A teacher s guide to the Maya exhibition and KS2 learning aids for students

Transcription

1 A teacher s guide to the Maya exhibition and KS2 learning aids for students

2 Introducing the Maya Gallery This prestigious exhibition explores key aspects of ancient Maya life including religious ritual, writing history, burial observances, calendar systems shamanic practices, and the importance of nature. The 385 artefacts on display span a period from 1000 BC to AD Visitors will be introduced to a collection ranging from elegant ceramic figurines, striking funerary masks, bold jade jewellery, and intricately carved stone panels, to grand architectural sculpture. Exhibition Themes The Mayas (Introduction) Mayas and Nature Society and Daily Life Heart of the City Facing Time & Stars The Ruling Authorities Sacred Forces In the Face of the Gods: Rituals Entering the Path Maya Funeral Rites Before your Visit We recommend preparing students prior to their visit. A basic knowledge of who the Maya were and their cultural achievements would maximise students learning opportunities within the exhibition. For information on key topics please see the study notes labelled: Ancient Maya Culture - Teacher Support Notes. The exhibition and this resource link directly to the KS2 History curriculum: a non-european society that provides contrasts with British history one study chosen from: early Islamic civilisation, including a study of Baghdad AD 900, Mayan civilisation AD 900, Benin (West Africa) AD 900 The Mayas ritualistic practices included bloodletting and, even, human sacrifice. You may wish to discuss this sensitive subject with your students before your visit. The tools and methods used to draw blood are detailed within the exhibition. Such acts were carried out for spiritual and religious purposes, not as depraved acts of barbarity.

3 Pre-Visit Activities Activity 1 Territory & Environment: Animal Masks Learning objectives: To identify the area the ancient Mayas occupied. To discover the flora and fauna the Mayas coexisted with. 1 Use section 1 of the teacher support notes to introduce the Maya to students 2 Use the map at to present the location of Maya areas within modern day central America 3 Using section 2 of the teacher support notes explain the term Mesoamerica, and discuss the topography, climate, and vegetation of the area 4 Elicit from students the kind of animals that inhabit Mexico s ecosystems e.g. jaguars, snakes, crocodiles, pelicans etc. 5 Prepare a selection of relevant animal mask templates. Students select one and decorate to create their own masks. Use elastic or string to wear. Activity 2 Discovering the Lost Ruins: An Explorer s Diary Learning objectives: To investigate how and when the Maya ruins were rediscovered. To consider the challenges of early exploration. 1 Use Wikipedia to research Frederick Catherwood, John Lloyd Stephens, and their expedition of Present a summary to students as a spidergram with Discovering the lost Maya ruins at its centre. 2 Access online the recent documentary Raiders of the lost past: The men who found the Maya. Analyse and discuss the challenges they encountered e.g. climate, terrain, equipment, conflict with local people. 3 Go to and print out examples of Catherwood s lithographs. Using these as inspiration students write a diary entry as if they were on that 1839 expedition relating their feelings and experiences. 4 Create a wall display of diary entries on mock aged paper with lithograph images. During your visit Gallery Resources Trails: Two educational trails relating to the artefacts on display are available for group led activities. One focuses on Maya hieroglyphs and numbers, the second compares artefacts from two contrasting cultures; the Maya and the Anglo-Saxons. Both use a variety of exercises suitable for a range of learning abilities. Audio Visual Displays: There are three points within the gallery showing film clips of modern day Mayas talking about their culture. These clips explore contemporary Mayas, creation myths, calendars, astrology, and traditional ceremonies practised in connection to crop cultivation. Interactive: The interactive station explores how the Maya calendar works. Students can input dates in English to find the Maya equivalent shown by glyphs.

4 Post-Visit Activities Activity One Maya Art: Making Clay Pots Learning objective: To recognise various types of Maya ceramics To recreate Maya artistic style on coil or slab pots. 1 Elicit from students the types of ceramics they saw at the Museum for example: plates, cups, tripod pots etc. 2 Find example images by typing images of Maya ceramics into an internet search engine. Discuss how the ceramics are decorated noting e.g. painting, carving, glyphs, images of gods, animals, and patterns. Also discuss colours. 3 Individual students are given clay to make their own Maya pots. Watch the following: How to make coil pots. Or How to make slab pots. 4 Decorate Maya style. Activity 2 Everything Maya: Making Classroom Bunting Learning objective: To investigate and compile fun facts about Maya culture 1 Prepare a A-Z list of Maya items e.g. pyramid, jade mask, feathered serpent, Chac, ballgame, glyphs, headdress, etc. 2 Students are assigned a letter of the alphabet (or pick from scrabble letters). 3 Using knowledge acquired from the exhibition/lessons they design a Maya fun fact with illustration that starts with the letter they were assigned. 4 Use the teacher support notes or facts from the book An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya by Mary Ellen Miller & Karl Taube, to assist students research. 5 Students are given a large coloured paper triangle to decorate with their fact. 6 Teacher pegs the facts A-Z on ribbon to form bunting across the classroom.

5 Ancient Maya Culture Teacher Support Notes Lessons can be designed around any of the topics below to introduce students to the key features of Maya culture and their predominant achievements. 1. Who were the Mayas? The Mayas were, and still are, an indigenous people from modern day Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Their exact origins remain a mystery. Most anthropologists and archaeologists support the theory that they derived from the Olmec, the great mother-culture of Mesoamerica. These highly developed civilisations first rose in Mesoamerica around 1500 BC and then thrived on and off for around 3000 years. The ancient Mayas left an outstanding legacy of artistic, architectural and cultural feats. 2. Territory and Climate Historians and archaeologists refer to the area occupied by the Olmec, Mayas and Aztec as Mesoamerica. It encompassed modern day central, southern and eastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, also western Honduras and El Salvador. Mexico is a land of great climatic and topographic diversity. The Sierra Madre mountain chains run north to south bordering semiarid central highlands. The Gulf coastline is characterised by rivers and tropical lowlands. In the south, conditions range from hot, humid rainforests to dry scrub jungle. The Mayas inhabited both highlands and lowlands. Their territories stretched from Chiapas, to the Yucatan peninsula, to Belize s Caribbean coast and the highlands southern of Guatemala. These sharply contrasting environments offered splendid opportunities for trade. 3. Society Maya territories were divided into state-like kingdoms ruled over by a lord or king. Society was divided into classes comprising of commoners, local officials known as lakam or ah cuch cab, merchants known as p olom, warriors, scribes, shamans, priests, nobles and the ruling royals. The lakam oversaw the organisation of tributary and military activities within his ward. Shamans were spiritual healers that mediated between the people and the spirit world. The priests were fulltime religious specialists who assisted rulers in ceremonies and presented sacrificial offerings to the gods. However, even kings themselves were subject to Maya overlords in the large system of alliances. 4. Economics and Trade The lower classes paid tribute to their king, and kings paid tribute to their overlords. Tributes could be any form of currency such as cocoa beans, cotton cloth, feathers, animal pelts, rubber, obsidian, jade, spondylous shell, sea salt, spices or ceramics. Kings could also offer higher tribute such as raw materials and labour for military service or construction programmes. Maya kingdoms would exchange commodities that could only be found in their region with distant kingdoms. These long distance relationships were of crucial importance to the economic well-being of every state. Successful trading was so important to the Mayas that they scheduled dates into their calendar exclusively for markets and fairs to conduct their business transactions.

6 5. Religion The Maya were a deeply religious and spiritual people. They worshipped a multitude of gods. The principal deities were: Maize god he played a vital role in the creation of humanity and was worshipped because maize was the sustenance of life. Chac was the god of rain and lightning. He was the patron of agriculture and was worshipped to ensure the success of the harvest. Itzamna was the high god of the Maya. An old, wizened god who had healing powers and was the inventor of writing. Kukulcán was a feathered serpent who was one of the world creation gods. The faithful would perform acts of autosacrifice by drawing blood from their tongue and penis, collecting it in bowls of paper. It would be burned as an offering to nourish the gods. Jungle spirits were also venerated and would be presented with offerings. The worship of Venus and the sun was also standard practice. 6. Writing The Mayas invented their own writing system composed of hieroglyphs (glyphs for short). They used hundreds of different pictograms and symbols to represent words and sounds. They wrote on bark paper and created screenfold books called codices to relate their rituals, gods and mythology. Only 18 pre-conquest codices have survived. Most were destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors. One surviving codex the Fejérváry-Mayer is on display in the World Cultures gallery at World Museum. Hieroglyphic inscriptions were also carved onto temples, stelae and ceramic vessels. 7. Mathematics and Calendars The Mayas also invented their own number system based on counts of 20. It was represented by a pattern of bars and dots. They were excellent mathematicians and even invented the number zero. They used many calendars but the two most common were the tzolk in and haab. The tzolk in is made up of 13 numbers and 20 dates to create a 260 day cycle. It was used mainly for divination. The haab is made up of 18 months each of 20 days to create a 365 day cycle. It was followed by a 5 day resting period called the wayeb. The two calendars fused together would take 52 years to complete before restarting. This was called the calendar round. 8. Astonomy The Mayas were keen observers of the sky and stars. They plotted with accuracy the phases of the moon, eclipses, the movement of Venus, Mars and Jupiter. They ingeniously built pyramids and temples to align with the movement of the sun so that during the spring and autumn equinoxes shadows would appear to create images on the walls of these buildings.

7 9. Time and Space The Mayas believed that our world existed alongside a spiritual and supernatural world and that everything in these two worlds was connected. In order to keep peace and balance in the universe the Mayas believed they had to make blood sacrifices to the gods to ensure life continued. The Maya world was made up of 3 sacred levels. The heavens where the gods and ancestors dwelt were represented by a great crocodilian monster. The underworld known as Xibalba was a dark watery place of the dead. The earth was the back of a turtle or caiman which floated in a primordial sea. It was divided into the 4 cardinal directions with a great tree as an axis, located at its centre. The tree s branches reached into the heavens and its roots delved into the underworld. 10. Art and Architecture In the beginnings of Maya civilisation architecture was very simple, small villages of single roomed wooden huts had dirt floors and a central hearth. By 500 BC the Mayas began to build cities around a central plaza with simple pyramids, symbolizing mountains, topped by a single roomed temple. The pyramids were made from earth and stone and had rubble cores. Around 300 AD cities flourished as kings succeeded in battles and the accumulated wealth was spent on elaborate building programmes. Using stone and plaster large ball courts, palaces, temples, tombs and pyramids were built, decorated with complex carvings and sculptures. The Mayas were also skilled at producing ceramic pots and plates and miniature figures called figurines. These would be either painted or intricately carved with glyphs or scenes of rituals and mythological tales. The Mayas greatly prized jade, turquoise, and spondylous shell which were used to produce jewellery and funerary masks.

8 Glossary of Maya terminology Bloodletting - The act of drawing blood from the human body for ritual purposes Classic period - AD , period during which Maya civilisation was at its height Codex - A Maya manuscript written in hieroglyphs on bark paper Glyph - Short for hieroglyph. A pictogram or symbol used to represent words and sounds Mesoamerica - Area occupied by the Olmec, Maya and Aztec. Includes: Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and western Honduras and El Salvador Popol Vuh - The epic story of the creation and history of the Quiché Maya people Post-Classic period - AD Pre-Classic period BC - AD 250 Shaman A person who acts as intermediary between the natural and supernatural worlds, using magic to cure illness, foretell the future, control spiritual forces Xibablba Mayan word for the underworld Zoomorphic A god or human represented by animal images Note on the word Maya In this resource the convention has been adopted of using the word Mayas when writing about the people, for example: the ancient Mayas looked to the stars (this is similar to our use of the British ). Maya is used when writing about the culture, for example: the civilisation of the ancient Maya. Mayan is used only to refer to the language. Useful Resources Books An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya by Mary Ellen Miller & Karl Taube Aztec and Maya Myths by Karl Taube Websites