Category Archives: Maya Tour

A university student in Memphis poses the question:
Did the Ancient Maya have extraterrestrial help to achieve their civilization?

Ever since I was a child wondering at the night sky, I have hoped and wished to see a UFO. I collected stories from magazines and newspapers about them; read all I could get my hands on, of the literature by Donald Kehoe, Project Blue Book, etc. But it never happened; I have never laid eyes on a flying saucer, or even a suspicious moving point of light.

I still would welcome a proof of their existence, but to date I have never seen any evidence that anyone is out there. As a scientist, I must conclude that, without more substantial evidence, we have never been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence. As a scientist, I am also impressed by the arithmetic that suggests overwhelmingly that we are not alone in the galaxy. Everywhere we look we seem to find planetary systems, and a calculable portion of these fall in the same range of life-sustaining features that we enjoy here on the thin habitable skin of the Earth. If only one out of a million solar systems is inhabited, then there are 200,000 such star systems in our galaxy. If we are just an average planet, then perhaps half of these will have a civilization more advanced than ours. That’s still 100,000 potential star-sailing civilizations. As far as I am concerned, it’s certain that they are out there.

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A four- to five-hour trek by road and a one-hour speedboat ride down the broad Usumacinta (which forms here the border between Mexico and Guatemala) brings the intrepid traveler to the riverbank-city-ruin of Yaxchilan, strategically located on a forested oxbow-peninsula, its main plaza winding along a plateau a hundred feet above the river.  Along this meandering sacred space its kings erected several dozen small palace-temples.  Kind of like the Washington Mall, I reckon.  Maya ceremonial structures like this always had lintels over the doorways, usually made of hard sapodilla wood, which resists rot and decay for centuries.  Eventually nature has her way, and nearly all these lintels rot away, letting a bit of the wall above them collapse.  Only a few such lintels survive, usually on high temples, above the tree line at Tikal and a couple other places where the wood was allowed to dry out. 
But at Yaxchilan and nearby Bonampak, the architects utilized a fine, tough limestone for their lintels, and Yaxchilan has yielded to archeologists (and ruin-raiders) about sixty of them, beautifully carved in relief.  Unlike the more-public stelae, which stand out in the plaza for all to see, lintels are much more private.  Only two or three people at a time can standin their doorways and admire them.  Continue reading →

Visitors to Palenque can spend days bedazzled by the many ancient  buildings in various states of picturesque decay and reconstruction.  Set on a jungled hillside overlooking the plains of Chiapas and Tabasco to the north, the ruined city is sometimes dubbed “Athens of Mesoamerica” due to its wealth of sensuous relief sculpture. Like the Acropolis of Athens, the buildings of Palenque display mere fragments of what was once a vast gallery of polychrome sculptural art, shining from every wall, courtyard, mansard-roof, hallway, and roof-comb.
Unlike Athens, shining white in the rocky semiarid landscape, Palenque is crowded, surrounded, festooned, (one might even say oppressed) by the fecund jungle.  Toucans, monkeys, and innumerable loud insects gambol in the branches of the forest canopy; every tree is burdened with bromeliads, air ferns, staghorn ferns, Spanish moss, strangler figs, huge termite metropoli, and aerial roots dangling down looking for more purchase, trying to wedge another slight advantage in the constant competition for the abundant resources.  Even in the “civilized” parts of town, near our hotel, the trees are stages, platforms for desperate competition, a tangle of roots and vines continually climbing on each others’ backs.
Only a tiny part of Palenque has been dug out from the grasping jungle. Ed Barnhardt and his team mapped the remains of about 1500 stone structures –temples, shrines, palaces, apartment blocks, performance platforms… even, in Residential Group B, a waterfall-view platform that could have –must have– been the site of moonrise-watching, spontaneous-poetry-composing parties.  Of these 1500, about 50 or 60 have been excavated.  Continue reading →

Teotihuacan is pretty convenient to Mexico City. A short bus-ride from the Bus terminal Norte, for 36 Pesos, and the ticket seller gave me my first lesson (on this trip) in caveat emptor: “The bus leaves in three minutes,” he informed us, “Do you have 8 pesos?” I had given him a 200-peso note, and fished out the requisite change. He gave us our three tickets and we hurried away…. You guessed it. He did not readily proffer our 100-peso-note change. The bus was pulling out of its parking space by the time we did the arithmetic, and realized we had been *allowed* to overpay. (Later that day, we reported him, but we were unable to return the following day and confront him. His colleague was very apologetic …. and unable to pay us back.)

No shade, bring plenty of water. Teotihuacan, like every major archeological attraction in the country, cost us each 51 pesos. Couldn’t find a decent map of the site to guide us around, though there were maps posted here and there. I shot a photo and consulted it from time to time. Most of the visitor-friendly portion stretches along the Avenida de los Muertos, the broad, (nearly) north-south boulevard that forms the axis of the ancient mertropolis. It’s not exactly a highway, interrupted by stairways and sunken courts… There are no ballcourts in Teo, but the Avenida, lined with steps like bleachers, would have served well. Imagine huge, sacred Stickball tournaments held in Times Square…. Or down Colorado Blvd in Pasadena, instead of the Rose Parade….

Evidence of the ancient city’s enormous population, (variously estimated from 150,000 – 400,000, during its apogee in the 500′s AD): Even today, with millions of visitors annually, the ground is littered with ancient trash. Potsherds abound, red, buff, or black, even right on the Avenida. Here and there, especially after a rain, the occasional chip of obsidian glitters in the harsh sunlight. One does not pick up souvenirs at archeological sites –it’s unethical and illegal– but I did shoot a few pictures of some of the richer surface scatters of s herds.

We met some schoolboys who showed us, not just sherds, but a piece of pottery painted with post-fire stucco they had found. Teo is a rich site still… Will reward anyone allowed to stick a shovel in the ground. 95% of the city still sleeps beneath the sod. A few of the mounds have been penetrated, and several painted apartment-complexes even lie outside the fence surrounding the site. Why is there not an army of archaeologists burrowing and exposing its treasures? Partly lack of funding, mainly infighting and highly restrictive obstacles to anyone’s receiving permission to dig. Anyone lucky enough to dig here will find career-changing treasures, and the powers-that-be are not generous in granting such opportunities. Stay tuned, and visit often.

Teo died violently –a layer of ash overlays the final layers of occupational debris– around 650 AD. Some experts date its Fall as early as 600 or as late as 750, but I note that the Late Classic Florescence all over Mesoamerica seems to have really revved up in the mid-7th century: Cities like Tikal, Monte Alban, and Cholula enjoyed a huge building boom in the Late Classic (650-850); I attribute this to sudden freedom from onerous Teo-taxation. Most of the Classic ruins one visits show very little Early Classic or Preclassic architecture at all. Late Classic structures cover them all, just as Rome’s Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance churches all hide behind Baroque facades.

As we climbed the Pyramids of the Feathered Serpent (actually they don’t let you near it; we climbed the *adosada*, or porch), of the Sun (about 260 steps to the top), and of the Moon (they let you up half way), we scanned the site to see which mounds had been excavated, as we knew that that was where to see painted walls. By the time we finally learned that the mural sites were outside the gates, it was pushing four pm, and they closed at five. After much searching and asking –a pleasant walk through semi-rural avenues and alleyways– we found Tetitla, a large complex (about 40 rooms?) with the remains of beautiful frescoes on many walls. Preservation exacted a price however: Only the portion of the walls which had lain buried for the last millennium, that is, the lower two to four feet, are still adorned… Often all we see are the feet of the sacred participants, or the lower framing band.

At Tetitla, also, lived some ancient Maya ex-pats; iconographer Karl Taube’s latest project is analyzing hundreds of fragments of their murals. He tells me they even contain a few glyphs. Sadly (for me), these are all packed away in the storeroom. But what is on display enthralls.

Now, the return journey provided some REAL adventure. About ten minutes out of Teo, the bus pulls over, some armed, brown-shirted special police clamber aboard, look over the passengers… point at me, and beckon. I rise slowly. I am NOT liking being singled out in this manner. My companions sit quietly, trying to be as unobtrusive, as *invisible*, as the rest of the passengers. They take me outside the bus, pat me down perfunctorily, and motion that I remain outside. Inside the bus they’re prodding and searching people’s handbags.… Eventually one of the guards and I establish enough of a connection to overcome the language *tope*. They’re looking for guns. My new friend tells me that the newest method to smuggle them is in ladies’ handbags, but all Americans are suspect. After ten endless minutes –or was it an hour?–, they let me back on, and we continue home.

Dazzling churches! Frida & Diego! Great cuisine! Pyramids! Sublime sculpture! Hieroglyphs! Mysteries! Howler Monkeys! Dawn chorus of a million birds! Dark, vaulted chambers, stone walls sweating, ceilings hung with bats! Leafcutter ants! Army ants! Biting ants! Stinging ants! Malarial mosquitoes! Montezuma’s Revenge! Corrupt cops! I love this place!

So, arriving into Mexico City with friends, one is obliged to put away the pith helmet and don the tourist’s baseball cap a bit. It turns out that we chose a bad time to visit the joined houses/studios of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in San Angel, as her half was closed completely and in his half only the top floor was open. (A landmark of modernist architecture by their friend Juan O’Gorman, built just after their return from the USA. Fenced with organ-pipe cacti.)

This contained his airy studio, reconstructed to look like he just left it: A sexy portrait of Dolores del Rio on the easel, her eyes enormous, Keen-like; his palette and brushes ready, his jacket and other clothes hung on the chair. Around three walls hang colossal papier-mache skeletons and other parade figures; shelves along the walls hold the tools of the traditional artist:brushes galore, palettes, scales with brass weights, muller and grinding-glass, jars of brightly-colored minerals, some finely powdered, others in crumbly crystals of sienna,

malachite, and orpiment…. And then four huge vitrines of artifacts: some folk-art, but mostly Pre-Columbian . Mainly pottery and figurines, broken heads of prettyladies, and the like. Someone once pointed out to Diego that he had a large number of :”fakes” in his collection. His reply: “It’s all made by the same hands.”

A taxi ride across town to Frida’s Blue House in Coyoacan was much more rewarding. No photos allowed in the galleries, full of her and others’ paintings, photos, drawings, letters, furniture, books, and other relics… Hmph. Apparently this is the spacious home-around-a-courtyard she had grown up in, and in the courtyard she displayed dozens of precolumbian sculptures, mostly Teotihuacan and Aztec. Tenoned skulls protrude from a little pyramid decked with Chicomecoatls (Aztec Maize goddesses), serpents, etc…. and so on. Lovely, tranquil place.

Lunched at the famed and gracious San Angel Inn (built in a grand 17th-century estate). Great environment. Good –not great– food.

1 June 2011

Tomorrow I set off with two friends for Mexico City.  For twelve days, we journey slowly across southern Mexico, eastward, toward what the Aztecs called “The Land of the Red and the Black”…  For the Aztecs, these colors usually refer to the rising Sun and the watery Underworld**, but they have a double meaning: Red and black are the colors of ink.  The Maya were the learned ones, their home the land of innumerable books.
My kind of people!
After twelve days —the wish-list is long, from Cholula to San Lorenzo to La Venta to Agua Azul to Palenque— I join a tour of 27 academics paid for by the NEH (thank you, taxpayers, thank you!) for five weeks, to as many Maya sites as we can get to.
Last trip I took, to Peru for ten days, I came home with 7000 digital photos (many in stereo, so it’s not as many as it sounds).  My view of the world is often framed by a camera viewfinder.
Packing to do, so will close here.  More soon!

**Yucatan is riddled with caves… So many that the land has no surface water to speak of… It’s all underground.  Every town and village is built around a cave, a cenote (Mayan dzonot), a sinkhole, access to an underground pool of the clearest, cleanest, sweetest water anywhere.  This peculiar topography is thanks to the limestone karst, shivered with a million cracks sixty million years ago by the Chikxulub meteorite impact…. Sorry, dinosaurs!=