The Mayan people gave rise to a remarkable civilization that flourished for about 600 years, from around A.D. 300 to A.D. 900. This period is usually called the classic period. The period leading up to it is referred to as the preclassic or formative. The period after the classic period is the postclassic or Mexican. The beginning date of the classic period roughly corresponds to the first date that an inscription of the Mayan calendar appears and the ending date to the last point at which distinctively Mayan architecture was being built.

This was a rich period for culture in Central America, and the Maya were surrounded by several other strong civilizations, including the Zapotec, centered around Monte Alban in Oaxaca; the Teotihuacán near present-day Mexico City; the Olmec of southern Veracruz; and the Totonac of northern Veracruz.

During this period the Maya built a whole series of city-states typified by elaborate ceremonial complexes with remarkable step pyramids, ceremonial ball courts, and other buildings sometimes called monasteries or palaces, though they may have been neither. The centers of the cities were almost exclusively ceremonial structures on a grand scale. The pyramids and other buildings were often very ornately decorated with features such as stylistic heads of jaguar or rain gods; elaborate murals featuring scenes of battle, the taking of prisoners, and human sacrifice; complex date inscriptions rendered in hieroglyphs; and statuary of kings and gods.

A Ceremonial Elite

The centers were inhabited by the aristocratic and priestly elite who were responsible for the ceremonies and divinations the rest of the Maya relied upon. The majority of the Maya lived in small buildings that clustered around these centers and worked in small fields and gardens that radiated out into the rainforests and mountainsides. They would come into the centers to hear the oracles spoken by the priests and to participate in the frequent ceremonies that made up the round of Mayan life. They understood these practices were necessary to fulfill needs of their gods so the harvests would be good and plagues and famines could be avoided.

This aristocratic class of shamanic intermediaries practiced bloodletting, astrological divination, and sometimes human sacrifice on behalf of the gods. They wore elaborate headdresses and ornamental costumes, made complex pottery, and carved statues in stucco and stone. They also developed one of the most sophisticated calendrical systems ever devised and took every opportunity to record in extraordinary detail every possible cycle of time they could find.

For the classic-era Mayan civilization, the measurement of different cycles of time was an all-consuming passion at the very center of their culture. It is necessary to understand just how important it was in order to fully comprehend their unique and extremely evolved world view. In fact, the whole development of the Mayan form of writing, a system using symbolic pictures called hieroglyphs, was based on a desire to record different moments in time as accurately as possible.