Cancun Maya Museum

If you find yourself unfortunate to be staying in Cancun you could do much worse than spend an hour or two in the Museo Maya de Cancún (Cancún Maya Museum). At the end of the long spit that contains, to me, some of the worst hotels ever created (especially when you take into account their concentration) an equally ugly modern building houses artefacts of a culture that had an understanding of aesthetics.

The items in the museum come from all parts of Mayan territory and from all periods from the earliest days until the demise of the Mayan civilisation until just after the arrival of of the Spanish invaders in the 16th century.

The images are presented here without comment and are in a relatively raw state. They are presented to give an impression of what this magnificent ‘pre-Colombian’ society produced when much of Europe fell into barbarism after the flowering of the Greek and Roman empires – not forgetting that the gains of those ‘civilisations’ were built upon slavery, war and imperial expansion.