Corn was once revered by a mighty empire. Around its planting and harvest, prayers arose, and the world turned. Corn, perhaps, may also have contributed to the downfall of one of the most complex, and most advanced civilizations the world has ever known.

The Maya thrived in the early part of the first millennium, as it settled in the Yucatan Peninsula in Southern Mexico, and in what are today Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras. The territory was not overwhelmingly vast, and what little it was seemed limited by the quality of the land that the Maya occupied.

Within the territory were mountains, volcanoes, plains, swamps, and jungles. All around the empire was rainforest. This was the land presented to the Maya, and upon it, they built their urban centers and temples. The surrounding soil, they utilized as farmland, which ran out after a few centuries of use. All this contributed to population dispersal, rather than conglomeration of peoples, which would also have allowed the Maya to build cities.

Society was composed mainly of rulers, priests, commoners, and slaves. The rulers, they regarded as gods. The priests were especially important, given the intricately linked ties between daily life and religion. Human sacrifices were also common, and were officiated by two special priests: an elderly one to hold down the victim, and another to cut the victim’s living heart out.

Built into this system was an obsession with time, and this aspect of Mayan life, the religious reckoning, has carried on still in today’s Guatemala and Honduras. Likewise complex and advanced were Mayan astronomy and mathematics, as the culture developed a number of accurate calendar systems, as well as planting schedules which centered on the whims and wiles of the gods.

Agriculture, religion, and time were infused – and planting, inconvenient but necessary as it was, became the focal point around which Mayan life revolved. Farmers invoked spirits from the four corners of the earth before planting their corn. The god of rain, Chac, was also important, as it was he who would bring fertility to the soil. If the religious celebrations pleased Chac, the Maya believed he would bring them much needed rain.

The rainforest was not useful for farming, so that the Maya had to cut most of the trees down, allow them to dry, and then burn them to clear the land. The ashes, they left behind as fertilizer for the soil. Although productive at first, the method wore the soil out, and fields had to be kept fallow for two to three years before they could be used again.

The main crop was corn, and they planted it by making holes in the soil, then putting three or four seeds into each hole they had made. If corn could not be had, the Maya had their vegetable gardens and orchards, where they grew herbs, oranges, green beans, peppers, chili, squash, avocadoes, tomatoes, and pumpkins. They hunted rabbits, birds, deer, and monkeys. Where the land would allow them, they grew cacao, and used the beans to make chocolate, or to use as currency. Cacao was so precious, in fact, that trees were passed from one generation to the next, as part of a Mayan family’s legacy.

As the slash and burn technique wore out the land, the Maya began to look for other methods to plant their crops. They terraced their hills in such a way that soil moisture was retained. They also dug canals and raised their fields. They used the canals, moreover, to raise turtles and fish, just in case food ran out.
Although they lived near the rainforest, Mayan farmers were often threatened by drought, and by a deep water table. For instance, in one Mayan city, Chichen Itza, workers could hit water after digging 75 feet (~23 m.). To solve the problem, they built water reservoirs and created small-scale irrigation systems, which, though useful, were still less impressive than those of their Incan or Aztec counterparts.

As they could glean little from their land to provide for a large, but dispersed population, the Maya adopted the philosophy of taking what they could, and no more. Their prayers, in fact, asked permission to plant “on the back of the land,” or hunt “the animals of the gods.” Their celebrations were mainly to beg for a bountiful harvest; and, when they had obtained one, to thank the gods for it.

In a few thousand years, however, the Mayan empire slipped into decline. Its population slowly withered and disappeared, dropping nearly 50% every few decades, until Chichen Itza collapsed in 1250 AD, and Mayapan in 1450 AD. Some part of this may be ascribed to the empire’s location. Again, the rainforest was rich in wildlife, but poor in fertile land. The main crop of the Maya, corn, yielded low protein, and upon it, the Maya depended, to their eventual detriment. The climate, moreover, was humid, making it difficult to store what grains the Maya could harvest.

As the population declined, priorities changed. The Maya needed to reassert their power, and military campaigns became the order of the day.

The tribe spread; its rule, and its centralization, decreased. The empire obsessed with time, and with taking only what it could from what little it had, was gone. All that was left was memory, and an ancient language of images and color; all that remained was land, barren still, save for the remnants of temples and cities of an empire that had disappeared into the rainforest forever.

Read more about the Maya through http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/CIVAMRCA/MAYAS.HTM, http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/latinamerica/meso/
cultures/maya.html , and http://mayaviewkeeper.com/TLMweb/
traditional_ways.htm.