This is our excellent guide Felipe showing us a Maya kitchen house - separate from the sleeping house. He told us that Mayans know that they are of Asiatic descent, like the Bering Migration theory postulates, because they have the Mongolian spot.He did tell us that showing his spot was not included in the price of the guide services.
The mongolian birthmark is flat, can be deep brown, slate gray, or blue-black. At least one mongolian birthmark is present on over 90% of Native Americans, over 80% of Asians, and over 70% of those like our guide with mixed Native American and European lineage. It is present at birth and fades by the age of two. Most have completely disappeared by the age of five.
Teri is standing here in front of a typical Maya home from the Dzibilchaltun era of many centuries ago. The amazing thing to me is that as we travel through the countryside and see small hamlets in the Yucatan, we can still see the identical style of construction today. Often, though, we do not even see the nice raised base to the houses. They seem to be built today mostly directly on the ground.
Typically you find today that Yucatecans still sleep in hammocks. It is a very practical bedding for the tropics. The Mayan hammocks that we saw sold in Merida were beautiful multicolor woven polyester creations which were made in a loom. We would have bought one except we do not have two strong points where to attach one. Columbus was the first European to send hammocks to Europe after he found the Tainos of Cuba and Santo Domingo using them in their homes. The word comes from the Spanish "hamaca". Apparently the hammock was adopted by the Mayans just a few centuries before Columbus arrived in Cuba.
This is the laundry area.
This is a very well preserved suit of armor belonging to a Spanish Conquistador arriving from Cuba to conquer Mexico.
The upper class Mayas flattened their children's foreheads using a device like this. The common folk had normal foreheads.
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