Day Seventeen

The Keeper of San Buenaventura

As of yesterday's Team Update, Mateo Alonso Pascual was trapped inside city hall with a lynch mob trying to get him. I'm happy to report that late yesterday afternoon he escaped safely.

Commoners took over the palaces of the rulers in the days following the Maya collapse. They left their plain pottery lying about for archaeologists to discover over a thousand years later.

The tense events of that day in San Mateo Ixtatán got me thinking about life for the average Maya person just before the collapse. Was it as filled with violence and uncertainty as life is for their descendants? We've spent much of our Quest exploring the lives of the Maya rulers who lived in spectacular palaces and made offerings to their gods in grand temples.

But what do we know about who built the temples and palaces? What we recognize as Maya civilization was built on the backs of these commoners, but they're almost invisible to history.

Studies done on the bones of Maya commoners show that they ate worse and had harder lives than the nobility.

	An altar showing the ruler inside the mouth of a mythical beast.

Some archaeologists believe that the final blow to Maya civilization may have come from the commoners rising up against their rulers. At El Perú, deep in the jungles of the northern Petén, online expert David Freidel found that the faces of kings were smashed off monuments in an apparent act of rebellion. What, in the end, happened to the Maya?

To read more about what the Quest team has learned about the Maya commoners, please visit MayaQuest at: http://quest.classroom.com/maya2001

Diggin' it,

- John Fox

< previous   MayaQuest Home   next >

MayaQuest is produced by Classroom Connect as part of The Quest Channel series of online adventures.