Mas

Editor’s Note: Each week, Mas magazine presents a bilingual lesson on Latin American history, followed by a quiz that parents and children can answer together.

    The pre-Columbian city of Copán is located in western Honduras near the Guatemalan border and was the site of a major Mayan kingdom of the Classic era.

    The kingdom, named Xukpi (Corner-Bundle), flourished from the 5th century AD to the early 9th century. Its name apparently refers to the fact that it was situated at the far southern and eastern end of Mayan territory.

    The site in Copan is perhaps best known for producing a remarkable series of portrait stelae, slabs of stone or wood with inscriptions, paintings or reliefs.  Most of the stelae were placed along processional pathways in the central plaza of the city and the adjoining acropolis, a large complex of overlapping step-pyramids, plazas, and palaces. The stelae and sculptured decorations of the buildings of Copán are some of the very finest surviving art of ancient Mesoamerica.

    The site also has a large court for playing the Mesoamerican ballgame.

    At its height in the late Classic period, Copán seems to have had an unusually prosperous class of minor nobility, scribes, and artisans, some of whom had homes of cut stone built for themselves.  Such homes, some of which have carved hieroglyphic texts,  were a privilege reserved for rulers and high priests.

    The buildings suffered significantly from forces of nature in the centuries between the site’s abandonment and the rediscovery of the ruins. There have been numerous earthquakes — no roofs of the stone buildings intact when the site was rediscovered, and the hieroglyphic stairway was collapsed. The Copán river changed course and meandered, destroying part of the acropolis and apparently wiping out various subsidiary architectural groups in the region. In the long period when the site was overgrown, the buildings and sculptures suffered from the invasive thick jungle vegetation and periodic forest fires. Archaeologists  have consolidated and restored many structures at the site.

Pre-Columbian history

    The fertile Copán River valley was long a site of agriculture before the first known stone structures were built in the region around the 9th century BC.

    A kingdom seems to have been established in Copán in 159 and it grew into one of the most important Maya sites by the 5th century. Xukpi was one of the more powerful Maya cities, although it suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the kingdom located at Quirigua in 738.

    The area continued to be occupied after the last major ceremonial structures and royal monuments were erected, but the population declined in the 8th and 9th centuries from         perhaps more than 20,000 to less than 5,000.

    The ceremonial center was long abandoned and the surrounding valley was home to only a few farming hamlets at the time the Spanish arrived in the 16th century.

Copán in modern times

    By the time of the Spanish conquest of Honduras, the site had long been overgrown by the rainforest. Although this large ruined city was known locally since early colonial times, it remained largely unknown by the outside world until a series of explorers visited it in the early 19th century. In 1834, Juan Galindo wrote a description of the ruins and it was published the following year. This sparked the interest of North American explorer and travel writer John Lloyd Stephens and English architect and draftsman Frederick Catherwood, whose illustrated books describing Copán and other sites excited a great deal of interest in Mesoamerican antiquities among American and European scholars.  The books are regarded as the commencement of modern Mayan studies which continue to this day.

    The site was the subject of one of the first modern archeological surveys and excavations in the Maya area conducted from 1891 to 1900 by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University. Further excavations and restorations were begun by the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the 1930s, the Peabody Museum again in the 1970s, followed by the Government of Honduras’s Proyecto Copán beginning in the late 1970s and continuing to this day.

Source:  Wikipedia

 •••••

Today’s Lesson:

1)  Where is Copán located? ____________________

2)  The ancient name of Copán was  ______________, and the city flourished from ______________ to __________ century.

3)  Xukpi suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the kingdom located at ________ in the year _____.

4)  The Copán population declined in the 8th century - 9th century from _________to less than___________ inhabitants.

5)  Further excavations and restorations in Copán begun in ___________ by ___________________.

Answers:

1)  Copán is in the extreme western of Honduras, in the Copán Department, near to the Guatemalan border.

2)  Xukpi (Corner-Bundle),   the 5th century AD,  the early 9th

3)  Quirigua.  738.

4)  Over 20,000.   5,000

5)  1930s.   The Carnegie Institution of Washington.