question is about pyramids and ceremonies, but it is mostly about origins. Travel in time and space into Central America, in the current region of Guatemala, to the year 1000 BC. I was up so early of what archaeologists call “pre-classical period average.” In that region there was a constellation of villages. Families, to live after centuries of agriculture, aggregated into more complex groups where social classes began to germinate. Amid this ferment, the first born plazas and pyramids, which would later be the watermark of the city-states of the Maya culture. Archaeologists have now discovered the Mayan archaeological site of Ceibal that these structures were born two centuries earlier than was known, according to a paper published in Science .
These plazas and pyramids are part of a complex built together and are architectural expressions of social change that existed, by this time, from the South of Guatemala to the Gulf of Mexico. It was already known that the appearance of the Mayan civilization as we know it was linked to this development, but the authors argue in the article that the Maya participated in this regional change. “There is this idea of ??the origin of the Mayan civilization as an internal event and isolated, and there is this other idea that was an outside influence that triggered the social complexity of the Mayan civilization. Now, we think that what happened is neither black nor white, “says Victor Castillo, one of the authors of the article belongs to the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, in the United States.
was in the classical period, between 250 and 900 AD, the most spectacular cities of the Maya civilization flourished, such as Tikal, situated north of Ceibal, at the beginning of the peninsula of Yucatan. But during the previous centuries, there was the rise and fall of cities and other civilizations such as the Olmec, which is another of the characters in this story.
Olmec civilization encompassed cities located on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of kilometers north of Ceibal. Centers such as San Lorenzo, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, peaked before 1200 BC. But archaeological surveys made to date have not revealed in San Lorenzo architectural structures of squares and pyramids which later became present in Mayan. However, La Venta, the great Olmec center that flourished around the 800 BC, after emptying of San Lorenzo, already had these complexes.
“Scholars always discussed the influence of the Olmecs in the development of lowland Maya society [in northern Guatemala and Peninsula Iutacão],” reads the article Science . “Some saw us as the mother culture: the source of all cultural innovations, from where the arts and centralized policy spread to the Mayans and other groups in Central America.”
There is, however, argue that the Maya groups that were developing south were little influenced by the Olmecs and would be more or less isolated. But the existence of squares and pyramids at La Venta is a strong argument in favor of the force as the Olmec mother culture. But the new study calls into question the theory that the Olmecs were the inspiration for the Maya culture.
Takeshi Inomata, the same university from Victor Castillo, and other colleagues working in the United States and Japan did archaeological surveys in some structures Ceibal, which is in Guatemala, on the southern border province of Peten, and found that the 1000 BC existed these ceremonial complexes, although they are much less sophisticated and large. The oldest structures of pyramids and plazas that were known Olmec city of La Venta were 200 years younger than these.
“The main complex Ceibal is done by a square, west of it is a platform or pyramid and to the east is a lot [flattened]“, explains Inomata. “This structure is generically known as ‘Group Structure E’, and can be found throughout the South of Central America,” he adds.
The authors argue that the pyramids and plazas of La Venta, dating back two centuries later than those which have now been discovered in Ceibal, belong to the same type of structures. “Probably, its uses were similar,” argues Inomata. “The rituals were very important to these civilizations, and there are a number of deposits associated with rituals in the square of Ceibal. Were found axes made of jade, which were deposited as a kind of offering,” describes.
So this novelty undermines the place of Olmec Mayan culture. “There is a profound social change to happen from the lowlands of the Maya, through Chiapas region [region in southern Mexico, along the Pacific glued to Guatemala] to the south of the Gulf of Mexico,” says the researcher. “This new social order emerged not only a center, such as the Gulf of Mexico from the Olmecs, but through many interactions between various groups, including the Maya.”
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