Year 3

Maya Workshop

16/11/2022

Our Maya Workshop was delivered by archaeologist Lucy.

We started our session off with an introduction to the Maya civilisation and a Q&A; we learned many interesting facts about Maya life.

We learned about their gods and religion, social hierarchy, food, clothes and jewellery, and more.

We learned to be archaeologist by uncovering Maya artefacts buried in the sand.

We made observations on those artefacts;

What is it? What is it made of? What is its purpose? What does it tell us about the Maya people?

We learned about the complex Maya numbering system.

The Maya didn’t use base 10, instead they used base 20. Instead of ones, tens, hundreds, thousands they uses ones, twenties, four hundreds, eight thousands.

They did not use the digits 1-9; they used symbols of easily acquired items such as rocks, sticks and shells to represent their numbers.

They also wrote their numbers top to bottom, rather than left to right. We attempted to decipher some Maya numbers – it was tricky!

Lucy brought lots of amazing Maya artefacts with her for us to explore.

We look at the engravings on the artefacts and theorised what story they were telling. Some artefacts showed priests performing the ritual of bloodletting to appease the gods.

We attempted to make our own Maya artefacts out of clay.

Most Maya pottery was ‘zoomorphic’ – which means it is shaped like an animal.