Daily life of the ancient Maya recorded on murals at Calakmul, Mexico

Abstract

Research into ancient societies frequently faces a major challenge in accessing the lives of those who made up the majority of their populations, since the available evidence so often concerns only the ruling elite. Our excavations at the ancient Maya site of Calakmul, Mexico, have uncovered a "painted pyramid:" a structure decorated with murals depicting scenes of its inhabitants giving, receiving, and consuming diverse foods, as well as displaying and transporting other goods. Many are accompanied by hieroglyphic captions that describe the participants, and include spellings of key subsistence items. Collectively, they offer insights into the social mechanisms by which goods were circulated within major Maya centers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 132 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.