We went to this museum once before as family, but it's one of those places where you need to read the plaques to know what you're looking at and the boys have no plaque tolerance, so I didn't get much out of it. Today, some people from my Spanish class wanted to go, so I tagged along. (Ubers are really cheap here, by the way. And you can pay cash!)
Here is the cast of characters:
The more you learn about the ancient Maya, the more interesting they get. And the madder you are at Bishop Diego de Landa who ordered all of their written codices to be burned in 1562. Like, dude! Ok, you sincerely want to convert them to Christianity and you really believe you're being helpful, but couldn't you just have taken them and, like, shipped them off to be preserved in a museum in Spain somewhere? You really had to burn them and permanently lose everything they knew about their history, astronomy, and ceremonial practices? There was only one copy! You don't burn the only copy!
[Takes a deep breath.] Ok. Where were we? Oh, picture. Here you go:
These little guys are less than two inches tall. Note the hinged jaws. The plaque said something like "The ancient Maya were skilled artisans." Yes, definitely a lot of skill here.
Although, I suspect some were maybe slightly less skilled than others:
And I think some were just being funny:
They used a calendar with 18 months of 20 days each plus 5 extra days. Here's how to write out the boys' birthdays.
Lots of speculations about pok ta pok, the ball game where the players hit the gum resin ball with their hip. Did the winning team get sacrificed, or maybe just the captain of the losing team? All of this ended 600 years before the Spanish arrived, so nobody really knows.
Janal Pixan altar set up. The fun thing is that the longer we're here, the more little things we recognize. For example, we now know the bowl of stuff on the right is
pib, which is like a great big chicken and bean tamale wrapped in banana leaves and baked underground. The stuff in the gourd bowls is
atole, which is a sweet corn meal drink flavored with cinnamon. And the two sticks in the middle on the floor are for a game called
kimbomba.
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