Venture-Out's

El Mayab
(The Mayan Homeland)

F rom the veil of mystery they came, and in mystery their dazzling civilization would fade.

By the time of Christ's birth, the Maya had fashioned an exalted culture that would flourish and endure for some fifteen centuries. Amid the natural splendors and awesome adversities of tropical America, the Maya founded cities which would far exceed the populations of their European contemporaries.

Romantic accounts of "Lost Civilizations" have led many to presume the Maya themselves are also lost -yet over four million people in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador speak and live Maya. From the midland recesses of the Lacandon, Tikal and Calakmul Reserves to the Gulf, Pacific and, until recently isolated, Mexican Caribbean Coast, the Maya dwell in some of nature's most spectacular settings while maintaining a continuity of lifestyle measured by centuries.

Innately conservative, as any rural society, the Maya are marked by the ancient dictates of their tropic environs, and their consequent conventions for the management of beneficial trees, of hunting and fishing grounds, and, particularly, of farming. Almost every aspect of Mayan life revolves around: the cultivation of the staple corn (with entwining beans and squash as ground cover), the wilderness management of precious woods for their gums and resins (plus habitat for medicinal herbs and wildlife), and, on the seared limestone plain of the Yucatán Peninsula: seasonal rainfall.

On the Yucatán Peninsula, extended families, seeking fresh planting grounds and beneficial wilderness groves (most often of chicle and peech [pitch ?]), establish compounds hewn from the jungle and bound by stone walls. Proximity to rare water, undepleted jungle accessible for the 'slash and burn' method of crop rotation, and the groves, is paramount to site selection. Within the stone walls of these compounds, thatched homes, storage bins and yards (together called 'solaria') are contained. It is here where barnyard cover, the intense cultivation of kitchen herbs, tropical fruits and spices, and their principle cottage industry, occur. And, it is the foundations of these same such stone walls, found on ancient sites, which serve archaeologists as the bases for their estimates of ancient populations.

Oftentimes, these compounds cluster to form settlements around the sacred 'Ceiba' (kapok) tree -the insulating fiber of which can, by spontaneous combustion, burst abruptly into flame during extreme dry periods. Paths emanate from these settlements' cores to provide communal access to natural wells (cleavages in the cracked and collapsed portions of the limestone shelf [that is the Yucatán Peninsula] exposing underground ponds or streams), scattered corn plots, beehives, semi-managed groves, hunting areas, and (coastwise) fishing areas. The natural wells (or cenotes ), suspect to snake infestation, since, at least, the arrival of the Franciscans, are often guarded by reliquaries dedicated to the Rain God "Chaac;" and altars on the peripheries of corn plots are often found containing offerings to appease jungle imps: "Los Aluxob." From dawn to dusk, and often by moonlight, maintaining these enclaves within an ever-encroaching jungle -a jungle so dry, yet tenacious, to be scorned by the Rain God himself- governs the community: a duty little-changed since ancient times.

The balance with nature, which must be maintained by these settlements, is most precarious on the seared plain of the Yucatán Peninsula. Being a limestone shelf, rainwater quickly seeps through the porous stone of the peninsula leaving the surface dry under a torrid sun. Nowhere else in El Mayab are the Maya so dependent on the accurate prediction of the rainy season -a period when some rainfall will, or should, occur at least a few minutes daily.

The need for accuracy is compounded by the "slash and burn" method itself. Fires are set to clear the brush and debris left after slashing. If the rains come too soon, and smother the fires, the ground cover can remain too dense for the germination of crops. If the rains come too late, the thin, almost nonexistent, topsoil can be incinerated beyond use. Knowing when to set the fires can mean the difference between marginal survival and widespread suffering.

The responsibility for deciding when to set the fires rests with the 'shaman', or, in Yucatec Mayan: ah-méné . Attuned to history, and to nature, the ah-méné studies the advent of flying ants, the activities of bees, frogs and birds (all of which can indicate the season's first saturation of the atmosphere with sufficient humidity), and beseeches the Rain God Chaac (and oftentimes his minions, Saints Peter and Paul) to determine the critical date. The people are charged with fasting and sexual abstinence. Once the fires are set, the skies are scrutinized for wind and clouds. If the fires are prolonged, children, croaking like frogs, are sent into the trees to rustle the branches in imitation of breezes harbinging rain clouds; and, at the mouth of the natural well cenotes , the ah-méné implores' Chaac' to emerge from his dry-season home, within the honeycomb of subterranean lakes and streams, to sow the skies with water from his magic calabash and dipper. If all succeeds, there is celebration. If not, the people are obligated to more fasting and abstinence until the earth trembles with thunder, and its surface is again splattered with the first heavy drops of quenching rainfall.

Within an ever-evolving mass of such settlement cores: immense plazas, palatial residences, soaring pyramids and interconnecting highways had, in the past, eventually emerged; and, within these same city cores, the wisdom of the ancient Maya had emerged to readily apply concepts in mathematics and astronomy which would elude the modern world until, relatively, very recent times.

In stunning architecture and in written language of crafted glyph and mystic metaphor, the Maya monumentalized their presence, their measure of their night skies, and their epic world-view.

Yet, by the time of Spain's only partial conquests in New Spain, the Maya had seemingly abandoned all to the wiles of the ever-pervasive jungle -a subject now being treated by the international community of Meso-American archaeologists and Pre-Columbian historians as "Pastore's Model of the Mayan Collapse;" and, by the time of Spain's only partial dominion of New Spain, had almost capitulated their culture to the wiles of Spain's ever-pervasive Inquisition -a subject vigorously discussed during the Internet's largest project yet: MayaQuest.

Still in the process of rediscovery, their sites, both ancient and contemporary, reveal -more than ever- both: their ancient and contemporary mysteries to the venturous.

The Definitive Day and Overnight Excursions offered by 'Venture-Out' have been honed by twenty years of personal experience by the "Expert" from MayaQuest: