Ceiba: A Sacred Tree

From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department
of Commerce. Taken by Maxfield Weiss, NOAA NMFS IA.

Two kinds of ceiba live where the Maya lived and live: Ceiba aesculifolia and Ceiba pentandra. Of the two, the species scientifically known as Ceiba pentandra is the one that it seems archaeologists think the ancient Maya held as a sacred tree. Let's look at the tree itself and what the ancient Maya may have believed about it.

Names
This tree has a lot of names. For example, it has two other scientific names: Bombax pentandrum, Ceiba pentandra, and Eriodendron anfractuosum. And as for common names, it is also known as the white silk-cotton tree, bonga, ceibo, kapoctree, kapok tree, bongo and silk cotton tree.

Then there's the ancient Mayan name for the ceiba. It may be yáaxche' or ya'axche -- the first means "first tree," while the second one is "green/blue-green/blue tree." The common opinion, from the sources thus far found, seems to prefer the second name. (You may also see sources give the name/spelling of yaxche' or yaxte' as the ancient Mayan name for this tree.)

One way to draw what's thought to be the
ancient Maya name for ceiba. 

Botany
Ceibas rise around 65.6 and 131 feet to 164 feet tall -- some are even 200 feet tall! The tree has gray bark and has buttresses -- wedges around its base that help the tree keep from falling over. Its leaves are made up of stalks off of which smaller leaves grow -- the tree looses these leaves every year, starting in January and going until March.

Though not every year, when its loosing its leaves, the ceiba grows night-blooming flowers that are pollinated by creatures including bats and -- in the morning -- birds like hummingbirds. The flowers' color range includes beige, an extremely pale pink and white.

Another notable feature is inside the seed pods. There is a type of soft fiber in them -- which is called kapok silk -- in which are seeds. Kapok silk is like cotton, though not easy to spin, because it doesn't naturally stick to itself as well as cotton. For ceiba trees, the point of the silk is to have something that floats the seeds away from itself, so that ceibas may grow in other places. But for people -- possibly including the ancient Maya -- the silk is useful in other ways, such as for batting in cushions. (A little more on this substance in the next section.)

These trees also have a surprising feature -- spines shaped like cones can grow right out of their trunks. It's believed that these spines keep away animals that eat plants. More often, you'll find it easier to see these spines for yourself by looking for ceibas that aren't very old.

Possible Ancient Maya Uses
There are different ideas that talk about possible uses the ancient Maya may have had for  the ceiba. One idea is that the ancient Maya may have used ceiba wood to make canoes.

Other ideas, focus on kapok silk. One idea wonders if the Maya used the fiber to stuff cushions for thrones. Another wonders if they spun it along with cotton to help compensate its inability to stick to itself like other fibers used to make cloth.

Ancient Maya Cultural Connection
The ancient Maya thought this tree was the World Tree. They believed that there was a ceiba that touched all three of the worlds that they thought existed: the upper world, the world of humans and the underworld, where the tree's roots were. The ancient Maya also thought the ceiba kept these worlds as the separate levels. (However, it must be noted that there are images of the World Tree as a different being, such as a crocodile.)

Ceiba Trees in Art/Writing
Some examples of ancient Maya representations of the ceiba tree can be found at the site of Palenque, where they liked to draw it kind of like a cross. (Why a cross? An explanation is that when ceiba trees aren't very old, that's what they kind of look like.) You may have seen one of these already: it's part of the coffin of the famous ruler, Pakal. Very noticeable among the coffin top's carvings is an image thought to be a ceiba.

If you look through the Maya codices, you can find pictures and sentences involving the ceiba. Using the search engine in the site The Maya Hieroglyphic Codices, it looks like drawings of as well as references to ceibas can be found in the Dresden Codex and the Madrid Codex. (The Paris Codex has, at least now, only references to ceibas, and the Grolier Codex didn't show up in the results.)

And there are even more artifacts. Some ancient Maya incense burners or incensarios as well as funerary urns may also be connected to the ceiba. Why? Because the artists who made them used spikes as part of the design, which may have been meant to look like ceiba spines.

References:
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service: Plants Databas: Plants Profile: Ceiba pentandra (kapoctree)

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute: Bocas del Toro: Species Database: Ceiba pentandra

University of California, Santa Barbara: Institute of Social, Behavioral and Economic Research (ISBER): MesoAmerican Research Center: Trails of El Pilar: Plants of El Pilar: Ceiba

Integrated Taxonomic Information System: ITIS Report Page: Ceiba pentandra

USDA Forest Products Labratory: Center for Wood Anatomy Research: Technology Transfer Fact Sheet: Ceiba pentandra

"Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities"; Karen Bassie-Sweet; 2008

"Animals & Plants of the Ancient Maya: A Guide"; Victoria Schlesinger; 2001

"Space and Sculpture in the Classic Maya City"; Alexander Parmington; 2011

Google Books: "The Origins of Maya States"; Loa P. Traxler, Robert J. Sharer (editors); 2016

The Maya Hieroglyphic Codices: Search Results  (for ceiba)

"Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies"; Rosemary A. Joyce, Susan D. Gillespie (editors); 2000

"Ancient Maya Commerce: Multidisciplinary Research at Chunchucmil"; Scott R. Hutson (editor); 2017

Florida State University: DigiNole: "Highland Maya Effigy Funerary Urns: A Study of Genre, Iconography, and Function"; Kathleen Garrett McCampbell; 2010

University ofAlbany SUNY: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Occasional Publication No. 17"Postclassic Pottery Censers in the Lowlands: A Study of Form, Function and Symbolism"; Bradley W. Russell; 2017

Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing No. 54: "The Idol-Makers in the Madrid Codex"; Mary A. Ciaramella; 2004

FAMSI: Maya Codices: The Dresden Codex (pages 60 to 74)

Clothing of the Ancient Maya

Author's note: This post was adjusted on December 12, 2017.

This is a whistle that was made around the 600s to 800s AD.
It's made of ceramic, and shows a woman -- the
blue paint was put on after the maker baked the whistle. From LACMA.

There is not a lot known about how the Maya dressed like in ancient times, and what is known mostly is information on people understood to have been elites. This is because of the environment in which the ancient Maya lived. That is, like the codices, a lot of the clothing has rotted away because of humidity. (Archaeologists have found pieces of cloth sometimes, such as in the Sacred Cenote.)

Instead archaeologists try to interpret the fashion sense of the Maya civilization via various other mediums. Examples of these mediums include things like pottery that has been painted, carvings like lintels and monuments, ceramic figurines, the four known codices, and murals. Archaeologists also have used records that people made in the 1500s.

General Concept

This is a figurine of a woman made
between the 600s AD and 900s AD.
There are several places it made have been
created, one of which is the Mexican State
of Campeche. From LACMA.

As it is currently understood, the ancient Maya had different ideas about clothes than people do today. For one thing, they never made clothes so they fit close to the body of their own accord. Clothes tended to be held in place by being knotted or were held in place by belts made of cloth. And for another, they could be quite different from Western standards of modesty.

Materials

Despite the decay problem, it looks like the ancient Maya used several kinds of plants to spin into thread and make cloth. Two plants they used were the cotton plant and the maguey. (And they also would make bark cloth. It is possible that bark cloth was a material for ritual clothing.) Using the backstrap loom, the ancient Maya made different kinds of cloth like twill, plain, and gauze.

Beyond the materials themselves, the ancient Maya would dye their clothing, via plant and animal sourced dyes.  Examples of colors available to the ancient Maya dyers include green, purple, black, blue and various sources of red. Two other ways the ancient Maya decorated their cloth was by embroidering it and by brocading it, which is when the design is thicker than the rest of the cloth -- making it stick up. (See a bit more on ancient Maya cloth in this post.)

Head Wear 

Titled "Modeled Head of a
Nobleman," this stucco artifact
may have come from the northern
lowlands and was made 600 AD to 900
AD. From LACMA.

Women tended to wear either a complicated hairstyle that involved intertwining the hair with cloth, or wore turban-like headdresses. However, women's head wear fashions seem to have been less diverse than men's head wear fashions.

Men also wore different fashions of turban-like headdresses. However, they also seem to have worn other kinds of headdresses, that were commonly complicated structures made using various materials. Some of the materials were feathers (along with gods, the "tail" feathers of the resplendent quetzal were one kind of feather it is known that rulers enjoyed) gems, and animal hides.

On a related note, murals found at Calakmul show women wearing decorated sombreros, while men wear headscarves -- except for one man whose head wear looked like a bowler hat.

Clothing for Men

A male figurine made in Mexico,
in the 700s AD to 800s AD. From the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Menswear included a loincloth that was, according to The Ancient Maya, ..."five fingers wide" -- though Your Travel Guide to Ancient Mayan Civilization says was between eight and ten feet long and ten inches wide. This loincloth was wrapped around the waist repeatedly before being passed between the legs. For the upper classes, they were commonly decorated with featherwork (a popular feather for rulers' clothes were the resplendent quetzal's "tail" feathers) on the ends. Lower class men wore un-decorated loincloths.

Seemingly not as common as the loincloth, some depictions of men show them also wearing a pati. A pati is a big, square-shaped piece of cloth that is -- like the loincloth -- decorated in relation to the class of the wearer. The pati was tied around the wearer's shoulders. Not just for day-wear -- except for very fancy ones -- it was also used to sleep in.

Clothing for Women

Women would wear a skirt and/or a sleeveless, poncho-like tunic (commonly known today as the huipil) or a dress. Maya skirts were either tied with belt or was knotted in place with the huipil worn over the skirt. Elite women's skirts, as with other clothing, were more decorated than skirts of the lower classes -- they would have decorative fringes and knots.

This figurine is thought
to have the same dating and source
as the image to the left. From the
Yale University ArtGallery.

This figurine was made in Mexico between
the 500s AD to the 800s AD. From the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Not everyone wore the huipil with their skirt, when they did wear more than a skirt. According to bishop Diego de Landa, women in Campeche, Balacar as well as along the coast wore a skirt as well as a folded piece of cloth tied around their torsos, under their armpits. He called the folded cloth a manta -- but The Ancient Maya: Fifth Edition calls a pati.

As to dresses, there seem to be different kinds of dresses worn by ancient Maya women. One kind of Maya dress is described in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing as a full length version of the tunic that was sewn up the sides. A second kind of dress seems to have been made of a large piece of cloth wrapped around the body.

Footwear

The ancient Maya wore sandals. Ancient Maya sandal straps had two thongs. One thong went in the space between the third and fourth toe. The other went in the space between the second and first toe. 

As with other aspects of ancient Maya society, it seems how fancy your sandals' design was depended on how high you ranked. Men who were not upper class wore deer-hide sandals that were untanned, with hemp cord for straps. For elites however, it seems they had much more complicated sandals.

References:
Google Books: "Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya"; Walter R.T. Witschey; 2016

Hampshire College: “Birds and Environmental Change in the Maya Area”; Peter Stuart; May 2015

(Automatically downloads  to your computer)

Google Books:" The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing Through World History: 1501-1800", Volume 2"; Greenwood Publishing Group; 2008

 Google Books: "The Ancient Maya"; Robert J. Sharer, Loa P. Traxler; 2006

Google Books: "Handbook To Life In The Ancient Maya World"; Lynn V. Foster; 2005

Google Books: "Ancient Maya Commoners"; Jon C. Lohse, Fred Valdez, Jr; 2004

Google Books: "Your Travel Guide to Ancient Mayan Civilization"; Nancy Daya; 2001

Google Books: "The Ancient Maya: Fifth Edition"; Sylvanus Griswold Morley, Robert J. Sharer; 1994

LACMA: Whistle in the Form of a Woman

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Standing Male Figure

LACMA: Mold-Made Figurine of a Standing Woman

LACMA: Modeled Head of a Nobleman

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Seated Female Figure

Mesoweb: Maya Archaeology Reports: "The Murals of Chiik Nahb Structure Sub 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico"; Ramón Carrasco Vargas María Cordeiro Baqueiro; 2012

Yale University Art Gallery: Seated Female Figure

The Free Dictionary: Brocade

Image Credits:

LACMA: Whistle in the Form of a Woman

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Standing Male Figure

LACMA: Mold-Made Figurine of a Standing Woman

LACMA: Modeled Head of a Nobleman

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Seated Female Figure

Yale University Art Gallery: Seated Female Figure