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. You can see monumental pyramids at all these sites, but so much more remains.Īncient Maya enjoyed steamy stone saunas, known as temascal in Yucatán Peninsula, or tuj in the Maya language of Quiché.

Belize, too, has its share of barely excavated ruins, such as Altun Ha, just 30 miles from Belize City. Even Tikal, the most famous ruin in Guatemala, has mounds that conceal what could be great temples.Lesser visited Maya sites, such as the sprawling El Mirador and Uaxactún, both just north of Tikal in Guatemala’s Petén jungle, are only fractionally unearthed and thrilling to visit for the sense of discovery. Major Maya sites, like Palenque in southern Mexico and Chichén Itzá in the north, have been largely excavated, but others remain buried. Much of the Maya world remains underground. That’s how they derived the concept of zero. To write the number 403, for example, a Maya would use a symbol for one unit of 400, zero units of 20, and three units of 1.

So Maya numbers are composed of units of 1, 20, 400, and so on. The Maya numerical system is based on factors of 20. While the idea of zero may have originated in Babylonia, it was independently conjured by the Maya, likely in the fourth century.Zero in the Maya written language was often represented by a shell-shaped glyph. The Maya’s remarkable Long Count calendar relies on zero as a placeholder. The ancient Maya developed the concept of zero. If anything, they’re hopeful that a new era will usher in an age of higher consciousness, greater peace, and enhanced understanding among the diverse peoples on the planet. But they don’t believe the end of the world is on the horizon. Many Maya may celebrate the beginning of the next 5,125-year cycle of the Long Count calendar just as we celebrated the new millennium. The Maya don’t believe the end of the world is coming.Īpocalyptic movies may suggest the Maya believe the end of the 5,000-plus-year calendar-December 21, 2012-is an end-times moment, but that’s just not true. There are more than 20 distinct Maya peoples within Guatemala, each with their own culture, style of dress, and language, and hundreds of thousands more Maya live beyond the borders. About 40 percent of Guatemala’s 14 million people are Maya, and southern Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula are home to many more predominantly Maya regions.Not only are the Maya enduring almost five centuries after the Spanish conquest, but their cultural traditions, agrarian lifestyle, and celebratory festivals continue on. Just as the fall of Rome didn't meant the end of Romans, the decline of great Maya metropolises, such as Guatemala’s Tikal, which reached its apex in the ninth century, doesn’t mean the indigenous people have vanished.

Mayan ways of life