pre-columbian archeology
Unlike Egyptian pyramids, Mayan pyramids were usually large platforms on which temples were built. Sometimes they were also burial sites.
The ancient Maya developed a complex and varied ceremonial life, through which they sought to explain their position in the world and the nature of things. One of the basic aspects underpinning their belief system was the possibility for their rulers and religious specialists to communicate with their ancestors and their ancestor's ancestors.
The rulers and religious specialists could communicate with their ancestors and their gods to obtain information to better interpret reality, but this communication was not immediate, instead was carried out through the performance of elaborate rituals.
The monumental Maya architecture played an essential role as a scenario in which this type of vital ceremonies were carried out for the life of the community, and in a special way their pyramid temples were decorated with images of the visions obtained by the rulers when communicating with their ancestors and with the divine forces.
It contrasts to the great amount of ruins and constructions existing in the Maya area, we have a scarce interpretation of the buildings that define it. Maya archaeology has devoted special attention to the study of monumental architecture throughout its 150 years of history, but its analysis has focused on the exterior of the structures, neglecting contextual studies. This has prevented us from getting closer to the thought processes of the people who built such buildings and, consequently, to a deeper interpretation of their meaning and function.
One of the basic principles that govern Maya architecture is that all their buildings were inspired by the peasant hut; a low platform that isolated the construction from the ground on which a rectangular building was erected based on sticks tied with vines, which had a single opening placed on one of its longest walls. On this frame was placed a steeply pitched roof made of beams, wooden poles and leaves of various palms.
With time, and as society became more hierarchical, this construction gained in extension and height, and was petrified to form buildings of an administrative and ritual nature. Very specialized needs that have to do with wealth, social status, the evolution of family groups or economic-administrative and ceremonial functions, introduced changes in this basic form until it deeply transformed the physiognomy of the Maya settlements. It is difficult to determine the exact moment in which these events took place, but all the data refer to the so-called Middle Formative period, around 600 B.C.
The form of the temple
As a consequence of these processes, the peasant huts were made of stone through the use of limestone and lime mortar, at the same time that they became specialized in the form of temples, palaces, ball games, steam baths, altars and other structures that make up the Mayan urban centers. Undoubtedly, one of the most striking constructions of this impressive architecture is the temple, elevated by superimposing massive platforms of stones and rubble covered by well-carved, stuccoed and painted ashlars, which decrease in height to form a terraced pyramid. Usually, but not always, a structure that archaeologists have called a temple was placed on top of this pyramid. A sloping stairway runs along one side of the pyramid and gives access to the upper construction.
The Maya culture enjoyed great dynamism throughout its pre-Hispanic period, so that over time they varied in size and composition and were combined in very different groups of sets and decorative styles, which corresponded to different conceptions and cultural needs. Such differences, functional and chronological, are the cause of the existing controversy about the function. Externally, the Mayan temple is a cyclopean construction, designed so that the real world has a feeling of remoteness and inaccessibility with respect to the officiants of the rituals that were celebrated in it. But it is also a building planned and designed for propaganda: foundations, staircases, balustrades, plinths, walls, jambs, lintels, moldings, friezes and crests were the object of sculpted decoration, with imagery that defines the space as sacred, but in which, in addition, historical information is intermingled with mythological and ritual narratives.
The crests, imagined with the function of serving as a large panel on which to place a specific decoration, played a special role in the set of these propagandistic spaces. The chronology and the change in the cultural structures made these crests very high and massive in the central and southern Petén, in the Usumacinta and sites of Chiapas they were lighter and openwork and in the center and north of the Yucatán peninsula they became lighter until they disappeared. Also the friezes of the temples were sculpted in stucco and painted with masks, figures of deities, religious symbols and hieroglyphic panels. Many buildings had chicozapote wood lintels that were profusely engraved and contained information of a symbolic-political rather than religious nature. Finally, some stairways were decorated with figures, masks and hieroglyphs, some of which manifest information of vital historical importance, as is the case with the Hieroglyphic Stairway of access to Temple 10L-26 of Copan.
The Mayan architects did not build the pyramid temples in isolation, but associated them with other buildings around large plazas. In addition, the temples were combined with each other and with other buildings delimited by the same platform, in response to sociopolitical and ritual integration needs. Thus, in 400 B.C. the Public Ritual Complexes, also known as E-Groups, appeared, some of which have a clear astronomical layout.
At the beginning of our Era the Templar architecture is organized in Triadic Patterns, whose functionality could be related to the myth of the formation of the world from the placement by the gods of three stone thrones in the constellation of Orion; also the temples were combined in large Acropolis, formed by buildings placed around courtyards located at different heights and supported by a single basal platform; and, finally, the Twin Pyramid Complexes, which were configured at the beginning of the 7th century in Tikal and were related to the passage of the stars and the calendar, commemorating the fulfillment of K'atun cycles, a period of twenty years according to the Mayan calendar.
The function
The Classic Maya named their temples with different terms, such as waybil "place of rest", pib na "subway house", or kunul "place of incantation", with which they intended to emphasize their function as a place of access to the universe of the sacred, where dramatic rituals were performed that allowed them to communicate with their gods and ancestors. The shape of the building, the decoration with which it is presented, the offerings it contains and, occasionally, the tombs it encloses, together with its architectural context with other buildings and the documentation from hieroglyphic writing and iconography, provide information about its meaning and function. The Maya temple did not have the same functionality as the Egyptian pyramid or the Greek temple, but rather it was more varied.
The two most sacred features of the Maya landscape were the mountain and the cave, which served as transitions between the physical world and the world of the spirits; such a concept was not exclusively Maya, but a pan-Mesoamerican feature. Ancient myths maintain that the Mesoamerican world was created in two vast contradictory environments: the Sacred Mountain, which contained in its interior the companion animals, co-essences, which the Maya called wayob, and the public plazas, conceived as replicas of the Primordial Sea where the first acts of the creation of the universe were executed, and where the main divine forces dwelled. Concepts that were formalized in the region since Olmec times and were assimilated by the Maya, who created impressive sacred mountains with the construction of their pyramids, and placed on them temples whose doors served as portals to the Outer World, organized around extensive public plazas. In their political and religious art programs, the pyramids were considered as sacred mountains (witz), and the temples as caves leading to the Outer World, whose doors constituted the images of the open jaws of the monsters that united both planes of reality.
The architecture of the ritual space replicated the features of the sacred geography; so powerful were the rituals performed on this sacred geography that the buildings, the objects and the people who performed them accumulated more and more energy and became more and more sacred. Thus, the kings built and rebuilt their temples on the same space for centuries, and these became more and more sacred. The great mythical and ceremonial stagings performed on these public stages continually reinforced their power. Thus, one of the primary functions of the pyramid temples was to serve as essential parts of an immense cosmogram, in combination with the plazas and other related buildings. As far as we know, this design begins in the Preclassic; for example, in Cerros (Belize), Structure 5C-2 was built around 50 B.C. on a small two-level platform crowned by a building oriented to the south. The platform was decorated with large masks of the Sun and Venus sculpted in stone and covered with stucco and painted, which were separated by a central stairway. On the east side of the platform, the lower mask represents the Sun at dawn and above it is Venus as the morning star; to the west, the lower mask identifies the Sun at sunset, which is preceded by Venus as the evening star. Inside the temple, traces of poles were found that emulated the four directions of the universe, leaving a reduced space in which the rulers practiced blood sacrifices, which constitute the ritual focus of Mayan life. So when the king went outside the temple, loaded with jade and performing dances in a trance-like state, he emerged as the Tree of Life, as the axis of the universe, identifying himself with the Sun and with the only force capable of maintaining the order and nature of things.
Temple I of Tikal
Also the Central Plaza of Tikal, Guatemala, was built as a cosmogram, with Temple I to the east, Temple II to the west, the North Acropolis -a direction that the Mayas located above- as an impressive enclosure filled with plazas and temples that keep the tombs of the Mayan kings and, to the south, where the Central Acropolis is located, a palace of nine doors that occupies the position of the Underworld.
Temple I was built at the death of Ha Sawa Chaan K'awil, one of the most charismatic rulers of Tikal, who developed the city after centuries of decadence, revolutionizing it from an architectural and urbanistic point of view. It is a building that rises 47 m above the level of the Great Plaza and breaks centuries of funerary tradition by being placed outside the North Acropolis. The pyramid is composed of nine bases on which rests a temple of three bays which are accessed by a single door. It is decorated by a gigantic cresting with the image of the ruler seated on his heavenly throne. This same ruler is represented in the wooden lintels that support the doors of access to the chambers of the temple, in which relevant passages of his life are narrated, for example, his enthronement.
The temple was built around 734 A.D. by Yi Kin Chaan K'awil, according to the plans of his predecessor and occupant of the funerary precinct, which was built before the temple was begun, and consists of a vaulted chamber placed more than 7 m deep below the level of the Great Plaza. In a vaulted chamber of 5 by 2.5 m and 4 m high, a large stool was placed on which the ruler rested on a mat, accompanied by a rich and varied offering.
A similar function and structure seems to have had the Temple of the Inscriptions of Palenque, Mexico. The discovery in 1952 of the tomb of the ruler Pakal led to the initial conclusion that the pyramid temples were funerary shrines of Maya kings, while the finding that these structures have long sequences of reuse and expansion documented the continued interaction of the Maya with their ancestors and the places where they were buried. However, modern archaeology has shown that many constructions do not enclose tombs, and that they act on other planes of the sacred geography of the Maya, as we have seen in Cerros, Copan and other places.
Sanctuaries, oratories, steam baths, observatories, spaces to commemorate the passage of time, ancestral buildings for political sanction and propaganda, royal mausoleums and cosmograms; pyramid temples are integrated into the sacred geography of the pre-Hispanic Maya. Built as a replica of some of the most relevant features of their environment (volcanoes and valleys), we must discard any kind of static consideration of this type of buildings.
On the contrary, they formed part of a continuum of sacred architecture in which small and large buildings, specialized and more general use, were integrated to create an impressive cosmic scenario in which gods and men met to interpret reality and give explanation and meaning to the lives of the Maya.
