The art of the Maya, as with every civilization, is a reflection of their lifestyle and culture.

The mayan art was composed of delineation and painting upon paper and plaster, carvings in wood and stone, clay and stucco models, and terra cotta figurines from molds. The technical process of metal working was also highly developed but as the resources were scarce, they only created ornaments in this media. Many of the great programs of Maya art, inscriptions, and architecture were commissioned by Mayan kings to memorialize themselves and ensure their place in history. The prevailing subject of their art is not anonymous priests and unnamed gods but rather men and women of power that serve to recreate the history of the people. The works are a reflection of the society and its interaction with surrounding people. One of the greatest shows of Mayan artistic ability and culture is the hieroglyphic stairway located at Copan. The stairway is an iconographical complex composed of statues, figures, and ramps in addition to the central stairway which together port ray many elements of Mayan society, pgint of mayan art. An alter is present as well as many pictorial references of sacrifice and their gods. More importantly than all the imagery captured with in this monument, however, is the history of the royal descent depicted in the heiroglyphs and various statues. The figurine of a seated captive is also representative of Mayan society as it depicts someone in the process of a bloodletting ceremony, which included the accession to kingship. This figure is of high rank as depicted by his expensive earrings and intricately woven hip cloth. The rope collar which would usually mark this man as a captive, reveals that he is involved in a bloodletting rite. His genitals are exposed as he is just about to draw blood for the ceremony. In the Indian communities, as it was with their Mayan ancestors, the basic staple diet is corn. The clothing worn is as it was in the past. It is relatively easy to determine the village in which the clothing was made by the the type of embroidery, color, design and shape. Mayan dialects of Qhuche, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, and Mam are still spoken today, although the majority of Indians also speak Spanish.

At a Glance

Much of the information gathered about the Mayans is gleaned from analyzing the

artwork and ruins of the cities found in the heavy foliage of the forest. Artwork such as murals, pottery and tablets serve to provide most of the basic information that anthropologists, historians, and scientists know about the existence of the Maya people, especially regarding social and family life. From the European repetoire of records, there are accounts of many of the battles between the Maya and the Europeans, there are records to the locations of some Mayan cities and occasionally, someone makes note of a ocial or cultural custom. The lack of real, first-hand data from the Mayan peoples directly regarding the probable intricacies of their social customs regarding things such as kinship and marriage leaves anthropologists to make inferences and educated guesses about Mayan lifestyle from a cultural and social perspective through mediums such as artwork and implications from the few records they do possess.

Information regarding Mayan tradtions of kinship structure, marriage customs and family structure is particularly scarce and therefore must be sought through indirect means. Much of the knowledge assumed to be known about Mayan family systems is comprised of a series of conjectures and hypotheses and is often questioned, contested, researched, and then altered with the addition of new interpretations of the existing information. There is much discussion and much disagreement regarding things such as kinship structure and family structure, though marriage is a little easier to learn about directly from the presence of murals and artwork since art would be more likely to commemorate such an custom rather than kinship diagrams and explanations of family names.

Kinship Structure

The Mayan kinship structure is an extremely contested piece of cultural information regarding their cultural family customs as very little is recorded bout it and much of the information must be inferred from language clues. For at least the past 80 years, anthropologists have been trying to form a comprehensive, or at least coherent, argument for Mayan kinship structure and a variety of hypotheses have been formed, supported and then rejected. ecent evidence has supported the theory that the kinship system was a "kariera kinship system based on bilateral cross-cousin marriage with cross-cutting patrilineal descent and alternate generation moities" (JSTOR article) though this conjecture is always up for debate and is undoubtedly isregarded but just as many anthropologists as support it.

Original Theories of Kinship

One of the earliest articles attempting to debunk the mystery of Mayan kinship was when
"in 1934, Eggan reconstructed a rule of bilateral cross-cousin marriage in the 'ancient' Maya kinship system. He shwed that 'the apparently random nature of [Maya] kinship applications disappears when such a rule is assumed' (Eggan 1934:6). At present there is some uncertainty as to the type of cousin marriage, the rule of descent, and the nature of noble and royal as opposed to commoner marriage practices in ancient Maya society. Lounsbury (n.d.), in a paper which remained unpublished and which I have not seen, evidently reconstructed a system of double unilineal descent in Maya. Coe (1965, 1987), following Lounsbury and Roys (1940), proposed two crosscutting descent groups: the matrilineage and the patrilineage. Thompson (1982) similarly argued for double descent and cross-cousin marriage. Hopkins (1985), on the other hand, adduced strong evidence for patrilineal but not for matrilineal descent groups, and he argued on the basis of ethnographic evidence that the Maya kinship system was Omaha in type. Omaha systems, however, are not associated with bilateral cross-cousin marriage. J. Fox and justeson (196=86:7) proposed, without much evidence, a system of matrilateral parallel and/or patrilateral cross-cousin marriage joining Maya royal families . Joyce (1981) derived an alternating system of descent analogous to Mundugumor 'ropes' (Mead 1935; McDowell 1991)" (JSTOR article). All of these arguments regarding the structure of Mayan kinship met with struggles for acceptance and approval as time and time again theories of kinship were contested and disproved.

Current Theory on Kinship

Maya rulers used the jaguar as a symbol for the divine right of kings. The Jaguar God inhabited the Underworld, home of the dead. Each morning, he became the Sun God, travelling across the sky to the west, where he fell back into the Underworld. To maintain the cycle of night and day, rulers performed rituals to appease the gods, the controllers of the fate of humankind. Like the Jaguar God, Maya kings defied death by being reborn out of the dreaded Underworld, which the average human could not escape. The Maya of the Classic period (A.D. 250-900) developed a sophisticated artistic tradition, producing sculpted stone, painted ceramics, clay figurines, and screenfold bark books of drawings and hieroglyphic writing. Maya ceramic artists were highly educated members of the elite. They used slip paint, a mixture of finely ground pigment, clay, and water, to decorate their pottery with images of rituals, myths, geometric motifs, and hieroglyphs. Ceramics were used as tableware, currency, symbols of status, and as offerings to the dead. Clay

pots were also made for cooking and storing food. Today, many Maya continue to follow the ancient religion in their ancestral homeland, which spans five countries of Mesoamerica: Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The People of the Jaguar exhibit focuses on authentic Maya pottery decorated with figures and glyphs, as well as certain objects re-created for the IMAX film.
A jaguar playing with a waterlily, both symbols of royalty.

Royal Regalia

Artifacts:
Jaguar God mask Figurine of a noblewoman Two-faced figurine Incised shell Vessel with two shamans Plate with bird motif Vessel with three Noblemen Vessel with four dancing Noblemen Vessel with crouched figure Vessel with dancing Snake Man

The current theory of Mayan kinship structure as discussed by Per Hage relates the system to a type of "Kariera kinship system based on bilateral cross-cousin marriage with cross-cutting patrilineal descent and alternate generation moieties" (JSTOR article). Kariera refers to a system often employed by western Australian people groups that revolves around the concept of ordering things in groups of four. The Mayans' kinship system is believed to be derived from not only Australian-type kinship systems but also from generic Asian systems as well, particularly the early Chinese. The use of the number four to order and categorize things and time periods is a common practice throughout Mayan civilization as shown in how they organize and symbolize colors, myths, birds, celestial phenomena, gods, years, metaphysical ideas, and of course, directions (JSTOR article). They also often divided their cities into four sections, measured important time spans out in four-year incriments and had a four-part socio-cosmological parallel to divide things into which were 1) plants, 2) animals, 3) natural phenomena, and 4) rituals/social functions (JSTOR article). The use of the number four is apparent in the cosmological structures and community divisions of Mayan civilization, linking them to similar structures in Asian and Asia-Pacific cultures whose systems also tended to have Kariera-style kinship structures. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that the Mayans also probably made use of the four-part kinship system.

In the Kariera system, there are only two generations, the odd and the even. For the ego, there are +1, +2, -1, and -2 generations which account for ego's parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren, respectively. Within those four divisions, there are two odd and two even numbers which serve to further divide theextended family. Especially early on in the ProtoMaya Archaic Period from before 2000 BC when the Mayan peoples tended to still live in small groups instead of in the gargantuan metropolises they eventually would construct and become famous for, this system was important because extended family was a vital function of identity and society.

Marriage and Family Marriage, of course, relates directly to kinship in that marriage ceremonies and practices relate specifically to how the community and network of families interact and intermarry. Bishop Landa in the 16th century stated in his notes and journals that first-cousins were allowed to marry other relatives on the mother's side and that often times, women were married to older men (not significantly older men, but just men that were a few years older) as it was seen to be more socially acceptable. The fact that people were married within their own relative group on the mother's side suggests the bilateral cross-cousin marriages suspected of the Kariera system of marriage. Strangely, even though cousin marriage is thought to have been definitely prominent at one point in time and even with the multitude of words signifying different family members and their relation to the ego (in fact, the list of family categorizations such as father, aunt, grandfather, etc., are so extensive because the name used to describe particular family members is partly dependent on ego's gender), there is not definite term for "cousin." However, this fact is not necessarily as crazy as it may seem because as time goes on and as societies gain complexity, they are more likely to lose some of the more generic terms in their language and only gain complexity.

This cross-cousin marriage was occasional, but very important for the nobility. Only very high status people neeed to follow the rules of matilineal cross-cousin marriage and even then, the marriage of that particular Kariera type only had to happen once per generation in order to sustain the legitimacy of the noble line and maintain reputation. Interestingly enough, by around AD 250, there were two different marriage systems for the Mayans-that of the commoners and that of the royalty and nobility. The commoners seemed to partake in bilateral cross-cousin marriage and the nobility seemed to use the matrilineal cross-cousin marriage which, again, is similar to early Chinese civilization practices. Marriages for the Mayans were determined by negotiations of parents and priests. After puerty and the Descent of the Gods rite of passage celebrating that bodily transition, the atanzahab (basically a matchmaker) was hired to examine horoscopes, names, familie, and find a good fit. Most of the couples the atanzahab matched were monogamous,

though men could technically be polygamous. Divorce and second marriages were allowed but were not on an extensive large scale level or very common.

Ancient Maya sacrificed boys not virgin girls: study

The victims of human sacrifice by Mexicos ancient Mayans, who threw children into water-filled caverns, were likely boys and young men not virgin girls as previously believed, archeologists said on Tuesday. The Maya built soaring temples and elaborate palaces in the jungles of Central America and southern Mexico before the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s. Maya priests in the city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula sacrificed children to petition the gods for rain and fertile fields by throwing them into sacred sinkhole caves, known as cenotes. The caves served as a source of water for the Mayans and were also thought to be an entrance to the underworld. Archeologist Guillermo de Anda from the University of Yucatan pieced together the bones of 127 bodies discovered at the bottom of one of Chichen Itzas sacred caves and found over 80 percent were likely boys between the ages of 3 and 11. The other 20 percent were mostly adult men said de Anda, who scuba dives to uncover Mayan jewels and bones. He said children were often thrown alive to their watery graves to please the Mayan rain god Chaac. Some of the children were ritually skinned or dismembered before being offered to the gods, he said. It was thought that the gods preferred small things and especially the rain god had four helpers that were represented as tiny people, said de Anda. So the children were offered as a way to directly communicate with Chaac, he said.

Archeologists previously believed young female virgins were sacrificed because the remains, which span from around 850 AD until the Spanish colonization, were often found adorned with jade jewelry. It is difficult to determine the sex of skeletons before they are fully matured, said de Anda, but he believes cultural evidence from Mayan mythology would suggest the young victims were actually male.