HISTORY

The Mayans built great temples and large cities such as Nakbé, San
Bartolo (in the north of Petén), Tikal, Palenque, Copán, Calakmul, as
well as Uaxactún, Piedras Negras. The monuments of the most
notable Maya are the pyramids that they built in their religious
centers.
 LOCATION

The Mayan Culture extends over an area of more than 350000 km that includes the
southeast of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and part of Honduras.
The Mayans were located in Mesoamerica, from the coasts of the Pacific Ocean to
the Yucatan peninsula in the Caribbean Sea. The culture created by the pre-Hispanic
Mayans developed in a vast territory: the current Mexican states of Yucatan,
Campeche, Quintana Roo, part of Tabasco and Chiapas; Guatemala, Belize and a
sector of Honduras.
 POPULATION

• Currently, the Mayan people continue to live scattered in Mexico (Yucatán,

Chiapas), Guatemala and Honduras, and it is made up of a population that
exceeds 2 million individuals.
 CUSTOMS
One of the customs revolves around the name of the baby. When the children were
newly born there was an event where they were assigned a name; nevertheless, the
child would have before all the people a kind of pseudonym and the real name would
only be known by the people closest to the family. If the child was a man they would
put "Ah" and if it was a woman, they would put the name "Ix" before it. Then they
carried their surname or patronymic. The third name was naalkaba, or a combination
of the name of his father and his mother or the names of the father and mother's
family. The last one was the coco kaba, which was the nickname they were given.
Aesthetic patterns
The aesthetic was also a characteristic of the Mayan culture, for them a beautiful
image was to have a straight-sided skull, obviously this is not a characteristic of
the human skull, which is why when the baby was born a table was placed on the
forehead with the aim of achieving a straightness on the forehead.
Another custom related to the Mayan aesthetic is that of the deviation of the eyes.
For this culture if a child suffered from strabismus was a sign of beauty and
distinction, therefore to achieve this effect the babies were placed something
between the eyes, so as to draw the attention of the child and thus manage to
divert their eyes.
It is also important to note that a sign of distinction was that of having
the legs arched and for this the mothers carried their children held at
the height of the hips, in such a way that they managed to alter the
straight shape of the legs.

One of the Mayan customs that we can appreciate up to the present is

the piercing in one of the nostrils where a kind of earring made of jade
was placed. Currently it is what we know as piercing, that means we
have similar aesthetic parameters; nevertheless, we can not say the
same of the perspective of the way of wearing the hair.
 TYPICAL FOODS
The ancient Mayans were an agricultural society, they harvested corn, beans, squash,
cassava and sweet potatoes, supplementing their diet with the product of hunting and
fishing done in nearby rivers, lakes or the mr. Corn in the form of tamales was the
basis of Mayan cuisine along with tortillas and atole, a hot drink that is taken for
breakfast. Even the Mayans worshiped the god of corn to allow them a good harvest.
Chocolate, which comes from a seed of the cacao tree, was known as the "drink of
the gods" because, by law, only the nobility could take it. An old Chiapas story tells
that after the Spaniards made chocolate a common drink, the mestizos drank it in the
church to support the long masses. At present, in Chiapas there is a special chocolate
drink called tascalate made of a mixture of chocolate, pine nuts, achiote, vanilla and
sugar.