Introduction
The Mayan civilization was one of the greatest cultures of ancient America in terms of duration, spread and sophisticated accomplishments in the areas of mathematics, astronomy, architecture and art. The Mayan’s ability to construct mammoth stone structures without the wheel or beasts of burden continues to amaze. People today are still awed by the spectacular Mayan temples and are fascinated by their hieroglyphs. The Mayas developed an extremely accurate 365 day calendar with a leap year, understood arithmetic and used a numbering system with zero almost a thousand years before the Europeans did. What began as a group of simple farmers slashing and burning the rainforest to cultivate crops, developed into a unique empire that endured two millennia, spanned 325,000 square kilometres, included 200 cities, and had 10 million inhabitants. It is a great loss to humanity that the Mayan codices – centuries of records and libraries of books written on bark paper - were destroyed by Spanish invaders. It is shocking that the Maya’s beautiful buildings and monuments were destroyed to build churches and that the jungle has reclaimed most of their cities. It is our responsibility to preserve what is left of the once great Mayan empire.
Temple I at Tikal
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