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Maya women rose and started the fires before 4:00 AM. Women made breakfast toasting leftover cornmeal pancakes. By 5 AM men had finished eating and left for the fields with their sons. There they harvested their maize. At midafternoon men and boys would return from the fields and sometimes hunt or check their traps along the way. They would kill birds with blowpipes and clay pellets. Sometimes they also hunted with spears. When the men got home they had hot baths waiting for them. (Some cities had community baths) After bathing men had dinner but the woman didn't eat with the men. The women served the men and then ate their dinner later. Dinner could include cornmeal, black beans, meat, maize, rabbit and turkey. After dinner men usually worked at making wooden and jade things which were sometimes used in trade. Women would spin cotton and weave. |
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To measure passages of time,
priests studied the sun, the moon, and Venus.
Mayas had a calendar with 18 months with 20 days,
plus 5 unlucky days which made up the days in a
year. |
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Farmers had their own plots of land as well as gardens as next to heir houses. Each village also had a plot of communal land which everyone would help to tend. Farmers drained swampy areas, and inclosed with earth banks to keep the water out and the farmers would plant crops there. Then they built irrigation canals, which brought water from the swamps to the crops growing in the fields. Mayans made use of several kinds of trees. Cocoa beans from cocao trees were considered valuable and sometimes used as money. People chewed the leaves of the sapodilla tree, and the resin from copal trees was used in religious ceremonies. |
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Mayas believed each day was a god that carried the weight of the day on its back. The priests had to figure out how all the gods were linked to a particular time. |
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The Mayans had a sense of beauty
that would be seen as hideous in our present
society. They practiced skull deformation by
tying boards to the forehead of newborn
children. Mayans had tattooing and body
piercing. |
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Men wore an ex which is a loincloth. Women wore loose sack like dresses. The clothes of the priests and nobles were made with finer materials and had many shells and beads on them. For ceremonies they wore wonderful head-dresses. |
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