Lecture: "The Mysteries of the Ancient Maya Civilization and the Apogee of Art in the Americas"

thank you very much thank all you for coming and i want to thank the frist and its staff for giving me this opportunity to talk to you the exhibit is really quite impressive and uh i'm also glad they they gave me this opportunity because i think a lot of people in nashville don't know that vanderbilt is one of the premier centers in the world of the study of pre-columbian civilizations both mesoamerica you know mexico and central america and south america where we have uh studies in the in the andes and coasts of south america and this is uh something that's going on there digs going on we have one of our tom dillahey one of the most prominent figures in south american archaeology is here and the the exhibit has great pieces from from uh all of them and um today i'm going to talk about the the art of the maya but putting it into the context of what it meant what the use of the art was and how it ties in to the develop the apogee of the civilization but also how the the great artworks contributed to the collapse of civilizations uh art can be very very important in in in the history of civilizations a lot more important than we usually think of it as being in our own society and in these pre-columbian civilizations it had very important religious and political functions uh that are associated with with the both the the fluorescence and then the disintegration of these societies so let me we and we have a lot of other development i mentioned at the end some of our development programs and so on but i just think it's important to for you uh to keep track of what's going on in vanderbilt and with these exploratory archaeology now the maya civilization i always when you talk about maya art you have to tell people what the maya civilization is because most people have no idea um this is a civilization that that existed the classic maya civilization uh existed in this green area the lowlands of northern guatemala parts of mexico honduras belize and the yucatan peninsula which is uh covered by a tropical forest environment and this is one of the most amazing things is that the maya civilization did develop in such a difficult and fragile environment the civilization is most famous for its ruins in the jungle temples and palaces overgrown with jungle the uh sort of stereotype you see in a lot of movies of lost civilizations in the jungle the maya fit that perfectly which leads to a lot of interest and a lot of silliness too about the maya usually when they have those like tomb raider or something it's a combination of anger wat with maya and the aztec calendar stone all kind of stuck together because they're not that many lost civilizations that are actually in jungle environment so they they have to combine them let me know if you ca i i'm cajun so i tend to use my hands and pace around if you can't hear me if i move away from the mic scream or something wave your hands uh the cities this is showing you the enormous cities that that uh we excavate in the jungle and in their original form the the structures were plastered and painted red with temples of many colors it's well known the sites are well known for their tremendous architecture this is a palace from the site of palenque in mexico and this is an acropolis from the site of piedras negras in in guatemala at conquene we have one of the largest palaces i'll get to that in a minute that's ever been found if all of this stuff didn't fit the stereotype of the national geographic stereotype of lost civilizations enough we have temples with tombs in them and hieroglyphic inscriptions that can sometimes lead you to the tombs so we have the full package deal and in the in the tombs of course there are these beautiful objects like some of the ones that are up in the exhibit are from uh tomb context i'm sure and most famous are the carved jade objects and i'll get back to that in a little bit and the beautiful ceramic vessels that sometimes have hieroglyphic inscriptions that give us a great deal of information and uh the another aspect are the carved monumental sculptures quite elaborate this is a king you can see his face here his jade ear spools the headdress and he's holding his arms in this position i'll show you in a minute he's just done a bloodletting and on the backs of these monuments are hieroglyphic inscriptions we also have this is from conquene the the site that vanderbilt has been excavating and these hieroglyphic inscriptions give us a great deal of information detailed information on the history of the civilization and allow in archaeology you know we struggle to get good dates on things because radiocarbon dates and some of the chemical dates have plus or minuses of 50 years or even 100 years so it's hard to get very precise dates the maya calendar gives dates in the context of the cities where it's located describes historical events and you can actually see the exact day on which something occurred and this is one of the inscriptions that shows one of their great cycles of time as you know one their biggest cycle of time a cycle of 13 bach tunes 13 periods of 400 years just ended on december 21st and the world was supposed to end uh and it didn't well you know let down again like all these comets and everything but it was great for archaeology i had elect we have an exhibit in a lecture series in europe and on december 21st i gave a talk in helsinki and they packed the house with people who wanted to spend their last moments on earth listening to me i don't know and that's the that's that's the spectacular side of my archaeology that you see in national geographic and in their films and so on they kind of own me so a lot of the pictures in here are from are from them however i want to make it clear that's not real archaeology that's really a tiny part of what we do what we mostly do is study hundreds of houses of all different social levels and the maya house complexes then as today are a series of thatched roof huts over low stone or clay platforms where the people lived and carried on their daily activities and this is what we excavate uh more than anything else we have a palace at congress you know we have some small temples and we have caves with lots of treasures but ninety percent of the time this is what you're you're analyzing and the maya are a wonderfully behaved culture from the archaeologist's point of view because this this is a house you see this stone is the base of the platform that the house was on and then there was a hut above it which has disintegrated but the maya threw their garbage behind their houses because they had gardens and they buried the dead under the floor of the house because they were ancestor worshippers so they wanted their dead with them so when you excavate you have the actual people you can do all kinds of analyses now to know about health and where they were born and all kinds of things status and underneath the floors you have these burials and from the type of pottery you find and the artifacts you find you can tell not only the date of the structure but the social status of the of the people in it and this uh is what this is bro these are various broken pieces of pottery and pieced together whole vessels right now we have about 300 000 broken pieces of pottery from con quinn and this is this is what we really do for every month that you excavate you end up doing about six months or more of analysis putting hundreds of thousands of pot shirts coding them for all different kinds of characteristics putting them in the computer and reconstructing what we really do is to reconstruct the sociology of ancient cities these are cities the temples and the palaces are just the kind of downtown sexy buildings but what we really do is a kind of sociology to try to figure out the economy how it functioned the social structure the political structure and for that you need to to study everything not just the the sexy stuff now um one of the characteristics of maya civilization that is most important you could say most mysterious but we've made a lot of headway in understanding it is the fact that it's in this subtropical humid forest close to a rain forest in this green area and these kinds of environments have very thin soils most of the energy is tied up in the 200 feet high jungle canopy they have few navigable rivers and periodic shortages of water it is like all rain forest it's a very rich but very fragile environment and it is not the sort of environment that high civilizations usually develop in in fact today the policies of usaid and others in protecting these kinds of forests are focused on keeping people out because as populations move in the forest is destroyed the maya who were unaware of the usaid policies they went ahead uh and for two thousand years had a a very successful high civilization with millions of people living in this range probably the the the population estimates vary but somewhere between 10 and 25 million people were living in this area and today it uh there's about half a million people in this same region and they've managed and they've moved back in in the last 40 years they've managed to almost completely destroy the rainforest some of their secrets we now know one of them was this dispersed population a residential pattern that is not like our own it's not urban and then rural there are green cities and you have the ceremonial centers in the in the middle but you have houses and gardens scattered through household gardens behind there were garden cities with a lot of agriculture going on inside of the cities and all kinds of special techniques to have successful rainforest agriculture they had dams and small lakes terraces they left areas of rainforest alone to be places where they could hunt deer they had orchards they had stone box gardens and these use what the the paleo ecologists that work on these projects the projects by the way when they when you talk about an archaeological project again it's not like in the movies uh the project director is just a kind of ceo and administrator mostly have to do all kinds of crap with the governments and the landowners and the narcos and whoever and manage and do research design and so on but you have a whole team of all different kinds of specialists who actually carry out the archaeology and to get back to my story the paleo ecologists analyzed one of the secrets of the maya civilization was their use of human waste of their own waste in stone box gardens to create very very fertile areas for intensive agriculture so this whole complex of techniques allow them to do what we really can't do today and that is to successfully maintain millions of people in a rain rainforest environment and another question you always get is like how do you find these lost cities in all of that lost cities well they're all over the place there's 400 registered in this patent region of northern guatemala alone there's one city and then there'll be area of slightly less population than another one and the difficulty is not fine the difficulty is getting approval and setting it up to be safe to excavate there getting approvals from the government and above all raising the money which is a lot of what we do and right now in the in the middle of accounting for money that's the the most unrealistic thing in the indiana jones movies is when he's like jumping off a train onto a horse or something and he gets no receipts for anything he he would come straight back and go straight to prison so it's it's actually there's a lot a lot to archaeology that isn't as exciting the cities um have causeways and reservoirs and temples and palaces they're very complex and the political organization of classic maya civilization uh was very very different from our own and most of the art is tied directly into that kind of political organization and it was an organization where you had holy kings the the rulers were divine they were worshiped especially after their death they were buried in temples and were worshiped and the rulers combined in the it was the strength and the weakness of classic maya civilization the rulers combined everything into one person kahula how the holy lord they were governors uh who administrators from palaces receiving tribute and controlling governmental decisions they were the war leaders who you see the the king here it's actually not a king in a bunch of midgets in maya art if you're it's like egyptian art if you're an important person you're big if you're less important you're little and you see his role here as a war leader and they were also ball players they would uh dress up in in this kind of gear and play the maya ball game which was a very sacred game um and so that you had all of these combined into one and above all they were the center of these enormous rituals which are somewhat like the rituals at places like anger what and so on in southeast asia where tens of thousands of people would come into the centers especially at the end of certain time periods or after a victory or with the birth of a prince or the death of a king and there would be these gigantic rituals pageantry and display and these were an important source of power for the state because the the power of the ruler was more than anything else his role as a holy lord and the maya conception of the universe was that of a great seba tree the largest tree in the jungle and uh radiating like the branches from the saber tree were planes of the universe there were nine planes of the underworld and 13 planes of the heavens and in between well is the world that we live on which was pictured as a two-headed snake or a two-headed crocodilian or turtle floating in this infinite lake and our world was on the his back and you see that here these are actually representations of serpents it doesn't look like it the maya always represented the serpents as when they strike if you've ever seen a serpent strike they really can open their jaws unhinge their jaws and they sort of strike like that and to celebrate this vision of the universe and to propitiate the deities and especially the ancestors to have good harvest to have successful wars and so on the maya constructed their ceremonial centers and in a way this looks like a big theater uh a big amphitheater and it was these are uh i call these theater states after again the models that are used in southeast asia of states where a great deal of power comes from this ritual display and you see the temples monuments to the dead kings there are kings buried in each of these and this is just one you see a ball court here where they would play the sacred ball game and the center of the whole ritual was the holy lord he was the embodiment he was the embodiment of the world tree he was like a tree and then many of the monuments is portrayed with a with a death deity or a sacrifice captive at his feet and then going up he held the two-headed scepter of our plane he was the master of the earthly plane and then his headdress goes up into these elaborate feathers and so on indicating the highest levels of the heavens and the sacred the muon bird the sacred bird that was in the heavens so he was the embodiment of them and he was the center of these rituals this piece is in the exhibit which is actually it's it's hard to see if when you're not accustomed to the art but you can see his legs here and arm there's his eye and he's standing as a world tree and then all of this is elaborate headdress here and then with ancestor images in the heavens now for these rituals the most sacred thing in the universe was the blood of the king the this was the the holiest substance the blood of a ruler or of a high noble but especially of the rulers the kahula how and so sacrificial rituals were very much centered around blood all of the temples were originally painted blood red uh the plaster was painted blood red and in some of the some of the ceremonies you had uh human sacrifice as you see on this altar here you see a a king that's been captured an enemy king he still has his headdress but he's been stripped naked and humiliated and he's being sacrificed on an altar now this whole human sacrifice thing among the maya is really blown out of proportion that apocalypto arguably the worst movie ever made has this vision of the maya which is nothing the maya did not have very much human sacrifice they would sacrifice captive kings and sometimes high nobles but it was a sort of a quality not quantity thing you would great ceremony you would sacrifice a captured king and this sort of meat factory that they had in apocalypto is sort of vaguely based on the aztecs so like aztecs on crack or something who were in central mexico you know a thousand years later the maya offering of blood however was very very central and the blood was usually their own the the offering was auto sacrifice uh bloodletting and it was practiced in honor of your ancestors at all levels of the society to the dead who were buried under the floor but the highest level their their high mass were the bloodlettings of the king and you see this is a an image showing the king getting ready to bloodlet and this instrument um is uh it's unfortunate term penis perforator uh a jade blood letter that was used to lacerate the genitals and the the rulers would inside of the temple they would lacerate themselves and they would run their hands under the loin cloth and they would drip the blood into a sensor as you see here this is what's happening way up on top in the temples the queens would also bloodlet but the queens would pull ropes with thorns through their tongues uh and also lacerate their cheeks part of the offering is the pain this is not again this is not unusual i mean they had this in medieval times in europe too part of what you're offering up is the pain but also the blood and the blood drips down into these bowls and you can see the purpose of this was for the greatest ritual of the state which was to bring up from the below from the underworld to bring up the ancestors or to draw down from the heavens the gods to communicate with the king and in this image this is actually a queen you can see this bowl it has paper on it with blood spots the glyph for blood and it's been lit and coming out of that in the smoke is the vision serpent and you see the open jaws of the serpent here and out of that is emerging an ancestor to communicate with the queen this one's a little bit clearer you see the vessel it's a very simple vessel in this case uh with the burning bark paper the vision serpent and the ancestor emerging to speak to the queen by the way with art you know aesthetics is always an amazing thing the maya thought what was beautiful was having a sloping forehead a big hooked nose drooping lower lip and crossed eyes and they did cranial deformation of children of the upper classes who had to be beautiful um causing the sloping forehead and the weak chin and so on and dangling a jade bead between the eyes and exaggerating the characteristics this is again not not unusual we uh in our society everybody women are all supposed to look like uh anorexic norwegian models um and so there's a lot of emphasis on that and all of us who are parents spend an enormous amount of money on orthodontic work uh for our children so there's a and and and also there's a tendency to have racial characteristics of your own group exaggerated to make you more beautiful and the maya have naturally somewhat sloping foreheads and large noses and so on weak chins and that they exaggerated those characteristics to show beauty and you see again uh the the bark paper with this arising this is my fame favorite sculpture this is from yash chilana site in mexico and it shows the king and the queen and their bloodletting together she's pulling a rope through his tongue he's hacking away here with a penis perforator and here's the bowl they're bleeding into the same bowl it's kind of romantic don't you think it's this is my favorite romantic buy a piece it's a good marriage you know the family that bleeds together um this piece which is in the exhibit which is quite magnificent um this incensario is one of those it's a more elaborate form but it's one of the kind of of sensors that would be used for this the blood and the paper would go into this and then it would be lit and the smoke would would rise out of it you should if you haven't been to the exhibit yet this is really i think this is my favorite thing in the exhibit afterwards the kings would emerge from the temples come down the steps display their their bloody hands uh and come down with these enormous costumes like 200 pounds of costumes on scaffolding we know this is not just in the art because we find these in the burials we found one at conquen where a weird preservation the actual feathers were stained into the mud and you could see the colors of the feathers going all the way down to the the feet and they would announce whatever the prophecies were to go to war whatever the advice was from the ancestors and these were all part of huge rituals that lasted sometimes three days and were the glue that held together the states because subordinate lords rival lords from other states would attend and there would be in addition to the big the big genital bloodletting there would also be lots of other ceremonies ball games and then in the palaces and sort of wild and esoteric shamanistic celebrations this is showing a party that was held after a bloodletting and a victory it's my favorite one as a cajun because these guys are dressed up like crawfish see this that's my theory this shows another one and you can see the lords are dancing um there's um dancing here and they're they're under the influence of over here is an enema pot and they're under the influence of hallucinogenic animals they're the jungle's full of all these natural hallucinogens and they would take them in the form of enemas and then transform into jaguars and so on which was part of the king's ability and dance now this system of of governance uh politics religion economics all rolled into one was the the reason why the maya have so much art you know art is not not every period of time has the same amount of art of great importance the renaissance is a period that's famous for the incredible amount of art in the way of not just paintings but architecture cathedrals and and sculpture and all of it and the reason for that in the renaissance i think is pretty similar to the reason for that being with the maya and that was that they were societies in which there was a very intense political status rivalry competition between different states not just in war but in how beautiful your cathedrals or temples could be how elaborate your ceremonies how much artwork you could give out to patrons and kings and sub-lords all of that was tied into the status of the ruler and was a competition between the different city-states because the maya never unified into any kind of unified political movement they had small individual city-states hundreds of them and then sometimes there were larger groupings into larger alliances but throughout the entire classic period which is the sort of uh peak period of the maya civilization from 300 to about 800 850 a.d during that period these kings were constantly battling each other making alliances marrying each other capturing each other and decapitating each other and competing in the size of their rituals the quality of their art in fact it was like the renaissance in a way too because sometimes they would capture artisans from another city and bring them back to do art in the victorious city and when uh there was a victory or better ceremonies uh or whatever the uh an advantage in status rivalry that particular state would have more architecture and more followers and a greater apogee during that period the holy lords were more successful so you had have really charismatic kings kings who combined sort of uh the qualities of a bill clinton a general mick jagger and pele or whoever they're beckham as a great ball player all of that had to be rolled into one and was the source of this intense status rivalry part of that status rivalry was warfare which was very highly ritualized among the maya it wasn't practical in the sense that we would think of it a lot one of the goals was to try to capture not kill the enemy king and the they went into battle as you see here this is a ruler and these are captives who are being bled for their blood and here are some of the captains and they would go on elaborate outfits elaborate costumes again requiring a great deal of art for these costumes and for the jewelry that went with them and the temples construction was another part of the status rivalry and as the classic period of the maya went on as you started to get into the seventh eighth century it just spiraled out of control the amount of architecture and art the number of monuments per 20-year period the maya calendar was base 20 and so we can measure from their inscriptions more and more temples more and more centers more and more monuments more and more palaces more and more works of art intensifying as you came to this crescendo and the same would be with their sculpture and their science the maya had very elaborate mathematical and astronomical skills they had calculated the elliptical orbit of venus they could predict eclipses and had a mathematics that was was very impressive but all of this was it was for not practical scientific purposes but for religious purposes and also for the purpose of competing in the status rivalry and these are monuments from the site of kirigua they're about 35 feet high on the back of them are these huge mathematical tables multiplying up to this one multiplies up to the 40 million just showing off their math and uh this and then of course the other center would have to construct in its own style more monuments so as to compete and impress the the visitors and thus gain followers and tribute and the artworks that adorned some of the palaces uh and temples uh like you see this deity here this is a corn deity and there are there's a good uh stucco mask upstairs that's probably from uh architecture part of the decorations that covered the palaces and temples i'll show you in a second at conquene we have the largest of these where i'm excavating the largest of these that have ever been found and beautiful ceramic vessels that were not only put in the tombs but given as gifts as offerings when people came to the ceremonies they would take back something like this or in smaller rituals when kings would visit they would give these beautiful ceramic vessels or works of art again in this competitive framework this is from the exhibit upstairs this is another piece from the exhibit that is interesting because it has this primary standard sequence it's called it's a repeated sequence of hieroglyphs that have the same hieroglyphs on each pot but then with just a couple of them different on every pot and they're found in tombs and uh michael coe yale's most prominent uh archaeologist did about three books on these vessels in which he wrote about how uh he's a very great archaeologist but you know we all miss a few he wrote about how this is some ritual incantation must be some holy incantation because they were in funeral uh vessels well uh the epigrapher the hieroglyphic specialist because this is something is you always have a specialist who just reads the glyphs and he when he was a graduate student at vanderbilt deciphered these glyphs and discovered that they say this is a vase that held chocolate that was owned by and then it would have the name of the king and so all of them all of the vessels would then be deciphered important information because you would get information on the kings but not too ritualistic or esoteric of a chant also in the burials and in gifting these are figurines from the exhibit uh very fine figurines that was another form of maya art these are figurines from kong queen the site that uh that we've been excavating for some time i had to show these because we have the best figurines or at least they have the funniest hats you gotta and these hats come off um this one this is a shaman uh uh a spiritual leader and he actually this hat that comes off you can't see it here but it has it's like harry potter it has a band of stars and half moons running around it and this one he's wearing a giant macaw hat and a ball player this is obviously the kaiser and this hourglass hat with a warrior but there's just so much art when you excavate the centers of these sites it's just you know it's it's disproportionate to the size of the population when you compare it to other civilizations in mexico and central america this this intense period of production of art now what ties into both our work and the question of how art which was reflecting the apogee it was part of what reinforced the success of the ruler and maya civilization but it was also contributed heavily to the collapse of my civilization we don't think of art as being that important but it can actually help collapse i don't think the frist is going to be doing that but these rulers for their costumes and elements of of power and authority they needed certain things and it wasn't like simply rich having luxury goods you know the the wealthy of diamonds and gold or something this is more like the pope's outfit this is these are elements of you had to have to be a holy lord you had to have the jade the jade ear spools and jade necklaces you had to have these discs that were covered with mosaics covered with mosaics of pyrite what we call fool's gold that would be glued to the disks and would make a mirror and this wasn't for vanity they used these mirrors to start fires you know when they had the blood-soaked paper they would get reflect in through the doorway and get the fires going with these mirrors conch shells which had to come from all these things had to come from very distant areas carved corn shells which would come from the the pacific or caribbean coast the feathers of the quetzal bird which came from the distant highlands not from the jungles but from coming down through trade from the highlands and then uh this is a stingray spine which was for the rulers the most important and most common instrument for genital bloodletting in fact in most of the burials of the kings they laid the stingray spine on the on the pelvis of the skeleton to show that he had been a holy lord and then these eccentrics which were made of imported fine flint or a volcanic glass obsidian from the highlands and these were used as scepters and also as blood letters this is in the exhibit upstairs this is one of these uh that was used and they would be used as scepters but also the most important thing the king did was to those the auto sacrifice the self laceration in their high mass so the scepter would be a blood letter at the same time and jade these are jades that are in the exhibit there's more than this um jade is green that's the color of the forest it's also the color of water because the maya make no distinction even today between blue and green it's one color and it's the color of the center and of the saber tree it is very very holy and the maya just had tons of this jade some of the some of the burials they'll have multiple necklaces that will be 50-60 pounds of jade beads it was very important part of the of the costume now that brings us to both the question of the collapse of civilization and also to the vanderbilt projects which have been uh probably the most active uh of any university in studying the mystery of the collapse of this civilization because of course this whole area today is covered the cities are all buried in jungle and the mystery is why between 800 and 900 a.d did this very successful civilization that had maintained this success for 2 000 years why did it collapse and there's a variety of factors involved but one of them had to do with the art and the ritual and the theater state and these are the trade routes of the ancient maya world which went along the caribbean along the gulf but especially important was this trade route from the highlands this is the mountains the volcanic highlands where the volcanic glass the jade the caxil feathers the pyrite all had to come from there and then travel first by river and all this way by river and then by land to the maya centers vanderbilt's work the vanderbilt um archeological work is been focused in this area for about the last 15 years at at many different sites it's a very large area which as you can see is right at the connection between the highlands and the lowlands and right at the nexus of the major trade routes of the maya world and that's where we've been directing these excavations projects of varying size each year um the pates batoon project that i ran in the in the 90s was one of the largest ever it had six camps and 300 workmen and about 40 archaeologists and uh was too big and at the very end like a kahula how i went mad and had a cerebral hemorrhage and everything was a bit much but since then we've continued with large projects and you have all of these different specialists most of ours are guatemalan students many of whom got their masters or doctorate degrees at vanderbilt who have now returned to their countries to direct archaeology and we also work with french scholars as well and a few gringos not too many um this is showing that the camp of the pates platoon project national geographic helicopter photo and you can see the endless sea of rain forest around it most of this rainforest this photo was taken in 93 i think most of this rainforest has now been destroyed especially by ethanol production which is devastating we think of ethanol as being ecologically great but they actually chop down rainforests to get a lot of it and to grow oil palm most of this is gone there we excavated uh about six different cities and the capital of those cities was one called dos pilas and it was a completely military center very successful because it conquered most of the trade route of the pacion river the main the jungle is very difficult to move through um in fact that's another ridiculous thing in apocalypto where they have those guys running through the jungle you know if you run barefoot through the jungle you will have within a few meters your feet will be absolutely filled with spines and everything else on earth it is very difficult to move through the jungle so the rivers the few rivers they had became kind of the super highways of the maya world and dos pilas conquered one of the largest one of these the pacion river and you see dos pilas here we excavated a lot of sites in this area and you see the river going down and this is where conquene is right this shows you where they are in guatemala right at the very base of the highlands where the mountains go up and you get that very different environment the the kingdom of dos pilas conquered the river it was a very militaristic kingdom constantly at war and each time they had a victory they constructed a hieroglyphic staircase some of them quite huge this shows a temple and shows the positions of the hieroglyphic staircases each of them recording a victory a military victory and it became a very rich city from tribute and conquests and we had tombs that we excavated that had treasures in them this is a very very beautiful pot that's always on exhibit somewhere um and caves they also had caves that were full of treasures that were running underneath the site this whole area has a lot of has a lot of caves and the caves were very important places for ritual toward the end of the time of dos pilas's greatness they they formed a marriage alliance with us another site all the way at the beginning of the trade route where the headwaters the of the of the pacion river the head of navigation and this panel which is probably kind of hard to interpret celebrates that because you see the king of dos pilars here the glyphs identify them this is a priest and mostly eroded is a 13 or 14 year old prince who's doing his first genital bloodletting and you can see the blood dripping into the bowl here and standing behind the king is the queen who was identified as the lady of kung quinn she was a princess from conquen and this marriage alliance gave them then control of the entire trade route and this is the route this river the highlands begin here conquin is here these dos pilas and these sites are in here and this is the river route that leads all the way through the maya world to the gulf of mexico now in the last 10 years we've been excavating at the beginning of this at the city of conquene which i just came from and it's a river city it's a swamp it has more i'm from new orleans originally and it actually has more mosquitoes than new orleans uh and and it's hotter um but it's a largely inundated area and this is where the pacion river first becomes navigable no more after the waterfalls and cascades it slows down and from here on you can use canoes to travel with your products to the rest of the maya world and the site the most important thing about the site are its ports there are six ports each of them has a small palace of a noble next to the port some of them were fortified and that this was for these the the maya we know from descriptions in the conquest period had these very very large trading canoes which they would move along the river their products now at conquen uh there is uh it's about the largest or tied for the largest palace in the maya world it's enormous palace because naturally in this position they were in they had a a great deal of wealth and today you know the sites that if you go to see a lot of them today if they're been studied by archaeologists that doesn't mean they're going to be reconstructed you excavate and then you re-very very often and this palace was not known about for all his time because it's so large and covered with vegetation that it simply um looks like a big hill and so it wasn't noticed also this was not noticed by the archaeologists or the looters because the site does not have any temples which is what attracts uh the the sort of sensationalist unfortunately archaeology of the maya world and also attracts the looters looking for tombs they don't have temples i'll explain why in a second and this was quite a sensation this picture was from the new york this is my favorite of the national geographic press release photos this was on the cover of the new york times and what i like about it is that this guy this tall handsome guy here was identified as arthur demarest which i was very pleased with this is obviously some dumpy assistant of some kind some lackey this is showing you some just some of the parts of the palace the palace goes on for quite some distance it has about 200 rooms and this is a reconstruction of what it was like you could see that this was not just it wasn't primarily a place for the king to live in it was an administrative ritual palace to receive visitors and to impress them smaller chiefs from the nearby highland kingdoms that they would get the the raw materials from and then other visiting lords from maya centers and these this is a person here these disproportionately large rooms were covered with giant stucco sculptures some of these are 10 feet high and this is just the head of one of these figures and then the headdress would come out like that and the and the body and then with monsters in between there's one stucco mask upstairs that um it's smaller but it's from an architectural facade like this where they would cover and they'd be painted in all different colors we have these all of these stucco sculptures we have an entire house that is filled with these stucco sculptures we have no place to put them and the government of guatemala won't take them they won't that you you can't sell them or anything but they won't take them back because they don't have any room in the storage facilities or the national museum so for about you know eight years now i've been paying rent on this house full of stuccos and this is showing one of the the ruler at the at the time of of the of the greatest the apogee of conquen which comes just before the collapse we usually think of collapses of civilizations we think of rome you know in this sort of slow decline but many collapses and this is something we can worry about uh happen at the very apogee they're like bubbles like the bubble the economic one we had where you build to a frenzied crescendo and then suddenly everything falls apart and that is what happened in the maya world this was the period of of crescendo this monument dates to 796. it's about this big uh and it shows the king and he's a waterlord he's sitting on a water monster and then two subordinates this is a a sahal like a lieutenant king and this is a woman who is a city manager and it's describing this the holy lord and these are all these colored things here are all water symbols because he was king of the river and controller of the water 796 by 800 conquene was completely abandoned and destroyed and so you had this peak and then the destruction these are some other monuments some of these were captured back from looters and uh we haven't restored it yet um the the meyer we've trained them as restorers and they themselves are slowly restoring and these are three of the ball court markers that show two kings playing the ball game they also record that one of the kings made various conquests in the name of taj chana the greatest king of conquering his name means great fiery turtle which to us sounds kind of ridiculous but the turtle is a is a is an uh a carnivore in the river they have these big turtles and they're snapping turtles and they eat the fish they'll take your finger off so they thought of of turtles as a very aggressive like we we would have lions on our on our crest of our royalty they have a turtle so he's great fiery turtle the reason why there are no um temples at conquene is this is sharing a temple from tikal this is showing a wheats a natural limestone tower we're right at the base of the highlands and so you have these mountains and they're hollow and there's 33 so far the cave archaeology team is a separate team of crazy spelunkers and archaeologists who go it's insane archaeologists are insane in general but cave archaeologists are totally insane because it's very very dangerous uh we have 33 kilometers of i don't know what that isn't like 20 miles of these systems um now measured and inside of them are hundreds and thousands of beautifully preserved artifacts that were offerings and in front of some of them we're digging right now this particular place we're digging um some of them in the area have platforms with monuments in front of the hill so these were the natural temples of the maya and as you can see they're much more impressive than the artificial versions that they had in the areas without hills further north also at conquene is the largest jade workshop in the new world we've got uh now about 3 600 jade artifacts some of which like this or boulders of 35 or 40 pounds because they had this large jade workshop and a lot of the jades that you find at other sites and tombs probably some in the exhibit here that are found at other sites were being manufactured at conquent where the jade comes down from the highlands through the valleys comes to conquen at the beginning of the river and there they would work it and then by canoe it would go to the rest of the maya world and you can see the jade debris and then final carved pieces now as i said these you had these alliances but then they broke up into smaller was a very unstable volatile period again kind of like the renaissance in northern italy and these competing states with status rivalry between them sometimes warfare more often competitive rituals competitive art competitive monuments competitive ritual displays to draw more followers this built up faster and faster into the 8th century when it really got out of control and especially here on the here at dos pilas and con quen and the areas we've been excavating this is the trade route that all of these goodies come down and so great pressure was put on this route as an important place to control and warfare became endemic and starting or starting very earlier it's much earlier than the rest of the maya collapse starting around 760. this is dos pilas in 760. this is dos piolas in 761 the city was besieged they tore down parts of their own temples and palaces to construct stone defensive walls with palisades on top of them double walls are trying to hold off the enemies and we find we find places where the defenses were breached and you have hundreds of these spearheads that are found in those areas and you can see they fortified not only at dos pilas but it spread through the whole region they fortified their temples and made them into fortresses all of this coming very suddenly and very destructively you know part of the rainforest adaptation of the maya that i explained earlier was this dispersion you had large cities but they were spread out very green cities once you have warfare going you can't do that you have to concentrate population uh for defensive reasons and so this was made this this area had the earliest uh collapse in maya civilization probably because it was on this route of intensive competition for goodies this is con queen it shows one of the entrances to the palace that has in front of it this sacred cistern which you see here drained and we've restored it that held spring water and was probably used for ablutions for purifying yourself before you entered the palace to see the king or the religious officials you could step down here and and purify yourself and come out and then continue into the palace at 800 a.d when we excavated this it was an overwhelming job we had to ended up having to bring in a huge team of osteologists a bone specialist because this thing was completely filled with human bones and we still we have a vanderbilt graduate student right now who's studying these as well it's been it's been like six years you'll probably be studying this collection for another 20. in this pond we found this particular pool there were 31 assassinated nobles men women children uh two pregnant women and two fetuses all age groups all very high status which we can tell from the analysis of their bones from their diet from the cranial deformation and they were killed with great ritual they were not they were in in beautiful costumes and had incredible things in the pool with them so it's sort of counterintuitive from our point of view that you would assassinate these people but they would be dressed in great finery and with very valuable things going into the pond one of these one of these had 18 jaguar canines no 36 jaguar canines which means they had to kill 18 jaguars to get those canines it's probably that's much more precious than jade and again all of this as they were assassinated they were put into the pond the team that analyzed this is the forensic foundation of guatemala who normally work with the un uh and the hague and the world court studying massacres around the world and the head of that team happens to be someone who got his degree under me and i convinced him to take a break from these modern massacres and analyze this so we had forensic analysis of all of these bones and we know that this was the most of them were killed by a spear thrust to the spinal column uh in some cases uh in the lower back through the spinal column which again seems gruesome but that is that or decapitation are actually the two most humane ways to kill somebody i mean they didn't have the gas chamber or whatever because you immediately sever the spinal column we since have found another another of these cisterns which has another 25 uh bodies of elites in it that we're still studying and what happened then this route all of these wars broke out first that those pilots then spreading to everywhere small villages and finally destroying conquest the trade route was cut off and the battles and warfare and sieges all along this area between 760 and 800 now the maya civilization at this point had a lot of other problems in other areas the whole superstructure of the society put too much pressure on the economic base and they became vulnerable to droughts periodic droughts they would be unable to respond properly they were destroying their soils to a large extent this civilization was was suffering from too much success but when these trade routes were cut off that that intensified the warfare everywhere because now there was less of these precious substances coming in and therefore that much more competition and conflict over them and so the maya collapse begins chronologically the earliest we have is it is in the area of the passion river trade route where we're excavating and that starts around 760 750 a.d um and then it spreads to other areas starting around 800. this piece is in the exhibit i was very surprised to see this this is a special kind of pottery called pablon fine orange and for some reason just before these cities disintegrated this ceramic shows up in a lot of contexts pottery shows up and so it's kind of a marker whenever you find it you know that that's about the time the city collapsed whatever city it was and so the collapse of maya civilization was kind of a domino in chronology it wasn't as sudden as people once thought it started around 750 and it didn't end until around 900 or a little later it started down here and then spread along the river route and then you can see these numbers i have this is from a book that i've written on this and you can see these numbers and that's kind of the order of zones collapsing one after another and then the jungle took back over and these cities now uh all of them at least in southern guatemala are literally buried in jungle and that makes them very challenging to excavate so that's the story of the collapse of maya civilization but i wanted to just have one ending positive note since this is such a grim story and it also could be seen as kind of racist to say that this is the collapse of maya civilization because there are 11 million maya uh here today ted fisher is one of the people uh from vanderbilt who studies the living maya the modern maya who were descendants of this civilization the classic maya civilization their holy cities collapsed and the southern lowlands of the paten jungle was abandoned but maya society survived elsewhere in the highlands in northern yucatan and those people are gradually moving back into the jungle and continue today and have very this is all these are all pictures actually the pictures my son took of some of the rituals that we participate in with the modern ketchi maya who live around the site and vanderbilt has very active development projects with them and a little known fact is that vanderbilt actually this is that peninsula i showed you of con quinn vanderbilt bought six kilometers of passeon river rainforest and i know around here people say they see some buildings vanderbilt probably owns that you know vanderbilt owns everything well they own six kilometers of the pacion river rainforest which they bought because the ethanol people were going to destroy it they were also going to drive out the maya population there that lived in the jungle and they would have they would have destroyed the site as well so vanderbilt purchased this and it's now a park you see an aerial view here on the pascagon river that's used its beautiful jungle park that's used for reforestation for forest preservation for scientific studies and for a lot of humanitarian projects with the modern maya we're very involved in projects with water systems and the most recent one uh with the help of of the finns is in women's girls education so that these people can actually the women can actually go to school which they're not able to do today so there is a a positive lining to this grim story and the uh the maya civilization in a very different form without the holy lords and without the the warfare except we do have narcos battling each other now and again but among the maya uh continues to thrive as a very important and vigorous culture today thank you you have questions doubts objections well it's interesting it's another one of the strengths and weaknesses simultaneously of the maya civilization to be a king you had to have this incredible amount of charisma you had to be a good warrior you also had to be good at polygamous marriage alliance uh and dancing and they would sing and that's all recorded in the inscriptions ball players so you needed a high level of charisma and of skills so instead of just having the first born would become the king it would be one of the children or it could be a brother so there was more flexibility in who would be selected to become the kahula how which was good for the charisma and the city but it also set the stage for even more warfare amongst potential rivals for the throne so there was a lot of dynastic warfare and a good bit of uh usurpation and assassination the palace that we're digging now has got sort of fortification systems around it and in it to protect the king so the succession was a an important characteristic of the maya female yeah players and you had a picture of a woman who was a city manager can you talk a little bit about what you understand well the um there wasn't a woman ball player but the role of women was very important because of the blood and the dynasty and the blood of the kings and the women are the ones that produce the future bloodline so as you saw in some of the monuments especially at the upper level the upper classes the nobles and the royalty women were very important because they were the producers of the princes actually i didn't go into this but male genital bloodletting of the kings is a womb envy phenomena uh like you see in some in some uh contemporary south american shamans and so on where the the queen gives birth to the princes and the future of the bloodline so through genital blooding bleeding uh hallucination and pain so the king with genital blooding hallucination and pain gives birth to the ancestors drawing up the ancestors it was the kings i actually showed you one photograph of one of the kings in the monument i didn't mention that he's dressed as a queen or they would actually sometimes dress up in women's clothing so the role of the women and and being producers of the dynasty was very important and also in marriage alliance and in a few cases we know of um where the king the the selected king was very young or where there was no appropriate heir the queens did rule in several cases and one of them who was naturally from dos pilas a very military center actually won battles and wars and their portraits of her doing that as far as the role of the women in the lower and middle classes that's very hard for us to determine there's a good bit published on it but none of it is very convincing other questions yeah yeah has the deforestation from the ethanol production exposed archaeological sites and what's what's happening yeah but we we know where most of the archaeological sites are we do find things that surprise us as we did at the beginning in conquering but mostly again in these this this national geographic does these i've been through a number of these press releases where they asked you for a moment of discovery and they really hype it up mostly the maya tell us where the ruins are they know where they are and if you we have development projects that help them with potable water and medicine and so on so they like us and they they tell us where these things are so it isn't the ethanol production isn't discovering much in the way of new ruins they are destroying the ruins however because as they deforest they also loot um and it's become a very and they're also the maya the ketchi maya who live in this region don't as you might imagine don't have lawyers and don't have decent land title so they're all often getting their land taken away it's one of my personal saw horses when i hear people talk about the joys of ethanol and its greenness but anyway i don't want to get into that we'll have we'll have another debate yeah um so you mentioned that in some places like i believe it was uh the collapse of that particular study occurred over the course of four years i believe those payloads like one year oh wow okay um so you get these these you know sporadic like very quick collapses and then you say the the the peak of my civilization is all collapsed over the course of something like 150 years yeah 750 and 900. um so i'm curious what way of life they transitioned to after that period you know after having abandoned these elaborate uh you know general and governmental sites just letting the jungle well you do have this period uh when i teach at vanderbilt i refer to it as the road warrior period so they have some you know reference to what what i mean but there is this period at some of the sites those pls is abandoned congress abandoned their early collapses but other places you have these sort of people living in the ruins at tikal a site i showed you a number of pictures of one of the largest site we sort of have this period in which the different palace complexes and temples are walled up and there's groups of lower status people living in the ruins squatting and sort of having battles with each other and recording it in graffiti so you sort of have gangs the city breaking up into into gangs in some places in other places the decline is slower and in some places especially on the coast of belize and northern yucatan there is no collapse it gradually changes into a different kind of society doesn't have holy lords far more that's the new trade route once the trade route collapses through the jungle the the the trade route the only trade route then is along the caribbean around the yucatan peninsula and through the gulf of mexico and along that route many of the maya cities just slowly change but they stop having the huge temples and the giant palaces it's much more modest because again you don't have this status rivalry system merchants are very important lineage heads are very important it's a more balanced power system in those that continue so it's it's a very big mosaic and the causes of the collapse i added a book with uh with two other archaeologists that has 25 chapters and 52 authors each presenting their view on the causes of the maya collapse usually biased toward wherever it is they worked and there are all of these there's still a great array of theories but of course i have the final chapter which is the truth i just call it the truth for short the title's longer but there it's funny you should ask that because there's something that we've really uh just in the last five years archaeologists have picked up on and we didn't see it at conquest until about four years ago are termination rituals where um there's a loss of faith in the in the rulers and you see just at the very end the kind of you saw this mass assassination but they also topple some of the architecture and they go through the monuments i don't know if you saw this but most of the monuments that i showed you the faces chipped and they very uh carefully and with great respect chipped the faces and turned the monuments face down putting them to death essentially because these are very powerful holy objects that have the holy lords on them and so you do have this and now there's a whole sequence of sites that have just been found in belize and now that people know to look for this they're looking for it everywhere and it looks like when things finally collapse they are very often these termination rituals and some of them they go like to the throne room of the king break up the throne and then cover it with garbage and we used to think these were all squatters living in the ruins but it seems to be a systematic ritual to mark the the death of the kings it's one of the problems of a divine lord situation if things go badly you have no one to blame you know uh it's entirely you and uh and you're held responsible so the system of divine kingship really went with the end of the classic maya we have other esoteric did you know we're esoteric now i don't know uh well it is an irrational life choice there's no question what that is it's the i don't know which the bad pay and the disease and you know being in the middle of drug wars and stuff it's got its disadvantages but i i started i announced to my parents i know this from my parents it's famous at four i announced i was going to be an archaeologist and uh i had read some things about i was a little confused because i thought you get to also study dinosaurs and a few grade levels later i discovered that you had to pick one of the other that was i had a midlife crisis in the third the third grade but i i've i've always been studying archaeology and doing it my whole life i never really um thought of anything else so i can't remember why i got into it i think it's because i found some fossils too at that age and again i thought she got to do it all you know i didn't know the truth how much accounting is involved and because that's the project director and constant grant proposals and kissing the butts of idiot officials uh it's they don't show that that should be highlighted they should do a movie indiana jones cpa you know indiana jones and the irs something like that one more question yeah were they captured i think they were captured and killed we we've made some advances on this it's still a hypothesis it really is a kind of a national geographic did a movie on this and they kept men it's a horrible movie oh i shouldn't hope there's no ngs they give me money so i shouldn't say that uh but um it's like a cold case they kept saying we who killed them who did it and the evidence is beginning to look like right there you're at the base of the highlands and you have these hill caves and there are highland people who are of a different uh material culture a different culture probably a different language group but it would appear that they probably worshipped the king of conquest because a lot of the of the ideology and sculpture and art there seems to be trying to project uh greatness to people who can't read a lot of it is is these high high pro high relief physical images and and they also have ball courts during highland style and the church that was found in association with these massacres the flint comes from a highland area nearby so it was probably part of their kingdom but not lowland meyer these highland people who had lost faith in the kings and that's who probably killed them because the other thing is it's very you know we thought it was very strange to begin with that you would kill these people and not take the goodies you'd be like you you murdered somebody a queen who's getting a diamond tiara and so on you would just put them down with the diamond tiara and the king and and queen were killed and just put into like 60 centimeters of mud but they had all these incredible treasures on them so um the the question of who who did it uh i think in most cases they had lost faith in the king and it was not necessarily local but nearby peoples that did it the causes however i i'm not that's a whole other a couple of books but the causes of the collapse also involve ecological problems and this competition between city-states also led to encourage larger and larger populations so you have more and more followers more and more people to construct and that led to a great strain on the environment as well so you had all those things coming together but the law the crisis of legitimacy which is just something we talk about in the last five years also ties into uh in many parts of the world the kings are also sacrificial scapegoats the king must die you know the king is linked to prosperity and if there is not prosperity you sacrifice the king that seems to be part of this complex of traits in the toppling that became the maya collapse and the population depends on what part of the maya world you're talking about but in the paten rain forest where i work the population drop is incredible it's like five percent uh are left uh living in various settlements over depending on where you are over a period of of decades in the case of conquene it was destroyed in a few days and there's nobody there afterwards it was not reoccupied until about the came in from the highlands about 50 years ago so on that grim note thank you very thank you much much thank you

Channel: Frist Art Museum

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Keywords: Fine Art (Literary Genre), Art (Collection Category), History, Museum, frist center, Dr. Demarest

Id: VfvS8ENVyJ0

Length: 81min 53sec (4913 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2013

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Presented by Dr. Arthur Demarest, Vanderbilt University Ingram Professor, Anthropology; director, Vanderbilt Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology (VIMA); general editor, VIMA Monographs in Archaeology

Dr. Arthur Demarest, an anthropologist and archaeologist, is considered one of the world's leading experts on Olmec and Maya cultures that are represented in the exhibition Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas: The John Bourne Collection. Demarest's work is reshaping ideas about the ancient, advanced, but long-lost Maya society. He is a Department of Anthropology project director in Central America and has spent much of that time excavating the ancient Maya port city of Cancuén. Join Professor Demarest as he discusses his interests in Pre-Columbian religion and ritual and the collapse of civilizations.

This program is presented in partnership with the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at Vanderbilt University.