THE BELIEFS OF THE ANCIENT MAYANS.

The Maya civilization occupied a wide territory that included South Western Mexico and Central America. This area included the entire Yucatan Peninsula, the highlands to the South of Sierra Madre, and all of the territory now incorporated into modern countries of Guatemala and Belize, as well as the Western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. The limestone of the Yucatan Peninsula was easily quarried and used for building and tool making. In the South, volcanoes stretched over the highlands and yielded valuable resources. The fertile volcanic soil allowed the people to grow crops.
The Mayans centered their power in the tropical lowlands of what is now Guatemala. They excelled at agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, calendar making, mathematics, and astronomical system. They left behind an great amount of impressive architecture and symbolic artwork. They built city-states that included great pyramid temples and public plazas featuring huge stone columns that recounted their history.
The earliest Maya settlements date around 1800 BC. The rise and fall of the civilization lasted over 3,000 years. Maya royalty recorded their history in writing and in imagery carved on monuments. The commoners recorded their own history in a different way, not only their history as a family but also their place in the cosmos.
Anthropologists say they have found evidence indicating that Mayans recorded their family history by burying it within their homes. They regularly ended their homes by razing the walls, burning the floors and placing artifacts and human remains on top before burning them again. The things buried didn't mean that people forgot about them. They buried his people in the exact same spot and removing bones from earlier ancestors to place them in other sacred spots, or removed pieces of them to be kept as mementos. The de-animation and re-animation of the home marked the passage of time and the cyclical nature of life. The arrangements, color and condition of the buried artifacts represented a sacred language of symbolic meaning.
These rituals occurred every 40 or 50 years and marked important dates in the Maya calendar. After termination, the family built a new home on the old foundation, using broken and whole vessels that had a very significant part of the dedication rites, colorful fragments, animal bones and rocks to mark important areas and to provide ballast for a new plaster floor.
Colors, such as red, which represented the East, Life, and Rebirth, were commonly used in burials and were generally found on the East side of the body or group of artifacts. Burial in the homes was common but only a few family members were entombed in there. Other artifacts -including groups of obsidian rocks- were also used in burials representing Mayan belief in the 9 levels of the underworld or the 13 levels of heaven.
Maya rulers and elite class had a basis in the domestic rituals of their subjects. Every royal emperor emerged or developed from domestic practices.