Fantasmas de una civilización caida

Today a group from my school took a fieldtrip to the Iximche Mayan ruins. I thought it would be a nice break from the usual seven hours of craming my brain full of verbs, however my teacher this week is overly ambitious and spent the way there constantly quizzing me on the names of body parts and trying to force me to conjugate past tense- something we only just touched on yesterday...but of course I should already have it down.

The ruins were pretty amazing. It is so easy for me to only think of existance in terms of my immediate world. Sometimes when I stop and think of even the billions of people living lives entirely seperate from mine in this very moment it blows my mind. Therefore, standing within the towering, moss-covered traces of a civilization that existed over 800 years ago I am very aware of how insignificant I am in the spectrum of existance.

While my knowledge of Mayan culture is limited to the few NatGeo specials I´ve seen (I couldn´t even remember, when coming down here, if it was the Aztecs or Mayans in Guatemala) I do know that their dissapearance as a culture is one of the few great Anthropological mysteries that exist today. The idea of a culture that completely dissapates is hard to imagine today. In an era where everyone is accounted for, where most of the land is mapped and citizenship to one country or another is a requirement the idea of a civilization just dissapearing is facinating. I guess the forfront theory currently is that they logged so heavily in order to make the stucco that coated their buildings, the weather patterns changed entirely and they had no food or water.

Acording to the flyer we were handed regarding the Iximche ruins- the Spanish, who invaded in 1524- made Iximche the first capitol of Guatemala. The ruins consist of three distinct plazas that divided the three classes of people. Each plaza has the remnants of mulitiple temples and before each are numerous stone alters where the poor would bring offerings to the Gods or the king in order to gain assistance with their perils. These offerings ranged from candles and produce to animals and slaves who would be used for sacrifice.

On the way back I though again a lot about the dichotomy that exists here between old and new. America is a relativly new country. Thus even in places like Boston where you see the old architechture side-by-side with the towering new skyscrapers, the old is still new enough that it barely fell before our ability for everything to be well-documented. We benifited from being the offshoots of another culture already in the upswing of industrial advances. Thus the new isn´t in contrast with the old but really just the natural path of our cultural growth and we have no traditions that cannot addapt to the rapid growth. On the other hand there is the Mayan culture and the Guatemalan culture. I see the people who still hold on to the culture and the traditions- which do not fit into the advancements that are popping up around them. Their way of life is in opposition with the colonization and modernization that I see all over Antigua and much of Guatemala where I have visited. Women clad in the traditional garb sit outside of McDonalds and peddal their woven goods. Men walk along steep mountain roads with bags of firewood hanging from their head as buses, cars and motorcycles rumble by. I find myself constantly unsure weather these archaic ways of life are out of tradition or poverty? And if the changes are with or against the desires of the Guatemalan people. Do they want two Sushi resturants, an Irish pub, a Burger King? Is the loss of what I see as authenticity a gaining of the assets of Western culture or a loss of their own?

And this is what I think about every day on my way to school. No wonder my brain is tired.