El Museo de Anthropologia

So on Friday for our culture class we took a little trip to the Museum of Anthropology which was pretty interesting.  The outside of the museum itself was very beautiful and elegant and the inside was just the same.  Upon entering the museum, in the first hallway, there were 2 giant stone tablets, along with a sculpture of Jaguars.  The reason that this is so sigfinicant is because during the time period of the Mayans jaguars were very plentiful and also worshiped by the Mayans.  They used to call them B'alam and the emperors wore jaguar pendents and pelts.  They also incorporated the Jaguars into astronomy and thought that 4 jaguars, each a different color, help up the sky.  After seeing many sculptures depicting the jaguars we went into a room that had collections a human artifacts as well as remains.  There were definately a lot of cool things in this room but a few stood out to me.  We learned in culture class that the mayans had certain rituals, as does any culture, but you do not actually get the full effect until you see what people are talking about.  The Mayans would change the shape of the males teeth for certain rituals, making the long and skinny, or serrated on the edges.  They would also incrust things into the teeth, such as little pieces of jade for example.  Jade is not native to this part of the country so it is also known that this must have been imported from somewhere else and used for these ceremonies.  Another thing that they would do to young males is deform their heads.  The way that they would do this is by having two boards that were attached at one end, lying the baby boy inside the boards, and then pressing down so to flatten the forehead of the boy.  This action would perminately deform the skull of the child and was normally done by the mothers.  Another interesting fact is that the Mayans and Aztecs had mainly the same gods but just called them by different names.  One example of this would be the serpent god.  In the Mayan language this god was known as Kukulcan, and in the Aztecs was known as Quatzequatl.  Many other gods overlapped and archiologists have found many statues of the gods that look very similar but come from two completely different places.  Now on to sports, one of my favorite topics, but i am still undecided if I would have liked to play this sport.  It was a form of basketball/soccer.  The object of the game was to use your head, hips, and knees in order to get a rubber ball through a hoop.  Now this doesnt seem so bad, but when you think about that they played with no shoes, in the dirt and rocks, and oh yeah the losing team got sacraficed, it puts a different perspective of things.  So these were probably the coolest things that I saw at the museum but there was definately a lot more to check out and coupld probably spend weekes writing about it, because after all there are people that do that for a living.