From Section 4: Malignancy and the Maya

The Rise

3000 years ago the Yucatan region was home to a scattering of people whose descendants would one day be known as the Maya, who learned how to make the most of a wide range of terrain, climates and natural communities as they moved along in small groups that subsisted by foraging, fishing, hunting and raising crops such as maize, beans and assorted cucurbits (e.g. squashes). The proto-Mayan strategies for raising crops varied from dry land rainfed planting in the arid northern region, slash and burn cultivation in the central Peten forests, wetland cultivation of the fertile swampy areas scattered throughout the region and near-continuous cropping in the valleys of the southern uplands, where soil fertility is periodically replenished by volcanic eruptions, and in addition to learning how to adapt to various natural situations some of the early Maya also learned how to adapt situations to their own ends by constructing raised fields, terraces, rainwater cisterns and irrigation channels. These significant investments of labour and resources were made by populations that were considerably larger, denser and less mobile than those of their nomadic ancestors, yet they certainly seem to have retained the pioneering spirit. For example one group used their knowledge of rainwater harvesting and storage systems to establish a new settlement in a location that was several kilometres from the nearest permanent water source and well above the local water table, and that settlement, eventually known as Tikal, continued to thrive and grow for many centuries.

Tikal was one of many early Maya agricultural settlements that did well, so well that by the latter part of the first millennium BC several settlements had sufficient labour available to construct and maintain elaborate agricultural infrastructures containing extensive terraces, raised fields, canals and reservoirs. Some communities were also able to indulge in less productive activities like the erection of substantial public structures; for example by 100 BC the coastal settlement archaeologists call Cerros had an impressive collection of stone temples and pyramids, while Copan to the south had erected several grand regal tombs and the central Yucatan settlement now known as Mirador had become one of the largest urban centres in the world (by that time Tikal also had some modest ritual structures). Cerros and Mirador appear to have been abandoned around the beginning of the modern era, but throughout the central and southern Yucatan settlements like Tikal and Copan continued to emerge, expand and raise their own buildings, and by the year 500 the region was home to an extensive network of settlements which merited recognition as city-states. The network and its members continued to expand rapidly for several more generations, and by the year 750 - which represents the peak of what archaeologists call the classic Maya civilization - the Yucatan region contained some of the largest and most concentrated human populations in the world. For example it has been estimated that well over 50,000 people lived in the urban centres of Tikal and Caracol, and that the population density within the city-states (including urban centres and outlying support communities) averaged around 200 people per square kilometre, which is comparable to pre-industrial Europe.

It was no mean feat to build several large cities in areas that are so challenging many remain uninhabited today, and the feat becomes even more impressive when we consider that prior to the arrival of Europeans the lofty temples, massive pyramids, broad plazas, grand avenues and elegant palaces of American cities were erected without the benefit of metal tools, draught animals or the wheel (which would have been of limited use in the tropical forests). Clearly the builders of the Maya cities were resourceful, determined and capable of commanding and co-ordinating enormous amounts of human energy. They also appear to have had a fairly good idea of what they were doing, because while the details varied, their city-states were quite similar in their basic layout and organization.

On approaching the borders of such a state we would have initially encountered a vast range of fields, terraces and the dispersed habitations of a network of small communities whose inhabitants were primarily occupied with foraging, food production and the maintenance and extension of the agricultural infrastructure. As we moved through this support area we would begin to encounter districts with more closely-packed structures, many accommodating people and activities associated with industry, trade and services; indeed modern city-dwellers may have recognized the Maya equivalents to factories producing pottery and obsidian implements, warehouses and strip-malls. Like modern suburbs the Maya equivalents tended to be rather featureless and chaotic in comparison to the city centres, where the organic lines of the countryside gave way to the geometrical precision of grand plazas, avenues and complexes containing stone structures ranging from stepped platforms and multi-roomed residences to multi-storeyed buildings that included towering temples and pyramids. The central precincts of Maya cities also contained one or more ball-courts with playing areas flanked by sloping platforms, and over time most ritual centres accumulated extensive collections of monolithic stelae and sculptures bearing idealized portraits of rulers past and present, which were marked with glyphs listing names, dates of accession and notable accomplishments such as victories in battle (similar records were carved into platforms, stairways and decorative panels).

These features were not only common to Maya cities, most of them could have been recognized in cities throughout ancient Mesoamerica. The similarities were especially strong among the ceremonial centres, which conformed to a pattern that reached its ultimate expression in the great city the Aztecs named Teotihuacan (place where the gods were born) when they came upon its impressive ruins several centuries after it was abandoned. Those ruins show that Teotihuacan was a contemporary of Imperial Rome and reached a comparable size and population, although it was not nearly so crowded or chaotic as Rome. Indeed in contrast to most other cities ancient and modern, the overall plan of Teotihuacan appears to have been laid down almost from the moment when the first ritual structure was erected over an ancient cult centre - a lava tube thought to be the womb of creation. That original structure eventually became the immense Pyramid of the Sun, the anchor point of a vast ritual precinct and surrounding urban community constructed according to a geometrical plan deeply rooted in religious principles. For example the great pyramid faces a distant line of hills and is situated so that the sun's path runs directly overhead and exactly perpendicular city's main avenue on each anniversary of the date the ancient Mesoamericans calculated that our world was created (the Olmecs are generally credited with inventing that particular calendar).

While few came close to matching the grandeur and geometrical precision of Teotihuacan, the cities that appeared throughout Mesoamerica shared many of the same basic design elements and they also appear to have been laid out according to a common set of principles derived from their builders' understanding of their connections to the universe and each other. The alignment of avenues, plazas, temples and major structures with celestial events and terrestrial landmarks tells us that the city-builders sought to establish and maintain harmony between themselves, their cities and the grand order of nature. Since they considered that universal order to originate in the celestial and eternal realms, the city-builders set the sanctuaries of their gods and the tombs of their noble ancestors - who serve as intermediaries between our mortal world and those realms - above and apart from everything else to demonstrate their exalted status. Within and around the sacred precincts they built the elevated and enclosed residences of the astronomer-shamans and warrior-rulers, thus emphasizing their status relative to the masses who dwelt in humbler peripheral structures that ranged off into the chaos of the countryside.

This deconstruction of Mesoamerican city planning is of course open to argument, because in most cases not much is known about what actually went on inside the great stone centres before they became silent ruins. For instance history has lost track of the exact identities of the builders, rulers and inhabitants of Teotihuacan, who unlike Maya potentates appear to have had little interest in self-advertisement (as with many Mesoamerican cities, even the original name of Teotihuacan is unknown). We do know from monuments and written records that by the time the classic network of Maya settlements started to show a major interest in heroic architecture they were dominated by warrior rulers who constituted a distinct caste defined by ancestral, marriage and alliance ties that extended throughout the network and possibly beyond. A common theme of Maya inscriptions is that of the ruler inheriting the symbols of command from his predecessor, which emphasizes an ancestral continuity of social roles that has been common to traditional cultures throughout history. It is reasonable to assume that Maya kings and peasants alike followed in their forebears' footsteps, as did urban tradespeople, priests, astronomers and administrators, although there is also evidence of some flexibility and mobility within Maya society. Rulers and dynasties sometimes changed as a result of power struggles and wars - which contrary to the onetime description of the Maya as a peaceful people were a constant fact of life - and as the developing urban centres of the classic city-states drew inhabitants from the surrounding agricultural areas they would have taken up new occupations as they made the transition to city life.

And why did so many people make that transition? By the time the first Maya urban centres began to appear the settled populations that created them had been expanding steadily for many generations, so population expansion appears to have been one of the keys to civilization. What was required for that to happen? If we assume that for a typical agricultural community it takes a consistent amount of land and labour to support each inhabitant (i.e. the efficiency of production is constant), then in the absence of other restrictions a community's prospects for growth will be largely determined by the labour supply. For example if the total amount of labour required to support a community is more than its members can perform, they should think about moving somewhere where they can at least establish a sustainable situation. But if a settlement has more labour available than it needs to sustain itself, it has the option of investing that surplus in efforts to increase food production - for instance by extending the area under cultivation by clearing forest or building terraces - which will then allow the settled population to expand. Such a population could continue to expand as long as the labour supply exceeded its absolute requirements and the natural situation remained suitably productive, and several Maya settlements appear to have achieved this kind of sustainable growth many generations before the classic city-states emerged.

Of course by itself, population growth does not necessarily lead to significant social changes; for example a network of small and largely independent communities could simply spread across the countryside by periodically contributing surplus members to new colonies. Before settled populations can start raising pyramids and laying out plazas and cities, they have to reach a point where they have sufficient labour and other resources to invest in such activities and the kind of social organization that is required to co-ordinate such resources, and the archaeological evidence indicates that the settlements which gave rise to the classic Maya city-states required lengthy periods of sustainable growth and social elaboration before they reached such a point. And long before they took an interest in erecting grand ritual centres settlements were investing in more practical projects like canals, reservoirs, terraces and raised fields, which makes sense because those projects would not only have helped settled populations to increase food production, they also had the potential to improve reliability, efficiency and overall productivity. For example irrigation systems and reservoirs can correct for seasonal variations in rainfall by supplying water during droughts, and they can also allow crops to be grown during the dry season or on land that normally does not receive enough rain. Such improvements in productivity would have been important to the growth of Maya settlements, and it is among the fastest-growing, most efficient and best-organized settlements that we would expect to find those capable of sparing labour, resources and people for activities like the building and operation of ritual centres and cities. Highly productive settlements would also have been the most likely sources of new colonies, which could have been set up from the beginning with all the advantages that older settlements had accumulated over the centuries.

The Flowering

Once again we have wandered into the realm of conjecture, but these considerations are consistent with what is known about the rise of large settlements in the Maya region, which were preceded by a scattering of settled agricultural populations that were in a state of sustainable growth for several centuries, during which several made improvements to the surrounding landscapes, many contributed to the establishment of other settlements and a few eventually developed a modest capacity for investing and organizing labour and resources in the construction and operation of ritual and urban centres. The appearance of those centres heralded the beginning of another phase of development during which several settlements experienced a combination of rapid growth, increasing liberation of labour, people and communities from food-production activities and the expansion and elaboration of ritual and urban centres. The result was a network of city-states that extended throughout the Yucatan, which were linked to each other by cultural and ancestral ties, such as those between colonies and their parent settlements, and also by political alliances and trade, including the exchange of goods such as obsidian, jade, cacao beans, luxury items like bird feathers and foodstuffs.

There is also evidence that the Maya had contacts with other civilized peoples, most notably Teotihuacan, which had outposts throughout Mesoamerica. Some Maya cities may even have received emigrants from the great city prior to its collapse in the latter part of the sixth century owing to a disaster which left it burned and abandoned. Actually, the date of the debacle is still is still open to debate, as is the cause, although the latest best guess implicates crop failures due to climate disruptions triggered by a massive volcanic eruption on the other side of the world in the middle of the sixth century - the development of Maya centres such as Tikal also appears to have undergone a hiatus around the same time. Regardless of the exact timing, if the embryonic Maya city-states did have extensive contacts with an established civilization we have an obvious contributing factor to their rapid and apparently co-ordinated development: they did not have to invent a civilized culture, they could have adopted an existing one as soon as they were ready.

This is not to take anything away from the Maya, since most civilized cultures have been derivative to some extent. Indeed it is not clear what the Maya would have had to borrow from other traditions, given their extensive contributions to Mesoamerican civilized culture which included advanced literate, astronomical and mathematical skills. Nor is it obvious when the borrowing occurred, since the classic city-states were not the first signs of civilization to appear among the Maya; indeed recent excavations indicate that Mirador was built on a comparable scale to Teotihuacan. We cannot even be certain how civilized cultures actually spread through Mesoamerica, or what they added to the already complex social arrangements and traditions of "precivilized" peoples. Certainly anyone who had lived in or had extensive contact with a centre like Teotihuacan during its heyday would have absorbed some definite ideas about how a city should look and operate, but centuries later a visit to the abandoned ruins was sufficient to inspire the nomadic Aztecs to go off and start building their own city at Tenochtitlan.

One aspect of the classic Maya civilization that may have been a relatively late import was the concept of divine warrior kingship. The ancestral religion of the Maya was rooted in ancient traditions - many of which continue today - associated with shamanistic rituals, astronomical observations and ancestor worship, and like all agricultural people the early Maya also acknowledged divine forces associated with essentials of survival like the sun and rain. By the dawn of the classic period these traditional beliefs had become incorporated into an official religion where deceased warrior-rulers were depicted as intermediaries between the mortal world and the eternal powers of life, death and regeneration. As the classic era proceeded living rulers began to assume similar intermediary roles, and in the process they came to be seen as semi-divine (i.e. when the dead king joins the gods, his son becomes a demigod). Having attained that status some rulers took the next logical step and styled themselves as the living incarnations of deities, which as I say may have been an imported notion because the first to take that step were the kings of Tikal, who identified themselves with an especially terrible god of war they adopted from Teotihuacan.

The deification process may have followed different routes and timings in different places, but it is clear from inscriptions and other records that by the time the classic city-states were in full swing most rulers claimed divine status. This development would have had a variety of political and social consequences about which we can only guess, but some were quite tangible - indeed it could be said that divine kingship powered the ascent of the classic Maya civilization, or at least the structures that marked it as a civilization. Each ruler had the right to build a palace and temple-tomb complex, and as the main link to the eternal, divine and celestial forces he was also obliged to recognize an assortment of ritual occasions. For example in Tikal it was the custom for rulers to mark the end of each cycle of the long-count calendar (a katun, equivalent to 20 ritual years) by dedicating a twin-pyramid complex. Another significant tradition was associated with the 52-year cycles of the short-count calendar, each of which concluded with an ominous "bundle" year when it was believed that the gods decided whether or not the world would continue for another cycle. One way to convince the gods that the lease was worth renewing was to enhance their earthly homes by building new ones or enlarging and rededicating existing structures, thus many Maya pyramids and temples have been found to contain a series of smaller, earlier structures inside of them.

These traditions ensured that the ritual and noble precincts of Maya city-states had a natural tendency to expand over time, and like the leaders of other civilizations throughout history the Maya rulers were also keen to commemorate their accomplishments and demonstrate their status via ambitious construction projects; for example most of the structures discovered at Tikal and all of the grandest ones were raised in the space of a few generations by an exceptionally vigorous dynasty. The Maya god-kings also competed with each other more directly. As settlements gave rise to cities, major centres spawned new satellites, agricultural communities spread farther into the forests and increasing volumes of trade goods flowed along rivers and extensive networks of roads and trails, the mighty warrior rulers and clans of the classic Maya competed for influence through marriage alliances, power politics, trade and wars. As in most warrior societies those who ascended to dominance were strong, energetic, skilled, ambitious and lucky, and like their civilized colleagues throughout history they observed a traditional code of honour. For example battles were formally arranged according to celestial events such as the rising of Venus, and they involved modest armies of warriors and militiamen who fought away from the urban centres, most of which show few indications of being fortified until late in the classic period, the exceptions being mostly located in border areas where they may have had to deal with invaders fighting by other rules.

The details are scanty, but we know that unlike modern generals the Maya nobles were expected to play prominent roles in combat, where their skills were measured by their ability to capture their colleagues in the opposing ranks along with the gods they carried to the battlefield on palanquins. This sporting approach to warfare may seem odd, especially after our recent recap of the modern world wars, but it would have made sense to rulers who claimed their positions not just as the sons of kings but also as the descendants and incarnations of gods. Within that context it would have been appropriate for Maya warriors to settle noble disputes - like those concerning the legitimacy and supremacy of princes - through duels and trials by combat, where success would have served as a sure sign of their strength, prowess and divine favour. Such perceptions would have been reinforced by what happened after Maya battles and their ritual equivalents like the sacred ball-game: the losers and their gods were sacrificed to the gods and ancestors of the victors.

Like most warriors the Maya nobles undoubtedly had limits to their chivalry; for instance their attitude towards slave uprisings or peasant unrest were probably quite different from their response to challenges from fellow princes. And like warrior elites throughout history they were not above bending the rules occasionally. While it was common for rulers defeated in ritually-synchronized "star-wars" to be succeeded by their natural heirs, it was not unknown for ambitious warriors to usurp vacant or weakly-held thrones, and princely encounters sometimes went well beyond ritualized shows of strength. For example early in the classical period the rulers of Tikal defeated their colleagues from the nearby state of Waxaktun and established their own dynasty on the throne to create a local empire. Such developments appear to have been rare during the early days of the classic city-states, but as they became larger and more numerous - presumably with a proportionate proliferation among their warrior cadres - increasingly intense and complex competitive pressures led to some substantial changes in Maya warfare. Traditional battle-axes, spears and armour were supplemented by new and deadlier weapons like spear-throwers, bows and arrows, while the ritually-timed, limited and occasional battles and star-wars became increasingly interspersed with unannounced "axe-wars," sneak attacks, raids, sieges and scorched-earth tactics. By the height of the classic period many of the old noble pretences appear to have gone by the board as the Maya city-states became locked in a state of near-continuous and unrestrained warfare.

A notable encounter occurred in the year 761, when the city of Dos Pilas was attacked by an alliance of neighbouring cities. It is not known where the first skirmishes of the war took place, but the final battle occurred at the site of the besieged royal palace, where the last defenders - presumably including the ruler and his heirs - hastily threw up defensive walls built from stone panels torn from temples and palaces. Eventually the defenders were overwhelmed and slaughtered, after which the victors proceeded to ceremonially topple the king's throne, destroy his royal temple and smash the stelae listing his previous victories, some of which had been over themselves and their ancestors. The royal temple was the last major structure built at Dos Pilas and the toppled stelae were the last monuments carved before the city was abandoned, but its ending was significant because it signalled the beginning of a new trend. By the year 810 at least 8 more Maya cities had ceased to erect temples and carve monuments, many of which were abandoned during construction, and within a century the world-class urban centres of Copan, Tikal and Caracol had dropped out of the monumental record. The population of the central and southern Yucatan region declined substantially as the classic urban centres and their surrounding districts were abandoned, and by the year 900 most of the people remaining in the area were living in small settlements and nomadic communities much like those of their ancestors two thousand years earlier, and their descendants a millennium hence. During their wanderings those people occasionally encountered the remnants of heroic buildings looming out of the forests, but by the time the Europeans arrived the great cities of the classic Maya had been all but forgotten even by the descendants of those who built and inhabited them......