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The Maya are usually known for their advanced astronomy and calendars, beautiful inscriptions and art, big pyramids, and stelae. As this list of Maya cultural traits and accomplishments goes on, it becomes more evident why the Maya are portrayed as a “high culture,” a unique “native American civilization,” and so on. Although these are not the only possible representations of the Maya, they represent the common sense about the Maya and are valuable representations for New Age appropriations, both focused on the ancient Maya elites.
Some of the earliest European accounts where such images are found are in sixteenth-century cronistas such as Bartolomé de Las Casas that compared what he was calling “Indians” to the Greeks and Romans, saying that they could be wisest and superior to European civilizations in some customs (Las Casas 1997). But the Maya as they are known today (i.e., in the common sense) were “invented” starting from the nineteenth century, “when the Maya...
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References
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Cavalcanti, T.J. (2016). Maya. In: Gooren, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_39-1
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