Posted on December 6, 2025 by David L. Smith
Building material and healing remedy After touring Cerros, a Preclassic Maya site in Belize, my guide took me a few miles down the New River to a lake covered in lily pads. The ancients cultivated them in great quantities to freshen ponds and encourage the growth of fish. The pads and stalks were dried to fertilize fields. Significantly, the lily pads played a key role in referencing the beginning of time and annual time cycles. Kings wore representations of lily pads in their headdresses, to associate themselves with aquatic deities. Coming back… Read More
Posted on October 26, 2025 by David L. Smith
Part I of III: From farmers to divine kings and villages to cities One of the great wonders of Classic Maya civilization is how they developed and sustained a unified political structure and ideology that covered an enormous territory (Guatemala, Belize and Southeastern Mexico) for nearly a millennia. In *Ancient Maya Politics: A political anthropology of the Classic Period 150-900 CE, anthropologist Simon Martin suggests that ideological mechanisms instilled a “dynamic equilibrium” within the social body that prevented the Maya from developing states or empires. Stitching together his comprehensive analysis with items… Read More
Ancient Maya Cultural Traits 