How many maya were there

Cultural traits that define the region include the domestication of maize, beans, avocado, and vanilla, and a common architectural style. Learn more about the rich cultures and lives of these early civilizations.

Demography is the study of a population, the total number of people or organisms in a given area. Understanding how population characteristics such as size, spatial distribution, age structure, or the birth and death rates change over time can help scientists or governments make decisions. For example, knowing how lion populations have increased or decreased over a period of time can help conservationists understand if their protection efforts are effective while knowing how many seniors or children live in a particular neighborhood can shape the type of activities scheduled at the local recreation center.

Select from these resources to teach your students about population characteristics. Archaeologist Stephanie Simms analyzes teeth from a human burial found at an ancient hilltop mansion called "Stairway to Heaven. Was this the royal palace of a Mayan king? New data suggests climate—specifically, severe drought—played a key role in the collapse of the Maya civilization. The ancient Maya had their own version of this sort of landscape-altering infrastructure.

They became excellent managers of rainwater, using massive systems of cisterns called chultuns to collect and store rainwater.

Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Much of the Maya world remains underground. Even Tikal, the most famous ruin in Guatemala, has mounds that conceal what could be great temples. Belize , too, has its share of barely excavated ruins, such as Altun Ha, just 30 miles from Belize City.

You can see monumental pyramids at all these sites, but so much more remains. The Maya were fans of the sauna. The Maya sauna, or sweathouse, is still popular and offered to visitors at hotels and resorts throughout the Maya world. Ancient Maya cities built saunas of stone or adobe mud—these were used for health and spiritual fulfillment.

The Maya combined water with fire-heated rocks to create steam, and sometimes elder leaves were added to the mix. The land of the Maya is volcanically active. A chain of volcanoes runs through Guatemala and several of these remain active. From the tourist-friendly town of Antigua Guatemala, you can often see Fuego volcano puffing out plumes of smoke or jettisoning fiery tendrils of lava, especially vivid at night.

Not far from Antigua about a minute drive is Pacaya volcano, which has been erupting continually for years. Travel agents in Antigua sell day tours on which you can hike to within a few yards of molten lava.

White-water rivers traverse the Maya world. When most people think about white-water rafting in Central America, they think of Costa Rica. The Usumacinta River runs along the border of Mexico and Guatemala—river trips stop at ruins such as Piedras Negras, on the Guatemala side of the border.

An American woman, Tammy Ridenour, has been running river trips and leading adventure tours in Guatemala for more than two decades, www.

Blood sports were important in the ancient Maya world. From the late eighth through the end of the ninth century, something unknown happened to shake the Maya civilization to its foundations. One by one, the Classic cities in the southern lowlands were abandoned, and by A. The reason for this mysterious decline is unknown, though scholars have developed several competing theories. Some believe that by the ninth century the Maya had exhausted the environment around them to the point that it could no longer sustain a very large population.

Other Maya scholars argue that constant warfare among competing city-states led the complicated military, family by marriage and trade alliances between them to break down, along with the traditional system of dynastic power.

As the stature of the holy lords diminished, their complex traditions of rituals and ceremonies dissolved into chaos. Finally, some catastrophic environmental change—like an extremely long, intense period of drought—may have wiped out the Classic Maya civilization. Drought would have hit cities like Tikal—where rainwater was necessary for drinking as well as for crop irrigation—especially hard.

All three of these factors—overpopulation and overuse of the land, endemic warfare and drought—may have played a part in the downfall of the Maya in the southern lowlands. By the time the Spanish invaders arrived, however, most Maya were living in agricultural villages, their great cities buried under a layer of rainforest green.

The majority of them live in Guatemala, which is home to Tikal National Park, the site of the ruins of the ancient city of Tikal. Roughly 40 percent of Guatemalans are of Mayan descent. The Mayan Civilization. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Aztecs, who probably originated as a nomadic tribe in northern Mexico, arrived in Mesoamerica around the beginning of the 13th century. From their magnificent capital city, Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs emerged as the dominant force in central Mexico, developing an intricate Teotihuacan is an ancient Mesoamerican city located 30 miles 50 km northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Tikal is a complex of Mayan ruins deep in the rainforests of northern Guatemala.

Historians believe that the more than 3, structures on the site are the remains of a Mayan city called Yax Mutal, which was the capital of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient empire. In spite of modernization and intermarriage between the indigenous population and Spanish immigrants, many Maya communities have succeeded in preserving their identity and their ways. This is partly because, throughout their history, the Maya have been confined to a single unbroken area including parts of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the western edges of Honduras and El Salvador.

The Maya face greater challenges, however, than those presented by tourism. Maya regions have also been subjected to intense political upheaval in recent decades, with significant loss of life and economic devastation. While many Maya have been killed during civil wars, others from countries such as Guatemala have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in countries such as Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Human-rights groups are calling for an end to these injustices and governments are working to find lasting solutions to the problems of discrimination and cultural genocide.