who were the mayans?. the maya were not one unified group of people. each city had it’s own ruler....
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They were more like City-states.These rulers formed alliances, traded
and they also fought each other.
The Mayans were similar though because they all shared the same
culture.• They had the same language.• They had the same class system.• They had the same calendar.• They had the same religion.
Quetzalcoatl
Mayan rulers filled their cities with sky high pyramids and ornate (decorated) palaces in order to show their great power and their connections to the gods.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mayacode/map-flash.html
We need to know about the land they lived on.
• There were many different types of terrain (land).
• They call theLand :• Highlands• Lowlands
TopographicalMap
They ate foods we are all familiar with.
• Beans• Corn• Peppers • Squash• Turkey• Fish (along the coast)• Chocolate
But what does it take to grow enough food to feed a whole city?
• Beans
• Seeds
• Pre-Columbian food
They had to learn to grow a lot of food on what ever land they lived on.
• In marshySwamps
• On steep hillsides
• In thick Rainforests where the sun never shows through the thick canopy. (The top of the trees.)
Canopy
They had developed many different agricultural techniques to deal with
the challenges of:• Limited sunlight• Erosion which led the nutrients to run
off with the rain• Swampy, wet land
Some of these practices were wise and some were destructive.
…..piling the excess soil on to man made fields (platforms) in between
the canals.
This was called Raised-Field Farming.
2. They had another technique when they needed to farm on hillsides.
• It was called Terraced Farming.
A few times each season the Maya harvested water plants from the
canals and spread them on the fields to further enrich the soil.
3.Lastly, they had to come up with a way to grow food in the forests and
Rainforests.
• This type of farming is called Slash and Burn.
First, the farmer cut down all the trees in the area he wanted to plant crops in. Cutting down the trees was the “slash part” of the slash and burn
farming method.
But this was unproductive in the long run!
• They get 100 percent productivity (100% of what they planted) the first year
• 60 percent the next year • And less than that in the years to come.
So in three to five years, the land is basically useless, and they have to
move on.”
• We now call this deforestation.