Well, good evening, everybody. My name, as you may know by now,
is Steve Tinney. And I'm the deputy director of
the Penn Museum. Many thanks to all of you for
coming to tonight's sold-out installment of our annual
"Great's Lectures". This year of course, our theme
is The Rise of the City, to tie in with the opening of
our new Middle East galleries in April 2018, it's getting
closer, and we have selected speakers
on topics, which will give us a sort of 360 degree look, at what makes a city, how they
grow, where, and why. The next lecture in our series
will be on January 3rd and will feature our own Dr. Steve
Tinney. Thank you. Associate curator in charge of
the Babylonian section, who will be talking about When on
the High, the Heavens Were Yet Unnamed: How the Great God
Marduk Built the City of Babylon. Thank you. As usual, after our lecture,
they'll be time for questions, which will be moderated by our
speaker. They'll be a microphone going
around so everyone can hear the
questions as well as the answers. And so to our speaker, I promised him it'd be a short
introduction. Dr. Simon Martin is an
associate curator and keeper in the American section of the
Penn Museum. He received his PhD from The
Institute of Archaeology: University College London, and
holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. It's a British fest this
evening, I approve. He is a specialist on Maya
hieroglyphic writing, with a research that focuses on
history, politics and religion. Since 1994, he has done field
work at the site of Calakmul in Mexico, and is known for the
co-authored books, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, from
2000 and Courtly Art of the Ancient
Maya from 2004. Simon has also curated
exhibitions of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC,
and at the Penn Museum, including Maya 2012 here, on
which he played a key role. And he is now deeply engaged in
an overhaul of the museum's Mesoamerican Gallery due to
open I think, in fall '18. And in stewarding the next
phase of the publication of the work on our excavation to the
great site of Tikal. So please join me now in
welcoming Dr. Simon Martin, who will talk to us about The Urbanized Jungle: Ancient
Maya Garden Cities. Okay, thank you very much Steve. So, a lot of the kind of urban
spaces that you're going to be listening to in the whole
series, are a little bit kind of, you
know, familiar, they're part of the heritage of the western
world. We can almost see the ground
plan of Philadelphia in these ancient cities. And that is, with the exception
of the kind of things I'm going to be talking about this
evening, is a very very different kinds of cities, and we have to understand them
in different ways. So here, of course is, you know
one of our classical sites, Rome, and we could also have
picked Pompeii, or indeed any of these sort of densely, densely congregated urban
spaces, people clustered together, and the important thing here is
that services all come from the
outside, so this is a political center
where you have craft specializations, you have
trading activities, and you have something that's in the
middle of a kind of hinterland, where the things that make the
city function are coming in from outside. Okay, let me maybe move this up
a bit more. Okay, or maybe I'll just shout
a bit more. Okay, now, if we want to look
at Mesoamerican urbanism, the place you can't really
avoid is Teotihuacan. So this is the enormous city in the valley of Mexico, just
north of Mexico City. I was there only two weeks ago
and was newly amazed by the sheer scale of the place. So this course is a lot less
famous than places like Tenochtitlan, which is the
Aztec capital. And we know very, very little
about the people who built and inhabited and ruled from
Teotihuacan. But we do know they were
capable of absolutely, spectacular monuments. This is the Pyramid of the Sun. And we can see here, a model, which shows the
Pyramid of the Sun with the Pyramid of the Moon, the Avenue of the Dead and
numerous numbers of complexes. So these areas out here, these
are not fields, these are actually under
represented compounds. So these are all dense
settlement like you find perhaps in Rome. We know that there's a close
relationship between Teotihuacan and the Maya. In fact, we believe with a high
degree of confidence that Teotihuacan conquered the Maya
area in 378 AD. And as part of that, and
interestingly enough, some very hot news, University of Harvard, Harvard
University are currently excavating that structure, and recently published in
Arqueología Mexicana, found some small fragment of the
murals from that building, and they are of Maya material. So these will not be the first
Maya objects found at Teotihuacan and speak to this kind of
ongoing relationship between the two
places. Okay, so now what we're going
to be looking at in terms of the Maya cities are also
nothing like that. I think we all know the Maya
area by now, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and just a
little bit of El Salvador. And these are the sort of
famous classic cities, a number of which we've worked at at
Penn, Piedras Negras, Quiriguá, Tikal,
Caracol, Calakmul, are all places where Penn has worked,
going back to the 1930s. We're going to be touching on a
few of these, but what I want to do this evening is to kind
of give a bigger time range, not just the Classic period,
which is actually the full extent of it is 300 to 900. We want to go back into the
pre-classic and then beyond into the post
classic, in a way, compare the earliest cities, the kind of
high point of civilization cities, and then cities from
the real sort of closing period just before the
Spanish arrived. So, this first contact with
Maya urban spaces came in the 19th century. This is very very late in order
to discover a lost civilization. It had really been buried away
in the jungle with very very little news reaching the
outside world until the first few decades of the 19th century. Then you have explorers who are
penetrating into the forest. They're following up on rumors
of places that they should visit, and in this case before
photography they're doing lithographs and
drawings and taking molds and generally coming back to the
western world and announcing these amazing things
left in the forest. And we could go up now to the
end of the 19th century, because this is Tikal. Well, excavated there, these
trees cut down by Alfred Maudslay, and this is a period
when really we don't know very much about Maya society or
civilization at all. This is still the very very
beginning of our understanding, And because of that lack of
knowledge, there were a lot of hieroglyphs in these Maya
cities but we couldn't read any of them, and we didn't really know
anything about the archaeology apart from the big structures. This fed a big misconception,
which dominated from the 1920s up until the 1950s and 60s. And this was that Maya cities
were empty, and this is reflected in Tatiana
Proskouriakoff's painting. This was done at the Museum in
the 1930s, and you got a few people
wandering around, because the cities were only inhabited by
priests. They were the sort of de facto
rulers, but they weren't really rulers because their job was to,
you know, make offerings to the gods, and everybody else lived
out there in the hinterland, in small little separated
hamlets, where they would gather occasionally. So that was Piedras Negras,
this is a vision of Copán. And here's the sort of the idea
of this very occasional gatherings where people from
the countryside would come in, and there'd be ceremonies, grand offerings and priests
would be doing big displays in fancy costumes, and that helmed forth all the
way through, from really the early 30s into the 1950s and
60s. And what changed it was again
actually work by the University of Pennsylvania, because first Edwin Shook and
then William Coe started excavating at Tikal. At that time Tikal was thought
to maybe the biggest Maya City and stayed that way for a while. And had a much more, renewed, different and advanced
attitude towards archaeology. So they weren't just interested
in the big temples. They weren't just interested in
digging and finding fancy tombs, they were also interested in
crafts in industry, in transport, in the
relationship of the hinterland to the center, and all sorts of the kind of
questions that we ask about every site when we dig them
today, but at that time, in the 1950s
was quite innovative in the Maya area. And two heroic characters, Bob
Carr and his colleague, Hazard, produced a map, and we know,
for reasons we'll come to a bit later, but this is an
incredibly accurate map. They did a fantastic job in
charting here, the central portion of Tikal. What you have is the monuments
all pegged out here, the North Acropolis, Temple 1, which we
just saw, Temple 2, the Great Plaza, and
these are all these sort of palace buildings and the fancy
buildings. But of course, this wasn't the
end of the map So this is just a view of what
those structures would have looked like in their heyday. Of course, all of these things
would've been plastered and then painted with red paint,
almost all of them. So it's really quite a
spectacular sight. So this is the full map of
Tikal going out for a kilometer and I think the whole extended
something like 25 kilometers or something. I can't remember the square
footage. But anyway, it's a very large
area, and we see central Tikal and
beyond it we have the settlement. Now these are very dispersed,
but there's far more of them than would have been in the
model of Eric Thompson, who was one of
the great proponents of this idea of a theocratic Maya, and really began to overturn
things. These were not empty cities,
there were actually thousands upon thousands of people living
there. It's just that their houses
have all disappeared. They were all perishable
structures, built on low mound, and they're actually very hard
to see in the jungle. So this is really why it took
such a long time to realize that places like Tikal, are
cities. You can see, of course, that
they're not cities like Teotihuacan, they're certainly
not cities like Rome. And the question is to try and
understand why they're different. And what it is that's going on
in those places. So I think we're going to look
at a little sort of a range of time, and I want to do both a very early
period and very current research. It suddenly went dead. Okay, one of my colleagues,
Takeshi Inomata has been going back to Ceibal,
Ceibal was excavated by Harvard in the 1960s and 70s. But he went back to its site
and looked at it, afresh. Ceibal is a quite an attractive
place, it has a very late architecture, this would come
from the 9th century. And like all Maya buildings, They're built sort of as an
onion fashion. So there's sort of kind of
structure down here. This is just a typical case
from San Bartolo, And then another building would
be built over it. And then another one over that. So this is how Maya structures
and Maya pyramids just grew and grew and grew, over time. Very few of them were built in
one complete go. So this is a map of central
Ceibal, and this would have been originally done by the
Harvard team, and we thought we had quite a
good understanding of Ceibal, but Takeshi started to dig into
a very large pyramid, which Harvard had only really looked
at in the surface and started digging here on
this platform in front of the high pyramid And digging and digging and
digging, because it turned out that this
was not a natural hill that had been modified and increased in
size, In fact, it was completely Maya
made construction, And that when they start
looking at the ceramics all the way down, they find it comes from a very
early period. This is a phase that we call
Shea?? and this lasts from about 1000
BC Up to sort of the 600, 400 BC. So this is really much earlier
than we would have expected such a large structure, because
this good meters and meters high in its original form At the bottom, and they were
several pits that they dug in different places, they found
offerings. Typical early offerings of
these polished green jade celts. The green spoons, what we call
spoons and figurines and sculptures in
Olmec style. Now, the Olmec are credited by
many people as sort of kicking off Mesoamerican civilization. They were on the gulf coast off
to the west of the Maya area. And that's a very contentious
topic, because today we tend to think that that's a little bit
too simplistic, that the Maya were around and
were interacting with the Olmec at a very early period, and in a sense this style is
shared by everybody. But whatever it was, this
indicates that a very advanced civilization
was there for the time, and that was a big surprise. So the problem we have in
studying Maya cities as I've kind of indicated, is they're
covered in trees. And that makes them very, very
hard to study. This is the kind of thing that
we do some of the time, little bit too much
swashbuckling for me. But on the whole, it's more
like that kind of thing. Where, total station so laser
survey equipment has been used to generate very, very good and more sophisticated
maps, a lot easier to do it now than it was back in the 50s and
60s. But we're now on the verge of
an enormous revolution, and quite a lot of what I'm
going to be talking about in the rest of the talk concerns
that revolution. Now, it kind of start out away
in Cambodia, because this is Angkor Wat. And this, as I think everybody
knows, is the other great lost civilization in the jungle. Actually Angkor and Khmer
civilization well the civilization is very old, but the site is actually
relatively late a lot later than places that we've been
looking at in the Maya area. What's important, at Angkor is
that they've done tremendous amounts of work there, and they've done a lot of
brand-new work. This is a view from a bomb. This is Angkor Wat, and you can
see it's surrounded by this enormous moat, and with just two bridges
connecting it to the rest. And essentially, this is sort
of like a park, you know, and a bit of park around here,
and with just the stone structure in the middle. Not so, if you take away all
the trees in ways that I'm going to
describe in a minute, you can see that there's a massive city
underneath this. But what we thought to be
effectively park land is surrounded by all of these very
gridded, very regular house mounds, each with individual
bathing pools. We know they're bathing pools
because an early Chinese visitor went to Angkor back in
the 13th century and his account survived. It's one of the most remarkable
pieces of literary sources of the ancient world that we have,
because he describes all of these buildings while they were
being used, while the whole city was full
of people. And he says that these little
pool things were actually where people would gather with their
families every day, the heat in Cambodia in the summer is very,
very intense. Okay, so how was that done? Well, this is a new technology
called lidar, and there's lots of different
ways you can do it. But essentially the principles
are all the same, this is an airborne version, and what you're seeing coming out here is a sort of
special adaptation, but it's also fitted onto
helicopters, and we'll see other things as well. And essentially it's a series
of lasers which are on that airborne machine. They fire to the ground at a
very high rate hundreds of thousands of pulses of laser
light per second. When you are doing that over
forest, great majority of those sort of laser pulses will
simply hit trees and bounce back. But anywhere from 5 to 15
percent will actually penetrate through in the same way as if
you're in a forest you look up and you'll see little bits of
sky, that's where the laser beams have come through and hit
the ground. So what it allows you to do is
to effectively separate these high tree-level hits from these
low land-level hits. This is the sort of
representation, these are sort of points, or
where the lasers are hitting the trees up above and this is
the ground below, and you can process that
information. You could say, you know what? We don't want any of the high
points, only the only ones we're interested in are the low
point And take it away. And that's how that map of
Angkor was achieved. That's how we can now strip
away trees and just look at the ground level and see all the
hidden features. And as the the technology gets
better, as the resolution improves
we're able to see smaller and smaller features, so we're now down to
centimeters of resolution. Eventually I imagine it's down
to millimeters of resolution. So this is how Angkor Wat was sort of peeled
away, showing these garden like features no one had
ever even suspected before. And this is the kind of
revelations which have transformed Khmer archaeology allowing people to have much
more accurate reconstructions of what these places used to
look like and really understanding the
functioning of ancient cities in this case. And it's not just urban spaces. We're also looking out there at
landscape. This is another Khmer site up
into the north, which is very poorly understood. And these are these Brides. These are these huge aguado
lakes and reservoirs which would fill during the rainy
season and be used for irrigation the rest of the year. Again, this is all covered in
Forest. It's only because of lidar
we're able to see down to the ground level. Okay, so this is the kind of
technology we're now bringing into the Maya area and we'll kick off by looking
at some of the developments at El Mirador. Now, El Mirador, contrary to all of those fans
of Tikal and Penn when it was digging in
the 50s and 60s, turns out to be a much bigger city. This was something that had
only been spotted from the air back in the 1930s. But when eventually people got
there and started collecting pieces of pottery that were
lying on the surface, they were amazed because it's all very
early. So this is prior to the classic
period. This is prior to the high point
of Tikal. In the early time we call the
pre-classic, cities like this were even
bigger than they were in the classic period. But it's still a very
mysterious place. We don't know very much about
El Mirador. Here's an example. This is why it's hard to find That's the biggest pyramid at
El Mirador, And they started building it. Certainly, we don't have really
accurate dates yet, but we can imagine, probably at
the same time that Ceibal was kicking off. Same time those big pyramids
were being built there about 1000 BC, probably El Mirador
was also being built at the same time. But its heyday with these
really huge structures is a little bit later. This is probably somewhere
between 400 BC and 100 AD. This is the great era we call
the Late Pre-Classic And El Mirador was enormous. It has two major complexes and
two very large pyramids were sort of on top of El Tigre. And we're looking out toward
enter. Now if this is going to work,
which I can't promise, it will See if we can. So this is such a large
structure that it is taller than the
Great Pyramid at Giza. It's actually 26 meters taller
than the Great Pyramid, And gives you some idea of the
scale of this. We don't know how many phases
there are. We don't know how far back this
goes, there's no deep tunneling into this structure, but it is one of the sort of
wonders of the Maya world. And it's one of these things
that's making us rethink Maya civilization. We have to think a lot more
about what was going on in the pre-classic, and in the late
pre-classic in particular, because out of this jungle
environment, a sophisticated, accomplished
and very energetic society arose long before the time of all the
inscriptions and all the fancy kings that we tend to study, or
I tend to study. We can get out of this. So that gives you a little bit
the idea this is just see underneath this is Tikal. And this is the data pyramid
projected on top of Tikal. So the whole central area where
I was showing that core of Tikal, the danta pyramid just
covers it. Another sense of just get a
sense of how big this thing is. And there's some archaeology. People really rich and handsome
have been digging there for many years. And not only has some of the
architecture been exposed, but also some of the artwork. These tend to be quite
enigmatic. We don't know a lot about
pre-classic art. We don't know a lot about the
themes that they're talking about. Some of it's really very
well-preserved. Very, very interesting. Let's go to flying figure here
with a sort of mosque on his back as well as
this fancy headdress with his face here and his arm on a sort
of flying mode. Mosques, this is the great,
typical pre classic iconic motif is these large
architectural masks from the side of the stairways. Very, very typical in the
pre-classic. And sometimes we have actual
monuments. We have stela, and this one actually has a text which you can see down here. So not only is it horribly
eroded, I fear that even if it wasn't eroded, we probably
couldn't read it. Pre-classic writing is
extremely difficult to read. There's some connections
There's clearly some signs which we see in the classic
period have their origins in the pre-classic, but so much is
different. It's almost like looking at a
different system. So when pre-classic
civilization collapses, and it does, places like Mirador are
abandoned. Later on they are reoccupied, but the site has enormous walls, and however larger population
it had, was completely abandoned
somewhere between 100 and 200 AD. And this is true of all the
great pre-classic centers. So something very dramatic
happened, and we don't understand it at all. So this is just another view. This is what lidar can give us
once it's been processed. So, the data itself can then be
put into three-dimensional graphic programs, CAD programs ways of analyzing it and
reanalyzing the show landscape. We can see out here are
different features. Some of them actually are
canals, but a lot of them are actually causeways, they're big
road systems, which covered these low-lying areas that
would have been very swampy in the rainy season. And you can still see them,
they're so massive Here they are, sticking up
above the tree line. And with lidar, we can trace
their palm. The faint one here there's a
much bigger one here, and really start to understand
this sort of radial structure, the ways in which pre-classic
centers were connected by roads. Obviously very, very important
and interesting In terms of the
politics. And features which are
completely enigmatic. So this is something that's
turn up relatively recently, These sort of pen-like
structures, almost as if they're sort of kind of cattle,
herding stations or something like that. But the Maya didn't have those
kinds of animals. So was it used for agriculture
Was we really don't know yet. And this is another one of
these challenges we're going to have to find out about. So that's the pre-classic. The pre-classic was Ceibal And El Mirador, we have a very
early site, and we had Mirador, which is the kind of
high point of the pre-classic. And now I'll kind of sort of
delve just a bit into the classic period. And three very closely related, and indeed, geographically
close site, El Pilar and Baking Pot, which
are both very small and Caracol, which is pretty
enormous. So this is a map of El PIlar, And it actually has two parts. This is one part of the center. And this is in Belize. And then over here there's
another part, and that's in Guatemala. So the border runs almost
exactly with the edge of this frame
here. And is good map it was in use
for quite a number of years, and everyone was very happy
with it until lidar came along, and showed us this thing over
here, which had never even been
noticed before. What we're seeing in these are
not natural, this is a trench. And this is another one. This is a double wall system on
a hill. So up here you have very little
in the way of construction, but for these massive defenses,
which made it almost impregnable What we're finding, and I don't have the images to
show you, but they are going to be
released in the near future and have been talked about in
conferences, is that there are a lot of these things out there
in the forest where there's quite a lot of elevation,
hillsides. There are also a lot of these
fortresses, and they're all the same in the
sense that they don't have much in the way of occupation. So they're not, they're not
protected cities like you might have in the old
world, they're more like redoubt. So maybe someplace this sort of
escape in times of trouble. But suddenly they made a lot of
effort into carving these trenches into bedrock and
mountainsides. So they put a lot of energy
into it. This is just one view of Baking
Pot, quite a small site. Been quite well studied and
quite interesting in terms of ceramics. But here it's just a question
of really showing you the ways in which you have to analyze these contrasts between ancient
features and modern features. Sometimes you can look at
things and get carried away with the idea that you're
seeing something very special and ancient, and actually turns
out to be something that was built in the
1950s and it had been abandoned, that kind of thing. So interpreting the data and
ground-truthing it is one of the most important things. So you see features here, but
you really need to have people that go out in the forest. And you can do that with a GPS. You can do a handheld GPS, and
it'll take you to exactly the feature that you can see on a
map like that. Now, I mentioned the
helicopters, and I mentioned the planes, and of course, they're very,
very expensive. But as the technology gets
better, we're now down to drone-sized lidar systems. And these for the moment are
really only suitable for quite small sites. You know, you can't fly these
up and do the vast cityscapes that we've been looking at. But for a, you know, a modest
site and a plaza group, maybe a
central series of temples, it's quite
adequate. And again, the quality of these
things will just keep getting better and better and better. And this is the kind of data
that it turns up. In fact, this has already been
processed. I went to a presentation about
the technical side of lidar, and it's completely
mind-numbing. Probably there's people out
here who are engineers and would get on with a lot better
than I would. But it's enormously complex,
and it takes a lot of work to get any kind of imagery out of
it. But this is sort of the
starting point. You get these data clouds, and
you can begin to see these structures, and this process is
reprocessed with different filters and ways of showing different elements. So I mentioned, we're going to
talk about Caracol. This is Caana, which is the central massive
structure at Caracol. Almost certainly pre-classic
originally. But we don't know because
there's never been a deep tunnel inside here. There has been some tumbling at
the back, and I do think they found some quite early stuff. But everything we're looking at
here is classic. So this would have been built
on top of an earlier pyramid. There are a number of tombs in
each one of these structures. And you can see that there was a all sorts of buildings here. These would all have been
roofed, where administrative, or perhaps priestley activities
went on. And I'm sorry this is a little
bit bleached out, but it's a representation of the map of
Caracol. And here you see this is Caana
up here, B-Ball Court, the A-Ball Court,
and a big plaza here, etc. So again, with lidar, we can
transform that. We can add enormously to the amount of
detail. And once this kind of
information has been processed, This is not the best case. you can just about see them
here, teracing. In fact, we know that around
Caracol's tremendous amount of terracing for field. So this is really quite
important, because you can see how close agriculture comes to the really
fancy pyramid. Their farming, right in the
center of town, Making the best use of what is
a really a very, very undulating landscape here,
where terracing would really be the best way of increasing your
land area for agriculture. Okay, so now we're going to
move into the terminal classic stroke, early post classic. And probably some of you came
to a talk I gave about Chichen-Itza, probably about
two years ago, And here's one of the maps that
I showed at the time. This site has not been studied
with lidar yet. I think when it has, we will
also discover an enormous settlement there, But that lies in the future
when these things become cheap enough to do. At the moment you need enormous
grant money you need in the region of two
hundred, three hundred thousand dollars in order to hire all
the people, the equipment, to get this kind of data. But that's not going to be the
truth for all time, it'll get cheaper and cheaper. The reason I'm really talking
about Chichen is not because of the lidar, it's really to
follow up on something I was talking about back then in I think 2015. This of course is the Castillo, it's a central pyramid at
Chichen. It dates to around 1000. So this is late on the side
that we've been talking about. And it's interesting because
it's really not Maya. This is a period of the Maya
lowlands, where again, they're being heavily influenced by
Central Mexico. This seems to be a period where central Mexico
has area in the same way as
Teotihuacan did, and they put up a structure
which is much more typical of central Mexican culture than it
is Maya culture. But this is a special day,
because this is Equinox, and at the Equinox people
gather in order to see this jagged diamond shape, and this
is the serpent head down here. So the idea is that the building was so specially
aligned that on the day of the Spring Equinox, the light
shines and catches and creates the diamondback of the serpent. No, About three weeks ago, I went
to a presentation in Mexico. Someone had done time lapse
photography of this feature over a whole
year. This feature happens every day
for four months. But all the people who go for
the Equinox feel that they're seeing something special that's
never happened before. All right, so we're now going to go even
later. So this is the latest site
we're going to be talking about in Mayapan. Mayapan is a really interesting
place, not least because we have some historical
document. So these are not heard of it
writing. But this is a colonial records
by the Spanish. Now, Mayapan was abandoned when
the Spanish arrived, but had only been abandoned for
about 70 or 80 years. So within very close to living
memory, people were able to talk about Mayapan and what
happened then. So this was, this is a view
what it looks like today. This looks a little bit
familiar, because this looks exactly like the Castillo. In fact, this is very similar
to a building at Chichen. And lots of these structures
all look like miniature copies of Chichen Itza. Its heyday was later, and as I say, it was abandoned, we think in the region of about
1440 AD, is when Mayapan was abandoned. And they tell us that the
sources tell us that it's because of an internal civil war that broke out
between the two biggest families and victory for one basically
destroyed the whole system, and it broke apart. One of the reasons that so many
people were living at Mayapan is because they were forced to. Mayapan was a place where all the stability of the whole
region were obliged to live, at least for part of the year as a
sort of system of control. So the tribute was all brought
in from the outside, a very interesting system, and no doubt one of the reasons
it collapsed was because this was a very was a prison-like environment. Mayapan has this sort of
typical late style, this is the great god Itzamna, on an incense burners. People tend to diss post
classic art. I think some of it's pretty
awful, but some of it is also pretty nice. And this is the map. So this was generated by, in the 1950s. It was like the dying days of the Carnegie project of
Washington. And the feature you can see
here is a wall. This is actually several feet
thick, several actually a couple of them about three
yards thick, and it has gateways, if you can
see any of them, a rather strange shape, that's
the center. In fact, the photograph I
showed you was just this area here. You can see all of this is
settled. And all of this is crammed into
this walled city. So it's a little bit more like
the European things, it's a little bit more like a ward
European city with everyone crammed inside. But if as some of my colleagues,
particularly Maryland mass and them been doing, is they bring
lidar to my upon It all changes, Because this is actually
natural landscape. These are not individual
buildings, but almost all of them have buildings on them. So what we thought was this
dense concentration in the middle it actually continues out into the outskirts of Mayapan. And they were even more people
living there than we thought. The original estimates were
somewhere between 15000 and 17000. This is probably 20 25 thousand
something like that. So a much bigger place than we
thought. And here, this is a close-up. And you can see these are the
structures, individual houses. And these are a field wall. These are like their own little
private fence. So they weren't really living
communally. It was a bit like a whole bunch
of gardens out in the suburbs. Everyone's protecting there
with a little stone wall. And you can see even a sort of
pathways between properties. We close in on that, we can see
the resolution get tough the closer and closer we get. But here's one structure with
just a few houses and a gateway up here and a
sealed-off wall space. Now, this is, this is essentially the Maya
way of doing things. This is what we find here in
the post-classic, in the classic, in the late
pre-classic, and in the early pre-classic, these little plaza groups is
how Maya society was organized. So if we look here and this is
a map, this is we've now moved to Calakmul, which is a
bigger site than Tikal, not as big as Mirador, but
still pretty big. And you can see these little
groups of buildings here all over the place these little
clusters. This is how Maya Society was
organized in this very dispersed manner. So this is what it would look
like. There would be a house for
living and sleeping. There would be perhaps another
one, because the family has expanded a little bit, and the
newlyweds need their own hut. They would also need a place
probably to store tools, and produce, so maybe we've got maze grain
that we're drying and keeping for next year. And it's groups a bit like this
that were discovered at a place called Ceren in El Salvador. This was a place that is called
with good reason, the Pompeii of the Maya area, because the whole site was
buried in a volcanic eruption. They had lots of warning,
because in fact, there is no dead bodies there. Everybody got out, but they
left everything behind. So what we have is not only
their houses, which are full of their implements, their
basketry, their parts and the things that they use all in
place, but because it's a very fine
volcanic ash, we even know what they were growing, because out in the fields there
are casts of margay plants, of cacao trees, of manayunk, manioc, sorry an easy mistake to make in this
part of the world. Manioc, large roots, root tubers You know, we can get the cast
of those and see exactly what they were growing out in the
field. So this was a real insight into
the sort of daily life economy of the Ancient Maya. And we know a lot about those,
those kinds of fruits and nuts and the various useful plants. You know, the palm leaves which
you use for thatch, the things that we use for rope. All of these things can be
reconstructed with a high degree of confidence. We know how these people
organized their life, and we know how they used the
forest. So there are different plants
at different levels. There are different fruits and
nuts and beneficial plants and herbs and medicines all out there in the forest. But as we can see that there
were so many people living there, but there wasn't very much
forest that was continuous. There wasn't very much wild
forest, except maybe in the mountains and the swampy areas,
because all the area which had could be grown as maize or
settled, was settled. So what we have is a center where we have the Great
Pyramids where we have the kings, the queens, the nobles, the
craft specialists, the people who are making the fancy masks
and carving jade and creepy obsidian blades and painting and painting pop. But outside that is a dispersed,
what another one of my colleagues has called, an
agro-urban space. A place where people are living
and farming at the same time, right on the doorstep of a big
city. Within the city. They are the
city. And it's a different way of
using the landscape than we're used to, and it's
one which is particularly suited to living in the
rainforest. So far, we haven't seen huge
amount of irrigation works. We know that there was
irrigation in certain places, but the new sweeps of lidar out
into the countryside are not showing the big canals and
things we might have expected to see. And it's probably because they
didn't need to. They were able to produce so
much food simply outside their door and maybe in a maize field
a few hundred feet away. But they didn't need that kind
of intensive agriculture. I think these are actually some
of the best reconstructions I've ever seen, very recently
produced in Mexico. What these places would have
been like. And you can see that there's
green, there's trees, there's bushes, there's plants
growing right next to me. So in conclusion, we have our lords, we have our ladies, we have our
fine palaces, we have hieroglyphic
inscription, but these places do not exist
without a hinterland, without a city with people living,
farming, and producing everything that
they need. And with that, I will conclude. Thank you very much for your
attention. And as Steve mentioned, I'm very, very happy to take
questions. You said all the buildings are
painted red, that all the buildings are painted red? Yes. Was that aesthetics, or was
there, was it cooling, was there a reason for it, why red? Ah, good question. Um, well, the red is almost all of it was hematite. So it's an iron oxide, which is
not local. This has to come from the
highlands. In fact, all the paints and
fancy minerals, are not to be found in the
lowlands at all. In the lowlands, you
effectively get two materials. You get limestone tons of it, and you get chert. You get inclusions of flint. So stone tools were something
that was, you know, lying around. But if you wanted something
fancier like obsidian like volcanic glass or some of these
paints, and you know, other kind of products, they have to
come from the highlands. So this is why we know there's
a lot of trade coming down from the islands. What was the purpose? I'm sure they had a big
symbolic purpose in the sense of regarding these red
buildings. They had certain notions about
the idea of blood, but a lot of that to be honest would be
speculation. We just don't know. But when we can excavate these
buildings deep underground, we see them in their pristine
state, most of them are painted red. Could you talk a little bit
more about water? How they could survive just
with what fell from the sky number one, and two, what do they do about
waste? They didn't have any rivers or
anything. Okay, well as all good
questions, one of the things I didn't really mention, but I should have done is
there's very few surface rivers in the Maya area. You can almost count big rivers
on one hand. There are rivers draining out
in Belize, and there are a couple that
flow through the central Peten, but there are huge areas where
there are seasonal streams, but that's about it. So water has to come in in the rainy season. And this is where the whole
model of explaining as if we know exactly how they did
everything starts to break down, because with the size of the
population we think of there, they must have had very
sophisticated ways of maintaining their water use. We know that they made big
reservoirs. I didn't really talk about them,
but there are reservoirs, not on the scale of Angkor, but nonetheless, they could
take hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of gallons, of
water. So that's one of the ways in
which they trapped water in the rainy season, tremendous
downpours, anyone who tries to work they're utterly miserable
between June and into January, pretty much it rains all the
time. And then it dries out and gets
very hot and very dry and you really won't see any rain
at all in the peak of that time, so they must have had good
water resources. The other thing they did, they created were called chultunes. So this was, limestone's very weak, very
porous, and it's not too difficult to
carve, so they would effectively just hack down a sort of tunnel
deep into the ground and then open it out and do a
kind of bell shape. And then that top could be
plugged with stone. Now sometimes these were used we think as dry spaces to keep
grain and things away from pests and disease and things
like that. But some of them were almost
certainly were actually because of their position and the way
that there's a runoff towards them from architecture, they were used to fill up a
little mini reservoir. That makes a lot of sense
because you wouldn't get a lot of
evaporation, which is a big problem with the big reservoirs. There are always tremendous
amounts being lost to the heat. So can you talk a little bit
about where the Mayans came from, and what happened to them? Okay, well the Maya are
Amerindian people. They are the same descent line
as everyone in the New World. So all the way down to Tierra
del Fuego, the whole of South America, the
whole of Central America and North America, are all people
who crossed from Asia back in the day. We're still, in fact actually it's another
thing that Penn's working on. One of my colleagues here. Tad Shaw is working on the genetics, to
try and understand those waves of people as they came in. What happened to them? Well, it seems as if that
system, the system of agriculture and politics, and
the way it's woven together, must have had some unstable
aspects to it. One of the things that we know
is that and I'm going to impersonate a chart here population during the early
classic was sort of like this, and then it swoons up. But the late classic between
600 and 800, population explodes far, far more people and 800 that's when the late classic Maya collapse
happened. So whatever was causing that,
it was associated with a very large number of people, and
probably an ecosystem, which is really just on the edge. What happened to them? A lot of them probably stayed
where they were, but through infant mortality and just general hunger, and over a period of time, they
sort of, the population faded and faded, but other people must have left
and gone somewhere else. Usually there's a question
about the Maya today. There are millions of Maya
still living in Yucatan and in the
Guatemalan Highlands, and increasingly coming back into
that central area, so the Maya did not disappear, they simply changed their
society. Postclassic society like Mayapan and like these other places were new ways of looking at
government. It seems as if the classic
period is the particular time for dynastic kings. We now think that dynastic
kingship was invented. We have some pretty specific
dates somewhere around 150, because the dynasties are
counting back in time, how many kings since a
particular date? And that's where they all end
up. So yeah, the classic period was
a particular thing with dynastic rule. What was going on in the
pre-classic? We still don't understand. It's a mystery. I think I said we would do you
next. You talk about your research
with Mayan hieroglyphics, and what you're finding out with
hieroglyphics, anything new coming out from what you've
been observing? Wow, so time, I wouldn't say every day, but I would say, every week
something interesting happens. And it's not only I mean, it's
slightly seasonal in the sense that this is digging season in
the spring, and this year was kind of a
poor year. I mean, we only like turned up
a couple of monuments, but in past years, there's been
huge troves of things that have been discovered. So this great, great masses of
new information to interpret. And out of that we're learning
alot of new things, but it's not just new
discoveries, it's because as we get better and better at
reading things, things that were published years and years
ago are suddenly Illuminating. And I have people writing to me
that young students who have fantastic ideas and poring over
these things in the way that students do and contributing and finding new things. So it's hard to pick out
individual things. But I think, I think it is very
interesting that the classic period is a phenomenon, in a
separated from the pre-Classic, in a way that we
didn't quite imagine before. Okay, someone out there, I
think. Is the language that the Maya
speak today in Guatemala in the highlands, the same as
they spoke in the classic period? Or has it changed? Do they use the same alphabet? It's different. It's still Mayan, so the language is
intrinsically related to the ancient language. But even back in the ancient
times, there wasn't one language. So we know from the spellings
of the hieroglyphs that there are at least two
languages being spelt there, Yucatec, and Chʼolan. And only forms of those
languages which exist today. It's probable that the languages in the Guatemalan Highlands
were, essentially had been there for a very long time. But they didn't have, they didn't use hieroglyphic
writing in the highlands. So instead of all these
amazingly rich different vocabularies and verbal forms,
we don't get we don't have them. We know the dominant language
is Chʼolan, and Yucatec is a kind of low of, you know, it was
adapted for Yucatec, but it was invented for Chʼolan
speakers and the kings all used Chʼolan
language, even if they are in Yucatec
areas. You have to imagine the way in
which the you know, the Russian Czar used to speak
French and the kings of England spoke French indeed and then later on German. And of course, Latin, you know, so these these prestige
languages that's what they had. So intrinsically they all reach
back. You can trace their phonology
and their verb changes. And there are common ancestors, the deepest one, we call
Proto-Mayan But this is very much a
reconstruction, a very highly technical thing
for linguists to work on. There was another lady. I have two questions. Okay, The first, is there anything
inside those pyramidal large buildings? you know, like tombs or
whatever. Yeah. And the second thing is, how
were the cities financed? Okay, well, a lot of those pyramids are
mortuary shrines. And so underneath, in fact
Temple One was excavated by Penn in the early 60s and underneath, they found the
name of Big 2 full of pots and shells and
carved bone and jade and the body of a king. We now know his name was Jasaw
Chan K'awiil. The famous one, of course, is
Pakal. K'inich Janaab' Pakal, the king
of Palenque, not only was he buried under the Temple of
Inscriptions. But a bit like with Egyptian tombs, there was
a stairway that goes down there. That was very rare, there's only a few places that
had stairways. But there were also pyramids
that we've been excavators have been digging
into, and they find nothing. They were not used as tombs. So just because there's a big
pyramid, one can't assume inside is a tomb. So the question about finance. Well, that's a really potent
and really interesting one. And maybe comes back to this
question about new topics. One of the things that we're... Any subject carries around like
a hermit crab. It carries its own history. And ideas become very fixed. And sometimes it takes a long
time to break out of those ideas. So back in the day, when people
said the Maya were ruled by priests, they also said there's
no commerce, there's no trade, there's no
water, and steadily all of those things have been
proven to be wrong. What we now know, and we should
have known is the Maya are actually great traders. I mean, I wouldn't say as an
ethnic trained, but anywhere you go today, the Maya are
great traders, and we have begun to find
marketplaces. So where I work at Calakmul, we have a two and a half
hectare quadrangular space with a temple on the center line. And that temple is covered in
mural paintings of people exchanging goods. Probably some of you have seen
talks I gave about that. So we know that they were
marketplaces. We know that there was
long-distance trade, and we're just beginning to kind of get a
handle on how it worked. Back to the language. How is it possible? What is the technique by which
the phonetics of a language that is dead. What developed? And what is the confidence that
the pronunciation that you're using right now is anywhere near of, to do
close to the pronunciation that it was used in? And then, of course, there's
languages today that are similar, And how can you just determine
that they are similar when there's no writings of
those languages? So spend the next half hour
talking about that I'll probably end up doing the
whole talk about these things. But to answer the question
quickly, and simply Maya writing presents the same
kind of problems as all undeciphered scripts. So you must have an idea about
what the target language is, but even when you know what
language it is, and because there are Maya people, and
there are Maya people living now, we can say that it's an
ancestral form of Maya with a great deal of confidence, but that doesn't get you to
actually crack the writing system. It may not have been possible
at all without two pages, which were written by a Spanish
priest and an informant of his in the 1560s. Now, this is a 600-page book of
which two pages are about flips. So it's a very, very small
amount. One page gives a description,
the writing system, except that it's wrong. And it has an alphabet, which is kind of inconvenient because the Maya didn't have an
alphabet, And it also has a list of days
and months, and it gives spellings to each one of those. And in fact, we know now that
they are spelling them with phonetic additions to them. So we know what the Maya months
are, because the calendar, you know, came survived into
colonial times. But the key thing was
recognizing the way in which the alphabet recurs on the
monuments and recurs on the very few late books that
survived. And with some very, very clever
studious work that went on for a long time, people were able to link images,
which were in the books to certain hieroglyphs, which
structurally they had to be, because you had the same phrase and one glyph changes in each
scene, but the only thing that changes in each scene is a kind
of animal. So you then have a hypothesis,
which is that that glyph must represent that animal. And then in Lander, a Russian called Yuri Knorosov
worked out that there was a miscommunication
between the informant called Gaspar Antonio Chi, and Lander, who is a Spanish
priest. Lander was asking him for an
alphabet because he couldn't really communicate, And in doing that, there was a
lot of frustration between the two of them. In fact, some of it comes out, we can now read the frustration
between the two of them. And what happens is the the
Maya script tries to represent the sound of Spanish letters. So when you have, [audio not
recorded] You got a spelling of the
Spanish word "Ele" And for H you get "Ache" Okay? Maya writing is a it has whole signs for words but it also has phonetics of
syllables. And that's, without the
syllables, we would not have cracked the
writing system. So it has pure vowels, and it
has "Ba" "Ka" "Cha" and a bunch of other ones,
because Maya language is more complicated than ours. They have glottalized forms. There's a difference between
"K" and "K' " So "Ka" wheel is not the same
as "K'a" wheel. And "K"ook is not the same as
"K' "ook. And these things survive in
Maya languages. And those words survive in Maya
languages. So we, on one hand, we have
images. On the other hand, we have
hypothetical glyphs that should refer to those images. And then we have signs that we
can recognize in those glyphs, because Landa gave us some half
information about them. And then we have dictionaries
which tell us what those words should be. So those things all
interpolated together, and you throw it on for another like
fifty or a hundred years. Then you end up with a very,
very tight system. So I can say, we can say this
with absolute confidence. There really, it's like algebra. There really isn't an
alternative. There's, you know that it's not
to say that we've cracked it all, by any means. But we have 157 different
syllabic signs. We have 40 or 50 vowel signs. We have about 500 different
logo graphic word signs. And those are read. But there are also ones which
can't be read because they're too rare, or there's no phonetic
rendition of them, or we don't understand the context that
they're in. And I think there's actually
quite a chance that there are glyphs we will never be able to
read, because we just don't have
enough information about them. But on the other hand, there
can be some extraordinary rare glyph that if it appears in a
particular context where they do, they do some amazing things. They, for example, they use, when they use logo
grams, they add phonetic elements to
them to help you read them. That's a big big asset, if we didn't have that we'd be
in trouble Also, they love to take logo
grams. So, like a word like lakam,
which means big, they will spell it one time,
just with lakam, one glyph but there are also spellings la-ka-ma somewhere else And when you can relate those
to context and say, they're exactly the same context, then
you can say, oh, I bet that sign is lakam. And that isn't a decipherment. That's a hypothesis. You then have to test it again
and again and again, in different contexts, until you
feel confident. So we have what's called the
core and the periphery. In the core is signs that we can justify 9
ways from Sunday are correct. Then outside that, there's a
periphery of ones that we think are right, but they could turn out to be
wrong. And then beyond that, there are
ones which we just don't understand that we've just got
wild guesses at. And some of them, like I say,
may never be solved. So I don't know if that's a
good enough answer, but it's the best, it's the best short
answer I can come up with. Okay, one more question, I'm
told we have one more. but I think we're tired out, in
which case I'll just thank you for.. no? All right, one more. I'm curious about the Mayan
city that has walls that's sort of like a European city
you mentioned. What were the threats faced by
the Mayans? And can you hypothesize about
why some Mayans may live outside their city walls. Walled cities are unusual. There are a few others, but this is very particularly a
late phenomenon. Most classic Maya cities have
no defenses whatsoever. That said, one of the big finds
at Tikal, was that something like 4 or 5
kilometers outside Tikal there is an earthwork which
goes around the whole northern part of the site, which stretches we now know
something like 20 kilometers. How that was used is hard to
say, in fact, there's good reason to think it was never
finished. But most cities were not
defended. And I think that's very, very
interesting. It says a lot about the
political system, because I think that there was
a lot of bellicose Marshall symbolism. Everyone was telling you what a
great warrior they were. But in fact, I think there were
factors which were tamping down warfare, because what I haven't
mentioned is anything to do with the politics, and in the politics there were
great kingdoms who exerted power over many,
many small kingdoms. And I think in the Classic
period there was actually a reduction in violence, because
there were powerful kingdoms who were saying, no, no, no, you
all belong to us. No one fights between
themselves. So, things changed over time. There's different, you know,
features come in, But essentially the Maya tell
you that they have lots and lots of captives and they're really torturing people and tearing
them up, and sometimes it's just the
image, rather than reality. Okay, with that, thanks very
much.
Dr. Simon Martin, Associate Curator, American Section, Penn Museum. By at least 1000 BCE the ancient Maya were building massive temple platforms in the midst of dispersed settlements, an approach to urbanism that persisted for almost two millennia. The low density of these settlements was uniquely suited to their rainforest environment, based on an “agro-urban” system in which foodstuffs and other important crops were produced within the heart of the city, right up to the edge of palaces and ceremonial plazas. Major questions remain about how this system came about and functioned through time. Dr. Simon Martin’s takes us on a tour of the jungle cities, exploring the origins, operation, and ultimate collapse of one of the world’s most sophisticated tropical civilizations.