1. What is your name and your background?
My name is Andrew Kinkella, and I have a PhD in Maya archaeology. I have worked in Belize at Maya archaeological sites there since the 1990s, when I was an undergraduate student at UC Santa Barbara. I have also done archaeological work in southern California, Germany, Baja California, Arizona, and a shipwreck in northern California. Besides archaeology, I also have a background in acting and improv comedy, and I am an active scuba diver with a Divemaster certification. I am currently a full-time college professor of archaeology at Moorpark College in southern California, and I have been doing that job since 2004.
2. How did you become interested in archaeology, and where did you start?
I first became interested in archaeology because it seemed like a way to do “meaningful travel,” where I could go somewhere and be more than just a tourist. When I was in college I wanted to see the world, and I was able to join a field school for three months at a major Maya site in Belize in the spring of 1993. That first trip was pretty transformative for me, because I found that I liked all sorts of things about archaeology, and all sorts of things about difficult travel in the jungle. I liked that the jungle is an unforgiving natural force (like the ocean), so it was a test of your mettle to just traverse it, or to get something done that would be so much easier in another environment. Maya sites have a very romantic aspect to them as well, literally being lost cities in the jungle. It was very exciting for me to work at a “lost city,” and help to answer questions about the past with real objects that we were uncovering.
3. What do you find the most unique and intriguing aspects of the Maya?
As I matured in Maya archaeology, I really got into cenotes and how they related to Maya culture. Cenotes are large sinkholes filled with fresh water that look like lakes, and they occur throughout the Maya world. Since I was already a scuba diver, I used my diving knowledge to explore these pools. It was very exciting to practice underwater archaeology deep in the Maya jungle, and I was the first person to ever dive in these remote locales. I like exploring the cenotes and learning about the ritual aspects of how the Maya used them. The Maya saw these pools as sacred places, as places where there was a close connection to the gods, where our world touched theirs. Because of this, they would throw sacrificial objects into the pools for the gods, including (sometimes) human beings. I also like being a realist about the cenotes - sometimes they are just for drinking water or to water crops - not every cenote has to be an important ritual location.
4. Which areas and time periods in the Maya civilizations do you specialize in?
The area of the Maya world I specialize in is the east coast of the Yucatan peninsula (because that is where Belize is located).
My time period specialty is the Terminal Classic Period (800-925 AD or so), which is the time period right before the Maya collapse. We see an uptick in the Maya use of cenotes for ritual purposes during this time, because there were a series of droughts and they were in need of rain to grow corn.
5. Did the Maya really practice human sacrifice, or is this just an example of cultural chauvinism on our part? How do we know?
Yes, the Maya practiced human sacrifice, but they did not do it as often as television and movies would have us think. It would have happened at very special times, often as part of a ritual to bring rain for corn. The sacrifice would be bloody and gory, because it must be in order to “count” and be meaningful. We know that human sacrifices happened because archaeologists have found human remains of sacrificial victims in the cenotes, and the Spanish recorded accounts of human sacrifice at these cenotes when they were invading the Maya world in the early 1500s.
6. What do the stelae and codices tell us?
They tell us all kinds of things, from Maya history to religion to calendar dates. The Maya hieroglyphics were also written on simple objects like ceramic plates and bowls, and can sometimes say simple things like “this bowl is for chocolate.” My favorite part of Maya writing is Maya history as written by the Maya themselves. The stelae give us a succession of kings and queens (royal lineages), sometimes unbroken for hundreds of years. Of course the history is couched in quite a bit of propaganda (Maya kings are no different than kings of any other state!). When reading Maya history as written by them, I’m reminded of the history of the British monarchy, with its surprising historical twists and turns, moments of glory and foolishness, and strange bedfellows.
7. Why did the Maya have several calendars that they used at the same time? Should we do the same? Would it benefit us?
The use of three major calendars all at the same time is a function of history (some of the calendars are older than others) and need (some calendars are more ritual or astrological focused, while others are more focused on the farming cycle or the 365 days of the year). My favorite calendar is the Long Count, which is just a count of the days since a mythical start date on August 11, 3114 BC. It is simply “Today is day 3,453,249 since creation. Tomorrow will be day 3,453,250.” Super easy! The complex part of the three Maya calendars is that they all work on a series of cycles, so you get cycles upon cycles and it gets hard to keep track.
I don’t think there is any worthwhile reason for us to change our calendar - whatever divides up 365 days into meaningful chunks for the society at hand seems to be fine.
8. What was the Maya belief about the nature of reality, and the interaction between humans and nature (for example, animals in the forest)? How might such a mindset benefit us today in our world? How might we work with our existing institutions to start incorporating some of the Maya beliefs? (I guess it has already happened to a point with the syncretism that occurred in the early years after the arrival of the Europeans.
This is a really big question! The Maya saw the natural world as more animated than we do, with living mountains and caves, and gods that inhabited the natural world and were closely tied to the natural world. If we saw our own world more like the Maya did, we would be more supportive of the environmental movement, and more proactive in saving our environment for the long term. We would see ourselves as more tied to the environment, as a living part of the greater whole. We are very divorced from this kind of thinking in our culture. We could also learn from the fact that the Maya ultimately destroyed their environment after thousands of years of living within its means - they made the exact kinds of mistakes that we are making today.
9. What are your plans for the future?
I’m really happy with my job as college professor, and I would like to keep doing it! I like teaching archaeology and giving public lectures on these topics. I am planning to write some books on archaeology and the Maya for the general public. I would like to expand my public presence by giving more public lectures and telling my story to larger audiences, and especially to influence young people to take the initial step of “meaningful travel,” like I did back in the beginning.
https://youtu.be/cCgrGwCMYVs
https://youtu.be/v3atFzqxmZo
