{"id":4677,"date":"2023-01-17T02:19:28","date_gmt":"2023-01-16T20:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=4677"},"modified":"2025-03-27T01:46:37","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T20:16:37","slug":"mayan-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/mayan-civilization\/","title":{"rendered":"Mayan Civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>Why in News?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The discovery was made using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) by a team of researchers from several American universities as well as collaborators from France and Guatemala.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><strong>About Mayan Civilization<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The Maya are probably the best-known of the <strong>classical civilizations of Mesoamerica.\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Originating in the Yucat\u00e1n peninsula around 2600 B.C<\/strong>., they rose to prominence around A.D. 250 in <strong>present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Building on the inherited inventions and ideas of earlier civilizations, the <strong>Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems and hieroglyphic writing.\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>The Maya were <strong>noted as well for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture, including temple-pyramids, palaces and observatories, all built without metal tools.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>They were also <strong>skilled farmers<\/strong>, clearing large sections of tropical rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The Maya were <strong>equally skilled as weavers and potters<\/strong>, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples.<\/li>\n<li>The <strong>Maya made paper from the inner bark of wild fig trees and wrote their hieroglyphs<\/strong> on books made from this paper. <strong>Those books are called codices.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Their <strong>society consisted of many independent states<\/strong>, each with a <strong>rural farming community and large urban sites built around ceremonial centers<\/strong>. It started to decline around A.D. 900.<\/li>\n<li>The Maya peoples never disappeared, neither at the time of the Classic period decline nor with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors and the subsequent Spanish colonization of the Americas.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The <strong>Maya remain in contemporary Mesoamerican societies<\/strong>, and maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs, combined with more recent practices such as the almost total adoption of Roman Catholicism.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><strong>Where is the Yucatan Peninsula?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>The Yucatan Peninsula is <strong>Mexico\u2019s southeastern projection, extending into the Atlantic Ocean.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>It <strong>separates the Gulf of Mexico to the north and west and the Caribbean Sea to the east.\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><strong>What is meant by Mesoamerica?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>It refers to a <strong>geographical and cultural area which extends from central Mexico down through Central America<\/strong>, including the territory which is now made up of the countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><strong>What is LiDAR (light detection and ranging)?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>It is a<strong> remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances) to the Earth.\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>These light pulses\u2014combined with other data recorded by the airborne system \u2014 generate precise, three-dimensional information about the shape of the Earth and its surface characteristics.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1<strong>)<\/strong>\u00a0What are Codices?<\/h3>\n<p>The Maya made paper from the inner bark of wild fig trees and wrote their hieroglyphs on books made from this paper. Those books are called codices.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ndtv.com\/feature\/2-000-year-old-mayan-city-discovered-beneath-guatemalas-rainforest-3691356\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>2,000-Year-Old Mayan City Discovered Beneath Guatemala&#8217;s Rainforest<\/u><\/a><br \/>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maya are Mesoamerica originating in the Yucat\u00e1n peninsula around 2600 B.C<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":4678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4677","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}