Tulum Mayan city ruins

I was not a good scholar and didn't catch what the meaning of the smaller building with the two faces on the front corners was.   One is eyes open and one is eyes shut and something about the struggle between life and death.    And then the big human sacrifice area.  I'm garbling with the Aztecs and did not catch the spiel about this, just that is was the sacrifice temple.   

I got mainly short video of the tower performers.  We saw this before going into the ruins themselves with no explanations while it was happening and it seemed like just a tourist gimmick.   The one guide explained later inside the ruins that each of the four guys spinning down on the ropes that are uncoiling does 13 revolutions.  13 and 52 are big deals in the Mayan calendar and belief system.   They believed a cycle of life was 52 years and they had a 13 day ritual at the end of each cycle which is the "no leap years needed in their calendar" 

The one guide also had some interesting bit on when the Spanish came.   Several years prior to their main landng a ship had wrecked and one of the survivors had been training to be a priest.  He was kept as a slave and knew the Mayan language.   The Mayans also had an Aztec princess who had picked up the Mayan language.  When the Spaniards went into Mexico they quickly ran into people who only spoke the Aztec dialect and it took the priest and the princess to translate to the locals, who were in resentment of the Aztecs and the high "taxes" extracted from them so were ready to rebel and were very wowed by the gunpowder weapons.  Thus the Mayans believed fate had ordained that the Spaniards would conquer since the necessary pair of translators were in place to help them out.