Mayan or Maya mythology is part in of Mesoamerican mythology and comprises all of the Maya tales in which personified forces of nature, deities, and the heroes interacting with these play the main roles. The legends of the era have to be reconstructed from iconography. Other parts of Mayan oral tradition are not considered here.
The Great Goddess of Teotihuacan is a proposed goddess of the pre-Columbian Teotihuacan civilization, in what is now Mexico.
Seibal, known as El Ceibal in Spanish, is a Classic Period archaeological site of the Maya civilization located in the northern Petén Department of Guatemala, about 100 km SW of Tikal. It was the largest city in the Pasión River region.
A stele, from Greek στήλη, stēlē, plural στήλαι stēlai, is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. The surface of the stele often has text, ornamentation, or both. These may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted.
Linda Schele was an American Mesoamerican archaeologist who was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played a central role in the decoding of much of the Maya script. She produced a massive volume of drawings of stelae and inscriptions, which, following her wishes, are free for use to scholars. In 1978, she founded the annual Maya Meetings at The University of Texas at Austin.
Chalcatzingo is a Mesoamerican archaeological site in the Valley of Morelos dating from the Formative Period of Mesoamerican chronology. The site is well known for its extensive array of Olmec-style monumental art and iconography. Located in the southern portion of the Central Highlands of Mexico, Chalcatzingo is estimated to have been settled as early as 1500 BCE. The inhabitants began to produce and display Olmec-style art and architecture around 900 BCE. At its height between 700 BCE and 500 BCE, Chalcatzingo's population is estimated at between five hundred and a thousand people. By 500 BCE it had gone into decline. The climate in Morelos is generally warmer and more humid than the rest of the Highlands. The Chalcatzingo center covers roughly 100 acres (0.40 km2). Evidence indicates that this was a site of ritual significance.
Izapa is a very large pre-Columbian archaeological site located in the Mexican state of Chiapas; it is best known for its occupation during the Late Formative period. The site is situated on the Izapa River, a tributary of the Suchiate River, near the base of the volcano Tacaná, the sixth tallest mountain in Mexico.
Tres Zapotes is a Mesoamerican archaeological site located in the south-central Gulf Lowlands of Mexico in the Papaloapan River plain. Tres Zapotes is sometimes referred to as the third major Olmec capital, but the Olmec phase is only a portion of the site's history, which continued through the Epi-Olmec and Classic Veracruz cultural periods.
Bloodletting was the ritualized practice of self-cutting or piercing of an individual's body that served a number of ideological and cultural functions within ancient Mesoamerican societies, in particular the Maya. When performed by ruling elites, the act of bloodletting was crucial to the maintenance of sociocultural and political structure. Bound within the Mesoamerican belief systems, bloodletting was used as a tool to legitimize the ruling lineage's socio-political position and, when enacted, was important to the perceived well-being of a given society or settlement.
World trees are a prevalent motif occurring in the mythical cosmologies, creation accounts, and iconographies of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica. In the Mesoamerican context, world trees embodied the four cardinal directions, which also serve to represent the fourfold nature of a central world tree, a symbolic axis mundi that connects the planes of the Underworld and the sky with that of the terrestrial realm.
La Mojarra Stela 1 is a Mesoamerican carved monument (stela) dating from 156 CE. It was discovered in 1986, pulled from the Acula River near La Mojarra, Veracruz, Mexico, not far from the Tres Zapotes archaeological site. The 4+1⁄2-foot-wide (1.4 m) by 6+1⁄2-foot-high (2.0 m), four-ton limestone slab contains about 535 glyphs of the Isthmian script. One of Mesoamerica's earliest known written records, this Epi-Olmec culture monument not only recorded this ruler's achievements, but placed them within a cosmological framework of calendars and astronomical events.
Ancient Maya art comprises the visual arts of the Maya civilization, an eastern and south-eastern Mesoamerican culture made up of a great number of small kingdoms in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Many regional artistic traditions existed side by side, usually coinciding with the changing boundaries of Maya polities. This civilization took shape in the course of the later Preclassic Period, when the first cities and monumental architecture started to develop and the hieroglyphic script came into being. Its greatest artistic flowering occurred during the seven centuries of the Classic Period.
Vucub-Caquix is the name of a bird demon defeated by the Hero Twins of a Kʼicheʼ-Maya myth preserved in an 18th-century document, entitled ʼPopol Vuhʼ. The episode of the demon's defeat was already known in the Late Preclassic Period, before the year 200 AD. He was also the father of Zipacna, an underworld demon deity, and Cabrakan, the Earthquake God.
Chiapa de Corzo is an archaeological site of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica located near the small town of Chiapa de Corzo, Chiapas.
The Western Mexico shaft tomb tradition refers to a set of interlocked cultural traits found in the western Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and, to a lesser extent, Colima to its south, roughly dating to the period between 300 BCE and 400 CE, although there is not wide agreement on this end date. Nearly all of the artifacts associated with this shaft tomb tradition have been discovered by looters and are without provenance, making dating problematic.
The tree of life vision is, according to the Book of Mormon, a vision received in a dream by the prophet Lehi, and later in vision by his son Nephi, who wrote about it in the First Book of Nephi. The vision includes a path leading to a tree symbolizing salvation, with an iron rod along the path whereby followers of Jesus may hold to the rod and avoid wandering off the path into pits or waters, symbolizing the ways of sin. The vision also includes a large building where the wicked look down on the righteous and mock them.
The New World Archaeological Foundation (NWAF) is an archaeological organization run by Brigham Young University. When founded it was the largest archeological project funded by a religious institution. It was founded by Thomas Stuart Ferguson who sought to show how the history of Mesoamerican cultures proved the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Ferguson however found evidence to the contrary and from 1961 he kept a low profile as a secretary to the foundation which then became associated with the Brigham Young University and renamed as the BYU-NWAF.
Max Wells Jakeman was the founder of the department of archaeology at Brigham Young University (BYU) and an early member of the advisory board of the New World Archaeology Foundation (NWAF). Jakeman has been described as "the father of Book of Mormon archaeology".
Maya stelae are monuments that were fashioned by the Maya civilization of ancient Mesoamerica. They consist of tall, sculpted stone shafts and are often associated with low circular stones referred to as altars, although their actual function is uncertain. Many stelae were sculpted in low relief, although plain monuments are found throughout the Maya region. The sculpting of these monuments spread throughout the Maya area during the Classic Period, and these pairings of sculpted stelae and circular altars are considered a hallmark of Classic Maya civilization. The earliest dated stela to have been found in situ in the Maya lowlands was recovered from the great city of Tikal in Guatemala. During the Classic Period almost every Maya kingdom in the southern lowlands raised stelae in its ceremonial centre.
Regional communications in ancient Mesoamerica are believed to have been extensive. There were various trade routes attested since prehistoric times. In this article, especially the routes starting in the Mexico Central Plateau, and going down to the Pacific coast will be considered. These contacts then went on as far as Central America.
