THE BALLCOURT

The ballcourt is found in all major Maya cities. It's a rectangular space (1)  closed by two sloping platforms (a) sometimes supporting buildings (b) and hoops (c). The objective of the game was to throw a rubber ball into the oponents' end zone (2) through a suspended hoop or a floor marker without the use of hands. Spectators could watch the game from the buildings above. The ballgame symbolized the fight between mythical characters whose tale is told in the Popol Vuh.

Since in Maya cosmology the world is divided in four cardinal directions, some have proposed that some cities were divided by the ballcourt in a northern part and a southern part representing the two mythical worlds (underworld and skyworld), and that the buildings took their meaning from the part in which they stood.

THE TOWERS

The towers are unusual structures in Maya architecture whose shape and function vary. The round tower of Chichen Itza named Caracol because of its spiral stairway would have been used for astronomical observations while the square tower of Palenque could have been used as a look-out.

THE STELAS

In the plazas of the cities are free-standing stone monuments similar to statues called stelas by archaeologists or "tree-stones" by the Maya (fig. 8). On those monuments are sculpted the portraits of rulers and hieroglyphic inscriptions recording their accomplishments or historical events. They were often coupled with an altar for offerings or prayers and were aligned in a specific order following the royal lineage and/or the alignment of buildings.

Fig. 8: Stela, Copán.

THE SACBES

The sacbes, meaning "white roads", are paved roads linking different architectural complexes of a city like at Tikal and Labná or linking different cities like Uxmal and Kabah. Contrarily to the cities of Central Mexico, Maya cities were not built according to a system of streets. Urbanism was planned but with a reversed logic where circulation space was the residual space between buildings. Thus, architectural space seems to have been favored over circulation space, perhaps because Maya cities did not involve the same functions as their large counterparts in Central Mexico.

The Maya architect abides by the principle of continuity. This principle is visible in the perpetuation of the basic form that manifests itself in the different types of monumental buildings and through time. It is even visible in the organization of the city which is a multiplication of the patio group form.

This principle is also visible in the process of construction. The buildings were rarely destroyed as is the case in the modern world. When a building had outlived its use, a new one was built on top of it (fig. 9). The new building could reproduce the same form, in which case the reconstruction was ritual and generally tied to an important historical event like the accession to the throne of a new ruler. In other cases, the new building had a new form and the change reflected new needs.

This effect of superimposition created with time the immense buildings and vast cities that can be observed today. Hence, the majority of visible buildings date from the last construction phase before their abndonment which corresponds to the Late Classic period (7th-10th centuries A.D.).

Fig. 9: Development of a building group, Uaxactún. (after Kubler 1990)