Maya Thatched House

The Maya thatched house is the everyday dwelling of the Maya region of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador: a timber or pole frame with walls of poles, wattle or clay, under a steep roof of palm leaves or grass. In Yucatec and Mopan Maya the word for house is naj (also written na or nah); a temple pyramid could be called k'uj naj, a dwelling of deities.

Ancient houses

While stone palaces and temples survive at sites such as Tikal and Copán, most ancient Maya people lived in houses of perishable materials. A Cambridge University Press study of everyday Classic Maya life describes middle-ranking homes on small platforms with wooden walls and thatched roofs, and the simplest homes at ground level with packed dirt floors. Wall poles were lashed together with agave twine, and roofs of palm fronds were tied on with agave-fibre rope. These materials were easy to gather and quick to repair, but a stray spark in the dry season could set a roof alight.

Archaeologists at the Paynes Creek salt works in Belize, where waterlogged posts survive, describe pole-and-thatch buildings as probably the dominant form of construction in the prehistoric Maya area. The posts there came from palmetto palm, mangrove, buttonwood and hardwoods, and canoes probably carried posts and palm thatch to the site. At Joya de Cerén in El Salvador, ash from an eruption around 600 CE preserved thick thatch roofs with deep eaves over earthen walls.

The stone corbel vault of Maya temples and palaces, in which courses of stone step inward until they meet, is often said to imitate the steep profile of the thatched hut. It needed very thick walls and gave little interior width.

Construction

A study by Reed College of houses near Labná in Yucatán records frame members that are notched and lashed with local vines: main posts, crossbeams, A-frame posts and a wall plate, with two main A-frame poles carrying the ridge pole at a rounded (apsidal) end. Walls were pole-and-stick frames covered with red clay, on a lime-mortar base where the clay met the ground. Roofs were thatched with plaited palm, and one new roof had a metal ridge cover.

Thatch materials

The plants used vary by region. FLAAR, a foundation that documents Maya ethnobotany, identifies guano palm (Sabal mayarum) as the main thatch palm of the Petén around Tikal, Uaxactún and Lake Yaxhá in Guatemala; corozo or cohune palm as the usual thatch of Q'eqchi' houses; and junco (Carludovica palmata), which is not a true palm, in Alta Verapaz. Grasses and sedges are also used. In Toledo District, Belize, builders distinguish durable bay leaf palm, which grows only in well-forested areas and may take up to ten years to produce usable leaves, from the cheaper and less durable cohune palm of disturbed land.

Today

Thatched houses persist mainly in rural and Indigenous communities and in tourism buildings, alongside metal sheet and concrete. Guatemala's 2018 census counted 1.7% of homes with straw, palm or similar roofs, against 68.1% with metal sheet.