There was a great sense of political connectedness between different groups. Pyramids were never more than 20 kilometers away from anywhere in the Maya world. Jaguar Paw and the other captives who are brought to the city have never heard of such a place.ĭuring the Classic period Maya settlement was so widespread that you lived at least within 10 to 20 kilometers of a large community. Generally captives appear to have been taken during war between polities. There's no evidence that innocent women and men were harvested from the hinterlands and sold into slavery or to provide flesh for sacrifice. While the male captives are to be used in sacrificial rituals, the women are sold as slaves. The villagers are attacked and captured by men from a Maya metropolis. women are traditionally shown in conservative dress, in huipiles, which covered their breasts. House lots were planned and intensively managed spaces where fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants were grown and where some domesticated animals were raised. Would Maya villagers have lived in stick huts, as they do in Apocalypto?Īlthough houses may have been of perishable materials, they had stone foundations and were often built in cleared plazas but certainly not in the wild jungle.
They hunted, but wild game was a relatively small percentage of the diet, and meat in general may have been seen as more of a luxury item.Īt that time, it appears that almost all the forest was maintained, manicured, and owned by somebody, and that you have a Maya group that doesn't practice agriculture is virtually impossible. Would this have been typical?ĭuring Classic times the Maya were an agricultural people. (Related: In Search of the Lost Empire of the Maya) In Apocalypto, the hero, Jaguar Paw, lives in an idyllic hunting village set deep in the jungle. To find out what the Maya Empire was really like, Stefan Lovgren checked in with Zachary Hruby, a Maya expert at the University of California, Riverside. It is this so-called Classic period, and especially its end, that the film most resembles, though no date is specified in Apocalypto. 800.Īrchaeological evidence points to a multitude of factors that could have led to this decline, including internecine warfare, the loss of trade routes, drought, and disease.īut before the fall, the Maya ruled the region from seats of power in dozens of cities. Though it gave rise to awe-inspiring architecture and surprisingly advanced science, the Maya civilization-which thrived in what are now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras-began declining around A.D.
Apocalypto imdb movie#
Mel Gibson says Apocalypto, his new movie set during the collapse of the Maya Empire, should not be seen as a historical document.
0 kommentar(er)
