The Mayan Collapse - Ruins Among the Trees
In the year 1695, right at the end of the 17th century, a Spanish monk fled barefoot
and starving through the tropical forests of Central America.
His name was Andres de Avendano y Loyola, and along with his men he was dying of thirst
and hunger.
Their faces had been torn by thorns and his feet cut open by pieces of flint scattering
the swampy ground.
Avendano and his men had been part of a mission to the city of Tayasal, an island stronghold
that was the last independent holdout of a once mighty civilization, the Maya.
Avendano's mission had been to convince the Mayan king of Tayasal to convert to Christianity
and to accept the dominion of Spanish control, which had now spread to cover most of Central
and South America.
But Avendano's mission had failed.
The Mayan people of Tayasal had rejected him, and now Avendano and his men fled through
the jungle back to Spanish lands.
Their journey was hard and treacherous.
They climbed over hill after hill through thick forest cover, desperate for food and
water, their legs almost giving out from under them.
But then they came over the crest of one hill and saw something that stopped them in their
tracks.
It was an enormous pyramid of stone jutting out of the forest canopy, tangled with roots
and vines.
And although Avendano was weak from hunger and thirst, he still found strength enough
to approach the ruins.
There was a great variety of old buildings, and though they were very high and my strength
was little, I climbed up them, although with some trouble.
They were in the form of a convent, with the small cloisters and many living rooms all
roofed over, and arched like a wagon, and whitened inside with plaster.
It seemed to us that these buildings must stand near a settlement.
But we found ourselves, as we saw afterwards, very far from a settlement.
At the time that Avendano stumbled across this ruined city, the Mayan civilization was
a shadow of its former glory.
The invasion of the Spanish in the 16th century had spread diseases like smallpox that harrowed
the Mayan population, long before the Spanish conquistadors arrived with guns, steel blades
and war dogs to subjugate the remaining population.
Avendano had seen Mayan people living relatively simple lives on the northern coast of the
Yucatan peninsula, but what he encountered here was something different.
These were the ruins of a city that rivaled the ancient capitals of the old world in size,
magnificence and grandeur.
Avendano couldn't have known it then, but he had stumbled across the ruins of the great
Mayan capital of Tikal.
For seven centuries, Tikal had ruled a vast empire, conquered its enemies and raised monuments
of astonishing size and quality.
And Tikal wasn't alone.
It was just one of at least 40 Mayan cities that had flourished in this region, giving
birth to a thriving and colourful culture of arts and literature.
And then, over 500 years before any European first set foot on the American continent,
this complex society had collapsed.
The great city of Tikal was abandoned, along with every single other city in the area.
After this catastrophe, the forest swept in to reclaim the stones of Tikal.
Its imposing pyramids were left to crumble one by one into the earth.
And the story of exactly what happened is still one of humanity's greatest mysteries.
My name is Paul Cooper and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.
Every episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed
into the ashes of history.
I want to ask, what did they have in common?
What led to their fall?
What did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their
world?
In this episode, I want to look at that great romantic mystery, the fall of the classic
Maya civilization.
I want to show how this great civilization grew up among environmental conditions that
no other society has ever contended with.
I want to explore the fatal flaws that lay beneath the surface of this civilization and
describe what happened after its final and cataclysmic collapse.
Despite Avendano's encounter with the ruins of Tikal, the legacy of the Mayan civilization
didn't really capture the world's attention until the early decades of the 19th century.
This is down to the work of the American writer and explorer John Lloyd Stevens and
his artist companion Frank Catherwood.
The pair had traveled together for two weeks through the deep Guatemalan interior, following
rumors that the ruins of an ancient city lay somewhere in the jungle.
They traveled in greater comfort than Avendano, but their journey was still difficult.
They were beset by mosquitoes and the constant mud of the seasonal rains.
As they rounded a bend in the river, they came across a sight that Avendano would have
recognized.
It was the top of a towering pyramid, just visible above the trees.
We ascended by large stone steps, in some places perfect and in others thrown down by
trees which had grown up between the crevices.
We followed our guide through the thick forest among half-buried fragments to fourteen monuments,
one displaced from its pedestal by enormous roots, another locked in the close embrace
of branches of trees and almost lifted out of the earth, another hurled to the ground
and bound down by huge vines and creepers.
The only sounds that disturbed the quiet of this buried city were the noise of the monkeys.
Stevens and Catherwood would go on to explore over forty Mayan sites around the Yucatan
Peninsula.
And the books Stevens wrote, illustrated with Catherwood's detailed lithographs, created
a sensation around the world.
Until then, it was thought that only old world civilizations like Egypt or Babylon had built
cities of such magnitude and elegance.
People of the time simply refused to believe that such enormous constructions had been
built by the people who now lived a relatively simple existence in Central America and called
themselves the Maya.
Nineteenth-century experts flocked to the news, proclaiming that ancient Egyptians,
Indians, Chinese or Norse explorers must have crossed the ocean from the old world and built
these towering pyramids here in the forest.
Some even suggested that they had been built by the mythical Lost Tribes of Israel or even
the inhabitants of Atlantis.
But at the time, Stevens caused something of a stir.
He was the person who had most extensively explored these ruined places, and he claimed
that these cities were indeed the product of the Mayan people.
Working our way through the thick woods, we came upon a square stone column, about fourteen
feet high and three feet wide on each side, sculptured in bold relief.
These were works of art, proving that the people who once occupied the continent of
America were not savages.
Stevens insisted that these vast ancient cities had been built up over centuries by an advanced
society indigenous to the New World.
To him, these ruins told that story clearly enough.
But of course, they also told another story.
It was the story of a catastrophe that had few precedents in human history, the dramatic
and wholesale collapse of an entire advanced society.
In the romance of the world's history, nothing ever impressed me more forcibly than the spectacle
of this once great and lovely city, overturned, desolate and lost, discovered by accident,
overgrown with trees.
It did not even have a name to distinguish it.
Today, we do know the original Mayan names of some of these cities, and that's due to
the tireless work of archaeologists who painstakingly decoded the Maya's written language.
But before we dive into describing the collapse of the classic Maya civilization, I think
it's worth pausing for a moment over how much of a miracle it is that any of this writing
still survives.
The Maya were a literate culture.
They wrote on books made of bark paper or deer skin, using reed pens and conch shells
as inkwells.
They used a rich and complex system of hieroglyphics similar to those used in Egypt, and it's the
only true writing system thought to have ever developed in the Americas.
The Maya used their writing in a sophisticated and often playful way.
I'll post some images of these hieroglyphs on Twitter and Patreon for you to see.
But after the arrival of the Europeans, the written language of the Maya was nearly eradicated.
We can place the blame for that tragedy at the feet of one particular villain, a sadistic
and fanatical Spanish bishop called Diego de Landa.
The span of de Landa's life neatly matches up to the Spanish conquest of Central America.
In 1521, three years before he was born, the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had fallen
to the Spanish.
By the time the baby de Landa arrived screaming into the world, the Spanish had already conquered
a large part of Mexico, enveloping it into a vast colonial territory that they called
New Spain.
From there, the Spanish conquistadors or conquerors moved south into the densely forested lands
of Yucatan, the lands of the Maya.
In the lands they conquered, the Spanish colonialists ruthlessly exploited the indigenous populations.
One surviving Mayan text, the Chilam Balam, records how the Mayan people felt at the time.
It was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of strife with
guns, the beginning of strife by trampling on people with horses, the beginning of robbery
with violence, the beginning of forced deaths.
But the Mayan people, without steel or gunpowder, fought fiercely against their colonizers.
So fiercely in fact, that it took the Spanish 200 years to conquer them completely.
As the conquistadors advanced into the Yucatan, the Maya fought guerrilla campaigns in the
forests.
The fighters were protected only by padded cotton armor, armed only with stone weapons
and flint spears.
But they ambushed Spanish soldiers with great effectiveness and laid spike traps for the
Spanish horsemen.
It was into this atmosphere of insurgency that Diego de Landa walked, a young man at
the age of 25 when he first set foot in the New World.
The year was 1549.
De Landa was meticulous in his work.
He kept detailed notes about everything he saw, about the Mayan culture, language and
society, and he did so in order to better identify its weaknesses.
As a missionary, he soon earned a reputation for being fearless.
He would often venture deep into the jungle, into areas that had only recently been conquered
by the Spanish, where hatred of the Europeans was bitter.
Perhaps it was this fearlessness that meant he was eventually put in charge of bringing
the Roman Catholic faith to the Maya people.
Until then, the Spanish had exempted the Mayans from the notorious cruelty of the Spanish
Inquisitions.
But the sight of Mayan people continuing to honor their old gods disgusted the new bishop,
and De Landa soon announced the beginning of an Inquisition, the first of its kind in
the New World.
De Landa was brutal in his methods.
He tortured countless Mayan people, hanging them from their necks as a form of interrogation.
In the midst of it all, he built a great bonfire in the center of one of the last Mayan cities.
He gathered together all of the ancient books he could find, centuries of accumulated knowledge,
writings on the history of the Mayan people, their study of mathematics, astronomy, poetry
and literature, and De Landa threw these into the fire and watched as they burned.
He later wrote about this event in his memoirs.
We found a great number of books containing these letters, and as they contained but superstition
and the lies of the devil, we burned them all, which dismayed and distressed these people
greatly.
Only three Maya books are known to have survived this act.
This ancient language was nearly lost completely.
But history, as always, has something of a sense of sarcasm.
De Landa's meticulous notes about the Mayan people have survived, and in those books he
wrote down something that he called the Mayan alphabet.
It's not a complete dictionary of Mayan symbols because De Landa only asked for the letters
that already existed in Spanish.
These notes were actually crucial to the later effort to decipher the ancient writings of
the Maya.
I'll put an image from De Landa's book up on Patreon for you to see.
So this is one of the first ironies that gather around the story of the classic Maya collapse,
that much of what we know about their written language is down to the very man who tried
his hardest to eradicate it.
As more of this language is gradually decoded, we've learned a huge amount from the inscriptions
that the Maya wrote on pottery, on their plastered walls, that they carved into bone and shell,
or chipped onto the walls of their temples and palaces.
These inscriptions have transformed our understanding of the society that once ruled the Yucatan
Peninsula.
We now know that Avendano and Stevens were right, that when the Spanish arrived in the
New World, the Maya were already an ancient culture.
They had built vast cities and monuments to rival any in the Old World.
And then, like so many civilizations, their golden age had passed.
Over 500 years before the first European ever set foot on the American continent, the whole
of Mayan civilization, over 40 large cities and countless people, had collapsed.
Tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of people, simply disappeared from the region
and the forests crept back to cover its ruins forever.
Before we dive into discussing exactly how this collapse occurred, I think it's worth
asking, who were the Maya?
It's important to understand that they were not one people, one empire.
They were a loose collection of city-states and kingdoms clustered around the Yucatan,
right where the continents of North and South America meet.
In modern terms, that's the area of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and the very south of Mexico.
I'll put a map on Twitter and Patreon so you can see the true extent of their territory.
The Maya spoke a family of related languages and shared a cohesive culture that built stepped
pyramids, drank hot chocolate from ornately patterned vases and made headdresses of emerald
green quetzal feathers.
They were a people of contradictions, who developed a mathematics capable of calculating
dates in the millions of years, but who never invented the wheel, the arch or the pulley.
They gave themselves colorful names that drew from the natural world around them, like Lady
Sharkfin, True Magician Jaguar, Double Bird or Smoke Serpent.
Early Spanish accounts of the Maya's appearance describe the jade plugs they wore in their
ears, how they tattooed their skin with green ink and painted themselves with red and black
paint.
The Maya believed that time was circular, that history really did repeat itself and
that the future could literally be foretold by learning about the past.
They worshipped a complex pantheon of gods, including the sun god, the god of corn and
rain, the gods of the sky and the gods of the underworld who lived in deep caves and
sinkholes.
Perhaps you already have an idea of the Maya as having an insatiable appetite for human
sacrifice.
Even films like Apocalypto might have given you that idea.
But we should be cautious about how we approach that subject.
For centuries, garish stories of human sacrifice formed the cornerstone of European propaganda
and their justification for the theft of Mayan land.
Evidence shows that ritual killings did feature in Mayan society, but it was usually limited
and small-scale.
And as we've already seen, the Europeans could be just as brutal in the application of their
faith.
The Mayans famously played ball sports.
One Spanish writer called Herrera wrote one account of this sport in the New World.
The king took much delight in seeing sports at ball, which the Spaniards have since prohibited.
The ball was made of the gum of a tree that grows in hot countries.
Though hard and heavy to the hand, they did bound and fly as well as our footballs.
And if we knew nothing else about the Maya, the colossal ruins they left behind would
be enough to prove their ingenuity.
But when you acknowledge the environmental challenges the Maya faced in the forests of
Guatemala, you really appreciate the monumental achievement that their cities represent.
The Yucatan Peninsula is a shelf of limestone of a sort called karst.
It acts a little like a sponge and over millions of years, rainwater has bored deep channels
into this soft rock and filled it with holes like Swiss cheese.
There are barely any rivers here, since any rainwater that falls is immediately drained
away into the twisting warren of deep underground caves.
Instead, the water gathers in vast underground sinkholes called cenotes.
These are pools of still water surrounded by echoey cave walls, often overgrown with
vines and creepers.
These were sacred places to the Maya, places where you could access the underworld and
its gods.
But they were also crucial to this civilization's survival.
The Maya were constantly battling to preserve water and to do this, they dug vast tanks,
plastering the bottoms of the cenotes to make them watertight.
They built complex systems of water control that allowed water to flow from higher tanks
to lower and to irrigate their raised fields.
In all of this, the Maya couldn't rely on four-legged help.
In Europe and Asia, domestication of animals like the horse and ox was one great driver
of civilizational progress.
Even in the Andes, in Peru, Chile or Bolivia, the presence of the llama allowed peoples
like the Inca to carry heavy weights across long distances.
But in the Maya lowlands, the only large animal was the shy and reclusive tapir, which they
sometimes hunted for food.
All transportation was done simply on human backs, using the simple technology of a strap
that tied around the forehead.
Another challenge was the inefficiency of Maya farming.
Their staple foods like corn were very low in protein and the harsh landscape meant that
agriculture was a constant battle against the forces of tropical nature.
The soil in Yucatan is very thin, sometimes only a few centimeters deep before you reach
stone.
It easily loses its fertility or becomes washed away.
The Maya largely relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, hacking and burning the forest
away in patches in order to grow a few rounds of crops, before letting the tropical forests
rush back in to reclaim the land.
The storage of food was a problem too.
In a humid environment of Guatemala and southern Mexico, it was difficult to store corn for
more than a year before it started going moldy.
One final point before we move on is that for most of their history, the Maya were essentially
a stone-age society.
Copper working began in Mexico in the 7th century, long before contact with Europeans,
but it took several centuries to work its way down to the Mayan lowlands.
The Maya never worked iron or mixed copper with tin to make bronze.
To cut and carve stone, they used blades made of obsidian, a kind of volcanic glass that
forms an incredibly sharp cutting edge when properly worked.
So every one of the great pyramids and temples you can see today was not only constructed
without animals and pulleys, but also carved in all their ornate intricacy without metal
tools.
But despite these challenges, the Maya flourished, the only great civilization to ever arise
in the midst of such harsh conditions.
The earliest signs of the Mayan civilization began around the year 1800 BC, nearly 2000
years before the beginning of the Christian calendar.
From this time, Mayan people domesticated maize, beans, squashes and chili peppers,
as well as the cacao bean, which they used to make a rich drinking chocolate.
The inscription on one ornately patterned vase from the city of Masham, called the vase
of the seven gods, shows that chocolate was often drunk in celebration, and new groves
of trees were planted on special occasions like the birth of a young prince.
This drinking vessel for the fruit of a new grove of cacao trees.
It belongs to the smooth-skinned sprout, the young boy who listened, sun-eyed Lord Jaguar,
the owner of the trees.
The Mayan world was essentially divided into two zones, the highlands and the lowlands.
The highlands were of crucial importance to the Maya, a spine of rocky mountains covered
with pine forest that follow the line of the continental shelf.
In those cool hills, the Maya found obsidian and the greenish precious stone jade, which
they carved into marvellous trinkets.
The highlands were also home to the quetzal, a bird with bright emerald green feathers
that the Maya used to create headdresses for their kings and priests.
If you stood in these highlands with your back to the Pacific Ocean, you would see ahead
of you a flat, undulating plain stretching out into the distance.
Four hundred kilometres away, the peninsula ends at the curving Atlantic coast, broken
with bays and lagoons.
It's within this basin that all the great wealth of Mayan cities rose.
This was a network of societies that looked a little like the classical Greece of Sparta
and Athens, or Renaissance Italy.
Think of the Pope ruling in Rome, the Medici family in Florence, the Doge in Venice, different
centres of power all sharing a common culture but in constant opposition for power.
In Mayan conceptions of the universe, the gods created three worlds previous to the
current one, each of them resulting in failure.
They believed themselves to live in the fourth world.
It's true that when the Mayan cities of the classic period began to grow and thrive, there
had already been a number of rises and falls.
But through the third and fourth centuries, Mayan cities began to grow with astounding
speed.
For much of the Mayan classic period, the largest and most powerful of these was the
city of Tikal.
When the fugitive monk Avondáño stumbled across the ruins of Tikal, it's clear why
they had such an effect on him.
That's because Tikal is home to some of the most spectacular ruins in the Mayan world.
Its limestone temples tower up to a height of 64 meters or 22 stories, almost as high
as the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge.
These temples were topped with enormous masks of the Jaguar sun god and originally painted
a brilliant deep red.
When making the first Star Wars film, George Lucas used Tikal as the setting of his rebel
base on a moon of the planet Yavin.
It's not hard to see why.
Today, the ruins do look otherworldly, the tips of those ancient pyramids just peeking
above the trees.
But Tikal is also one of the Mayan cities whose history we understand the best.
A long list of its rulers has been discovered and excavations have uncovered the tombs of
those same rulers.
Archaeologists now believe that this city may have held as many as 90,000 people during
its height.
But to understand the history of Tikal, we also have to introduce another huge player
in this region.
This player stands as a shadowy force behind much of what occurred in the Mayan world.
This was the city of Teotihuacan.
Teotihuacan lay over 1500 kilometers away in the Valley of Mexico.
It was a vast city of stone pyramids.
Today, much of it buried beneath the urban sprawl of Mexico City.
But in its time, it was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas.
Teotihuacan commanded a powerful military and controlled all the crucial trade networks
across the continent.
It had a monopoly over a particular kind of green obsidian that was of exceptional hardness
and quality.
In this era, it wouldn't be too far off to think of Teotihuacan as something like an
early version of the United States.
It was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, with a population estimated at 125,000 or more,
which would have made it at least the sixth largest city in the world at the time.
Like the United States in modern times, it was also fond of intervening in the politics
of its southern neighbors.
In the early centuries of the first millennium, Teotihuacan began aggressively expanding
its sphere of influence, extending trade routes far south into the Mayan lands, establishing
embassies in faraway cities, and spreading that shining green obsidian far into the forests
of Central America.
The Mayan city of Tikal came under the influence of Teotihuacan in the 4th century AD.
It's not clear if this was a military conquest, a palace coup, or a diplomatic intervention,
but we do know that a young ruler, Yash-nun-ahin, which means curl-nose, rose to power in Tikal
with the apparent help of this distant superpower.
One stone carving in Tikal shows King Curl-nose being crowned, while Mexican soldiers look
on carrying distinctive dart throwers.
In the burial tomb of Curl-nose, artifacts have also been found carved out of that tell-tale
green obsidian that everywhere gives away the influence of Teotihuacan.
One remarkable image, carved on a pot from Tikal, shows just how this cultural exchange
happened.
On the left of the scene, we see a stepped pyramid in the Mayan style.
This is Tikal, and on the right is a temple of Mexican design, with a great fanned crown
at its top.
This is Teotihuacan.
From this Mexican temple, four foreign soldiers come, carrying those dart throwers, along
with vases of boxes full of gifts.
In the center, they build a temple together that has stepped sides like the Mayan temples,
but a fanned crown on top like the Mexican.
It's a clear image of collaboration and partnership, and might even show the construction of an
embassy in Tikal.
Is this harmonious image an accurate portrayal of the situation?
We don't know, but under the influence of Teotihuacan, Tikal grew in wealth and power
until it was the most powerful city in the Mayan world.
Its empire at its greatest height contained a population of half a million people.
One useful hieroglyphic in the Mayan system is one called Yahau.
It means his lord, and when we see it in the inscriptions of one city talking about another,
we know that this city has been subjugated.
The other city has become their ahau, or lord.
Around the time that Tikal started its partnership with Teotihuacan, its neighbors began using
this phrase to describe its kings.
Tikal's soldiers fanned out across the Mayan world, armed with weapons made of that green
Teotihuacan obsidian, and city after city fell under its banner.
It was the beginnings of a true empire, and for a while it looked like Tikal's plan to
rule the Mayan lowlands might have worked.
That is, were it not for one very important thing in their way.
It was their great rival, the city of Calakmul.
Calakmul was a city with a very distinctive character.
Like Tikal, it too was building an empire.
In every dominion it conquered, Calakmul's people marked the site with its emblem, a
snakehead, which in the Mayan script makes the sound khan.
Its lords called themselves Kul Khan Ahau, or the Lords of the Snake, and I'll put an
image of this glyph on Patreon for you to see.
Another interesting feature of Calakmul is the emphasis it put on the female line of
its royalty.
Whereas the inscriptions in Tikal only speak about kings, those in Calakmul mention the
joint rule of a king and a queen.
Calakmul was proud of its roots, which it traced back to the ancient Maya of the pre-classic
period.
So while Tikal had a kind of international outlook, allied with the distant superpower
Teotihuacan, it seems the people of Calakmul saw themselves as the true inheritors of the
Maya legacy.
And Calakmul was a powerful city too.
It was surrounded by a complex system of canals and its many buildings are tightly packed,
clustered like the skyscrapers of a modern city.
But in the early centuries of the classic period, Calakmul was outmatched by the might
of Tikal, swollen as it was by the riches of Teotihuacan.
The rulers of Calakmul, the so-called Lords of the Snake, must have calculated that the
only way to challenge the supremacy of Tikal was to outplay them in the game of strategy.
Calakmul set out on a centuries-long game of chess with their rivals.
They slowly gathered the small states that surrounded Tikal into a network of allies,
threatening Tikal's trade routes and supply lines, slowly suffocating it.
It was a kind of cold war and for this reason, the snake stones carved by Calakmul are by
far the most numerous of all the Mayan city-states.
They appear right across the Mayan world and often in places that for Tikal would have
proven pretty inconvenient, threatening their trade routes and menacing their farmland.
The strategy, although slow, was a success.
From the second half of the 6th century AD, Calakmul gained the upper hand.
The distant power of Teotihuacan fell under mysterious circumstances and now Tikal was
left all alone, surrounded by its enemies.
But it wasn't until the rule of one particular king, a man known as Double Bird, that Tikal's
fortunes would really take a turn for the worse.
Double Bird seems to have been particularly bad at the game of politics and we know this
because his actions would lose the city of Tikal, one of its key allies in the region,
a city known today as Caracol.
Caracol was once one of Tikal's underlings.
As part of its service, it would have paid tribute in the form of food and valuables,
it would have sent soldiers to fight for Tikal in its wars and workers to build its temples.
At least in the year 553, that's what Caracol still was, but it's possible that the forked
tongue of Calakmul was already beginning to erode this alliance.
In any case, the king of Tikal, Double Bird, wouldn't help matters.
I have to stop here for a moment and point out that we understand very little about warfare
in the Mayan world.
The Maya often undertook low-level skirmishes and their wars seem to have served a largely
ceremonial and symbolic function.
These wars, known as axe wars, would have involved perhaps only a few hundred fighters
and their main purpose seems to have been to capture prisoners for sacrifice to the
gods, to decapitate an important noble, hence axe war, and presumably to bring back plunder
and glory to the capital.
The Mayans in general were not interested in wars of conquest but just occasionally,
a different kind of war was undertaken which had a more brutal and all-encompassing nature.
These wars are referred to in the Mayan inscriptions as star wars.
As far as I can tell, the previous connection to George Lucas is a coincidence.
The name star war comes from a specific type of glyph used in the Maya script which depicts
a star showering the earth with fire.
This war seems to have been something quite rare in the Maya world, a war of total conquest
and destruction.
The inscriptions, as always, are hard to decipher but it seems that in the year 556, the king
of Tikal, Double Bird, embarked on an axe war, a low-level attack against his former
ally, the city of Caracol.
His soldiers would have swept into its territory wearing padded cotton armor, wielding flint
spears and clubs studded with blades of green obsidian.
They would have burned villages inside Caracol's sphere of influence, robbed anything they
could get away with and kidnapped a number of its citizens who they would later have
sacrificed at one of Tikal's temples.
Double Bird's reasons for ordering this attack are unclear.
It could have been a way of punishing some kind of insult from Caracol.
Perhaps Caracol hadn't been fulfilling the duties expected of it as an underling, or
Tikal feared that it was falling under the influence of its great enemy, Calakmul.
Whatever the reason, the rulers of Caracol didn't take this axe war in good humor.
In retaliation, they announced the beginning of a true war, a star war, against their former
masters in Tikal.
We can assume that Calakmul gave every help it could to Tikal's enemies.
It lived up to its reputation as the kingdom of the snake, putting its pieces into place
for centuries, building a network of allies that surrounded Tikal and cut off its supply
routes, wrapping itself around Tikal and choking the life from the once great city.
And now it seems that crushing grip tightened.
In the year 562, the once great city of Tikal was surrounded and besieged.
Its defenses were overwhelmed and its enemies swept into the city, smashing shrines and
temples.
Tikal's enemies uprooted the stone monuments proclaiming the achievements of its rulers,
broke them and buried their pieces.
They vandalized carvings of its kings, lopping off the heads of its sculptures, chipping
at their faces with stone tools.
And the destruction was devastating.
For the next century, Tikal's population stopped growing.
For a hundred years, no stone carvings or great public monuments were erected.
Its people were buried with only meager possessions and production of painted pottery ground to
a halt.
The fate of Tikal's king, Double Bird, is unknown.
He was probably taken back to Karakol or Calakmul and executed at the top of a pyramid.
A new king was put in place in Tikal, a man named Animal Skull.
And although we know almost nothing about him, inscriptions in his tomb show that he
was not the son of Double Bird.
For the next century, Kalakmul and not Tikal would rule the Yucatan.
But this great Mayan rivalry would go on.
Tikal would regain the upper hand and then lose it.
Conflicts between the two cities' allies would blaze on for generations.
But it wasn't war that caused the collapse of the Mayan world, at least not entirely.
To get to the root cause of this collapse, we will have to look at how Mayan society
structured itself, the fatal flaws built into its civilization, and the tensions and conflicts
that would ultimately tear it apart.
One way that we can track the progress of the Mayan collapse is by looking at the number
of inscriptions they left.
When times were good, the Maya erected new temples, palaces, and carved monuments.
So we can see that around the year 500, as the classic Mayan period just got started,
the number of dated monuments was quite low.
In the city of Copan, for instance, there were only 10 built in the year 514.
But as the years went by and Mayan society grew, the number of monuments in Copan skyrockets.
It increased to 20 per year just a century later.
By the year 750, over 40 monuments were being constructed each year.
But then the collapse set in.
After this, the number of dated monuments begins to falter.
Only 50 years later, in the year 800, only 10 monuments were built.
In the year 900, the construction of new monuments had ended.
From the year 800 onwards, all across the Mayan lowland, these inscriptions start to
die out, faltering like a failing radio signal and then crackling out into silence.
Each of these cities goes out one by one like lights blinking out in the dark.
The process began in the southwest, along the Uzamasinta River.
At the city of Bonampak, the last date of an inscription is the year 792.
The city of Yashilan fell silent in the year 808.
From there, this wave of doom washed over the whole of the Maya lowlands.
The great snake city of Calakmul went silent after the year 810 and Copan followed in 822,
Tikal held out another 70 years after the fall of its great rival, but it too finally
fell into the darkness in the year 889.
The last Maya inscription of all, in the remote city of Tonina, comes in the year 909.
And the strange thing is, none of these inscriptions give any sense that anything is wrong.
There are no prophecies of doom or accounts of terrible events.
Maya art doesn't decline either, but remains elaborate and highly skilled to the end.
So what happened?
How could this vibrant and powerful culture collapse so suddenly and so completely, leaving
not a single warning behind?
As with the fall of any civilization, the collapse of the Maya wasn't a simple event.
It's hard to point to any one cause and form a simple, one thing leads to another narrative.
All of the environmental stresses we discussed earlier meant that to succeed in such a harsh
landscape, Mayan society, like any society, had to accumulate a number of stresses and
imbalances.
Under extreme stress, these would form into fractures and with sufficient pressure, they
would splinter along the whole length of their world.
Of these stresses, surely the most pressing was the capacity of the Maya to feed their
booming population.
In order for any society to work, farmers need to produce enough food to feed themselves
and also enough to feed all the people in the society who aren't farmers.
The soldiers and carpenters and masons and of course, the king and all his nobles.
In a hyper-efficient modern economy like the United States, less than 2% of the population
work on farms.
Each farmer in America feeds over 150 people as well as themselves, freeing up a huge proportion
of the population to do other things.
But for the Maya, who used slash and burn agriculture and grew low-protein crops, each
farmer could feed perhaps five other people.
As the end of the 8th century neared, the Mayan population was booming.
In Tikal, for instance, the population in the city centre was 65,000, with a further
30,000 in the outskirts.
There were perhaps as many as 800 people living per square kilometre and they began living
in hastily constructed wooden buildings piled on top of one another.
Today, when we walk through the spacious plazas and temples of the Mayan cities, it's hard
to imagine that those empty overgrown terraces were once teeming with dense residential populations.
And as the population of the Maya lowlands exploded, the demands on its agriculture only
increased.
Another huge problem was deforestation.
Because of what we've seen of the overgrown ruins of Mayan temples, we have a romantic
idea of the Maya as a people who lived out their lives beneath the jungle canopy.
But by the end of the Classic Period, the Maya lowlands had been more or less completely
deforested.
Studies of pollen samples found in lake beds and swamps in the region show that by the
end of the 8th century, hardly any forest remained in the Yucatan Peninsula.
The Maya had cut down the trees not only in their cities, but between them as well.
So if you stood on top of one of the great temples of Tikal or Calakmul around the year
800, you wouldn't see the thick forest canopy you see today.
You would have seen houses and streets stretching out in every direction and beyond that, people
toiling in the fields.
The Maya used some trees for construction, especially the extremely hard wood sapodilla,
which is naturally resistant to termites.
But most of the trees would have been used for burning.
In order to create lime and mortar for the construction of their great temples and the
plaster that lavishly coated them, the Maya burned limestone in great pits.
This intensive industrial process would have used up a great deal of the forests and the
forest land would then have been given over to agriculture.
But you can't grow crops on a patch of soil endlessly.
The nutrients and minerals that plants depend on soon get depleted unless the soil is given
time to rest.
The Maya, just like slash and burn farmers today, must have understood that the soil
needs to be given long fallow periods between growing.
The ground needs to return to nature to regain its nutrition.
But as the demand for food from the population increased, it's easy to imagine that the farmers
were placed under increasing pressure.
With the population growing, the rulers of these cities may have ordered their farmers
to grow crops on the same soil again and again, with no fallow periods allowed.
It would have been a short-sighted strategy that courted disaster in exchange for short-term
gains.
But at this point, the Maya may have had little choice.
Another huge factor is the role of drought.
As we've discussed, one of the greatest challenges the Maya faced was the collection and storage
of water.
And the climate of the Yucatan is such that variations in annual rainfall can be enormous.
Droughts were a common fact of life, and in fact a large part of Mayan infrastructure
was designed around planning for them and mitigating their effects.
But every system has its limits.
Archaeologists who've looked at sediment in the region estimate that in the year 760,
the Yucatan Peninsula suffered its worst drought in 7,000 years.
This was caused, it seems, by something the Maya would have appreciated all too well,
the awesome power of the sun.
As the Maya knew, the sun is a fickle god.
The radiation it gives out is not constant.
It's subject to variation going through peaks and troughs.
Geographic scores taken in Greenland confirm that levels of solar radiation around this
time reached lows that hadn't been seen for millennia.
This caused a harsh, dry cold to descend over the northern hemisphere and global weather
systems shifted northwards.
All the rain that arrives on the Mayan lowlands comes from the Atlantic on the trade winds,
bands of air that move in predictable patterns across the Atlantic Ocean.
With a northward shift of these winds, a brutal drought would descend on the Maya, and this
event coincides neatly with the Great Collapse.
Archaeologist Betty Meggers has combined physics and anthropology to propose a fascinating
theory.
She asks us to think about human societies as simple thermodynamic systems.
For Meggers, our societies are like machines or organisms.
They require a strong, stable form of energy to flow through them.
She argues that this energy is what allows the system to organize itself into increasingly
complex forms.
Increased complexity allows greater collection of energy, and so the society grows.
But if the strong flow of energy is cut off to a system, that system then collapses to
a level of organization that can be supported with the energy that remains.
She puts this theory in simple terms.
If an increase in energy resources or their control results in increased cultural complexity,
a decline in energy resources should result in a decline in cultural complexity.
And if the solar radiation theory is correct, it might be worth us putting Meggers' theories
to work.
Human society was suddenly unable to maintain its complexity as a result of the sun's sudden
drop in radiation, and it imploded.
In some places, the collapse was so drastic that the entire area was abandoned.
In the Chilam Balam, a surviving Mayan text from the post-contact era, you can almost
hear the echoes of some recognition, some authentic memory of what might have happened
during this time.
When our rulers increased in numbers, then they introduced a drought.
The hooves of the animals burnt, the seashore burnt, a sea of misery.
So it was said, so it was said on high.
Then the face of the sun was eaten.
Then the face of the sun was darkened.
Then its face was extinguished.
One site where we have a detailed understanding of exactly what happened during the collapse
is the city of Copan, now in western Honduras.
Copan was a small but densely populated city, built in a narrow and steep-sided river valley
lined with pine forests.
Its people loved sports, it had the largest ball court of any classical Maya city, and
it used the symbol of the leaf-nosed bat as its emblem on inscriptions.
For much of its history, it was a close ally of Tikal and fought wars on its behalf.
Copan was a trading outpost, perfectly positioned to profit from the trade in obsidian, jade
and quetzal feathers coming down from the hills.
In the fertile alluvial silt of the valley floor, the Mayans could feed themselves on
a thriving agriculture, growing their staples of corn, beans and chili peppers.
But the soil on the hills around Copan is less fertile.
It's more acidic and prone to erosion if cultivated for long periods.
Even today, modern farmers can grow barely a third of the amount of corn in the hills
when compared to the valley floor.
From the 5th century onwards, fueled by this fertile soil and trade, the population of
Copan boomed.
By the year 800, it may have reached as much as 30,000 people, living in this small area
of only about 10 square miles.
Between the years 650 and 750, construction of royal palaces and monuments was especially
frenzied, and nobles other than the king even began erecting their own palaces.
This all points to a period of thriving economic success, but the opulent life of the nobles
had to be supported by the hard work of Copan's farmers.
As Copan grew through the 5th and 6th centuries, it expanded to fill the bottom of the river
valley.
But as the year 650 came around, space was beginning to run out.
After that, people began to build their homes on the valley sides.
It must have looked a little like a Brazilian favela today, houses climbing on top of each
other on the slopes, but these dwellings were inhabited only for about a century.
The reason for that can be seen in the layer of sediment that today covers their floors.
As the people built up the mountainsides, the ground was eroding.
Some samples taken around this time show that the pine forests that once covered these
hills had been gradually cut down.
As these trees disappeared, their roots no longer held together the fragile soils on
the valley sides and the earth would now be swept away by the rains.
This acidic, low-nutrient soil would have leached down into the valley bottom, reducing
its fertility as well.
As the hills were slowly abandoned, the burden of feeding all of Copan's people would have
fallen increasingly on the valley bottom.
The fields would now need to be worked harder than ever in order to avoid famine and this
would have reduced their fertility even further.
Farmers would have likely fought over the last remaining pockets of land.
Analysis of skeletal remains from Copan paints a chilling picture.
From the year 650 onwards, signs of disease and malnutrition among its residents increased.
Their bones became porous and weak, their teeth showed increased stress lines.
These signs of ill health showed up in the graves of rich nobles and kings too, although
of course the health of the commoners was much worse.
When times were hard in Copan, it's likely that the common people would have blamed their
rulers.
In the Chilam Balam, one of the few surviving Maya texts, we can see this connection between
the king and the natural world explicitly.
This is the first question which will be asked of the chiefs.
He shall ask them for his food.
Bring the sun, thus it is said to the chiefs.
Bring the sun, my son.
Bear it on the palm of your hand to my plate.
The Mayan system of rulership was based on an implicit promise.
You support the king's lifestyle and he will protect you.
He will keep the gods happy, the sun shining and the crops growing.
If the king was seen to break that promise, the people may have decided that he had to go.
The last we hear from a king of Copan is in the year 822 with a single inscription.
It was carved when Copan's last known king, a man called Ukit Tuk, came to the throne,
apparently during a period of violence and chaos.
He began the carving of a four-sided monument just like his predecessors, but it was never
finished.
One side shows him being crowned, the next is half-carved, but the remaining two sides
are blank.
It's as if the carver just got up one day in the middle of his job and left.
Whoever Ukit Tuk was, he couldn't muster enough support to keep the idea of royalty alive.
Three decades later, in the year 850, the royal palace of Copan was burned and history
in that city came to an end.
With the collapse of royal authority, a time of chaos followed in Copan.
But the population didn't leave all at once.
In the year 950, a full century after the burning of the royal palace, there were still
roughly 15,000 people living in the valley bottom, about half the number at its height.
But the population continued to dwindle and by the 12th century, there is no sign of any
inhabitation in the valley.
Some samples show that past this point, the forests crept back to recover the ruins of
Copan.
At Tikal, we don't have the same level of detail, but we can trace the collapse of this
great city by looking at its monuments and inscriptions.
During the mid-8th century, Tikal had once again gained the upper hand over its enemy
Calakmul.
With its return to glory, Tikal boomed to an impressive height.
As it consolidated its power over the region and gathered all its wayward allies back under
its protective umbrella, Tikal also embarked on a burst of construction the likes of which
it had never seen.
Almost all of Tikal's great temples and pyramids date from the second half of this century.
But as the year 800 rolled around, all of that would come to an end.
By the mid-800s, it's clear Tikal was coming apart.
Its vital allies were now putting up monuments of their own, proclaiming themselves kings
of smaller provinces rather than sworn servants of the great king in Tikal.
Monuments began going up in Washakhtun first, asserting their independence from Tikal, and
in Ishlu and Jimbal in the north, the same thing was happening.
Tikal's dominion was fracturing into a mass of small kingdoms.
What's worse, the kings of these kingdoms often referred to themselves on their carvings
as the Holy Lord of Tikal.
By the year 900, there was no longer a king in Tikal.
There were no longer any people either.
The city seems to have fallen into chaos and the population drifted away.
While the palaces and temples of Tikal were abandoned, there's evidence that poor people
in the city's outer districts moved in to occupy them.
It must have been a strange feeling for these Maya peasants, entering the royal palace for
the first time and finding it abandoned.
They must have walked its halls in awe and run their hands along its richly painted walls
and carved stones.
These common people seem to have squatted in the abandoned royal palaces for a century
or more after the fall of Tikal.
We can see their traces in a layer of what's called midden, scraps of broken pottery, piles
of rubbish now piling high in the corridors of the once opulent halls.
These common people also scratched graffiti into the plastered walls of these palaces,
images of temples and animals, caricatures of people they knew.
I'll post some of these images on Patreon for you to see.
But the people who stayed here seem to have continued to revere the great temples and
holy palaces of the city.
They continued to worship the stone monuments of bygone kings and even moved them at times
to more convenient places.
But it seems they weren't able to read what the inscriptions said.
Some of the monuments they moved contained writing and the people who moved them put
them back into place upside down.
This pattern was repeated around the Mayan lowlands where common people made journeys
into the abandoned cities to pay respects to the slumbering gods.
But one by one, all of the cities in the Mayan lowlands were abandoned.
It may give you a sense of the scale of the catastrophe and the depth of the damage done
to the environment, that no attempt was made at a single one of these cities to ever re-occupy
them.
The forests of the Maya lowlands grew back and it's thought that when the Spanish arrived
at the end of the 15th century, the trees they saw covering the land had only just recovered
from that time.
In all of this, a picture does begin to emerge of what happened during the classic Maya collapse.
Damage to the environment and a period of climate change combined to cause a failure
of agriculture, which led to strains that the Maya political system simply couldn't
manage.
People finally turned against their rulers and the hierarchy of society collapsed, reverting
to chaotic and simple forms of life.
Collapsing cities would have sent refugees fleeing to other cities nearby, exacerbating
their own problems and causing a chain reaction of collapse that spread like a fire across
the whole region.
Perhaps if the Maya had ever formed a unified government, some of these crises could have
been averted.
But as the large empires of Tikal and Calakmul atomized and came apart, each city became
its own small kingdom.
With agriculture failing everywhere, the only way for some of these kingdoms to survive
was to take what they needed from their neighbors.
Against a backdrop of drought and famine, a hundred bitter wars over scarce resources
began.
At the site of Piedras Negras, archaeologists have found evidence of buildings being burned
during this time and monuments vandalized.
At Yaxchilan, the central part of the city was hastily fortified with rough stone walls,
built using stones taken from the surrounding temples and palaces.
It was a last, desperate defense.
Spear and javelin heads have also been found here, littering the ground in great numbers,
pointing to a violent and bloody battle.
It seems that as the fabric of Mayan society came apart, its people turned against one
another and a violent struggle for survival turned the Mayan lowlands into a bloodbath.
Today, the crumbling pyramids and cities of the Maya are still being uncovered.
In 2015, a geographical feature in Tonina that was thought to be a hill turned out to
be a Mayan pyramid and recent measurements have shown it to be one of the largest ever
built.
At 75 meters tall, it rivals the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan to be the tallest pre-Columbian
building in the Americas.
The ongoing battle to decipher the Mayan inscriptions continues.
Today, we understand a great deal of what we read on the stones of the Mayan temples,
but so much more remains untranslated.
One thing I find particularly moving is to read the texts of the post-contact Maya, who
had been invaded and ravaged by European settlers, whose lands were taken away, whose language
and history had been erased.
In the time after the Spanish arrival, Mayan people tried to hold together some vestiges
of their great tradition.
They passed it down by word of mouth from generation to generation, sometimes in secret,
and some of these texts survive to this day.
But it's a strange kind of survival.
The complex webs of reference, mythology and symbolism no longer point to anything.
All the associations and stories they once referred to are forgotten.
All the meanings they would have once carried have been lost.
And so, these texts remain, much as the crumbling stone pyramids do.
They stand as a silent testament to the loss of a whole world that will never again return.
I want to end the episode by listening to an extract from one of those texts called
The Ritual of the Bacchabs.
It's an incantation written down by a Mayan shaman after being passed down through the
ages, from the golden age of his civilization.
Today, although we know the meaning of most of the words, we can barely understand any
of what the text means.
As you listen, I want you to think about what it must have felt like to watch this great
civilization fall, to watch its great monuments, its palaces and ball courts crumble into the
earth.
Imagine the feeling of doom that must have crept over the whole world, over the wide
plains stripped of their trees and scorched with the smoke of burning lime, over the hills
and mountains where the quetzal birds still called, and over the empty pyramids, slowly
but unstoppably crumbling into the earth.
Can-a-hao, they say, is the creator.
Can-a-hao, they say, is the darkness.
Coming from the fifth level of the sky, the head of the dragonfly, the head covering its
worms, it bit the hand of the unfettered creator.
The unfettered darkness, it licked the blood in the sweat bath, it licked the blood in
the stone hut.
Now then, throw it to the demented creator, to the demented darkness.
Thank you for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.
I've been Paul Cooper.
I'd like to thank all my voice actors for this episode.
Jake Barrett-Mills, Helena Bacon, Brian Chiobe, and Peter Preciado.
And special thanks to Kevin McCloyd for all other music played on this episode.
Do check out the rest of his work on incompetech.com.
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you thought.
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