Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Although Jenkins suggests that ancient Maya knowledge of this event was based on observations of the Dark Rift in the Milky Way as seen from Earth (this dark rift, it is said by some Mayan scholars, was believed by some Mayans to be one of the entrances to Xibalba), others see it as evidence of knowledge imparted via ancient contact with ...
In ancient Maya cosmology, Middleworld is the Earth, or the world of men. "In ancient Maya thought, the universe was suffused with sacredness that resonated from the presence of deities. The ancestors, spirits and deities not only resided in the Upperworld and the Underworld (sometimes called Xibalba), but also shared the Middleworld, or Earth ...
Large-scale workshops for obsidian tool-making were spread around the ancient city. Religious practices that would later be further developed throughout Mesoamerica were elaborating during the early Middle Preclassic at Kaminaljuyu, including the erection of mounds to serve as substructures for small shrines or funerary/administrative temples ...
This resulted in the erasure of Mayan religious institutions, especially those centered on human sacrifice and propitiation of the multi-deistic pantheon. Martial values and human sacrifice were a ritualistic core of Mesoamerican spirituality prior to European incursion, but quickly dissolved in the early stages of Imperial rule.
The Mayan calendar’s 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span
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 ancient building dates to sometime between 1000 A.D. and 1200 A.D., toward the end of the settlement’s existence in the Yucatan Peninsula, the experts said.