Tikal

We took a quick 2-day trip up to Tikal by plane and were absolutely amazed by everything we saw. This is one of the most spectacular Mayan ruins anywhere and is covered by jungle now. The time period when this land was settled and used was around 800 BC to 900 AD. Around 750 AD, the nucleus of the city was about 65 square Km! Tikal was ´rediscovered´in 1848, though not much could be seen because everything had been grown over by jungle life. Most of the work for excavation has been done since the 1950´s. Many of the structures have been rebuilt to an extent and so I think a lot of what we saw is some guesswork as to what the original structures looked like. The original structures also had a lot of color on them, but of course this is hard to imagine now. It would be awesome to see just a second in time from that time period. Part of the early work done on excavations was done by foreignors and unfortunately, they took a lot of what they found. One of the first explorers in this region was Bernoli from Basel, Switzerland. There was an agreement that for the work he did on the site, he would be free to take whatever he wanted. Due to this, a lot of what he found is back in a museum in Basel. Similar people followed suit after this. There was a time period where the University of Pennsylvania did a lot of excavation work, but fortunately, they left everything they found for the Guatemalan people. After 1986, the site was turned over to the Guatemalan government and they continue to do work here and probably will for many years.



Temple 1, shown here is the most famous of structures at Tikal and is the one shown on all advertisements, postcards, etc. This temple is also know as the Big Jaguar. It is 47m in height and was built in the year 700 AD by the ruler at the time whose tomb was discovered underneath the temple (unlike Egypt, these pyramids are solid and chambers are dug below the structure after construction). The next picture is next to the temple and is part of the Gran Plaza, specifically this area is called Acropolis del Norte. This area has been damaged and built back up numerous times, typically corresponding with a change in the ruling dynasty. As a consequence, this area chronicles the history of some of the rulers of the area. From atop this area, we could see out onto the rest of the Gran Plaza, including Temple I on the left, Temple II on the right (built for the wife of ruler under Temple I) and Acropolis Central in the back. This was the central area for people at the time of the Mayans.

This was the first structure that we saw and there are another probably 20 just like it, but most are still covered up by earth. It is a lot of work to uncover these structures from dirt, trees, roots and all of the life that has grown over in the last 1000 years, so they have not all been uncovered and hopefully most will remain uncovered.

On top of one of the structures in the Lost World (from the pre-classic Mayan era), we could see this image. This is a good picture to show how the entire Tikal area is in the middle of a vast forest. The farthest building that you can see is Temple IV, or the two-headed snake temple. It is the tallest temple in Tikal and in all Mesoamerica. It was built in 740 AD (during the end of the classic Mayan era) by the son or grandson of the first ruler whom built Temple I. Temple IV is 64.6m tall from the base (which is below ground level).

The Mayans probably settled on this spot because it was the highest elevation in all of the lowlands. Probably several reasons they choose this spot, they were above swampland, could spot potential invaders, and many archaeologists suspect a religious motivation...to be closer to the gods. The site is not located near enough to any lake or streams, so they created large quarries to collect rainwater (limestone is rather pourous, so they dug out the soil and patched the limestone with plaster). They also got all of the limestone that they used for these buildings in closeby quarries. Some of these structures were bigger than you can imagine and the tallest one took about 35 or so years to build. They made tools with flint to be able to extract this limestone.


In the population at Tikal, only about 20% of the people were the high class and about 80% were of a much lower class. There was a lot of turnover in rulers due to fighting within the group and between cities. When one ruler would take over, he would often times destroy the tops of temples and build a new layer for himself. Because of this, many of the temples have as many as 25 levels.

Temples I and II were built such that on March 21st and September 21st, the sun casts a shadow from Temple I to cover Temple II completely. These two temples were built for a ruler and his wife to show that they would always be together. This is a great example of how highly the Mayan people thought of women. They were very important in the Mayan society, mainly because of their childbearing abilities.