Copán Ruins

By Katie

Many people travel during Holy Week here in Central America. We got to do a little of that ourselves this year since we had the week free from work. My friend since childhood, Tanya, came down and the three of us went to the Mayan ruins of Copán in western Honduras.

While you might not expect this photo of an ugly barren mountain to be the first on a blog post about the ruins of an ancient civilization, really this is the most important picture for us today. The most popular theory about why the Mayans at Copán fell is that they had deforested the surrounding mountains, over-populated them and over-farmed them to the point that the rains stopped coming and the land became useless. From the looks of it, not much has changed since Copán fell around 800 ad. Maybe we modern humans need to learn a little from history.

We toured the ruins on the date of our four-year wedding anniversary :)



Honduran first graders learn the Mayan numbering system since it´s a great introduction to learning to work with fives. In this picture you can see the glyph of King Rabbit 18, so named after the month he was born in and for being the 18th king of Copán. The three bars on the left side represent fives and the balls represent ones. 3 fives plus 3 ones = 18



Immaturity break!



Tanya and I had learned about the ancient Mayan people as little elementary school kids together, so it was fun to go there with her. Of course, what impresses you most as a kid is the Mayan ball game; a soccer-like game in which players need to hit the stone bird heads with a heavy ball. The winner of the game is sacrficed to the gods, a high honor. A very memorable history lesson!



Tanya and I in the ¨locker rooms¨ of the ball stadium, naturally.



Nestled in a hillside among the ruins is a very impressive sculpture museum housing many of original pieces that were taken out of the ruins to be preserved. Also in the open-air museum is this full-scale replica of one of the first temples in Copán. When it was unearthed they found it to be brightly painted as in the replica here.

It was an amazing trip, and a destination that Honduras can be (and is) very proud of.