The Classic Maya Collapse: New Evidence on a Great Mystery

and so to the intrepid dr simon martin uh thanks to simon for stepping into this virtual forum um simon as many of you will know is associate curator and keeper in the american section at the penn museum he receives his phd from the institute of archaeology university college london and holds an m.a from the royal college of art in london he is a specialist on maya hieroglyphic writing with research that focuses on history politics and religion since 1994 he has done field work at the site of kalakmal in mexico and is known for the co-authored books chronicles of the mayan kings and queens from 2000 and courtly art of the ancient maya from 2004. his new book is now out in the uk he says he hasn't actually seen it himself yet and it's on its way to here here to the us entitled ancient maya politics a political anthropology of the classic period 150 to 900 ce and includes a wealth of new historical information based directly on simon's groundbreaking decipherment of maya monuments certainly something to look forward to he has already also curated exhibitions at the national gallery of art in washington dc and at the penn museum including maya 2012 where he played a key role simon was also the lead curator on our spectacular new mexican and central american gallery which opens the public this past november on top of all this simon is the 2019-2020 holder of the prestigious j.i kislak chair for the study of the history and cultures of the early americas in the john w klug center at the library of congress so please join me now in both congratulating and welcoming dr simon martin who will talk to us about the classic maya collapse new evidence on a great mystery simon thank you steve um i hope everyone can see me and hear me well um i am going to share my screen well hello everybody um welcome to downtown uh philadelphia um i know we have some international viewers we have people watching uh in central europe um and all the way over to the west coast of the us so there's some people um staying up very late and some people still early in the afternoon i'm going to talk today about one of the most remarkable um massive strange social disintegrations that the world has ever seen i'm going to talk for about an hour or so and take you all through the the essential background to that uh the dominant theories uh and some of the new data which is beginning to transform our understanding of that event okay so somewhere around the year 800 um and all the way until the early 10th century so sometime just after 900 classic maya civilization came to an end and what we're seeing here is uh tikal the site which penn museum excavated from 1956 to 1969 represented a couple of decades or so after the collapse so the city is no longer maintained it's not being whitewashed or weeded or swept and the jungle is beginning to come back because uh it would soon sweep over every maya settlement so the part of the world i think um most people here will know um we're talking about the toe of mexico guatemala belize and honduras and this is a view of just a selection of the enormous numbers of massive maya sites and they peaked and they reached their largest population and greatest refinement in this era the 600 to 800 and this is when we see the most naturalistic and and finely wrought maya art architecture this very um precise rectilinear style uh temples and plazas and ball courts and palaces fine working in very hard materials like jade and other kinds of green stones incredibly delicate work here with um clint this is chert so this has been expertly mapped to produce these very elaborate shapes and many many painted plates and cylinder vases and the remarkable thing about them is the way in which they give us insights into my mythology so there's a wealth of material here which takes us into the mindscape of the ancient maya incredibly valuable from that point of view and of course we have this enormously elaborate calendar system something which was began to be worked out in the 19th century and will form a kind of framework and skeleton for the chronology we're going to be talking about and the writing system uh this is something which um began to be deciphered really only in the 1980s this is when the phonetic decipherment of my writing began and it is an ongoing process we're still deciphering new signs uh we still have some way to go but the majority of texts can now be read with a fair degree of certainty so in that period um 600 to 800 we have the maximum extent of maya civilization the the highest populations the greatest social sophistication this is again this view of tikal but of course that doesn't exist anymore and it came to an end fairly rapidly this is what you see if you want to look at maya architecture in the flesh this is what happens if you walk into the forests of central mexico or central america you're going to see mounds like this completely indistinct fallen buildings even when we've cut back the brush and we're seeing here these larger temple structures they're so completely covered they're so part of the landscape that it's easy very easy to mistake them for natural and they were rediscovered uh only in the 19th century and this is when some intrepid explorers um people from europe and the united states started going down to that area started traveling discovering new sites doing wonderful illustrations and later on photography as the brush as the trees as the vines were cut back and this civilization was brought to light once again now one of the things that they found a whole category of things are the maya monuments and here we see one at color more strangled broken this is what most uh maya monuments on the surface look like and this is one of the reasons that we need to do archaeology to find well-preserved things that are beneath the surface but nonetheless um there's lots and lots of information even on stones that look like this and from that we've been able to piece together at least part of the story i'm going to be telling this evening now um this classic period begins um as steve mentioned about 150 but the earliest monument that we have um comes from tikal it's discovered by penn and it's dated to 292. this is in the the maya long count system um and very briefly um the way that works is that we have units up here which are of 400 years units here which are about 20 years uh here single years and then 20 day months and individual days so in the maya numerical system um bars are five and dots are one so we have eight you can see and then twelve and then fourteen and eight and fifteen uh and that's the way we notated that today uh eight twelve fourteen eight fifteen and through some quite elaborate um calculations and a lot of hard work by many scholars we can align that with a high degree of certainty to the year to 92. now um the other end of my um carved history in the lowlands um comes at tanina which is actually on the beginning of the highlands and that is about 600 years later so that gives us here um the units of 10 you can see the two bars which make 10 uh and then four and then these signs are zeros so we have one missing off the bottom what it's notating is 10 4 0 0 0 and that equates to 909 and this is the last dated long count monument there are a few later sometimes arguable dates um but this is the lot the last long count date in this form now after that um my writing continues it continues into a period we call the post classic and didn't die out until the time the spanish arrived but already in this era you can see a massive change and some sites are erecting monuments like this one this is a site called yeshom uh in the northern lowlands uh and this has a long count it sort of begins as a long but everything here is gobbledygook this is nonsensical um so this is a monument put up to look like writing but it isn't and i think it's it's really profound in telling us the ways in which writing was still highly valued um but at this place at least there was simply no one who was literate anymore so this is a full display i did recently um which shows uh the number of dated monuments um for all these each of these eras so we start here in this this period is the early classic from um 300 to 600 then the late classic from 600 to 800 and then this last century here some people call the terminal classic which i tend to avoid i i just refer to it as the 9th century so we can see arc of course where we reach a peak around the middle of the 8th century we're undoubtedly missing monuments around here because we find broken early classic monuments deposited deposited inside structures so many of those have still to be found i'm sure that they won't reach this kind of peak but they at least would probably fill out some of this this area here so let's look at the sort of heart of the central southern lowlands uh and this is a selection of the dates which are terminals so these are the last carved monument dates in the long count system uh and they vary from uh about 790 to uh i showed earlier on so this is covering just over 100 years uh and in that went from uh peak population the greatest artistic achievements to desolation now um of course archaeology has a big part to play in this um chronology we have from the epigraphy and that gives us remarkable to the day accuracy but um we rely very much especially on sites that don't have inscriptions um to discover their fate through archaeology and through accounts of ceramics and architecture um there are a very still fairly loose but nonetheless very interesting population graph like this and you can see how closely it matches that monument count from the previous chart so we have a sort of growth period here in the earth um and a peak again around this same uh period here in the mid 8th century before a very rapid decline so let's look at some of these theories um now we'll realize that my civilization came to an end which they discovered very early on um there's been many ideas and and some are much better than others and i'm going to mention um as many as i can but it really it is quite as scratching than really only the surface i've certainly left out um lunatic ones so um various people have argued that they're sort of psychological factors sort of psycho cultural factors um and one of them is simply that there's tremendous growth and energetic civilization sort of ran out of steam it's kind of cultural exhaustion um and with that sometimes it's this idea of determinism so there may have been something for example um in the maya calendar that said that all the cities should be abandoned maybe there was some oracle which told the maya fortold uh the end of the maya and they sort of conveniently and unhappily went along with this i think that there's no reason to believe any of these now loosely gathered under what we could call biological um is things like population growth so this again is is um where the whole society is put under stress by simply being too many people um with too little food and and as we'll discuss it a little bit more later on but there's good reason to think that um we know the jungle is a very difficult place to grow food now the other sort of vaguely biological um idea is pathology so disease um and this is a a reproduction of a version of a scene from an aztec so this is very late um and not from the maya area and it's showing as far as i know i think smallpox and of course this was diseases brought by the europeans by the spanish when they came to the new world and there's lots of experts who have severe doubts whether pathology epidemics have so much power um in the americas um because so much of the the so many of the diseases we suffer from uh come through uh animals come through uh our livestock and in the maya area and throughout mesoamerica there simply wasn't that kind of interaction with captive domesticated animals however um i guarantee um for reasons you might be able to guess that pathology will in some way come back to the fore i imagine it's a new wave of enthusiasm for looking at ancient american diseases now um we sort of get into the ones which are are more unpopular and had the most golly attention um and these are sort of vaguely social but they're all things to do with conflict beginning uh in particular um in the 20th century the idea that there was a mass revolt that the the people rose up against their tyrannical rulers uh took over the sites um killed uh the elite and this led to a general collapse in society a very sort of different take on the idea of revolt um is the second one on the list which is the idea of a noble's revolt so this is where the sort of upper classes are rebelling against the actual the divine or semi-divine kings and their rebellion is something that destabilized maya society and led to the collapse then um we have the idea of invasion um which had its um heyday back in particular 1960s we'll hear we'll hear more detail about all of these and then finally into nissan warfare so internal mire against maya conflict and i should stress that you know in the old days we used to think a lot about the idea of single causes and that is a very unfashionable idea today today we think much more about multiple causes so it could indeed be a combination of any of the factors that i'm mentioning tonight um and some others that we don't know and that simply there isn't one um prime mover that isn't one single magic bully which took them down but it's something much more intricate and something much more into interlocking so let's first um look at peters negras this is um the site in guatemala where penn worked excavated in the 1930s and one of the things that penn found was this uh royal bench this is a throne for the rulers of piedras negras and we can see on the front there's uh inscriptions um and then it's carved back with these two faces and it's actually their two eyes here this is a big monster face with figures coming out of the eyes now these faces are completely reconstructed because the whole bench was found smashed into pieces and this is the niche where that throne used to sit and the legs came out here and then these are all blocks smash into pieces so somebody whether it's a noble whether it's a commoner uh or whether it's an invader uh took peters negros apart um in in at least in when it comes to the royal sanctuaries like this one now another thing that which ties into the idea of the sort of kind of uprising against the elite is the defacement of monuments here we have a one from cancun in guatemala and you can see that the sort of the faces have been bashed in now you can certainly find monuments like this but in all honesty there really isn't very many and there are many sites where perfectly untouched monuments um were never in any way attacked or or defaced and i think the idea that this is evidence for a particular uprising is is extremely weak and we shouldn't really pay any attention to that now this idea of the the nobles revolt um it partly comes from the ways in which architecture and wealth were changing hundred years or so of classic civilization at this time uh the nobles are building bigger building and more luxurious ones so but the main image here is from the region of ryobek and this is um a part of the maya world where multiple elite residences suddenly spring up so we lose the focus on a central royal court uh and some you know smaller subsidiary it becomes very hard to distinguish a royal court from a noble court that they all seem to be pretty much on the same level and for this to happen there must be a financial and economic the more wealth staying in the hands of nobles rather than going into down here the insect image uh is from kopan and uh inside these buildings this is a part of the site called sepulturas we very elaborately carved thrones and so it's not just the magnificence of the building they're also commissioning their own art and uh this which comes from the region of of yash chilan is an unidentified site shows the new prominence of these nobles so on the right hand side we have not a king but a subsidiary law the king is over here but the noble is taking the prestige position this right hand is uh right hand side is where the most important person stands and for them to appear in in in this kind of position along with kings is some innovation in this period again possibly a sign that nobles and kings are recalibrating the power between them so let's move on and talk about cebal up the usama center into a new river system called the passion and to the idea of invasion now this also has a pen connection because uh our former director the uh much respected and loved jerry sabloth worked as an underground well as a graduate student at sabah in the 1960s and he and and as well as dick adams working at a nearby site found lots of things which to them suggested foreign influence um this is either one from sabaan it's an unusual style we have elements here that we have not seen before um some of which you could say are have appeared earlier in my area but they become much more prominent and much stranger the inscriptions are pretty standard but a lot of these motifs and these ways of putting iconography together are different some are in a style which is much more typical of the um gulf coast area so this is beyond the maya realm to the west central mexico but particularly where uh central mexico comes down to the gulf gulf of mexico so these kinds of images and this kind of flowing here is much area new forms of ceramics come in so the great tradition during the classic period had been painted um polychrome ceramics those um pretty much disappear and about 800 and after that we have these mold-made vessels now one um this one here was found at cebar but we have one in our collection um so in the newly installed gallery we have one which was made from um the same mold as this um and the doubtless many were made so these were mass-produced this was the whole point about molding as opposed to hand painting which was obviously each one was one the firing of a polychrome ceramic is very very elaborate and highly you need tremendous experience uh vessels like this once you actually have the mold are very very easy to produce really show a drop in expertise now this vessel very last painted polychromes and the style is already losing a lot of the elaborate um work that we had in the classic period it's earlier in the classic period excuse me and but what i'm pointing out here is the the fact that here we have um pretty normal hierarchy but here we don't these are day signs but not maya day signs they're day signs in a central mexican system and here they're not serving as a date they're actually serving um as a name they are part of this name here so we have a name which is part composed of myoglyphs and part using a calendrical system from outside the maya area and this was also seen as being a pivotal piece of the puzzle another thing uh was architecture so we have new architectural forms uh we have c-shaped buildings that's a ground plan in the states sort of an extended u shape or c shape um and particularly these circular buildings but there's never that many of them um but they're a real departure from things that we see in the classic period so the idea is that the great usama sinter river leading on to the passion and to the whole central patent was a highway where people could have approached from the west um new societies or new to the maya area societies perhaps militaristic societies that overwhelmed the maya and this was the idea um not just of the archaeologists i mentioned but also uh sir eric um thompson thompson was the the sort of the doyan he was the sort of the great thinker of the whole middle 20th century he was a particular proponent of the idea that all the strange features in the maya area that come in in the 9th century are the result of invasion so let's mention now this whole the idea of internecine warfare and mention these two other sites tospilas and aguateka now warfare had always been me uh warfare had always been a part of my society and and that really is no no innovation uh is that this gained in intensity it gained in destructiveness and some of the rules by which uh warfare was conducted were abandoned and warfare became more destructive and we certainly see lots of signs for increased warfare now these are two um images both of um the center of dos pilas you can recognize that it's actually the same view at the top we have what it in the uh 700s and down below what it would have looked like in the 800. so what's happened is that a sort of village has formed in the middle of the plaza and they have stripped the stone from the great temples to make these concentric walls around the site so it's really just a little village which has defended itself with this double wall system nearby at aguateka we have some really explicit evidence so uh they were building large wall systems and in fact we know that they were under construction because um quite a few of them were still incomplete and presumably were in the act of building against a particular enemy and that enemy overwhelmed aguateka around 800. so this is a national geographic view of the storming of aguateka and that site is like a it's sort of the maya version of pompeii when the archaeologists um takeshia namata working there started excavating the buildings they found the content still intact so smashed and burned because the buildings had been brought down but things still in their original locations they also found bodies people simply lying around and it looks as if after this um ferocious attack the site was completely abandoned nobody came back nobody buried the bodies no one even retrieved some of the valuable objects it was completely finished as a site so um the idea of internecine warfare internal warfare is one of the two main paradigms active today for the collapse of my civilization now there are others um and we have ecological ones so we have this relationship between uh the maya and their environment one of them of which there is some evidence in some places is soil exhaustion and then deforestation these are sort of predicated on the ideas of maya subsistence being what's called sweden agriculture and this is what uh maya farmers today do they will burn down new or forest areas they will plant maize but the nutrients are do not last very long so after a number of years those fields have to be abandoned you have to move on somewhere else while that store recovers now for reasons we also come to there's really no chance that that was the system that ancient maya civilization used deforestation uh comes into the same general category and i'll really talk about these things in a minute but uh at the time that jared diamond was creating his well-known book about the collapse of societies those were very uh important thoughts they were it was the idea that the maya had destroyed their own environment and this is something that diamonds picked up um you know referring to some quite legitimate academic sources but it was very much an idea of its time and today very few people think the maya exhausted their environment in fact there's lots of evidence that they were excellent designers of their own ecological system the ways in which they were building terraces and check dams and canals and reservoirs um were really quite intricate and we only have evidence of that um in recent times so uh the maya were not they're were not destructive of their environment they were if anything they were fantastic users and very very efficient users of what ostensibly is a very poor environment so here of course we have modern scenes of the forest being burnt back and today tragically this is really mostly for cattle farming so this is where the the jungle is really is destroyed and this is really considerable problem with the destruction of central american nature uh now one of the other parts of this were lake core sediments so this is drilling down in the heart of lakes to show all the runoff that's come from the land and how it's been deposited in in lakes and this shows that there was a considerable runoff in these kind of periods again this was seen to be a destruction of the soil and evidence that the farming was becoming more difficult i think today we tend to think that this is just simply a sign of success this this is was the inevitable result of the mass intensive farming that was going on and in any case this is fairly patchy there's lots of areas where this kind of big runoff has never been detected uh so sort of the real large-scale natural kind of ideas uh i find it very hard to believe but some people really did think that maya civilization came to an end by earthquake um there were a couple of places where it looks as if you can see the remains or fractures caused by genuine earthquakes why this would lead to the collapse of a civilization i don't know um but that was suggested and then we have hurricanes as another and then general climatological explanation so i'll skip over earthquakes and look at hurricanes because hurricanes are potentially extremely damaging now we're used of course to these big systems barreling up through the gulf of mexico and they don't often come into the maya area or at least not today but there's lots of signs that the maya were worried about this because if you look at the map today um you'll find very very few major settlements on the belizean coast it looks as if they um had a real interest in staying away from that coast and it could well be because of batterings by hurricanes now the real problem with hurricanes though is not so much people it's agriculture um a hurricane came through the maya area in uh the 20th century and was recorded to have destroyed 98 of all the maize that was growing in the patten the central area at that time now of course you know there's not very many people living there at that time um but if you imagine that on an intensive farming system and one which is very finely balanced with an essential need for for the food coming in for as we will discover very large populations then a bad storm at just the wrong time could have been um could have been very disastrous now the idea that this would have killed off everyone i think is is very unrealistic so what we're talking about here is is more the disruption of society the the idea that the the kings have let uh society down they the gods are no longer protecting people and and so really it's what for men's maybe some of these other things like uh internal warfare class warfare all of these things again maybe multi-course or not single cause now the big one here is drought and um drought has become the most uh favored paradigm for the destabilizing of classic maya civilization now strangely the reason uh we know that one of the reasons we know that and the way we find out about it is going underground the maya area is riddled with caves this is this is a limestone shelf where the water tunnels down and forms um rivers uh caverns uh deep cave systems now into those of course filter water and these create static tights and static mites now when we cut those or when experts cut them they are essentially just like dendrochronology these are like looking at tree rings but what's happening is they're deposits they've been coming down obviously this is on its side but the water would be trickling down or down here or down there depending on whether it's a static tight or sonic mite and depositing um calcium so through this you can count back um in time and look for maybe certain kinds of markers certain kinds of maybe volcanic eruptions leaving certain extra elements in the atmosphere ones in which you can calibrate these rings with precise years now this is not by any means a simple process um one has to take into account many factors including um the whole nature of the rock which the water is filtering through but in theory and if it's done correctly it will tell you how much water was falling how much rainfall there was in any given year in fact not even every year indeed every season and in theory we could get down um to every month so there's tremendous potential uh in analyzing um these speleothems as a technical term and i think once we have um each one of these really cost a tremendous amount of money time and labor and laboratory analysis so we only have in the region of four or five of these sets of data once we have 50 once we have covered uh all the maya area then i think we'll have an incredibly accurate and important record about rainfall what this shows is a lot of variations so we have high rainfall and we have droughts and you can see that it's really bouncing all over the place all the time there is a very very severe drought here but you can see that it's actually quite a bit later than the maya collapse so the date that we're talking about is around here this is much later so if one of these peaks somewhere around there um was the destabilizing factor it has to be predicated on other things for example that um the level of population becomes so high that my society become uniquely vulnerable so this is um has to be factored in as something which would make a drought that destructive not all of these studies agree so we're having to average out um late course settlements um speedy fm's from different regions eventually as i say i think we'll come to something very accurate at the moment there's variability so precisely finding one particular drought that could have been the killer i think is still still not quite there but nonetheless if you were to ask most maya scholars today they would say that drought is very likely to be some kind of factor the evidence suggests that these are multi-year droughts and if you have a big shortfall and rain going on for four five six years then this could seriously destabilize society now what i'm going to do now is move on so this so the spilly fm data is part of this new evidence this is part of the the new insights we're getting through um archaeology and technology now another one which is um happening at the same time and is is equally remarkable is a system called lidar so this is airborne laser scanning and those of you who came to the lecture i gave a couple of years ago called the urbanized jungle was one that particularly talked about lidar what we're looking at here is a google earth view of tcar so in the center is the central plazas temple 1 temple 2 north acropolis out here the big temple 4 and here the plaza of the seven temples etc etc but still lots of of forest um cover what lidar does by using uh a laser in an aircraft which which penetrates the canopy gets down to ground level reflects back and uses lots of fancy software processing what you can do is that so that is precisely the same view except with lidar rather than with normal photography so you can imagine what kinds of insights are possible once we can look at the terrain in that kind of detail and there are many things we can do there are many different kinds of filters there's different ways of looking at soil there's ways of combining this with other kinds of gis and measuring different forms of slope and analyzing different soils and in particular looking for permanent features created by the maya so terracing reservoirs and particularly structures including defensive structures and some of the really new and exciting work um is on field systems so this is where the whole old idea about sweden agriculture is called slash and burn has to come to an end because we can see vast field systems um in the maya area the biggest sites are located next to what's called bajos so these are the low-lying areas which are seasonally inundated they are today and they form a swampy area which is almost impossible in the rainy season however now using lidar we can see that these were not empty landscapes these were agricultural agriculture on a vast scale so these were covered in canals raised fields irrigation specially manipulated with large reservoirs in certain places too so the idea of very high population levels becomes immediately much more persuasive the limiting factor that the jungle is a terrible place to try and grow a lot of crops is ended we we don't have that problem anymore we know that there was fertile land which was constantly being used and we're not just talking about small areas here these barrels are covering thousands of square kilometers so these this is a big big area now uh i mentioned about also about architecture and so this is a site called naactun in guatemala and it's on the edge of a bajo so you can see down here this low-lying land and you can see some of these traces of field systems and the architecture up here now the scale of the lidar um scans means that we can look at not just individual sites like this but whole areas whole terrains now up here that's the bajo we just looked at before we were looking south now we're looking plan view north up here and that was that area everything else here is a home is a house or a group of homes so you can see two things one is that the maya um style of low settle us low density settlement so there's a lot of agriculture going on in between all of these houses as well as in the bajos these sort of kitchen gardens where people were growing herbs and medicinal plants and um specialist things um chile and things like that um all of this area would also have been green with trees with little maize plots as well as the sort of the high levels of intensive agriculture out in the barrels imagine this not in a little two kilometers stretch here but but spreading over the whole area so you can get some idea of how many people were living and this uh is a collection that was the notch tunes section up there but these are the other sections which have been done so far down here at tikal all the way out to la corona or more tune etc right now there is a project which will cover if not the whole area then almost the whole of northern guatemala and that will be the most revelatory tool that maya archaeologists have ever had it will be something we remark so far you can see these density maps can see populations you can see how dense that notch tune area is but also around tikal but also how it starts wheedling out quite dramatically out towards the west these are areas which are ostensibly very similar to this kind of terrain maybe not so many battles but if the idea is the maya were just short of land there was too many people there's not enough agriculture they could easily have moved into these areas and eked out some kind of living so it looks as if they really stayed in these areas because they were just hunky-dory there was really no problem at all so of course what we're looking at here with this chart was a relative chart so it doesn't try and tell you how many people there are it just tells you to scale the relative scale between not very many and a lot by counting the homes which lidar is showing us we can create um some really quite accurate population estimates and the people who are working on this suggest that the central area so not even the entire maya area but the central high density area could easily have contained about 10 million people so uh again this would would have been hard to imagine without this agricultural system which would have made that possible so the two really fit together from our point of view talking about the collapse it's it's very significant because it means that not just some people disappeared moved somewhere else or whatever it means that a huge number of people moved and went somewhere else or died out and coming back to this um this plot where we see all the sort of extinction dates of the different sites and we have this area this period of decline here we can express that another way which is a chart i i recently did what this shows is a collection of number of sites so this is the last 70 sites that appear in the maya record and it just covers from 800 up here to 920 and what you seem to see is a pretty straight line it seems to just come straight down here so that suggests a gradual fall off there were lots of people here and then they steadily declined over this period now although that looks very persuasive i think that it's it's actually very misleading the reason it's misleading is that this counts all sites so quite a number of the sites in here are very small and they're sites which only erect monuments in this period so they're not part of a big continuous system there's something that smaller crops up at the end also there was a resurgence in the ninth century of sites in the north which is a whole separate subject very very interesting especially how that intersects with the idea of drought but it it distorts things when we're talking about the southern lowlands the densest areas what happens uh if we take that data out as the chart actually changes it changes also for one further very important reason which is that terminal dates are significant only when you put them into context so chica's last date is in um 869 but it didn't erect any monuments all the way from 8 10 to 8 6 9 8 10 is where things really come to an end and many of these sites or let's say a significant number have this feature and we can look at the the detail of how this was working around 810 by looking at aguateca so this is the same site which we had all the uh the warriors attacking the burning and the pompeii place the largest structure here is l88 this is a modern photograph of it it was excavated um by takeshi anamata and what he showed was that this building was not complete it was under construction you could see that because there's a construction ramp at the bottom here but you have exposed um what we call construction bins so these are walls excuse me these are little walls which are used to stabilize you they would build a wall and then fill it with rubble and it makes a much more stable structure there's also depression here which looks as if they were building a tomb chamber but never actually got around to doing it the fascinating thing is that out in front we have monuments we have um a steeler here which is 4.4 meters high and it has been smoothed ready for carving but it was never carved and we have something called alter m now alter m um it's you can see it's difficult to see but it's there's really no doubt that it recalled the date nine or how that gives you 919.000 which is the year 810. when it was found it was thought to be simply eroded and it is eroded but in fact when you look at it closely it's not simply eroded it was also never finished what this tells us is that um we can date the destruction of aguateka very accurately we can say that it was destroyed before 810 and in fact they were building the monuments to celebrate that period ending um when the site was destroyed this is a pattern that we find in other places um the famous murals of bonham park the great battle scenes and scenes of royal arrangement and dancing and all of these things um is very well known um and magnificent is also very late and in fact it was never finished here you can see that they the main text has been painted out but these captions the names of all these characters had not been filled in the last date which is actually buried somewhere down here is 791. so the idea that they were painting this somewhere around 800 is not unrealistic this is another unfinished thing and like the the building at aguateca we find many structures across my area which were under construction they have piles of stone neatly stacked up ready to be to be laid and of course we don't know exactly when things were abandoned but it seems increasingly likely that it was ordered a very similar time so if we look at the the flourishing of maya civilization up to 810 we have these sites all very active but after 8 10 there's much much um and some of these like kopan well the last date there is 822 or um como calco 8 14. so it's really getting thinner still if we take out the ones where there were hiatus episodes in other words where there were big gaps um then it gets even fewer and so i don't think we are talking about a slow 100 year decline i think what we're looking at is a very rapid event which i call the early 19th century crisis and that led to the abandonment of not all sites but many sites so that idea of the decline i think we can replace with the idea of a kind of coder that there was an event somewhere shortly before and shortly after 8 10 and then it played out over the next 100 years it was 100 years before everything finally ended so let's look about at the sort of the newer evidence of what what was going on at that time we know the architectural styles are changing we know that ceramic forms are changing we know that motifs iconography including some deities were changing elements of the writing system were changing and fluorescent power for importance centers were changing now this um you might recognize bill those of you who know the museum this is us moving uh caracal alter 13 into position in the new gallery and when you do a new gallery you have to do of course a new research and really try and rethink everything in the collection and write new new captions and details about them and i knew that the altar 13 from caracal was important and significant uh it's significant not least because the date is 8 20. so this is the 10-year event that follows the great um early 9th century crisis and it's a crisis that did not affect caracol they steam on quite happily this features of this text which are very interesting um we see two characters one um presenting some feathers and a captive to a lord over here who is clearly um the king of karakol and we have his name up here in fact his name appears over here as well um and this character is um named not once or twice but three times this is his caption and he appears twice more in this now let's look at him so his name is um papa malio and apart from the fact that that is an odd name he has a title which is chicken this is a very late spelling but nonetheless um it's part of that whole system now kalomte is something that we didn't we've sort of paid some attention to it but i i think we've still underestimated how significant colomte is kalantay is the highest title of maya kings so not all kings are kilometers only a few at any and the column t title is is directionally organized so there's a version for the north there's a virgin for the east the south and the west and in fact that version is the western version it's chicken and that's actually the most common um it seems to have all sorts of residences to do with the west and and sort of uh powerful forces out there linked originally to the great side of tituakan the others are rarer but nonetheless quite significant this information tells us that that figure so the sort of seeming subordinate figure actually outranks the king and he outranks the king he's mentioned more often than the king and it was thanks to some other work that i was doing for my book that i began to realize that not let's just skip back here that these scenes are not necessarily um fully reflecting the relationship between the characters depicted what i mean by that is that we seem to see the subordinate uh presenting to the lord we have other scenes where the text tells us something very different it tells us actually that the relationship is inversed what i suspect is going on is that this is a piece of rhetoric this is a royal rhetoric which is on display in the site of caracal and they are presenting things in a way which makes their guy look good the text on the other hand i think is more faithful and around here it's telling us that papa malio the western colomte is overseeing uh events conducted by the caracal king in fact that whole relationship is repeated around here as well this is is reserved for hierarchical relationships where someone is supervising where someone is overseeing in a hierarchical sense so there are lots of reasons to think that pat maliel is not the subordinate pap malio is actually the person in charge and we know that he is based at a site called ukanal ukana was a perfectly normal maya kingdom but with pap malio there it becomes much much more important there we go so we can see the two of them now one final thing about patmalia which is interesting he's wearing very little clothing uh as you can see they're both it's probably high summer um but this headdress is quite significant and there's a light figurine um in a site museum where you can see the same head wrap it's a beaded head wrap it's not really a hat it's something which is tied on the back in fact you can see the knot here where it's tied along the back and the feathers three feathers coming out the top this um is is typically used to identify people from the west non-maya or let's say non-classic maya people and this i think fits in with what's going on now something which i i found um some colleagues of mine who i was i'm troubling with questions um pointed me towards it and it to me was was a little minor revelation it's published in 1983 by a scholar called um lawrence feldman and it looks at names which were in this area when the spanish arrived and he actually you can see here features to look for in 8th century personal named list kind of remarkable is this exactly what we're going to do um the same bit right now is that the prefixes um for surnames used in the chantal language so this is a western maya people who have come from the west at some point in antiquity their names often begin with power and of course one can see immediately how that ties into papamalil that name as strange as it is is not strange if it was a chantal mayan now let's widen a little bit more and go on to some some other sites here so we can see sabal and here's karakol is down here but also the site of nakum which very rarely features in any discussions and that's because the work there is very new at boot canal um instead of um things getting worse things get better the population grows their temples are rebuilt and new kinds of ceramics come in we so we have those molded ceramics and a type called fine paste which which was made on originally on the gulf coast of mexico you can see here these circular structures now these are built on the top of older pyramids so the pyramids are quite old but the temples on top are new now this is excavated by my good friends from poland and have been working there for about 10 years or more and what they've shown is that this whole area here was rebuilt in the 9th century so a time when chicago is beginning to look like it did at the beginning of this talk this is being rebuilt and in this kind of style so nakum is fluorescent makum is wealthy nakum is succeeding and excavations in the surroundings show that their population was getting considerably bigger and it's very likely that nakum is attracting people who are abandoning other sites because many maya sites are already completely deserted or nearly so so this is a dynamic where there are less people but they are gathering in these new power centers now the really sharp eyed people will have noticed here this circular structure circular structures are not at all myosites but there is nakum the biggest circular structure is at cebal um at cebar it's at the end of its own causeway so this is buildings um excavated by gerry back in the 1960s now that's very very interesting now in the past people have linked this circular structures to new movement in particular a new deity coming from the west one which many people have heard of quetzalcoatl this is the the feathered serpent we don't have feathered serpent imagery but the feathered serpent was celebrated in in his wind aspect a deity called with circular structures in central mexico so the idea is that this is part of a kind of religious diffusion that's coming from the west and in fact we see not only these circular structures up here in yucatan in the north we find a lot of them on these river way which are coming into the central area so here is cebal here is nakum there are other circular structures down here in each ton tan and calzada morphan and other sites so circular structures are late they come in quickly and they're associated with new ceramics now at cebar um let's look a little bit more at the very big changes that took place um at this time i know i'm got very short of time here so i i apologize i'm gonna hurry up a little bit um the monuments that surrounded that structure were very interesting and this is stila 10 and we'll come back to that in a second now some of them are very very conventional you can see this is a typical maya profile but if you look at this set and these are the four buildings surrounding temple a3 at um cebal you can see different kinds of faces these are typical classic faces these are not typical classic faces so the is this sort of flat forehead this sort of snobby nose as opposed to this kind of big meyer style nose now that's interesting um but the really strange thing is that this is all the same person and it's not just the same person it's the same person on the same day this is one celebration and he's depicted four times in four different ways and some of them are growing maya and some of them don't and this was part of the evidence that these are actually people who come from the west and that these are versions of the maya so in the words of a colleague of mine this is code switching this is him showing himself in different forms and you could argue it either way you could say well he's basically maya but here he is pretending to somewhere else or you could say he comes from somewhere else and he's in a sense pretending to be maya okay so sebastian attends so this the dates we're talking about mid 9th century and this text is really really crucial um it's it's tends to have been undervalued um over the years we've known what it said for a long time the the problem is not what it says the problem is what does it mean up here we have the name of the king this is watul cartel so this is this guy he's the guy on all of those monuments and he's the holy lord of sibel um and then we have a a verb and it is a secondary clause and tells us that it was seen so this is the the ceremony that he's conducting up here uh it was seen by this king of chicago this guy who was the king of kalakmal this guy who was the king of muthul to san jose and it happened at seva so in 849 the kings of tikal kalakmal were told san jose come to ceba now this is a massive inversion of the political order of the classic period ceban is a podunk place um chica collect more other great superpowers something radical has changed that they would then decide they were deemed to come to the minor center of seba a little thing about that name because watul cartel this is like pap malio in the sense that it's not a real typical maya king's name in fact it doesn't really make any sense and it's previously been suggested even back in the 1990s that this might be the rendition of a foreign word it's not clear in what language um not readily identifiable even in chantal maya but it certainly is very strange uh now quickly a few other features of course this is the where papa malio is based this is slightly later than his time um but here you can see that they're using the square day name there's the king's name he's a colomte so he's a high king uh this is his sort of normal name he has a square day name there too another guy um this is at the site of of washington but this is the king of washington down here this guy is someone else um he is witnessing the period ending and his name is oloman what a strange name we don't have that somewhere alarm does turn up on the mold made ceramics so this allows us to date those to even greater refinement we know that around 830 to about 850 people were producing his name up there this style of molded ceramics and this particular form is typical of belize this is so this is more like the eastern forms towards the caribbean coast this one is more typical of the central area the kind of things that were from cebal and it actually comes from washington was discovered there and the reason i'm showing it is because we're seeing these lords um fine fair enough and we have a legible maya text yeah it's all very predictable but their names are square day name and they don't have anything else they don't they're not identified any other way and i think if we were looking at these with a completely unbiased eye we would say um well these guys are probably mold made foreign are a feature of the gulf coast these are this is a gulf coast um mold made ceramic and here you can see a square day name so this is actually very very typical of that area this is one from the region of cebal again the square day names with these warrior characters um and then just returning to these features the architectural styles the ceramic forms the iconography the writing system everything has changed after 8 10. we still get people with conventional maya king's name um they are still around they are still at some sites although they tend to be the plural sites they seem to be places even at tikar which have now fallen into ruin but they have some sort of active elite group but the successful centers have guys with strange names papa malio olom and some others which we can't even quite read these are strange people strange names um i mentioned before up here we looked at this business about power being a prefix in chantal maya this is also very interesting calendrical names are often nowhere in origin 45 percent of people now what that means is that nawa is the language of central mexico and the calendric names in nawa would be square day name so it looks as if papa malio and the square day names both make sense because maya people in contact with central mexico we're using mexican day name and here's a selection of them here very strange things um and a recently identified so much on here which helped to establish that it's not just any system it actually is noah so to conclude um we don't know what brought an end to the maya we don't know whether these changes are reacting to something um or whether they're part of the instigation of it but i think we can say something which hasn't been said before there's two kinds of people in the ninth century maya loveland there's guys that i call the new elite they are all of them all of them are columns all of them have strange names they use a lot of fine paste and mold made ceramics and they have round temple the old elites so they have traditional names they're very very seldom and very tend to be only in very early periods columbus they don't have much fine pace they don't have many mold made ceramics and they don't have round temples so the confusion that we had in the ninth century was seeing new styles old styles uh strange things things from central mexico conservative maya things can be shifted into sort of two groups one which stay very traditional another which are innovative they combine new and old features and one has suspicions that they are not maya um this of course is the obligatory book plug um this is all discussed in um greater detail um in a chapter here um i should point out that it is eye-wateringly expensive so um i know there are some aficionados out there who will purchase it but i it is these academic books are staggering prices but it will come out in paperback eventually with that i have finished my talk i apologize for overrunning and i'm open to any questions that people

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 66,258

Rating: 4.82266 out of 5

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Id: vaHULQivXyI

Length: 74min 38sec (4478 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/car23975]

Okay haha. We have 2 separate meteor showers this month, AND the moon changes colors on an eclipse. Thank god for consciousness or I would be worried. The simulation admins are giving us signs that things are going to get bad.

[u/moon-worshiper]

The Maya 'collapse' is European-Caucasian Whitewash Revisionism. The Maya started declining after 900 AD, but they were still there when Cortez and his priests showed up. It is well documented that all the thousands of books were collected and burned in huge piles. The one secret that is never talked about, is that one priest decided to keep 2 books, that ended up in Germany. It took a long time to decipher them but that is why Mayan hieroglyphs can be read now. How do archaeologists know so much about the Maya, if they had all mysteriously disappeared? The truth is the conquistadors slaughtered the population that was left, so that they had to flee to the jungles. All those hundreds of cities emptied by conquistadors, and the diseases they were carrying did the rest. The indigenous peoples chant: First came the priests, then came the ships, then came the cannons, then came the disease.

[u/Hubertus_Hauger]

Historical collapses are quite revealing, especially on what may happen to ourselves!

The Maya of the Classic Period 150–900 CE created one of the most dynamic and successful societies of the ancient Americas. Millions of people inhabited thousands of settlements, divided among more than a hundred kingdoms. By controlling water resources and terraforming the landscape they developed an agricultural system that supported a ruling class of king and, nobles, as well as strata of artists, architects, potters, merchants, and warriors. But at about 800 things began to go seriously wrong and within a century all their great cities were abandoned, never to be reoccupied. One of the great problems of world archaeology,

... but the mystery is solved.

[u/Telemetrics277]

Just as a note, the movie Apocalypto gets a ton of stuff extremely wrong about Maya collapse (including shamelessly mixing Aztec and Maya cultures and even timelines together).

[u/WorldWarITrenchBoi]

The Mayan society never actually collapsed though; they existed all throughout the time of the Aztecs and still exist in fact. What did collapse was the Ancient Mayan Empire, and even then it wasn't so much a collapse as the imperial state went away and urban society retreated somewhat; the Mayans were still incredibly influential even after the Empire was gone. For instance, the Maya were to the Aztecs roughly what the Ancient Greeks had been to the Romans.

[u/fafa5125315]

without watching this i can tell it's horseshit