Artfiact: Ceramic Drum

The Mayans were known to hold various ceremonies associated with ball games, death, religious ceremonies, and other festive occasions. These large ceremonies, would fill open plazas, used for ceremonial dances. The dance that took place during these festivities was the main form of amusement in which musical instruments were used to create the beat for the dance. The dance entailed performers, dressed in supernatural costumes and often called "Holmul dancers," that reenacted mythical scenes. The performances united the community as performers and audience shared the experience. Music was considered a cultural activity that was divided between classes, and prestige was often indicated through the use of music and musical instruments, one of which was the drum.

Musicians would beat the drum which would produce sound by the vibration of a tightly fixed membrane. This vibrating membrane enabled the projection of sound that could sometimes be heard over a distance of two leagues.

Death served as a very important time for uniting the community. When such ceremonial gatherings came to an end, the musicians would throw their instruments into the burial chambers, often royal tombs, as a means to help the dead find their way into the spiritual world. In this action, the use of the drum changed from being an instrument used by the living, creating sound for gathering in an open space, to being a symbolic object used to help find the right path for the dead within the subterranean word. The closed space of the burial chamber can be thought of as the threshold for the drum in which its use is differentiated into one that inspires path and how an individual gathers and travels through the cycle of life and death.

The Mayan religious tradition was based on cycles and the belief that knowing the past meant knowing the cyclical influences that created the present. With this knowledge, the cyclical influences of the future could then be seen. The constant beat of the drum can be looked at as a cycle of sound that inspires the path taken from life into the spiritual realm of death through its symbolic descent into the interior of the earth, via the stairway (burial chamber) into the subterranean world. Through this distancing sound, the acoustics of the space created by the drum travel from being heard in past, open gathering space to being present in a defined closed space to then traveling into an imagined space of the spiritual in which path may vary.