DEMYSTIFYING THE MAYA

By David Malakoff

For years archaeologists believed that the Maya, one of the most accomplished ancient cultures, mysteriously collapsed during a short period of time. Recent research indicates that the causes of their downfall are more complex than mysterious, that they occurred over an extended period of time, and that some cities never collapsed.

Everyone loves a mystery. And perhaps no mystery has so delighted archaeology buffs for the last 150 years as the question of what happened to the ancient Maya, who centuries ago built majestic monuments—and then abandoned them, seemingly overnight, leaving behind ruins and indecipherable inscriptions.

Researchers have attributed the Maya collapse to various factors ranging from war and political instability to drought and disease. Mystery lovers looking for a neat, satisfying solution to the collapse will be disappointed, however. Over the last few decades, archaeologists have amassed evidence ranging from pottery fragments and stone structures to ancient pollen grains and translated glyphs that undermines many once cherished notions about the lost civilization. The findings have shattered the presumption of the Maya as a peace-loving people living in a united empire that was pushed into the abyss by a single catastrophe.

In its place, scholars are painting a new portrait of a complex, fragmented culture rife with warring city-states. Between A.D.750 and 950, many of these communities succumbed to a combination of problems, rather than a single calamity. But some flourished even as nearby settlements withered. Others never really “collapsed” at all, instead taking several centuries to shift to new ways of life. And the popular perception that the Maya disappeared entirely is surely news to the millions of descendents still living in the region.

“It’s turning out that the Maya aren’t necessarily mysterious, they are just very, very complicated,” says David Webster, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has spent 30 years excavating Maya sites. “But that’s not a story everyone wants to hear.”

BIRTH OF THE MAYA MYSTIQUE

To understand why this view of the Maya isn’t universally accepted, archaeologists point to the stubborn persistence of what the late Gordon Willey, an influential Mesoamerican archaeologist, once called the “Maya Mystique.” This mystique is a set of beliefs that dominated Maya studies for decades and still holds sway in some quarters.

It began when President Martin Van Buren appointed John Lloyd Stephens, an American lawyer and adventurer, to be “special ambassador to Central America” in 1839. Stephens arrived in Guatemala and promptly began “looking for the government to which he was accredited, and which he never could find,” a friend later wrote. But he did “discover something which would prove more interesting to his countrymen than any diplomatic correspondence.” It was the Maya ruin of Copán, in western Honduras. In a now-famous passage of his Incidents of Travel in Central America (1841), Stephens described what he saw: “The city was desolate... It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction.... All was mystery, impenetrable mystery.”

The book was a runaway best seller that informed several generations of Maya scholars and a public eager to hear tales of discovery in dangerous, exotic locales, Webster writes in an upcoming book of essays, Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public.

Over the next century, explorers poured into the Maya region, which stretches from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula down to Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. They began excavations and marked dozens of new sites, including major settlements at Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán, Palenque in Chiapas, and Tikal in Guatemala. They found mounds of broken pottery, rows of tall, carved stone slabs and pillars known as stelae, and sacred texts.

By the 1950s, a small clique of influential archaeologists interpreting these finds arrived at a few key conclusions. Although there were dissenters, the conventional wisdom went something like this: the Maya were rather peaceful, agrarian people whose pyramids and central squares were used only for religious purposes. And the collapse, which was marked by the end of monument building sometime in the ninth century A.D., was probably caused by a peasant revolt, or perhaps an invasion.

These researchers also helped fine-tune the timeline for roughly 3,000 years of Maya history, dividing it into

This stucco mask is found on the summit of Caana,the largest and one of the latest structures at Caracol,in Belize.Caracol’s residents were carving stone monuments as late as A.D.859.

It’s now thought that the collapse of Maya cities occurred at different times in different places for different reasons,such as the amount of rainfall. The southern lowlands were the focal point of the collapse.Cities in the northern lowlands generally survived.The collapse dates given for some of the cities on this map are based on their latest dated monuments or buildings.

three periods: the Pre-Classic, which spanned from about 2000 B.C. to about A.D.250, when the first monuments begin to appear; the Classic, from A.D.250 to 950, during which the monument building reached its peak; and the Post-Classic, from 950 to 1500, when Spanish explorers arrived. Subsequently archaeologists further refined the chronology, using differences in pottery styles and other criteria to create a Terminal Classic period, from about 830 to 950, during which the collapse occurred.

NEW THINKING

By the 1960s and early 1970s, however, a new generation of researchers was dismantling the mystique and challenging the accepted chronology. Breakthroughs in deciphering Maya writings helped discredit the idea that the Maya built vacant, ceremonial centers. Archaeologists came to recognize the massive structures and squares as the richly appointed palaces and precincts of Maya kings and their courts. The glyphs, and the discovery of obvious fortifications and weapons, also helped lay to rest the myth of the peaceful Maya, showing that they sometimes engaged in combat.

Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated investigations at a number of sites suggested that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, people didn’t necessarily disappear from Maya cities after they stopped building monuments. At Caracol, in Belize, the presence of ceramic artifacts outside the urban centers suggests that “the stelae disappear at least 40 or 50 years before the people begin to abandon the city,” says archaeologist Arlen Chase of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Chase and his wife, Diane, have been working at Caracol since the 1980s.

Earlier researchers often missed these remaining populations because they focused on the urban centers where the Maya elites lived, and ignored the suburbs, archaeologists say. “For all practical purposes, the first 70 years of systematic Maya archaeology consisted of the study of temples, observatories, tombs, ballcourts, sweat baths, and other great buildings at the epicenters of major sites,” Webster writes. A newer generation of scholars, he says, has carried the work into outlying areas where the inhabitants didn’t erect massive monumental architecture.

The investigations of the outlying areas are helping researchers refine population estimates by providing insight into how much food the Maya could produce, store, and trade. These estimates, however, remain a source of controversy. But there is nearly universal agreement that, over time, Maya populations declined. In the book The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation, archaeologists Arthur Demarest, Prudence Rice, and Don Rice conclude that 2.6 million to 3.4 million people lived in the Maya lowlands in A.D.800.

The observatory at Chichén Itzá,in Mexico,is seen here.The city’s residents were still constructing public buildings after A.D.1000.

The Palace from the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque,in Mexico.The last known date on a monument or building in Palenque is A.D.799.

By A.D.1000, however, they estimate that number had dropped to just one million. “Call it a collapse or what you want, but obviously something was going on,” says Chase.

THE EMERGING COMPLEXITY OF COLLAPSE

What, exactly, that “something” was remains a source of lively debate. Archaeologists say the end of monument building marks a major shakeup in the Maya elite—probably the fall of some dominant political culture. But virtually all archaeologists now reject the idea that the entire culture rapidly collapsed at about the same time and in the same way, due to one or a few main causes. Instead, they say that each Maya site offers its own complex story of decline and abandonment, and some appear to have flourished for decades or centuries even while neighboring settlements wilted.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the inhabitants of the southern lowland settlements of Quiriga and Naranjo in Guatemala, carved their last stone monument around A.D.810. The last monuments that have been found at other southern lowland sites are of a similar time period. But monument building continued at other sites during this time. Caracol’s inhabitants, for instance, carved stone monuments as late as A.D.859, according to the Chases. In Tikal, the workers wouldn’t lay down their tools for another 10 years. Northern cities such as Uxmal actually begin to blossom then, erecting new monuments and homes for a booming population.

Similarly, signs of final abandonment vary from place to place. Some settlements show no signs of life—such as pots, fire pits, or trash heaps—after the mid- to late 800s. Others still had sizable populations when the Spanish explorers arrived. A few are even inhabited by indigenous people when archaeologists arrive in the late 19th century. It is difficult to envision a single mechanism—such as drought, invasion, or revolt—that could explain such variation, says Prudence Rice, of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. “You can’t paint the Maya lowlands of A.D.700 to A.D.1100 with a broad brush; there are too many different things going on at the same time over too big an area,” she says.

But archaeologists are recognizing some common threads in the Maya decline. One is war. “In parts of the

lowlands, the violence got so out of hand that probably nobody was secure,” says Webster. At Caracol, the Chases have found burned buildings and the body of an unburied child that hint at the city’s violent end. Such fighting may have weakened Maya elites, and made it impossible to maintain the agriculture and trade necessary to sustain large urban populations.

But what were they fighting over? Sometimes it was resources, such as stone, water, or land, argue some experts. Others, however, favor cultural or religious differences. Divine kings, for instance, may have been pitted against those who favored a different political system.

Whatever the root cause, the violence prompted some populations to flee to stronger, more secure settlements, says archaeologist John Henderson of Cornell University. In the lower Ulua River Valley, which lies about 100 miles east of Copán in Honduras, a project led by Henderson and Rosemary Joyce of the University of California, Berkeley, has found evidence of just such a shift. In the early A.D.700s, Henderson says, “you see dozens, even hundreds of small villages spread out along the valley. But come 800, they disappear. It’s pretty much the same trajectory as the Maya lowlands.”

But the valley’s population doesn’t necessarily disappear, he says. “They move on, and appear to reaggregate in fewer places.” One of those places was the town of Cerro, which sits on an elevated hilltop in the middle of the valley. Although the team has found no obvious fortifications, “it is clearly a location chosen with an eye to defense,” he says.

The tensions that produced such shifts may have had their origins far earlier, far outside the Maya realm, Henderson believes. “I see the Maya world coming apart near the end of a larger domino effect that started centuries earlier further west in Mesoamerica,” he says. The ancient city of Teotihuacán (near what is now Mexico City), for instance, “comes apart around 600. There were a lot of interconnections among these cultures, and it’s hard to see how Teotihuacán’s collapse would not have had a major ripple effect to the

east.” Monuments in Tikal and Copán, for instance, record the elevation of kings allied with Teotihuacán around A.D.400. One scenario, he says, is that the slowly spreading problems prevented leaders from avoiding downfall in times of trouble by calling in chips—such as extra food, labor, or military help—from distant allies. Another factor in the Maya collapse was almost certainly population pressure, according to Webster. Growing populations exacerbated the agricultural challenges of plant diseases and insects. Studies of pollen and silt at the bottom of the region’s lakes show the Maya also deforested some of their lands. Evidence of forest clearing is seen in the layers of lake silt laden with tree pollen that are covered by layers laden with pollen from crop plants and associated weeds. The thick layers of silt likely resulted from the massive top soil erosion that can follow deforestation and farming. “When I hear people say the Maya were masters of sustainable agriculture, I just laugh,” he says. Drought probably also played a role, especially given that Maya cities often lacked easy access to water. For years, paleoclimatologists have argued that the collapse coincided with an unusually dry period in the region. The drought scenario draws on several lines of evidence, such as computer models that suggest that the unusually cool temperatures of that time would have led to reduced rainfall, and sediment and fossil samples from the region’s lakes, which contain Stela 10 at Seibal,in Guatemala,is among the last known chemical isotopes that can monuments produced by the Maya.Its dedication date is A.D.849. be used to estimate rainfall. But it’s difficult to explain why some cities, especially those in the historically dryer north, were able to withstand the change in the weather, while others in the more humid south were not. One explanation may be how well the Maya took care of their local forests, argues archaeologist Justine Shaw of the College of the Redwoods in California. Deforestation tends to make local droughts worse, Shaw notes in a 2003 paper in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, since trees offer

Altar Q shows the portraits and names of 16 kings who ruled Copán,which is located in Honduras.This portion of the altar shows Yax-K'uk'-Mo' (center,left), the first king of the Copán dynasty,who reigned from A.D.426–437,and Yax Pasah (center,right),the last great king of Copán,who reigned from A.D.763–820.

shade, hold moisture in the ground, and even promote rainfall. So Maya regions with greater deforestation may have been the hardest hit, Shaw says, possibly starting a cultural domino effect: “Divine kings became unable to guarantee sufficient rainfall. The surplus production needed to support elites and full-time specialists was no longer available. Warfare aimed at solving the problem aggravated the situation by disrupting the agricultural cycle and displacing farmers.” Soon, the end was near.

Webster, for one, doesn’t put much stock in such drought-related theories as the primary reason for the decline, calling them “the latest fad.” And the Rices are certain they won’t be the last word on the subject. “We’re still working to integrate all of this information that often points in opposite directions,” says Prudence Rice. “People may not agree on the answers, but the whole discussion of the Classic to Post-Classic transition is becoming much more sophisticated.”

And while Don Rice says he hates connecting the word “mystery” to Maya studies, Webster says many other archaeologists still count on it to sustain the interest of both funders and the public, even as they use the money to overturn some of the most hallowed myths generated by the Maya mystery. The mystery “was present at the birth of Maya archaeology,” he writes. “And it will probably persist until the end because both archaeologists and the public prefer simple answers to complex historical processes—and the frisson of a good human catastrophe well-removed in time.”

This incensario from Caracol dates to the Terminal Classic period, approximately A.D.830–950,during which many cities collapsed. DAVIDMALAKOFF is an editor and correspondent with National Public Radio in Washington,D.C.His article “The Vestiges of Northern Slavery”appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of AmericanArchaeology.