3. 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 undressed Avendano Iloilo 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 Aventine yo and his man had been part of a mission to the city of Tyre saw an island stronghold that was the last independent holdout of a once mighty civilization the Maya Ivan Tanya's mission had been to convince the Mayan king of Tyre so 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 Aventine yos mission had failed the Mayan people of Tyre SEL had rejected him and now Ovenden Yanis man 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 roofs 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 with some trouble there in the form of a convent with the small cloisters and many living rooms all roofed over and arched like a wagon whitened inside with plaster seemed to us that these buildings must stand in her 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 sixteenth 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 razed monuments of astonishing size and quality an Tikal wasn't alone it was just one of at least 40 main cities that had flourished in this region giving birth to a thriving and colorful culture of arts and literature and then over five hundred 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 [Music] you [Music] my name's 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 and 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 [Music] despite Evan Daniels 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 Stephens 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 but as they rounded a bend in the river they came across a site 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 another's thrown down by trees which had grown up between the crevices we followed our guide through the thick forest among half-buried fragments 214 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 40 maeín sites around the Yucatan Peninsula and the books Stevens wrote illustrated with katha woods 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 have been built by the people who now lived a relatively simple existence in Central America and called themselves the Maya 19th 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 14 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 have 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 Mayas 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 ink wells 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 and I'll post some images of these hieroglyphs on Twitter and patreon view to see but after the arrival of the Europeans the written language of the Maya was nearly eradicated and 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 delando'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 and 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 and from there the Spanish conquistadors or conquerors moved south into the densely forested lands of Yucatan the lands of the Maya and 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 Jews began of strife of guns the beginning of strife bikes rambling on people with horses to begin of robbery with violence to begin 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 their 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 and 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 and perhaps it was this fearlessness the men 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 Inquisition 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 delando was brutal in his methods he tortured countless Mayan people hanging them from their necks as a form of interrogation and 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 the 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 but these notes were actually crucial to the later effort to decipher the ancient writings of the Maya and I'll put an image from des landes book up on patreon for you to see [Music] 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 and 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 but 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 hundreds of thousands perhaps even millions of people simply disappeared from the region and the forest 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 and is 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 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 quetzel 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 to arch or the pulley they gave themselves colorful names that drew from the natural world around them like lady shark fin true magician Jaguar double bird or smoke serpent early Spanish accounts of the Mayas appearance described 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 and perhaps you already have an idea of the Maya was having an insatiable appetite for human sacrifice modern 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 mined 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 a Terra wrote one account of this sport in the new world the Kings have much delight in seeing sport 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 hands they do band and fly as well as are 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 cast it acts a little like a sponge and over millions of years rainwater has bought 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 civilizations 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 and 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 and 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 centimetres deep before you reach Stone it easily loses its fertility or becomes washed away the Maya largely relied on slash-and-burn agriculture packing 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 and the storage of food was a problem - in the humid environment of Guatemala and southern Mexico it was difficult to store corn for more than a year before it started going moldy and 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 seventh 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 [Music] the earliest signs of the Mayan civilization began around the Year 1800 BC nearly 2,000 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 vars from the city of mahjongg called the VARs 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 son 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 forests the 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 and the highlands were also home to the quetzel a bird with bright emerald green feathers that the Maya used to create headdresses for their kings and priests and if you've 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 400 kilometers away the peninsula ends of the curving Atlantic coast broken with Bay's and lagoons and 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 centers of power all sharing a common culture but in constant opposition for power in my own conceptions of the universe the gods created three world previous to the current one each of them resulting in failure they believed themselves to live in the fourth world and 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 and for much of the Mayan classic period the largest and most powerful of ease was the city of Tikal when the fugitive monk avendaño 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 it's lime stone 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 to call as the setting of his rebel base on a moon of the planet Yavin and 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 and this player stands as a shadowy force behind much of what occurred in the Mayan world this was the city of tio tio Aachen toti walk on 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 and 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 millenium Teotihuacan began aggressively expanding its sphere of influence extending trade routes far south into the Maiar 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 Josh knew naheen which means curl nose rose to power in Tikal with the apparent help of this distant superpower one stone carving in Tikal shows King Cole nose being crowned while Mexican soldiers look on carrying distinctive dart throwers in the burial tomb of Cole knows artifacts have also been found carved out of that telltale 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 and from this Mexican temple for foreign soldiers come carrying those dart throwers along with VARs of boxes full of gifts in the center they build a temple together that has stepped sides like the Mayan temples but a fand 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 and 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 Yahoo 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 there Ajo or Lord around the time that Tikal started its partnership with Teotihuacan its neighbors began using this phrase to describe its kings Tikal 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 two cowls plan to rule the Mayan lowlands might have worked that is were not for one very important thing in their way that's their great rival the city of Calakmul Kollek mall was a city with a very distinctive character lucky cow it too was building an empire and in every Dominion it conquered khalaq moles people marked the site with its emblem a snakehead which in the Mayan script makes the sound carne its lords called themselves cool car and a howl 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 mentioned the joint rule of a king and the Queen and calakmul was proud of its roots which it traced back to the ancient mayor of the pre-classic period so while tikal had a kind of international outlook allied with the distant superpower territory walk on it seems the people of Calakmul saw themselves as the true inheritors of the Maya legacy and calakmul was a powerful city - 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 decal 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 coloured Maul 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 to Cal'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 and the strategy although slow was a success from the second half of the sixth 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 decals 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 Cala Cole was once one of Tikal 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 and 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 seemed to have served a largely ceremonial and symbolic function these wars known as acts 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 and acts 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 and 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 and 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 ax war a low-level attack against his former ally the city of Carrick or 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 caracoles 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 T Karl's temples double birds 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 tickle 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 tea Cal'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 to Carl 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 tickles 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 tickles 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 decals King double bird is unknown he was probably taken back to Caracol 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 calakmul 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 wars 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 flaw is built into its civilization and the tensions and conflicts that would ultimately tear it apart [Music] 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 and copan skyrockets it increased to 20 per year just a century later and 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 and 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 that was a mass inter river at the city of Bonampak the last date of an inscription is the year 792 the city of Yas salon fell silent in the year 808 and 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 copán followed in 822 tickle 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 mayor inscription of all in the remote city of Tanana 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 [Music] 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 bees 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 Mason's 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 a hundred and fifty 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 and as the end of the 8th century neared the Mayan population was booming in Tikal for instance the population in the city center was 65,000 with a further 30,000 in the outskirts there were perhaps as many as 800 people living per square kilometer 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 if 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 Atta Karl 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 burns 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 the 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 archeologists 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 ice cores 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 Tradewinds 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 mayor and this event coincides neatly with the great collapse archaeologist Betty Megas has combined physics and anthropology to propose a fascinating theory she asks us to think about human societies a simple thermodynamic systems for Megas our societies are like machines or organisms they require a strong stable form of energy to flow through them and 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 Megas theories to work Mayan society was suddenly unable to maintain its complexity as a result of a son'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 are surviving Mayan texts 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 when they introduced a drought the hues of the animals burnt the seashore burnt a sea of misery so it was said so it was said on high but the face of the Sun was eaten then the face of the Sun was darkened Vaness faith was extinguished [Music] 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 it's 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 quetzel 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 copán boomed by the year 800 it may have reached as much as thirty thousand people living in this small area of only about ten 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 cope and farmers as copán 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 and the reason for that can be seen in the layer of sediment that today covers their floors as the people built up the mountain sides the ground was eroding pollen samples taken around this time show that the pine forests that once covered these hills have been gradually cut down as these trees disappeared their roots no longer held together the fragile soils on the valleys 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 and as the hills were slowly abandoned the burden of feeding all of Japan'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 and these signs of ill health showed up in the graves of rich nobles and kings - although of course the health of the commoners was much worse and 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 arks them for his food bring the son vas is said to the Chiefs bring the son my son bear it on the palm of your hand to my plates [Music] the Mayan system of rulership was based on an implicit promise you support the Kings 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 coupons last known king a man called Bukit took 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 took it took 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 copán 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 in habitation in the valley pollen samples show that past this point the forests crept back to recover the ruins of copán 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 eighth-century Tikal had once again gained the upper hand over its enemy calakmul and 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 Tico'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 it's 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 were shocked to infer asserting their independence from Tikal and in issue and Jim ball in the north the same thing was happening tickles Dominion was fracturing into a mass of small kingdoms and what's worse the kings of these kingdoms often refer 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 all and run their hands along its richly painted walls and carved stones these common people seemed 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 are people they knew I'll post some of these images on patreon for you to see but the people who stayed here seemed 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 may and 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 and 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 reoccupy 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 damaged the environment and a period of climate change combined to cause a failure of agriculture which led to strange 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 and with agriculture failing everywhere the only way for some of these kingdoms to survive was to take what they needed from their neighbors against the 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 yossel on 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 defence 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 other 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 tow Nena 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 and 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 survived to this day but it's a strange kind of survival their 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 backups 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 but 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 quetzel birds still called and over the empty pyramids slowly but unstoppably crumbling into the earth can our how they say is the greater can our how they say is the darkness coming from the fifth level of the sky the head of the dragonfly the head cover in its worms it bits the hand of the unfettered creator the unfettered darkness he licked the blood in the sweat bath elect the blood in the stone huts Nava no fur 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 gob and Peter Preciado and special thanks to Kevin McCleod for all other music played on this episode do check out the rest of his work on incompetech.com I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter so please come and tell me what you thought you can follow me at Paul mmm Cooper and if you'd like updates about the podcast announcements about new episodes as well as images maps and to see behind the scenes you can follow the podcast at fall of sibs pod with underscores separating the words this podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on patreon you keep me running you help me cover my costs and you also let me dedicate more time to researching writing recording and editing to get the episodes out to you faster and bring as much life and detail to them as possible I want to thank all my subscribers for making this possible if you think you can spare anything please do head over to patreon and support the podcast today for now all the best and thanks for listening [Music]

Channel: Fall of Civilizations

Views: 124,751

Rating: 4.8161159 out of 5

Keywords: podcast, mayans, history, mayan collapse, fall of civilizations, fallofcivilizations, paul cooper, documentary, mayan documentary, civilization documentary, history podcast, learn history, maya, mayan, guatemala, belize, honduras, mexico, historical, historical documentary, doc, learning, ancient history, mayan history, end of the world, apocalypse, armageddon, mayan ruins, ruins, ruin, ancient world, what happened to the mayans, why did the mayans collapse, why did the mayans disappear

Id: SnFaRXeep5Y

Length: 69min 56sec (4196 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/MikeCavalle]

A fantastic set of history lessons.