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In the ancient Maya cities, all sorts of offertory items including sacrificial implements were also stored and buried in deposits (caches) below architectural features such as floors, stelae, and altars; in these cases, the intention may often have been a dedication to a specific religious purpose, rather than an offering to a divine recipient.
In common with the rest of Mesoamerica, the Maya believed in a supernatural realm inhabited by an array of powerful deities who needed to be placated with ceremonial offerings and ritual practices. [339] At the core of Maya religious practice was the worship of deceased ancestors, who would intercede for their living descendants in dealings ...
The writings of 16th-century Bishop Diego de Landa, who had infamously burned a large number of Maya books, contain many details of Maya culture, including their beliefs and religious practices, calendar, aspects of their hieroglyphic writing, and oral history. [115]
The Classic Maya used dedication rituals to sanctify their living spaces and family members by associating their physical world with supernatural concepts through religious practice. The existence of such rituals is inferred from the frequent occurrence of so-called 'dedication' or 'votive' cache deposits in an archaeological context.
The archaeology project, which began in January 2023, has recovered 218 bags worth of ceramic pieces, three of metates (a stone used to grind grain or cocoa), two flint knives and many other ...
Ancient Maya art comprises the visual arts of the Maya civilization, an eastern and south-eastern Mesoamerican culture made up of a great number of small kingdoms in what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Many regional artistic traditions existed side by side, usually coinciding with the changing boundaries of Maya polities.
In 1967, an underground cistern known as a chultun was discovered near a sacred body of water at Chichen Itza, an important ancient Maya city on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Skeletal remains of ...
Schele and Freidel, Maya Cosmos. 1993. Taube, The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatán. Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya. 1992. Thompson, Maya History and Religion. 1970; Tozzer, Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán. 1941. Zender, A Study of Classic Maya Priesthood. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Archaeology, University of ...