Anthropology 2100 Lecture Notes - Imperial Cult, Linda Schele, Epigraphy
11 Mar 2013
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Document Summary
The maya occupied about 324,000 square km in southern mexico, guatemala, belize and honduras. It was a varied landscape with lowland jungles on a limestone shelf in an area that is flat, hot and humid, and with few rivers, to mountainous uplands that were productive agriculturally because of the rich soils. The maya were made up of about 40 independent states that were never highly urbanized but population densities were very high around ceremonial centres which formed the core of their cities. There was an indigenous development in both the lowlands and the uplands. The preclassic maya 1000bc 250 ad: It had stone buildings on platform mounds and a royal compound with buildings up to 45 m tall. There were carved stone stelae and they made plaster masks on pyramids and this would have required coordination of a large labour force and there was the emergence of a religious elite.
