RESOURCE: Maya caption humour

Popular culture has often presented the Maya as an ancient, mysterious, and almost alien people – a people who predicted the end of the world in 2012 and who achieved metaphysical enlightenment in the Celestine Prophecy. Utter nonsense. The Maya are very real people whose ancestors are as approachable as the living Maya today. Their rulers played their roles and collected their taxes, their priests performed their rituals, their warriors fought and their lovers loved. Yet it was their artists who expressed human emotions in clay figurines so vividly that we can relate to their feelings and even put words in their mouths. Here are some of the figurines I found in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and one from a site museum at Lubaantun.

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