Maya Rise and Fall (3)

The earliest arrivals probably had no choice—overcrowding elsewhere may have forced them into this forbidding environment. But once there, they mastered its challenges. Settling near rivers, lakes, and swamps, they learned to maximize the thin soil's productivity. They cleared the forest for maize, squash, and other crops by slashing and burning, much as today's Maya do, then re-enriched the land by alternating crops and letting fields lie fallow.

As populations grew, they adopted more intensive methods of cultivation—composting, terracing, irrigation. They filled in swamps to create fields and carried silt and muck from bottomlands to fertilize enclosed gardens. Artificial ponds yielded fish, and corrals held deer and other game flushed from the forest. The ancient Maya ultimately coaxed enough sustenance from the meager land for several million people, many times more than now live in the region.

Over the centuries, as the Maya learned to prosper in the rain forest, the settlements grew into city-states, and the culture became ever more refined. The Maya built elegant multiroom palaces with vaulted ceilings; their temples rose hundreds of feet toward the heavens. 

Ceramics, murals, and sculpture displayed their distinctive artistic style, intricate and colorful. Though they used neither the wheel nor metal tools, they developed a complete hieroglyphic writing system and grasped the concept of zero, adopting it for everyday calculations. They also had a 365-day year and were sophisticated enough to make leap-year-like corrections. They regularly observed the stars, predicted solar eclipses, and angled their ceremonial buildings so that they faced sunrise or sunset at particular times of year.

Mediating between the heavens and earth were the Maya kings—the kuhul ajaw, or holy lords, who derived their power from the gods. They functioned both as shamans, interpreting religion and ideology, and rulers who led their subjects in peace and war. Demarest and others have described the Maya centers as "theater states" in which the kuhul ajaw conducted elaborate public rituals to give metaphysical meaning to movements of the heavens, changes of the calendar, and the royal succession.


forbidding - 险峻的，恐怖的        a forbidding cliff 
swamp - 低湿地，沼泽
maximize - 最大化
maize - 玉米
squash - 南瓜
slash - 鞭打
alternate - 交换，交替
fallow - 休耕      land in fallow
cultivation - 耕作
terrace - 修成梯田
silt - 淤泥
muck - 牛马粪便
fertilize - 施肥
corral - 畜栏
coax - 轻松做好，哄骗
meager - 贫乏的
prosper - 繁荣
vaulted - 拱形屋顶的
mural - 壁画
intricate - 复杂的
hieroglyphic - 象形文字的
grasp - 理解，掌握
leap year - 闰年
mediate - 调解
derive - 由来      We derive knowledge from books.
shaman - 萨满教巫师
interpret - 解释，理解
ideology - 意识形态
elaborate - 复杂的
metaphysical - 抽象的
succession - 继承