Subsistence, Technology and Crafts

The subsistence base of Maya society was simple. The Maya farmer cleared the jungle with stone tools and fire, planted his maize and bean crop, harvested the crop, and stores it. After two years of planting, a filed was abandoned to the jungle and another patch cleared; five years or so elapsed before the original plot was again used. Maya women ground the grain with metates and manos.

The extreme simplicity of Maya technological equipment contrasts sharply with the glories of the ceremonial center. One of the most common implements is a chipped-stone about 15 centimeters long, 7 centimeters wide, 5 centimeters thick bifacially chipped with blade at one end and pointed or blunted head, or poll, at the other. It may have been hafted either as an axe or as an adze and was the principal land-clearing tool and the principal cutting implement for dressing limestone blocks.

In addition, numerous manos and metates for corn grinding, projectile and lance points of flint, and little obsidian flake bladelets have been recovered. Although no abundant, grooved stone bark-beaters for making paper and polished stone Celts were found in Maya sites.

In the minor arts and crafts the Maya were somewhat more spectacular than in their stone technology. Pottery was both painted and carved, and includes some of the finest decorated pieces of pre-Columbian America. Polychrome pottery usually was coated with an orange or buff slip, which then was painted over with black-outlined designs of darker orange, red, white, or brown.

The versatile Maya craftsmen also fashioned pottery figurines, jadeite earplugs and beads, Celt-shaped amulets, obsidian and flint “eccentric” forms often found in stelae caches, and also carvings of bone and shell. The Maya made bark paper for clothing and for books, or “codices”. Cotton clothing also was worn. Gorgeous ceremonial costumes, as represented in murals or on painted pottery, appear to have been made of dyed textiles embellished with tropical bird feathers and jaguar pelts.