Early People
The most accepted theory for how our hemisphere was populated is that humans walked across a land bridge that existed where this strait is.
What is the Bering Strait?
This is the region from the southern part of Mexico to the northern countries of Central America.
What is Mesoamerica?
The Maya built these different structures in their cities.
What are stone pyramids, public plazas and temples?
This economic activity was important to get materials that weren't readily available in one's own area.
What is trade?
This is a sport the Maya learned from the Olmec.
What is a ball game in which they tried to bounce a ball into a stone ring.
This is why farmers were so successful at domesticating plants in Mesoamerica.
What is a warm climate and very fertile soil.
To increase the land the Maya had to cultivate, they did this to the hillsides.
What is create terraces?
In this city a beautiful temple was built to commemorate King Pacal.
What is Palenque?
These beans had great value, were restricted to only the most important people and were even used as money.
What are cacao beans?
This is what destroyed the Maya civilization.
Historians aren't sure.
This was the main source of food for the Mesoamericans.
What is maize and vegetables?
This type of region the Maya lived in provided them with additional food and wood from trees.
What are heavily forested areas or rainforests.
The Maya figured out that a year has this.
What is 365 days?
This is a glass-like volcanic rock that the Maya traded.
What is obsidian?
Bloody hand to hand fighting with spears is characteristic of this.
What is Maya warfare?
These are the people who formed the first urban civilization in Mesoamerica.
Who were the Olmec?
This is the period during which the Maya spread to the Yucatan Peninsula.
What is the Classic Age?
The Maya figured out the cycles of this celestial orb.
What is the moon?
Most of the Maya were this.
What are farmers?
Rulers and priests being born into their roles, excluding others from these high positions helped to do this.
What is to control society?
This crop helped them establish a reliable food source.
What is maize?
The Maya used this to coordinate planting and harvesting & for planning religious ceremonies.
What is their calendar?
The Mayan knowledge of astronomy was so precise that they could even predict these rare events.
What are eclipses?
The Maya believed that their gods needed a sacrifice of this bodily fluid.
What is blood?
The Maya believed that it was only the Kings and the priests who had this unique ability.
What is to communicate with the gods?
These were kept by writing on bark-paper or by carving into stone tablets.
What are records or record-keeping?
This is the peninsula in Southern Mexico that has most of the Maya and Olmec ruins. If you ever go to Cancun there, then please visit the beautiful Mayan temple pyramid at Chichen Itza!
What is the Yucatan? or What is the Yucatan peninsula?
Mayan hieroglyphics were similar to this writing system because the symbols represented both objects and sounds.
What is Egyptian writing or Egyptian hieroglyphics?
The Mayans were one of the first civilizations to have represent this mathematical concept symbolically.
What is zero?
This book has valuable information about the Maya.
What is the Popol Vuh?