Mayan Architecture

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Imagine if one day, everything you knew about U.S. history, just went away. All you have to figure out as to what happened, in the past, was art, religion, and writing that were left behind. This is basically what happened with the Mayas. The Mayas were not discovered until the 1840’s by John Lloyd Stephens, even though the Mayas have been around since 1800 B.C.. We have learned a lot about the Maya people through their art, religion, and writings they left behind. We have learned a lot about how the Mayas lived through their art and architecture. Although surviving Maya art represents only a small proportion of the art that the Maya created, it represents a wider variety of subjects than any other art tradition in the Americas (Miller …show more content…
Adobe (mud strengthened with straw) was applied as a coating over the walls of huts, and continued to be used throughout Maya history. Maya cities may have shared many features. There was a large variation in their architectural style. These different styles were classified as Central Petén, Puuc, Chenes, Río Bec, and Usumacinta. First, let’s talk about Central Pentén. The Central Pentén style was modeled after the city of Tikal. The style is characterized by tall pyramids supporting a summit shrine decorated with a roof comb, and accessed by a single doorway (Foster 224). Additional features are the use of stela-altar pairings (monuments), and the decoration of architectural façades, lintels, and roof combs with relief sculptures of rulers and gods (Foster 224). Next, let’s talk about the Puuc style. The pattern of Puuc-style architecture is Uxmal (Foster 224). The style developed in the Puuc Hills of northwestern Yucatán; during the Terminal Classic it spread beyond this region across the northern Yucatán Peninsula (Foster 224). Puuc sites replaced rubble cores with lime cement, resulting in stronger walls, and also strengthened their corbel (entryway in a wall) arches (Foster 224-225); this allowed Puuc-style cities to build …show more content…
The Maya writing system is one of the exceptional achievements of the pre-Columbian people of the Americas (Sharer and Traxler 125). It was the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system of more than a dozen systems that developed in Mesoamerica (Diehl 183). The Maya writing system (often called hieroglyphs from its resemblance to the Ancient Egyptian writing, although there is no connection between the two) is a logo-syllabic writing system, combining a syllabary of phonetic signs representing syllables with logogram representing entire words (Kettunen and Helmke 6). At any one time, no more than around 500 glyphs were in use, some 200 of which (including variations) were phonetic (Kettunen and Helmke 6). The basic unit of Maya hieroglyphic text is the glyph block, which transcribes a word or phrase (Johnson 15). The block is composed of one or more individual glyphs attached to each other to form the glyph block, with individual glyph blocks generally separated by a space (Johnson 15). Glyph blocks are usually arranged in a grid pattern (Johnson 15). For ease of reference, epigraphers refer to glyph blocks from left to right alphabetically, and top to bottom numerically (Johnson 15). Therefore, any glyph block in a piece of text can be identified: C4 would be third block counting from the left, and the fourth block counting downwards (Johnson 15). If a monument or artifact has more than one inscription, column
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