphs about the end of the cycle, on 23 December 2012.

Gods of execution and of suicide

At Dzibilchaltun, a Mayan ruin outside Merida, another highly evocative museum talks of a violent world infused with spirits, a full blown shamanic culture that had ritualized its conversations with gods who demanded and received blood. The grotesque remains of statuary showed men piercing their penises with agave spines because the gods enjoyed pain along with their blood. A violent cosmos of constantly opposing powers of light and darkness, life and death, is enacted in war and the ritual ball games, whose outcome was human sacrifice. The Mayan universe is visible and invisible. "It is a cosmos that moves with violence. Without the work of man and respect for the rites, the world would end."

Forced labor of Mayans under the Spanish

In Merida the story of the Maya are told in murals in the Governor's Palace, now the City Hall. The bitter drama begins with man sprouting from a corn stalk, and continues with the conquest of the Spanish, who brought steel and instruments of torture. Jacinto Canek, rebel leader, is quartered with red hot tongs. The Maya, their eternal hard labor, their misery in slavery--these stories are told in giant murals blazed with umber and black and brick red.

A Mayan green cross, adapted to Christianity

Merida's new and high tech El Gran Museo del Mundo Maya begins with the asteroid Chicxulub that fell on Merida 65.5 million years ago, perhaps the cause of dinosaur extinction. Then it works backward through Mayan history, through the juxtaposition of Indian and Spanish beliefs, explaining for example the green crosses that had been the Mayan's own pre-Hispanic symbols for the four corners of the earth. Maya Classical Era's stories were of the gods who longed to be worshiped, with stone carved creatures and monsters, and a number of reconstructed heads of Mayans--a boy who had been sacrificed, a rebel leader, a mother. Humans were sacrificed to a panoply of densely drawn gods, including at the Mayan ball court, dating to the 14th c BC., ten centuries before the Greek or Chinese sport. There are as many Mayan dialects as there are European languages, a Mayan universe parallel to the Western.

El Balak???

Campeche, a World Heritage Site, has benefited from Mexico's funds and become as beautiful as all the old colonial cities would like to be. A museum occupies a gate of its fortress walls, well-endowed with original objects of many archeological sites. Beautiful stelae are explained: the god K'awiil carries a flaming torch, his arms and legs have the scales of a reptile and one of his limbs is transformed into a serpent, which represents a lightning bolt--a god of celestial storms. "He of the earth, He of the Sky/Serpent." Chaac, whom we had seen in many archeological digs where he is called the rain god, his long curly nose protecting the corners of buildings, is called into question here. Archeologists have many interpretations of Chaac, despite his ubiquity. Really, who were the Maya? We know little.

Young king, preparing to give his blood

Also in Campeche there is an extensive Mayan collection in the Fuerte San Miguel, a fort high on a windy hill over the sea, where the devastating sun and fresh sea breezes mingle. But alas, it has been closed since December, because the lights don't work. So we drove as long as we could along the Gulf of Mexico where the sea breeze and forested road restored our spirits.

Southeast of the city of Campeche in the Rio Bec region, in the vast and beautiful Biosphere of Calakmul, is another museum that ties the Maya in to the rich abundance of wildlife of the Yucatan jungle. Calakmul has 94 species of mammals, 300 bird species, 20 amphibians, 73 species of reptiles, 18 fish and many invertebrates. There are stable populations of jaguar, puma, white-lipped peccary, Guatemalan black howler, ornate hawk-eagle and tapir.

Pygmy fruit-eating bat

The same bat, depicted religiously

Calakmul's Ice Age prairies had been filled with saber tooth tigers, mastodons and other megafauna more than 13,000 years ago. But jungle grew quickly after the ice receded, which was where the first Maya settled, where they cultivated and gathered food, and saw the native animals as divine forces. This magic and religious significance was a constant presence in daily life, a source of art and legend. For example, the pygmy fruit-eating bat of the jungle has a large ear-like membrane on its nose, which is depicted on many religious Mayan totem poles and ceramics. Nocturnal animals like owls were messengers of death. "When the owl sings, the Indian dies." The nocturnal bat and snake were also envoys of the underworld--the snake appearing in every architectural site. Most important of all, the jaguar ruled the night and the jungle, ruled over the the success of the hunt, allowed the sun to rise, and had to be appeased (at least in the late Mayan era) with human hearts.

A queen summoning the snake god

Finally, the young and atypical city of Chetumal, back on the east coast of Quintana Roo, has an elegant museum constructed according to the multilevel universe of the Maya. The underworld of Xibalba is recreated below, the higher mysteries of the calendar, astrology and prediction above, with the more concrete Mayan world at the middle level. Unfortunately its contents are models of and not the original art of the archeological sites. But it does not shrink from explaining these pieces of evidence we have of the ancient Maya:

Ritual dancer, probably a sacrificial dance

"Nobility and glory are bestowed through blood, and through blood the lords have command and the cities receive blessings. To the gods the most precious blood is offered, that of the rulers, their children. And so, when war is waged and the enemy ruler is captured, in the celebration we offer his blood and his life. The lords seek the favor of the gods for all their acts with the offering of their blood; the males give the fertilizing blood by piercing heir members with the tail-bone of a manta-ray and with a sharpened graver; the women puncture their tongues with sharp obsidian or a manta-ray spine. Through this hole they pull the string which carries the sacred substance to strips of paper which are burned in braziers so that the blood rises to the gods converted into aromatic copal smoke."

These were the ancient Maya.