Maya

The Maya star in Mel Gibson's classic movie Apocalypto.

...

... okay, FINE.

The Maya are the Yucatec branch of a larger ethnolinguistic group along the Gulf of Mexico and especially that big bulge including the Yucatan peninsula, in Mesoamerica. That group has been labeled "Maya" because the Yucatec were the first Maya whom the Spaniards met when they came over, and that is what those "Maya" called themselves. There survive other Maya branches: like the Huastec spinoff up the coast, the Quiche who wrote the Popol Vuh, and - most of all - the Cholti, whose language recorded what we know as "Classic Maya" civilisation.

Although the Cholti and, later, the Yucatec owned the only truly literate script in the New World - a hieroglyphic rebus, like the Egyptians' - this script was "forgotten". By which we mean, the Spaniards systematically suppressed it. Bishop Landa was the worst culprit but, ironically, he was also the man who did the most to transmit the script to us: he scribbled down its most-significant ideograms, and also encouraged the locals to write down their works into Latin script.

As (partially) a result, the Maya culture and languages survived to the present day and are in better shape than such for most Mesoamerican peoples. Also, Michael Coe and Tatiana Proskourieff were able to pick up on what Landa started, and deciphered the old script. Despite Eric Thompson's best efforts.

So: what did Coe and Проскуряко́ва find? weellll... the Maya aristocracy were assholes. Er, sorry. But they did a lot of city-on-city warfare and mass murders, and human sacrifice, and slavery. I guess you could say that everyone was doing it in that time and place, and the Spaniards weren't much better (although better than the Portuguese at least on the slavery thing).

The Maya also used heavy metals in their paints, which dribbled into the water supply - that cannot have helped. Their agriculture was a little more sustainable until it, you know, wasn't. At the end, the Chorti commoners mostly said fuck-this-noise and went back into the forests.

Currently Copan still speaks Chorti, and there are some other communities out west speaking related Chontal, but mostly other Maya peoples carried on that civilisational torch. Like the Yucatec.

/tg/ Relevance

This hobby started out in a Western culture, the USA and the UK, so 1970s-era Western concerns have defined the community's approach to The Exotic. That meant the Maya were treated less for their own sake than for the sake of their past. i.e. Time for a TOMB RAID!!

The most-dramatic Maya lost cities, meaning Cholti cities, had got themselves un-lost over the late 19th century, contemporaneous with the un-losing-ness of Egyptian and Sumerian cities. This inspired all manner of pulp fiction in Clark Ashton Smith stories which, of course, bequeathed to the AD&D society C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. (Raiders of the Lost Ark only increased interest in this genre although, technically, that opening temple might not be Maya.)

Nowadays with wider appreciation of the Maya mythology, including one of humanity's most dramatic underworlds, and the newer perspective on Maya history/-ies, we might someday see a Maya-themed adventure which actually involves living Maya culture. (Better - we hope - than what was done to we mean, for the Mexica.) The movies have already got this ball rolling. (Did we mention the Mesoamerican ballgame yet?)

To get y'all started, other 2000s-era Maya-themed kino, besides Apocalypto (which is great) which you can watch is The Ruins.