Unveiling the ancient Maya's relationship to animals and nature

AUGUST 12, 2024

by Yifan Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

As the scorching May sun of Central Belize blazes down on us, temperatures soar to a staggering 106°F. Local farmers anxiously await the onset of the rainy season to sow their crops, but the much-needed first rain remains elusive. This property is owned by a community of Mennonites who live in the town of Outlook to the west. The maize fields lie empty except for us. We are the Valley of Peace Archaeology project team, named after a nearby village where our foremen and excavation assistants live. We are braving the extreme heat to conduct salvage excavations of 11 ancient Maya mounds.

The relentless drought has sparked widespread wildfires, turning the forests on the edges of this deforested area into a smoky chaos. We feel like we are in a high-temperature oven. Today, a hummingbird, displaced by the fires, flew into our shaded palapas, seeking coolness. It lingered briefly before flying off, weakly searching for precious water.

In stark contrast to the severe environmental destruction that we see all around us, our excavations reveal the ancestral Maya's profound respect for nature and animals. I'm standing thigh-high in an excavating trench, staring down at an animal cache for Maya ritual that we just uncovered. The cache contains the bones of white-tailed deer, dogs and raccoons, indicating that these mammals once thrived in the lush forests surrounding these ancient Maya communities.

U. of I. anthropology professor Lisa Lucero, the principal investigator of the VOPA project and my mentor, argues that the ancient Maya treated animals and all other ecosystem members as equals to humans. In their world view, there was no division between "culture" and "nature." In Popol Vuh, the 16th-century K'iche' Maya creation story, the "Plumed Serpent" created animals before humans, with the only difference being their ways of speaking. To the Maya, the world is a holistic garden where humans, plants, animals and nature coexist harmoniously.



Wildfires and smoke surround the excavation site. Credit: VOPA and Belize Institute

More:
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-unveiling-ancient-maya-relationship-animals.html