1Reading 14-2READING 14-2V.W. von Hagen 1957. The Ancient Sun Kingdoms Of The Americas, The World Publishing Company, Ohio.Maya AgricultureCorn was the epicenter of the Maya world. The cornfi eld, the col, was their preoccupation; “the great-est number of them were cultivators...who applied themselves to harvesting maize,” said Diego de Landa. These observations are confi rmed by another priest in a sixteenth-century document written in the Maya highlands: “If one looks closely he will fi nd everything these Indians did and talked about had to do with maize…” The grain is ancient; the latest dating through maize fi nds in the Bat Caves of New Mexico places it as cultivated plant before 2000 B.C. Dr. Paul Mangelsdorf, whose studies on the origin of corn in the Americas are classic (and never given to undue speculation) believes that “the present-day races of maize in Mexico...are the product of four thousand years or more of evolution under domestication.” Its place of origin within the Americas is still undetermined. The Mayas had corn as a developed plant. This corn (ixim) after life itself was their greatest preoc-cupation. Yum Kaax, believed to have been the corn god, is always represented as youthful and wearing an car of corn in his headdress. Prayers were offered to him. The head of Yum Kaax, found at the ruins of Copán, is among the most sensitive in primitive American art.Methods of agriculture seem not to have changed much since the earliest times. The Mayas felled trees and brush with a stone ax (bat) and burned them during the dry season. The earth was turned with a fi re-hardened digging stick (xul). Each Indian was allotted by his clan organization a portion of corn land, a hun uinic, of four hundred square feet. Land was communal property: “…the land was held in common and so between the towns there were no boundaries or landmarks to divide them except when one [city-state] made war on the other.” The technique of corn culture was the same everywhere in the Americas: the felling of trees, burning, fencing, planting, weeding, bending the stalks at harvest (so as to deter the birds), harvesting, and shelling. The Mayas preserved the corn in storage bins; “they kept it in fi ne underground granaries called chultunes.” Water was, as mentioned earlier, always a Maya problem. Those in the hinterland built huge reservoirs. At Tikal an immense one was located in a deep ravine, the porous rock cemented and held by a masonry dam. The sites of Piedras Negras, Palenque, and Yaxchilán were located on rivers. Cobá, in Yucatán, was set felicitously between two lakes, but most of the cities in Yucatán had as their only permanent source of water the well, the cenote. A Maya farmer tried to locate his milpa as close as possible to the wells. As new fi elds were needed, there was a tendency for the Maya farmer to move farther and farther from a given cen-ter. This in time doubtless loosened his connection with the city-state. Agricultural decentralization could well have been one of the factors which loosened the social structure of the Old Empire and contributed to the disintegration of cities. Between January and February, at the time of light rains, trees were felled. From March to May was the hot and dry season, the living trees blossomed and the cut trees were burned. The larger unburnt logs were dragged to the edge and built into a crude but effective fence against deer and other animals. Ash from the burned plants was turned over with the digging stick, and the land was cul tivated. From June through August, the rains fell heavily.* These were the planting months.Planting was ritually controlled. Maize, the gift of the gods, was sacred, and planting had to be done with the proper ritual. The rain god Chac was properly propitiated and those days when rain should fall * Rainfall is heavy in the jungle regions, eighty inches a year. In El Petén (near where the fi rst great Maya cities, Tikal, Uaxactún, etc., were located) it rains sixty-fi ve inches a year; in Yucatán, forty-six inches. There is a high incidence of rain but water is not held by the shallow soil; it percolates down through the porous limestone into the cenotes one hundred feet below the surface. Some water remains in pockets called aguadas. These were the planting months.2 Reading 14-2were selected for planting, in order that the newly planted seeds would sprout. Astronomy was mostly as-trology. But the almanacs for planting were based on empirical observation; in one of the Maya codices it is stated: “This is the record of the year-bears of the uinal…” Actually, this was weather forecasting based on observation of previous years. In the ninth month, Chen (Moon), and the tenth, Yax (Venus), planting was to be done during certain lucky days. Typical interpretations of the Maya planting almanac were these: “Cimi, the 5th day of the 11th month Zac [February]…bad day for planting…with rain incantations there is a good down-pour…The month and day of 9 Caban [February- March]…good day, lucky day, heavy rains, good for planting everything.” For every detail of planting, sowing, and harvesting there was ritual, yet much of it was based on the shrewd observations of the earthbound man, who related them to the priest-scribes. The priests in turn set it all down in glyph script so that it could be remembered. During his excavations at the ruins of Copán, in Honduras, Dr. Sylvanus Morley found that two stone time markers were placed four and a half miles apart in such a position that the sun set directly in line with them on April 12 and September 7. It is thought that April 12 was the date chosen for burning the brush in the fi elds around Copán. Chac was the rain god. He is represented in the Maya glyphs in books, on sculpture, and in painted murals as the long-nosed god. His eyes, T-shaped, suggest tears and, symbolically, rain. His importance in the Maya pantheon can be gauged from the fact that the Chac name glyph occurs 218 times in the three surviving Maya codices. Chac was a benevolent deity and considered to be man’s friend. The Maya farmer always evoked his name when planting. He was the god. So in the months of Chen and Yax there were great festivals to honor him.Planting was simple and effective. All that was required was a bag to hold the maize kernels and a fi re-hardened planting stick. A hole was made in
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