The Mayans

The Maya are an indigenous people of Mexico and Central America who have continuously inhabited the lands comprising modern-day Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas in Mexico.

A unique and intricate style, the tradition of Mayan architecture spans several thousands of years. Often, the buildings most dramatic and easily recognizable as Mayans are the stepped pyramids of the Terminal Pre-classic period and beyond.

Ancient Maya art refers to the material arts of the Maya civilization, an eastern and south-eastern Mesoamerican culture that took shape in the course of the later Preclassic Period. Its greatest artistic flowering occurred during the seven centuries of the Classic Period.

The Mayan and other Mesoamerican cultures used a vigesimal number system based on base 20 (and, to some extent, base 5), probably originally developed from counting on fingers and toes. The numerals consisted of only three symbols: zero, represented as a shell shape; one, a dot; and five, a bar.

The Mayan calendar is an ancient calendar system that rose to fame in 2012, when a “Great Cycle” of its Long Count component came to an end, inspiring some to believe that the world would end at 11:11 UTC on December 21, 2012. The media hype and hysteria that ensued was later termed the 2012 phenomenon.