Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 19, 1993 TAG: 9301190234
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MAYAN RUINS AND A SURVIVING CULTURE
Christine Weber spent four years producing and directing "Lost Kingdoms of the Maya" for National Geographic, focusing on the ancient culture that flourished between 250 and 900 A.D. in Central America and Mexico.The special, Wednesday at 8 p.m. on WBRA (Channel 15) and narrated by Susan Sarandon, looks at the highly developed civilization by visiting ruins of cities, recreating rituals and talking to Mayan descendants to help viewers gain insight into this culture.
But Weber wants viewers to realize that the Mayas live today. They are over half the population of Guatemala, she said, and they account for a large part of that country's income.
"They really are not dead," she said. "They are really a culture of survivors through unbelievable odds, and continued odds, and still hanging on."
Hundreds of thousands of Mayas have been killed during recent years in Guatemala's civil war. "It's so complicated and hard to explain," she said. "They're not necessarily being killed in Guatemala because they're Maya, but because they're poor. But the fact is that they're Maya. That's the irony, because Guatemala probably makes most of its money off the tourism to the ruins of their ancestors' cities, and the country's big export, Maya textiles.
"It was wonderful and fascinating and tragic to work on the film," Weber said. "It was so beautiful in Guatemala, and despite the number of people who have been killed, they have such a sense of pride."
Among them is 33-year-old Rigoberta Menchu, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize-winner who was recognized for her writing about her family's losses and deaths in a country where the haves and the have-nots are deeply divided. Weber said 80 percent of the land in Guatemala is held by 2 percent of the population.
"The Mayas really haven't been the majority of the guerrilla movement," she said, "so the government has waged this campaign of fear and intimidation to keep them from joining the guerrillas. They established civil patrols and forced them to spy on their neighbors, which is totally contrary to any Indian philosophy."
Weber said she plans to assemble outtakes from "Lost Kingdoms" of interviews she had with widows and others and provide them to Amnesty International. "There was so much to fit in this film, we couldn't include everything."
What the film does include are visits to archaeological excavations at Copan in Honduras, Caracol in Belize, Dos Pilas and Tikal in Guatemala and Chiapas in Mexico. Of more than 4 million Mayan descendants, most live in Chiapas and Guatemala. They speak 30 or more versions of their own language.
One of the keys to understanding ancient Mayan culture is to talk with modern Mayas, who continue to embrace many of the traditions and customs of their ancestors, celebrate sacred Mayan days and weave traditional garments.
The other keys are "dirt archaeology" - sifting the dirt for clues, she said - and decoding hieroglyphics on stones found in the ancient cities.
Weber said she didn't know much about Maya culture when she started her film, but she has come to realize that American public interest in the Mayas is lively.
"I think it's sort of a cult," she said. "I attended a lecture at the Smithsonian, and it was full, with people standing all around, wearing Mayan clothes. I think a lot of them had gone to some of the sites. Once people have gone to the sites, they're hooked they're such mystical places."
Certainly the sites are impressive, in the way that the pyramids of Egypt are. Originally built with huge boulders, the structures are still puzzles, both literally and figuratively. At the sites, researchers have assembled rocks they call the "GOK pile" - "God only knows where this one goes" - while they try to reconstruct buildings without diagrams.
Some of the Mayas' structures were simply built over others, in the manner of a set of nesting Russian eggs. As a building is excavated, the archaeologists find that it may be only one atop a second, and a third, and a fourth.
At Rosalila, at Copan, researchers found that, unlike most nested buildings, the innermost structure had not been demolished but was sealed within two larger temples, its original red color covered by a whitewash.
"That's what makes Rosalila so fascinating," she said, "because in most cases they just destroyed the buildings and filled in with rubble. One theory is that by covering up the red, they were ritually killing the building. They then put in gentle fill, to preserve all that sculpture."
The National Geographic Society has given nearly 100 grants totalling nearly $1.5 million for Maya research since 1939 and has produced 51 articles since 1913, and more recently, four films about the Maya civilization.