About

Sakbe means white road.

The Maya built these raised roads of stone and lime plaster to join plazas, temples, and cities. Some ran for miles through the forest. This site borrows the name for a slower road, one study at a time.

Sakbe is kept by Treva, a student of the Maya. She lived a year in Antigua, Guatemala, in 2007. From there she walked Tikal into the night, climbed through Palenque, stayed at Na Bolom in San Cristóbal de las Casas, and learned about coffee, textiles, and the mezcal of Oaxaca. She has watched the giant kites rise over Santiago Sacatepéquez on the Day of the Dead and the alfombras laid for Semana Santa in Antigua.

She studies the humanities at the University of Maryland Global Campus and plans to add English as a second major. She works as a digital designer. She is not a trained archaeologist. The site is a record of what she reads, sees, and learns, and of the scholars who taught her.

Tikal is at the center of the site. Teotihuacan appears where it meets the Maya at Tikal, and nowhere else. Other places come in as the road reaches them.

How the site works

Every claim about the past cites a source, with a page number where there is one. Peer-reviewed work comes first. Where a line comes from general knowledge or a thin source, it is marked to verify. Where a suggestion is a guess, the page says so. Maya words follow the spellings of the sources they come from, and the Words page lists them.

The colors on the site come from five Maya pigments, hematite red, Maya blue, ochre, jade green, and indigo. The Tz’ihb page explains each one.

Corrections

Errors will turn up. Corrections are welcome, through the Contact page.

Sakbe is a project of Axiom Planet.