If not aware of the culture’s violent history that inhabited 
Tulum’s incredibly idyllic setting, you might, while strolling through it, let thoughts drift towards envy for those formerly living in this Caribbean Paradise. In reality, by today’s western standards, life in ancient Tulum hovered on sanity’s edge.
A narrow passageway penetrates an 18-foot wide massive rock wall. Tulum’s sacrificial altar lies at the stairway’s base instead of on top in front of the overlooking temple as at Chichen Itza or Macchu Pichu. A picturesque white sand beach lies far below and slightly North of the main temple marking Tulum a former Mayan seaport. A blue-green sea stretches to the horizon, its foam flecked surf throwing itself on a sandy beach below the ruins’ elevated setting. The scene is serene - peaceful – “Caribbean.”
Amidst this idyllic setting, at a nearby ball court, a ritual game (precursor of volleyball, soccer, and football) was played with a ball made of natural rubber. First team to score was declared the winner. Saved more time for the anticipated “sudden-death” main event.
The entire winning team, according to Mexican tour directors at
the site, toasted victory with liberal quantities of fermented nectar at the sacred event’s conclusion. Then, in high spirits, they celebrated triumph further by migrating enmass to Nirvana - after leaving hearts - and heads - behind at the temple’s sacrificial altar. Game over.
Primitive cultures always created strong personal interest in a
mind fascinated by questions such as: How did they stay warm and dry? Secure food? Hunt wild game? Tan hides for clothes? Maintain soil fertility for successive crops? Cultural and social interactions within their individual clans? With their neighboring clans? Focus of their religious practices? How does their art evidence an ability to think in the abstract? Diversity of art? Creative skill creating art? Ad infinitum!
They either lived in harmony with the land or, if they abused it, they faded from existence. No “high tech” government bailed them out of serious economic predicaments if they lived beyond their means. They lived in harmony with nature or nature eventually consumed them.
The Pueblo culture of the Southwest U.S. is an example of suspected cultural catastrophes influenced by environmental abuse. Mesa Verde, Aztec and Chaco Canyon’s cliff dwellings bear mute witness to probable economic and cultural destructions due to environmental disasters. Pueblo ruins at those sites mutely guard today’s surrounding sterile desert terrains that once nurtured fertile croplands feeding the inhabitants occupying the pueblos’ now silent stone highrise apartments. Could something similar have shutdown Meso-America’s complex ancient stone cities?
Maya history and legend, as evidenced by some of their art and engineering devices, offer curious clues hinting at ties to widely spread ancient global cultures.
The Maya understood the principle of zero. Their scholars and architects developed a singular engineering feat of construction
called a “corbeled arch.” Stone carvings at the Mayan ruin of Copan depict an oriental figure accompanied by heads of elephants - with tusks. At the time those latter carvings were crafted, elephants had been unknown on the North American Continent since the last ice-age extinctions of mammoths and mastodons. Those creatures lived during millennias greatly preceding the appearance of Meso-America’s Maya cultures.
Maya scholars computed math with three symbols instead of the ten symbol decimal system used globally today. Before exiled 
from their ancient Indian capital, the Naga reportedly used the identical three symbols to figure their calendars. Cortez and Diego de Landa’s destruction of Aztec and Mayan libraries, when pillaging various Meso-American cities, probably permanently erased answers to many questions raised by Mayan cultural similarities displayed in far flung ancient global civilizations’ ranging from Asian to European excavation sites.
Sacred books of India, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana, document the expulsion of tribes called “Maya” and mention a Hindu Divinity named “Maya.” The Hindu elephant legend under Lord Ganesh is strongly referenced to the Mayan rain god Kum Chaak and the latter may somehow originate from Hindu influence.
Agamemnon’s Mycenaean tomb (father-in-law of Helen of Troy) employs two unique Mayan corbelled arches leading to underground cisterns. This Mayan engineering attribute also shapes a magnificent vaulted passageway at Corinth’s Cyclopean ruins in ancient Greece.
The Mayan Tojobal dialect permits modern Japanese and Mayan descendents to converse. Prof. Gualberto Alonzo of Merida, Mexico reports 40% of the Japanese language utilizes Mayan roots.
The Greek alphabet uses Mayan words. Professor Alonzo also documents Mayan roots in various European vocabularies. The links connecting these various cultures are an intriguing mystery.
Hunters were the first human populations to migrate to the Yucatan area. They soon decimated its wild game populations. Of necessity, the people turned to tilling the soil to augment feeding themselves.
Highly religious and devoted to a simplistic lifestyle, farming and trading eventually brought unequal wealth to the Mayan people’s earlier cultures. As usual, with virtually all global mankind, the spread of wealth caused strife and quarrelsome jealousies to weave devious threads into the various ancient Meso-American cultures’ politics. As a result, they invented kingship to channel excess wealth back into their subsistence culture through financing great cities and funding a nobility charged with governing these imposing ancient cultural complexes such as Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, Tulum, Copan and many others.
Knowledge of math enabled Mayan high priests to develop accurate annual calendars charting the best times to plant various crops, predict eclipses and, eventually, govern every facet of this unique culture’s lives from birth to marriage to death - including encouraging and influencing human sacrifice.
A supportive populace struggled to erect stone cities donating free labor and food to the nobility governing them. These mammoth labor-intensive projects were accomplished without the simplest of metal tools. Stone and obsidian chisels carved masonry and wood materials. Art, in many various forms, (from painting on canvasses of stone, to crafting fine gold jewelry, to detailed carvings on stone and wood) was subsidized by a web of intricate socialist efforts that in time encouraged developing world class skills.
Residential dwellings outside the stone city complexes were simple structures fashioned from poles and saplings bound with vines and supported over platforms of rock or white powdered limestone. The roof was a steep, thatched, gabled structure. They buried their dead kin beneath the family hut’s floor believing departed ancestors continued sharing life with their descendents.
On a lengthy bus drive to Tulum from Playa del Carmen (our Carnival Cruise port of arrival on the Yucatan Peninsula), we drove by similar thatched residential structures in use today. Where evidence of abandoned homes (decayed and partially collapsed) existed, often new ones stood next to them. Others simply stood abandoned to an ever encroaching uninhibited vegetative growth.
I expected to see typical “jungle.” While
the growth was often impenetrable, it was brushy - not tall mature timber with verdant under-story similar to that found in virgin tropical forests.
Tulum’s Mayan farmers historically cleared land by felling and scattering brushy growth while girdling the largest trees. The latter were left standing in place to wither and die. When the desiccated material lay dry and brittle, they torched the area. Unfortunately, this destroyed humus or organic material but the process extracted potassium from the ashes - an element vital to healthy corn production which was the main item in their diet.
They also made a strong fermented drink from the grain. The latter was vital to their sacrificial rites.
Without the addition of fertilizer, usually in two years, intensively farmed soil became unproductive. Crops then rotated to other tracts of prepared land while allowing the depleted soil to revert to brush. After five to six years, the slash/burn process began anew.
Expanses of brushy growth and roughly cleared areas between Playa del Carmen and Tulum are reminiscent of ancient Mayan crop fields and suggest that many of today’s current population of Tulum descendents continue the ancient ancestral “slash and burn” Mayan agricultural policies.
Ancient Meso-Americans accomplished such arduous labor with sharp blades and axes fashioned from obsidian (volcanic glass) and stone. Tulum’s common Mayan worked uncommonly hard to feed himself and his family. By modern standards he was also illiterate. The populace, in their illiteracy, depended on ancient Mayan, Aztec and Incan priests in temples such as built at Chichen Itza, Macchu Pichu, Copan, Tulum and others to interpret their annual calendar’s predictions for crop production involving clearing, sowing, planting, harvesting, and parenthood, death and a never ending flow of daily events.
The nobility, supported through taxing the extremely arduous endeavors of their illiterate subjects, studied with former priests and nobility to advance the various Meso-American cultures’ accomplishments in architecture, literature, art and science to levels rivaling ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations.
Meso-America’s main cultivar was corn. Bread and various drinks came from it - some of the latter fermented. Their civilizations could not have existed as they functioned without this grain’s production. Many authorities suspect major corn crop failures led to the demise of these fascinating city states scattered across Mexico and Central America.
Other crops cultivated for consumption were amaranth (a form of maize), squash varieties, sweet potatoes, and a host of tropical fruits including papaya and avocados.
They hunted deer, wild boar, rabbits, monkeys, armadillos, iguanas, opossum, and tapirs and fished to fortify their diet with protein. Jaguar, puma (mountain lion) and many varieties of snakes also inhabited the area.
They used wooden whistles or calls imitating deer during the mating season to lure them within range. This technique was only recently rediscovered by modern hunters. Most of today’s hunting fraternity can purchase deer “grunt calls” at a local sporting goods store.
Mammals in Central America, such as deer as well as the people themselves, are usually considerably smaller physically than their far northern or far southern counterparts. Smaller animals lose body heat more efficiently in the Tropics than larger bulkier ones. A mature white tail buck’s back in a zoo outside Xel-Ha (a Mayan ruin North of Tulum) barely came to my knees.
The temperate environment at the equator owes its comparatively mild year-round temperatures to the minimal effect there from the Earth’s seasonal wobble on its axis. This wobble influences the far northern and southern hemispheres’ winter seasons.
Photo-periodism (seasonal shortening and lengthening of natural sunlight) virtually influences all mammals’ pineal gland (the so-called third-eye) that inhabit the less temperate zones of the earth causing, for instance, whitetail bucks to shed their antlers annually, annual migratory flights of birds, deciduous trees’
to drop their leaves every year. The colder climes encourage mammalian species to evolve bigger bulkier bodies in order to generate more body heat and thus better survive colder harsher climates in the less temperate zones.
Thus, the miniature fully mature buck in the Xel-Ha zoo probably carried his antlers from one year to the next never shedding them as whitetails in the U.S. do. The tropic’s more constant annual rhythm of daylight’s average daily length is credited for minimizing photoperiodism’s influence on seasonal environments there.
Tulum stored water from rainy seasons in rock-lined cisterns for use during long, hot, dry periods. To prevent the water from fouling with algae and various distasteful, not to mention life threatening, vermin, they placed tortugas (turtles) and ranas (frogs) in the cisterns to tidy up. (I am not well informed as to who tidied up after the frogs and turtles. However, it’s not irrational to assess that an excess of frogs and turtles eventually migrated into local stew-pots now and then.)
Quite suddenly in history, the Maya culture abandoned their massive stone cities after centuries of habitation and intense practice of a daily life rigidly structured by calendars interpreted by their scientist/priests. While much has been written that Spanish invasions influenced this mass exodus, the latter reportedly began taking place long before. Unfortunately, Cortez and Diego de Landa’s destruction of Aztec and Mayan libraries probably permanently erased most historical clues explaining maddening gaps in the history of the world’s cultural migrations particularly as pertains to ancient Meso-America. European introduced diseases also radically decimated Meso-America’s indigenous populations.
One hypothesis infers Mayan cities existed by choice of the common people. As long as the general populace believed the nobility were necessary to promote Maya culture and faith, they supported the extreme sacrifices extracted from their ranks.
Whether such sacrifice was the constant sweat of their brow from toiling in the fields, or spent on ambitious construction projects erecting huge stone cities, or shedding human blood in prolific human sacrifices determined by their nobility as necessary to regenerate the fertility of land and people, they cooperated in forming communities dedicated to building huge stone edifices sheltering their cultures’ once growing industries of fine art and thriving commerce.
Then, some calamity or economic crisis, such as extended drought, may have dramatically altered the average ancient Mayan’s perception of the economic and cultural costs associated with their daily life. Such a disaster might have contributed to the wide spread abandonment of all Meso-American cities. Additionally, government may have become too expensive and corrupt to warrant the public’s continued support.
Today, we are just beginning to understand the legacy ancient Meso-American cultures left scattered throughout recorded and unrecorded history.
Note of interest to the traveler:
Professional photographers, when planning a trip to visit ancient Mayan and Aztec
excavations, should check for any restrictions on photography before departure. My Tulum visit surfaced an unpleasant episode just before entering through the massive stone gate when Mexican tour authorities refused to let me take my tripod into the ancient complex. Later the explanation offered was, ” … the tripod was too professional.”
It was OK to take in a camera costing more than the first two cars I ever bought but they took the tripod away!
Avoid future unpleasantness and disappointment by requesting any and all such restrictions in writing before committing any booking deposits. Take copies of written confirmations when visiting the site(s). I am not certain that will 100% guarantee authorized entrance if a similar problem arises but, if challenged because of such equipment, signed documents might cause pause for thought if local authorities realize the cruise line’s administrative personnel are directly involved. In fact, the cruise line should clear a path avoiding such incidents in the first place.
Better yet, also secure signed documents from the activities
director, or the appropriate counterpart , of any tour you are booked on. Our activities director from the Ecstasy did not accompany our tour to Tulum. Smaller tour groups probably would be accompanied by an official that should clear such problems before arrival.
Third world countries often spawn strange “authorities” at the most diabolical times. The above incident taught me to keep a number of $5.00 bills at the ready. So far, that has worked every time since. When in Rome, (or…) … !
The person appropriating my tripod at Tulum’s gate was the Mexican tour director accompanying a busload of tourists from Playa del Carmen to Tulum. I also registered a vigorous complaint with Ecstasy’s activities-director, but got little satisfaction there either. The incident taught me to get all commitments on paper next time.
Or don’t send the check.
Another sticking point: The main reason we booked that tour was that it originally promoted a side tour to Chichen Itza. After boarding the ship in Miami, we discovered the Chichen Itza event was diverted to Tulum. While that may sound like nit-picking, for travel editors presold on material for Chichen Itza, on the return home, their response was: “Tulum where?!”