Male Narrator: This object’s delicate, fragmentary condition is crucial to understanding one of its original functions for the Maya. James Doyle:
James Doyle: In about the ninth or tenth century, the Maya obtain gold from Central America, probably from Costa Rica or Panama, in the form of blank disks and also finished products like bells and pendants. The disks were then reworked by Maya artists. They were hammered to the thickness of aluminum foil, and the artists would then chase, or emboss, very complex scenes of warfare, of captive sacrifice, and of mythological beings into the gold disks that also include hieroglyphic texts.
[mysterious, rhythmic music evoking period and mood]
Male Narrator: Although the scene on the disk is almost indecipherable, the adjacent drawing clearly shows the large canoe full of people, including five wearing Maya garb.
James Doyle: They seem to be attacking two smaller rafts in a naval battle. The lower half of the disk is embossed with wavelike designs, suggesting that they are indeed on an open body of water. The people in the canoe are overshadowed above by a large Maya deity probably the Maya deity of wind.
[music ends]
Male Narrator: The Maya cast the disk as an offering into the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, a great ritual center on the Yucatan Peninsula. The Cenote is a sinkhole filled with water that the Maya believed was an opening to the underworld. Many traveled great distances to make ritual offerings of valuable objects. Over time, thousands of objects accumulated in the depths.
James Doyle: Most of the gold disks were crumpled up before being offered into the Cenote, as part of their ritual sacrifice.
Male Narrator: The idea of reciprocity between humans and a natural, and supernatural, world, was fundamental to the Maya.
[mysterious, rhythmic music evoking period and mood]
James Doyle: And so what we see with the Cenote, one needs to offer the most precious things, many of which had come from the land itself—such as gold, jade, and other things that were mined from geological sources—that needed to be returned in order to bring good things to Maya peoples and their communities.
[music ends]
