Concept

Maya religion

Summary
The traditional Maya or Mayan religion of the extant Maya peoples of Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and the Tabasco, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Campeche and Yucatán states of Mexico is part of the wider frame of Mesoamerican religion. As is the case with many other contemporary Mesoamerican religions, it results from centuries of symbiosis with Roman Catholicism. When its pre-Hispanic antecedents are taken into account, however, traditional Maya religion has already existed for more than two and a half millennia as a recognizably distinct phenomenon. Before the advent of Christianity, it was spread over many indigenous kingdoms, all with their own local traditions. Today, it coexists and interacts with pan-Mayan syncretism, the 're-invention of tradition' by the Pan-Maya movement, and Christianity in its various denominations. The most important source on traditional Maya religion is the Mayas themselves: the incumbents of positions within the religious hierarchy, diviners, and tellers of tales. More generally, all those persons who shared their knowledge with outsiders in the past, as well as anthropologists and historians who studied them and continue to do so. What is known of pre-Hispanic Maya religion stems from heterogeneous sources (the primary ones being of Maya origin): Primary sources from pre-Hispanic times: the three surviving Maya hieroglyphic books (the Maya codices of Dresden, Madrid and Paris) plus the Maya-Toltec Grolier Codex, all dating from the Postclassic period (after 900 AD); the 'ceramic codex' (the corpus of pottery scenes and texts) and mural paintings; the inscriptions in stone from the Classic (200–900 AD) and Late Preclassic (200 BC-200 AD) periods Primary sources from the early-colonial (16th-century) period, such as the Popol Vuh, the Ritual of the Bacabs, and (at least in part) the various Chilam Balam books Secondary sources, chiefly Spanish treatises from the colonial period, such as those of Landa for the Lowland Mayas and Las Casas for the Highland Mayas, but also lexicons such as the early-colonial Motul (Yucatec) and Coto (Kaqchikel) dictionaries Archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic studies Anthropological reports published since the late 19th century, used in combination with the sources above Traditional Maya religion, though also representing a belief system, is often referred to as costumbre, the 'custom' or habitual religious practice, in contradistinction to orthodox Roman Catholic ritual.
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Related publications (11)

Maya Codical Glyph Segmentation: A Crowdsourcing Approach

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Jean-Marc Odobez, Gülcan Can

This paper focuses on the crowd-annotation of an ancient Maya glyph dataset derived from the three ancient codices that survived up to date. More precisely, non-expert annotators are asked to segment glyph-blocks into their constituent glyph entities. As a ...
2018

How to Tell Ancient Signs Apart? Recognizing and Visualizing Maya Glyphs with CNNs

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Jean-Marc Odobez, Gülcan Can

Thanks to the digital preservation of cultural heritage materials, multimedia tools (e.g., based on automatic visual processing) considerably ease the work of scholars in the humanities and help them to perform quantitative analysis of their data. In this ...
2018

Analyzing and Visualizing Ancient Maya Hieroglyphics Using Shape: from Computer Vision to Digital Humanities

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Jean-Marc Odobez, Rui Hu

Maya hieroglyphic analysis requires epigraphers to spend a significant amount of time browsing existing catalogs to identify individual glyphs. Automatic Maya glyph analysis provides an efficient way to assist scholars’ daily work. We introduce the Histogr ...
2017
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Related concepts (29)
Maya civilization
The Maya civilization (ˈmaɪə) was a Mesoamerican civilization that existed from antiquity to the early modern period. It is known by its ancient temples and glyphs (script). The Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. The civilization is also noted for its art, architecture, mathematics, calendar, and astronomical system. The Maya civilization developed in the Maya Region, an area that today comprises southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador.
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