New Light on the Ancient Maya

please welcome one of the great archaeologists of our era dr. Michael Koh [Applause] Thank You Caroline this evening I'm going to supposedly tell you about new light on the ancient Maya would take about ten hours to do this I have one hour so I'm going to concentrate on new things that interest me that I think you would like to know about and I'm also going to talk about the lack of new light in other words on areas of Maya studies but really we don't know anything about and that we'd like to know more about areas that are controversial too in which I and my friends have one interpretation and my enemies have another but I'll see how they could be reconciled so that's what's on the agenda for tonight it's an incredibly complicated subject often I'm asked by called up by people and TV characters and whatnot we've said we want to do a thing in the BBC or something on the Maya tell us all you know about the Maya it can't be done it's too complex but I'm so I'm just going to give it a once over lightly and go through from beginning to end the things that are going on in the Maya area now that I know about that are different or that we need to have more work and that have thrown a new light on these people the Maya area you all know exactly where it is it's a it's a very compact area compact linguistically and compact culturally there are differences and in the Maya area when you move let's say from one area to the next but they are small compared to the differences with the rest of the civilized people of Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a cultural area which includes the Aztecs the Mayans the zapotec that the west X etc these are people who all had an a pretty advanced civilization compared to the rest of the people in North America north of the Isthmus of Panama the area is received as a certain definite restricted quality as far as ecological possibilities go here and that's still being worked on I took this picture in they pay 10 the northern part of Guatemala the Guatemalan lowlands in an area in which the forest has not been cut down which is not the case for a lot of the lowland Maya area today that's not what it looked like at all when the ancient Maya civilization was going in fact that forest probably didn't exist much of it was cut down by the Maya with consequences that I'm going to talk about later but there is a very strongly marked rainy season you can see this great thunderstorm and no think what a mama this is right on the Mexican border and a very equally strongly marked dry season so that's the regime that controls all of agriculture in this part of the world what's really new in Maya archaeology today is the study of Maya origins and we know much more about this and we ever would have known let's say 25 or 40 or in 75 years ago and thank 75 years ago or a hundred years ago nothing was known about Maya origins we had an idea of how old a Maya civilization was but that was about all because of the correlation between the Maya calendar and the Christian calendar which was a triumph of 19th century scholarship we have known how to date Classic Maya ruins but how where these people originated and how many of the traits that are in the Classic Maya came about we knew nothing about and we're getting to know a lot now I think that most of us who work on this subject except not all but most of us accept the idea that Maya civilization really has its under pending in the Olmec civilization of southeastern Mexico especially along the the Gulf Coast a plane here on the northern side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec this is a civilization that begins probably even earlier than 1200 BC that I put here but in terms of true years probably as old as 1500 BC when you correct the radiocarbon dates for the true ages by 400 BC it's over and it's two great sites although there are many in this region here the two great sites are the oldest which is San Lorenzo and then La Venta and San Lorenzo was where urban life begins for the Maya where civilized life as we know it begins with the first pyramids the first big constructions the first monumental carving the first real iconography of the gods and so forth and of course it's famous for these portraits of their kings these gigantic basalt heads of which over a dozen are known for San Lorenzo and a smaller number for La Venta and other sites at first San Lorenzo is the great site it has no equals anywheres else inmates for America and then later lavinda curiously enough in the Maya area proper to the east these people a while of the Olmec were carving enormous stone monuments the the Maya themselves really didn't amount to much except when you get into about 600 BC in the Maya lowlands here of northern Guatemala in the southern part of the Yucatan Peninsula where we're getting the first evidences for really large-scale construction using limestone but this is work in progress right now and the future is going to hold all sorts of interesting possibilities there so the Olmec are the oldest these colossal heads have absolutely no prior evolutionary roots there are no tentative moving there's no tentative move towards making and carving and moving colossal heads by at least twelve thirteen fourteen hundred BC these people knew how to do this and they suddenly appear they do these things and we don't know anything about it the eye that we find that excuse me the first the first iconography appears at this point the first really recognizable gods and Carl Talbot who's sitting here in the front row teaches at the University of California Riverside is the premier person in the study of the origin of the Maya god's going back into the Olmec gods this is the young maize God the corn God in a rather infantile form a favorite theme of the Olmec found at San Lorenzo in fact that by our expedition back in the 1960s there I can't go into this tonight but it's an amazing civilization truly now there are opponents people who work in other parts of Mesa of America and say all this is just a sister civilization it's just like any anybody else's it's like saying that ancient Rome is just a sister civilization the Huns are you know the people up in England or in Norway were just as good as the Romans well that ain't true the same thing can be said about the the Olmec these people really created civilization as we know it after the the the destruction of San Lorenzo according to the radiocarbon dates about 900 BC and it was thoroughly destroyed the monuments were broken up buried cast-off levente which is to the north east of San Lorenzo in the state of Tabasco becomes the great site and you can see a very large pyramid was built here at La Venta here of earth and clay it's never really been excavated it's over it's about a hundred feet high nobody's ever been inside it to see whether there might be a mighty tomb and I will predict here you hear me now that there's going to be a great tomb in there somebody knew how to tunnel into this any rate during the La Venta period is when the great time of jade carving in early May so America takes by the the Olmec as you can see here in this wonderful mask at Dumbarton Oaks where Carver's of jade extraordinary jade carving be that this becomes the valuable for all of me so America from this time on not gold and all these things that appear late but Jade incorporated in their tombs worn in ceremonies this is a life-sized mask of carved Jade really and magnificent think of the maize God as Carl has shown who is a probable principal divinity of the Olmec well this brings us in that the that's in the early and middle pre-classic period up till about 400 BC then we enter into a period in which most of the really interesting discoveries in the Maya area as far as I'm concerned are being made right now wonderful discoveries have been made at a number of sites especially here in the k10 region of northern Guatemala and neighboring Mexico over the Mexican border and these are the principal sites this is a late pre-classic site in the Maya area a cubic Olmec area the site of e sapa el peru coming up oh you el mirador which i'm going to show you San Bartolo which I'm going to show you there is an amazing being found there every and every field expedition that's been made the great site I'll show you where it is again here just to remind you El Mirador is north of T call the call is right about here El Mirador is almost in Guatemala and in fact you can see a great site called calakmul over the border if you get on the highest pyramid in El Mirador and vice versa you can look back this is an amazing area I was lucky enough to be taken up there courtesy of Richard Hanson I told him like I go to El Mirador but I'll be damned if I'm gonna walk there two days over a bad trail in in two days of repaired trail back on foot with very little water and food you have to like everything with you I said I'm not gonna do it you give me a helicopter and I'll go by God he did and I went and it's amazing this is a map the whole site has been mapped by by dr. Hansen by Richard Hansen using the latest equipment but it is the largest site at largest ancient city in all of the Maya area that ever existed and it's extraordinarily early it reaches its height earlier than Tikal and watch Achtung that's Kofun at Palenque and all of these much better known classic Maya sites it's extremely early and extremely large the to this is this map National Geographic map will show you the main parts of it this is this is the one of the largest pyramids here the Tigre complex there are causeways linking it there's a big causeway not really shown well here that links it to the daunting pyramid which is the largest pyramid in meso America it's the largest pyramid and tallest pyramid in the new world and it's probably in terms of both the largest pyramid in the world larger than the Great Pyramid of in Egypt it's an amazing sight absolutely tremendous and it would take a hundred years to really excavate properly this is from a helicopter looking at the dontoh pyramid and you have to realize that the canopy the top of those trees of that of that jungle is about a hundred and fifty feet high so you can get an idea of how big the dontoh pyramid is it goes all the way down below the tree level I've climbed to the top it's really quite there's really nothing quite like it gigantic causeways in this area Oh everything is built of limestone doing it the hard way that is instead of placing the limestone blocks that they cut out this way as they've made the the pyramid going up that place them facing into the pyramid so they had to use at least two or three times the normal number of blocks to go in there but it gives these pyramids great stability this is really an extraordinary site here's a reconstruction done by a very the Rutledge of an extremely able artist whose work from the National Geographic on this particular thing of what El Mirador might have looked like at its height in the late pre-classic prior to let's say 100 AD probably around 200 BC with the T Great Pyramid here and in the distance that's the danta one that you saw this is a reconstruction of what it looked like everything covered with red hematite these enormous pyramids often crowned with three temples on the top we don't know who they're dedicated to with roofs that were made of perishable materials they had really put the famous Korbel Arch into view right then and we know that this is late pre-classic there are a number of sites in that area that are that old this is what we call the Mirador basin in northern and kind of northwestern Guatemala a bigger and if you stand on the dontoh pyramid or Tigre this one you can see popping up on the horizon the tops of pyramids of other cities that are almost as big it's like being on the Triboro bridge in New York and looking towards Manhattan I'm gonna kiss you you're really looking at something that's worth saying it's amazing and most of those other sites have hardly been touched by archeologists it's just so enormous what do you do with a place like this in these early these late pre-classic pyramids there's a tremendous amount of iconography very few cars stone monuments have been found at El Mirador unlike other late pre-classic sites particularly on the Pacific coast of Guatemala but what you do find up there are these pyramids or platforms with gigantic stucco masks of their gods flanking these inset stairways and these gods generally show a gigantic bird excuse me this particular guy here is really a bird a sort of anthropomorphic bird that's his great feat that sticks out he's either an eagle or a macaw or a vulture they're various interpretations of this these are his ear spools here his eyes here and but he's got gigantic claws coming out from each side this is probably an individual we now know of as a principal bird deity and he was the principal god of the peoples of the late pre-classic in the Maya area and I'll come they're really working hard on this now if you come to that symposium on Saturday you will hear David Stewart talking on the PVD or the principal bird deity but all of these of most of these sites of the late pre-classic going up into Yucatan into this area here in the Payton and elsewhere in the in the loewen's have these gigantic stucco masks and that's the iconography on which they've been working these days let me just go back and show you where this is now they're almost the most exciting sight although it's not as big as El Mirador here the San Bartolo in the northeastern Peyton right near the Bailey's border here nothing was known about this I 10 years ago until a young archaeologist named Bill Saturno who've been sent up to into this wild region up here to look for sites with car stone monuments and he never found them stumbled into San Bartolo by sheer chance and a tunnel had been made there's bill there a tunnel had been made into a back of a pyramid here by looters and he went in to get out of the famous story would have to get out of the Sun it with midday run out of water he was hot he was about to get sunstroke and whatnot and while he was in that tunnel he looked up and by god there was a mural looking out out on the bottom of a mural that the looters hadn't touched so he called in the National Geographic got more money and has been working there ever since with a really good team that again includes Carl sitting up in the front row doing the iconography of this site and their extraordinary there was inlaid pre-classic times on the back of a rather modestly sized pyramid put a room with a flat roof and it had murals running around for the four walls up above the level of the entrance doorway and they have turned out that the murals on two of the walls were in situ and in perfect condition were relatively perfect and the other two had been destroyed when they had filled in and torn down the whole top of the building to make another pair of it the whole thing in late pre-classic time so they've got a double puzzle they've got the this is from one of the intact walls which shows a young God who's got that black spot on his cheek who's perforating his penis right here with an enormous stick which was a form of auto sacrifice practiced by my Lords but he's a god than which God is he he's almost certainly one of the gods known in later times as a hero twins in Maya legend this is Bill their hair is Heather Hearst who has been drawing the entire mural set including the the fragments that are being put together that we're laying on the floor at half scale and she's she's a MacArthur award recipient she's really the best archaeology archaeological artist I think in the world there's hear her reconstruction of part of the north wall which shows what Carl has identified here as a young maize God with an Olmec face in his resurrection from the underworld being greeted by these young women and a young men over here bringing him food and water and they are going to dress him again as the maize God he died and went into the underworld in the great Maya legend that's recorded as a Popol Vuh the book of counsel of the keychain Maya and his he was slain his head hung in a tree magically impregnated a young lady of the order of a lord in the underworld and she gave birth to the hero twins in the upper world she was expelled from the underworld to the upper world was pregnant gave birth to the twins and then they come into the underworld again and after a series of magic encounters were the Lords of the underworld they managed to get their father they Mays God out and resurrect him and this is a favorite theme in my iconography from this time on and especially in the late pre-classic and especially here at San Bartolo it's an amazing series and I can't really go into the whole iconography but it's extraordinary if you take that Olmec mask from La Venta that's at Dumbarton Oaks and get it at the same scale as as the San Bartolo figure you can see that he's actually shown as a may as an Olmec maize God they knew who the Olmec were in the late pre-classic they were always harking back to this Olmec president the way we hark back to the Greeks and the Romans they were doing the same thing with the Olmec I don't think they ever forgot them all the way through the pose classic I won't go into that but that's a scheme in the Popol Vuh of the gods the old mother and grandmother and grandfather gods the creator gods who produced the maize God who impregnates lady blood in the underworld his head spits into her head and she then goes up to the upper world and produces the hero truth and what we're looking at here and they send Bartholomew Earl's the whole series of Hunan pose in various ritual activities including penis perforation and often in conjunction with the principal bird deity who is the spiritual counterpart of the grandfather god thick the Creator God himself known as each I'm not in the later Maya rather complex but we're getting a handle on it now this is the west wall a partial thing this is now being put together in which there's a whole series of world trees with the principal bird deity up here with various offerings being made by the various who Nabu gods down here and there are also here the first evidence for coronations of a Maya king down here and glyphs to go with it he is being given a special headdress that he's going to put on he's seated on top of a kind of a platform a scaffold that reached by a ladder something we find in classic Maya and here is a row of glyphs here most of which we still don't understand they're so early there's even earlier glyphs at San Bartolo here that go all the way back to at least 300 BC and earlier levels underneath the building with the murals and again except for this cliff here which is probably an early form of the glyph Wow for King we really cannot read these or to donate early that there's not enough of this to do anything with it the origins of Maya writing are still a puzzle and we just don't know but Maya writing is probably as old as any other writing anywhere else in Mesa America and there's a lot of new evidence coming out right now about this we do have Maya writing on objects and various collections this happens to be at Dumbarton Oaks it's Olmec on one side and the other side was recarved with a figure in Lake pre-classic times of a seated ruler and it actually describes his seating here shows the the rear end of somebody sitting down here and this is his name here which is repeated over here behind here this is again another earth lay pre-classic coronation thing now for the Classic Maya when we did that there how can I do this in one hour I'm gonna do my best there's so much to tell you about this this of course is from the famous Bonampak murals which you'll hear about probably from on Saturday from Mary Miller she's giving a kind of cleaner e address to everybody about of all of this she's been in charge of the phone park neural project that's of course dating from about 800 AD just about there these murals much much much much later than what we've been looking at there of course the Classic Maya are much much better known than any other people's probably of the entire new world because we can read their writing now they say 85% of all my lists have been translated it's hard to come to that but we know when the standard average Mayan inscription can be read pretty much in its entirety there are no more puzzles here it's a wonderful story that's been told many times and I hope that on I think it's on Friday we're going to have that two-hour film of how Maya writing was finally deciphered but so we can we know a lot about that we know less about the classic in the highlands because there almost no inscriptions whatsoever from the Classic Maya period all of the inscriptions basically come from this region here and there there are basically thousands of them and even in long texts on Maya pottery which tell us a lot of things of course Tikal has been it's one of the it's still being excavated it's not over now and they're really concentrating here because it's the classic period is so well known that because they're concentrating the Guatemalan archaeologists on the late pre-classic part of this whole thing big structures with the fake stucco masks right now it's apparent that the most of these big pyramids are also contained tombs the looters have known this all along they go right for them when they're looting of Maya site they hit the pyramids right away and go for the royal inscription so that huge amounts of looting has come there for instance the famous tomb of the guy has this fellow in herre house out jon kyl wheel who's buried at base level here late the most important late classic king of tikal who was engaged in a huge war with the king his bitter enemy the king of Calakmul to the north over and what's now Mexico that's his tomb contains a wealth of spondylus just what we don't get in these tombs is of course all the organic materials that were put into there if we only had proper preservation but you don't if we had preservation like they have on the coast of Peru you would find all the textiles in fine bark paper books folded up in there you'd find carved wood you'll find gourds you find basketry what we do know however from the latest analysis is that cylindrical vessels like this contain chocolate every cylindrical vessel that was put in a tomb probably had the chocolate drink in this this is the latest stuff I've I I thought I should have talked about chocolate tonight but chocolate was enormous ly important to these people it was the elite drink that was taken to seal all important diplomatic and marital contracts and everything else that that went on and it was a glue that really held Maya society together even though they're all had these independent kingdoms chocolate was what toasting and chocolate night banquets and so forth was the important thing this is some of the bone scenes that we found in a bunch of bones car in size bones that were found with this great king and here we find the maize God in his canoe probably being taken to the underworld and then he's going to come out of the underworld in his canoe and these are chalks rain gods fishing and then a captive welcome to this in a moment thanks to glyphic work done over a period of years going way back in the 20th century to the work let's say of Heinrich Berlin on the inscriptions we know that each important Maya polity or political unity each important Maya City had its own emblem glyph and here are some important ones there's many more that have been identified since then and once that was identified you could start and we once we knew from tatiana proskouriakoff work that this is history being recorded on the monument then you could start talking about Maya politics and the relationship between sites it's now enormous ly complex the Maya area was never an empire as sylvain as Morley had thought he called it the old Empire and the new Empire those never exist existed what you had you had cities of various powers and or lack of powers some of which lorded it over others some of which beat others at warfare some of which managed to establish diplomatic relations through wife exchange and things of this sort rather complex of things that of people like Simon Martin and Nikolai Gruber who made this particular diagram are here Tikal for instance had very bad relationships with calakmul constant warfare one would triumph and then the other two would triumph back and forth and they extended their tentacles around to other one of these policies what it looks like a lot now from the point of view of politics what was going on in central and northern Italy during the Renaissance same culture same civilization but different politics but this we are now getting a big handle on warfare unlike what Eric Thompson had thought when he wrote his general works on the mind warfare was constant in the Maya area and it went on from the very first from the late pre-classic even earlier all the way up through the Spanish conquest they were constantly at war with each other they were not a peaceful people at Morley and Eric Thompson had thought this is a bound captive Tony nah which is a wonderful sight really getting up into the highlands above Palenque it's got lots of wonderful sculpture almost three-dimensional in a great Museum at the site that's well worth a visit if you haven't been to Tony enough if you go to Palenque make sure you drive up the Tony not and he's identified who he is buying his glyphs who he was and where they got him from what particular warper Tony now was a very warlike place so they were constantly at war with each other a lot of the work in more recent years that's still being written up right now on Classic Maya sites is going on at copan in the east and Palenque in the West these are on the periphery of the Maya area but in many respects their enormous Lea important Kofun over here and Palenque here in the West on the peripheries of the Maya area a lot less stodgy than T colonists are in their art cupon specializing in three-dimensional limestone or track I'd sculpture and Palenque and beautiful stucco work and very delicately carved reliefs and they are really wonderful Campanas very exciting because it was a coke pond where my inist were able to demonstrate that the inscriptions which have been castigated by joyce marcus among others it's just being propaganda and made-up history where real history that the people mentioned on them actually existed and existed when the Maya said they did this is the dynastic record of 16 successive Kings alter cue here and here at copán these people seated on their own name glyphs here going around here from the earliest here to the latest earliest here to the latest here he's the first king of Kofun yesh Kokomo according to the inscriptions and the latest one who commissioned this one yosh pasa were these real kings and it so happens that by tunneling in from the cut riverbanks on the side here of the copán River putting tunnels into various levels in this great which area which is where the state temple of copán was they have found the whole dynastic succession in their king after king not all there but the really important ones including the first one right at base level this is Bob Shara from the University of Pennsylvania excavating what turned out to be the first king of all and his another one nearby of hid for almost certainly his wife in other words yes Kokomo who was importing who had come in from the West now that I'm not going to go into any great detail they're still being argued about here at II call and other important Maya sites like Oakland there are early dynastic records that show new Kings coming in from the West from some other place and the other place has to be Teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico when you're taken out outside of Mexico City the providing is you're taking out the charity work on which or 30 what gun which is the largest city ever in the new world and that were certainly in terms of population a great city out the early classic probably from about 150 AD maybe a little earlier on up till 600 AD when it was destroyed and so you find in these early tombs imported pottery from from that area that particular one stuccoed is a pure two or three walk on tripod base with which we know held chocolate in it because it's been analyzed as having chocolate there are two alkaloids in chocolate Thea of caffeine which you will know about that's the kick and coffee and theobromine which is peculiar to chocolate you find those two together and when they scraped the bottoms of these vessels to Edie it's chocolate and probably every vessel that looks like this once had chocolate in it so the teotihuacan influence on is now being worked on Lots we don't know about it as far as I'm concerned there was a Teotihuacan Empire there's plenty of evidence for this all kinds of explanations come from the Mayan is they can always find some kind of excuse you can't get a PhD unless you're gonna argue with somebody and basically they're taught barking up the wrong tree if there's every evidence that this was a mighty empire and that they control both of Maya Highlands and Maya lowlands in fact most of Mesoamerica at least for a hundred years probably longer and then it becomes more Maya as this thing wanes but they never forgot about Teotihuacan this was always a great city that they that they remembered at least the kings did now the Classic Maya collapse you can talk about this till the cows come home or people use the gas on this subject that I mean on and on and on with all kinds of weird theories like destroyed by earthquakes by this by that no civilization ever gets wiped out from one cause it's just like a natural species like like the Atlantic salmon I like to fish for Atlantic salmon they're in trouble everywhere all over the North Atlantic they may go extinct as in the wild form everything is impinging upon the Atlantic salmon now overfishing netting by native peoples at the mouths of the rivers fish farming is doing horrible stuff global warming you name it it's all coming together they can't recover and that's what happened to the Classic Maya that's a story as you can see this is an old one from one of Morley's early books a wonderful book the ancient Maya and it shows the number of monuments that were produced by 20-year periods approximately 20-year periods all through my history this is the dates ad and you can see it starts taking off this is where the Teotihuacan influences in here and it comes up here and reaches a peak about 700 or so and then in the eighth century boom it starts going like that until finally by 909 that's the end that's the last Classic Maya monument with a date on it so there was a collapse there's no question about it a place like Tikal may have looked like this at the end a hundred years after its basic abandonment tomorrow I'm being taken down to see those wonderful Carlos Janna murals are down in San Diego I've never seen them but this is actually based on this one of Tikal in its decline but people were camping out there still but it's gone it was a huge cataclysm that happened to people destruction everywhere the monuments have been destroyed eyes gouged out of monuments they've been smashed up mouths chipped away something big had happened and the area was most of the central Maya area was abandoned nothing northern my area but the central one so what are the causal factors I've put them up here you can read them and all of those things we know took place every single one of them there's good evidence for every one of those things most of the work has going on on the warfare environmental destruction and drought the environmental destruction is clear from cores that have been made in lakes in the Pape in and northern Guatemala etc sedimentation taking place they had cut down all the forests basically there was nothing left probably just decorative trees by this time I mean it was stripped and Mexico is stripping the area right now just like that Guatemala started this is Guatemala the Guatemalan border here this is Mexico in here this is a great jungle that once covered that area that only in places like El Mirador now in northern Guatemala and the Maya had done did this themselves back in the late classic from about 600 on there was nothing left and we know that they had overextended themselves it's a perfect case of environmental destruction leading to bad things tremendous amounts of warfare what's going on this is a Maya vase it's been unrolled so that you can see what's going on here there are these my has many many scenes like this on lake classic pottery this is a cylindrical vase has been unrolled by Justin Kerr with his Hasselblad camera that's been especially devised with it wonderful record that Justin has given us of Maya life Maya hieroglyphs and everything by unrolling all of these vases in public and private collections and this is from the lake classic and it shows stripped captives this guy here being naked was a considered terrible among the Maya that they've been stripped and they're going to be taken off where they're going to be tortured obviously and by warriors and then then finally dispatched you didn't want to fall into the hands of the Mayan fact I'd much rather be a captive of the Aztecs any day than of the Maya but the Aztecs that didn't torture people as far as we know we know the Maya did there's excellent evidence for the effect on this unplanted Maya site this is something that Arthur Demarest they're one of his publications who was in charge of the excavations at those Feliz in Guatemala and originally this part of the site of those people islook like this until this stepped-up warfare you know this before ad 761 after eighty 76-61 there was tremendous warfare going a really stepped up and they started to put defensive Palisades and everything around these buildings abandoning others and moving in the settlements inside there it's like you know putting the the wagons in a circle to keep the Redskins off in Wild West movies exactly the same thing what's going on here at those fields and there's wonderful evidence for this there's a nearby cycle our TECA which was totally demolished before they could really get out with all their stuff so everything has been left in situ in burned buildings and whatnot Takeshi no Monta now the University of Arizona has done wonderful excavations there it's a kind of a Pompeii where everything was just left there so you can really see what these buildings were being used for that's ongoing research - there's our TECA up there and it's it's really been here it is here it's been was totally demolished burned to the ground and everything there's the site of yashi Alana long me it was a mess ain't that River there's a structure there that is covered with arrowheads or dart points absolutely covered the Japanese have dug that and you know I mean there's hundreds thousands of arrow has a rain had rained down on this place at this point so there was warfare I can assure you so that was a very important thing and then maybe revolution I mean Thompson was the first one to come up with this idea here's a real Tory if there ever was one talking of that revolution but it almost certainly did happen because you find for instance I'm the bonum Park murals here which are about the time the the collapse is really getting going the eyes of almost all of the kings of the important figures here have been chipped out very carefully sometimes the mouths a bit chipped out on the monuments - you're probably the same thing on the steely these guys really really where I think disposed of at this thought probably including the scribes who were producing the codices old libraries went up at this time we've only got four surviving books and they all date to the post classic afterward we don't have any of the thousands of books we know must have been in use in classic month in the Classic Maya Eric they had home libraries if we could just get two or three new ones all our ideas about the Maya will change someday in a dry cave and bellies or someplace like that somebody's going to find a box with intact codices in it but uh I may never live to see that but it's going to happen the northern area people are trying to argue now why this happened but the northern area didn't suffer this at least for a while we have what's called a terminal classic at the very end of the last century or so of the classic it it has a kind of fluorescence and especially in the northwest among the pool hills of Yucatan that's where you get the great sight of who schmuck Abaza lobna etcetera which are really very very beautiful site with lots of inscriptions usually in the lentils in a rather different kind of record Chichen Itza is another one that is flourishing in the terminal classic in a site we call this style that poke some of the best architecture ever produced it had a heavy influence on let's say Frank Lloyd Wright was found at small it was heavily influenced by these buildings around here and some of his architecture he was wild about this kind of Maya architecture he would not have been so wild about the architecture of the Payette n that's for sure so then we enter into the post classic Maya and here the big argument is and I will say it is an argument Carl and I are on one side and all the properly thinking people who worked at Tula for instance and central Mexico think identically with it that there were real Toltecs a people who had arisen in central Mexico after the ruin of Teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico and they flourished they built a capital city called Tolan or tool as it's called today here north of Mexico City Mexico cities about here that's the valley of Mexico there is about where Teotihuacan is remember they came all the way down and took the Maya area over now in the Postclassic beginning probably around more or less 900 there are now as no historic accounts about the Toltecs who the Aztecs considered their predecessor the people who had given them civilization there are people who deny many Mayan is deny the Toltecs ever lived oh no they're just they're basically Mayas have wandered up there it's complex to say well he has text thought they existed why shouldn't we and he's right I've never changed my mind about the Toltec I think there was a period in the Maya area at Chichen itzá where the Toltecs really did invade and really took over at northern yucatán and probably also took over part of the Guatemala Chiapas Highlands down here but chichen especially and there's a Toltec period there as far as I'm concerned this battle is still going on and you know I've never changed my mind about Chula and the position of the Toltecs there's a toltec art style that emphasizes these tough looking warriors with pillbox shape the hats the famous Atlantean warriors here and built a pyramid like this pyramid be at Tula with these great standing warrior figures on top with a flat roof building then these colonnades which is difficult of toltec architecture which is not to be found before the Toltecs came along and according to the ethno historic records from both central Mexico and from the Maya area the Toltec seem to have gone through the coast of Veracruz and according to the Maya sources a guy called Coco con the feathered serpent probably at old Ted King took his people across into Yucatan invaded and conquered them and established a new capital again at the old capital of chichen itza this of course is the famous castillo which was dug back in the 1930s by the mexicans and you're looking from the temple of the Warriors which carne had dug and excavated also at the same time in the 1920s and 30s you're looking at a choc mall here I think a sacrificial figure here that probably contained or heart offerings and whatnot looking out now there are people who say this is just developed from the captive figures of the Maya I don't think so it's typical of northwestern Mexico in particular Michoacan Guerrero and so forth and you find them at Tula I think they're typically toltec I think the whole thing is Toltec even including this four-sided pyramid there's another pyramid as you know inside there where you find the famous red Jaguar thrown in there with Jade inlaid eyes I'm not going to get into the chichen bit here but i really do think that there was a pole take chichen unfortunately Carnegie was there for God 17 years excavating and we know less about chichen itza and are there any other site of any note in meso America it's white of the fact that maybe a million tourists see it every year we don't know nothing about it really it's chronology basically it's to me it's still a big mystery unfortunately well this is from the Carnegie excavations in the temple of the Warriors the great murals here and I'm pretty sure you're looking here at the Toltecs invading by water along the coast probably the Campeche coast of a Maya area Maya town and you can see the typical Maya houses here of this dates God knows to what probably about a thousand ad would be good there incidentally there's one of these murals that shows blonde blue-eyed captives with basically white skin being sacrificed by Toltec warriors when I was a kid I read I was a great devotee of Prince Valiant and I remember well one episode in Prince Valiant where he comes down to Yucatan with his fellow Vikings and in faith and one can laugh but thousand ADEs good time to have vikings comes up nobody's really explained those blond blue-eyed people thompson said all were there devotees of the sun god you know were there yellow hair well I don't know but at any rate more murals have been discovered at other sites particularly my upon which took over after chichen itza fell there a lot of ethno historic accounts about that downfall of chichen itza my upon is the kind of a 15th century rather grungy ruined they've reconstructed the main pyramid which we know from spanish sources was dedicated to Kukulcan the feathered serpent and many many effigy incense burners have been found in conjunction with the elite buildings in this little site that is surrounded by a great big wall it's a walled site where everybody had to live inside my upon compared to what if you're used to Classic Maya size it isn't much but they found wonderful murals here quite recently that have not really been fully published as far as I know so this this is an ongoing site Tulum was seen by the Spaniards in you they went along the coast came over from coastal Mel and Tulum was still occupied other sites along here they saw people running around they call it the grande Cairo they thought it was as big as Cairo well forget it it's small Cairo in those days was enormous bigger than any any city in Europe by a longshot and but it's a wonderful site it was loved to death in the last sort of four or five decades when I first went to this place in 1948 there was the guardian here a Maya Indian this was independent Maya back in 1948 the talking cross Maya really they owned the place and they the Guardian had a book that showed how many people had come in that year five other people had been in 1948 to this night now what is it fifty thousand a day come in from their cruise ships and God knows what they roped off a lot of it it's a beautiful place and very very late occupied right up and through the Cong through the period of the Spanish conquest I think and wonderful murals inside all of them all of these rooms of plenty of iconography there incidentally if you want to go dipping here biggest sharks I've ever seen we're going along here so the Spanish conquest fund gotta end somewhere the Spanish conquest it took a long time to conquer the Maya and we have just loads and loads of course documents now because of that the want a hose the whole family there were uncles and sons of God knows what the monta hosts were the principal cork east authority well it took them a long time because the Maya never had an empire like the Aztecs did you couldn't go to the central part of the empire the way they as Cortes did right to the heart and grabbed what the kizomba the Emperor there was nobody to grab because there were all these little independent principalities at this point and forever this is the way the Maya weren't so they get they take over one but the others were still in revolt and the the Maya unlike the Aztec were two things like fighting at night they fought guerrilla actions for a completely different than the Aztecs they didn't like pitch battle they kind of reminds one of Vietnam I've to admit they were they fought like that and I can tell you it's hard it took decades to finally conquer the lion it wasn't until the 1690s that they conquered the last mark Kingdom in the Yucatan Peninsula Tyus oldness now it underneath Flores in northern Guatemala where they were still had in the late 17th century still using hieroglyphic books so what did the Spaniards do in Photoshop fun can really burn a codex what the Spaniards did was burned the knowledge of the Maya of their own past they burned hundreds perhaps thousands of codices we don't know how many because anybody who wrote who could read this stuff was under suspicion of idolatry and I'm not going to go into vetti if you've seen that film that film is now available breaking the Maya code to our film it's now out you can get it if you anybody interested I'll tell you where to write in it's a wonderful film tells you the whole story and the guy who was responsible for the some of the worst destruction was a guy from whom also ironically we got a lot of our knowledge about the Maya and that's Bishop Diego de Landa the first franciscan bishop of Yucatan who wrote the the account of the things of Yucatan relation then of course is a Yucatan in which he tells you how they wrote and here are not going to get into this this was in fact the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone it's basically a by script you need a vise grip really to crack a ancient script which is what shampo Lyon had with a rosetta stone this is a by script in Spanish in Maya here the Maya hieroglyph and every one of those 27 hieroglyphs there has proved to be accurate and the the the decipherment was the basic decipherment of the lab the linguistic part of this a real decipherment is when you can actually pronounce what you're reading in the language in which it was written and we only were able to do this thanks to this Russian scholar Yuri Kamarov I gave a big talk on him last week in Washington really an amazing guy and he used the London elf abet through great avail here but you must remember that the Spanish conquest everybody said well what happened to the Maya they're all going now I said well there's six or eight million of them still around who hasn't been told that they're all gone but my I continued still live they've had terrible recent history and not only in Guatemala but elsewhere as the dominant culture Hispanic culture has overwhelmed them whether in the form of military or massacres or economic oppression god knows what but there's still plenty of them around and they're getting to know about their past reintroduce to their pets this is a great Salalah market so Lola and they're at Lake atitlán in Guatemala this beautiful beautiful lake and many of these people still continue their old ritual activities this is a shaman at the site of who taught lon and a tunnel that's underneath the main temple they're praying with incense Maya incense palm for a family that's come there to pray with him there's lots of this going on a great deal of Maya culture still goes on underneath a facade of Latin America and Catholicism it's it's it's it's there and it's through them that many of the insights into Maya thought and iconography and all sorts of things that's come about so this kind of research is going on now with a cooperation of the Maya and I'll stop there and with beautiful Guatemala that's Lake atitlán don't forget to go there if you haven't seen it thank you [Applause]

Channel: Distinctive Voices

Views: 50,563

Rating: 4.7888889 out of 5

Keywords: distinctive, voices, national, academy, academies, science, sciences, engineering, engineer, institute, medicine, medical, uci, irvine, uc, beckman, center, nas, educational, maya, ancient, archaeology, archaeological, society, history, historian, historians, epigraph, epigraphy, epigrapher, civilization, new, world, culture, cultural, michael, coe, yale, university

Id: LwR-TKbieEk

Length: 59min 55sec (3595 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2010