Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  In their two expeditions, Stephens and Catherwood’s itineraries had taken them in a circle around what would later prove to be the core of the Classic Maya civilization: the dense lowland forests of the Petén, today the northernmost province of Guatemala. Remarkably, however, they had surveyed two of the greatest “golden age” Maya cities, Copán on the eastern fringe of the heartland and Palenque on its western perimeter. In between, waiting to be discovered, were more than sixty Maya cities and settlements from pre-Classic and Classic times—800 B.C. to A.D. 950—buried in a jungle no larger in square miles than the small U.S. state of Maryland. It was within this circumscribed, agriculturally unpromising environment that the Maya thrived, eventually growing east into today’s Belize, west into Chiapas, and northward into the dry northern reaches of the Yucatán Peninsula to build Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, Labna, Kabah, and Tulum.

  Agriculture presented their first fundamental challenge. Instead of rich cereal grains like wheat and barley, common in Eurasia but unknown in the Americas, the chief staple of the Maya was corn (maize), a protein-poor plant that Mesoamerican people selectively bred over thousands of years from a wild grass.5 In the Petén the Maya faced severe seasonal rainfall, swamplands, long dry seasons, dense forest, and soils that in many places only thinly covered the limestone bedrock of the Yucatán Peninsula. To adapt, they alternated crops, fertilized their cornfields with the ash of burnt depleted stalks and rich muck from the swamps; they constructed raised growing beds in wetlands, stored and channeled water, and terraced slopes to capture silt. They carefully shifted and scattered crops under the canopies of thinned stands of protective rain forest, and kept household gardens of native avocadoes, papayas, and guava. They set aside fallow zones and grasslands for the hunting of deer, wild boar, tapir, and peccary to provide protein for their diets.6

  By the tenth century B.C., family and tribal plots were producing enough corn and beans, peppers and squash to form a complete diet. The population began to increase quickly, hamlets grew into larger settlements and small chiefdoms, and the stage was set: enough of the populace was released from constant demands of farming and hunting to create the first stirrings of civilization—much as Catherwood had projected.7

  Archaeological evidence now shows that the cradle of this civilization formed in a place known today as the Mirador Basin in northern Petén. Two key centers appear to have sprung up in a surprisingly short period of time, Nakbe and El Mirador, located eight miles apart and connected by a causeway made of crushed limestone. While Nakbe is now considered the oldest Maya ceremonial center and dates from about 800 B.C., El Mirador grew into one of the largest urban complexes in the world at the time, with a population by 200 B.C. estimated at between 60,000 to possibly well over 100,000 people. Its immense man-made platforms, bordering shallow lakes called bajos, supported palaces, pyramids, and temples, including a single architectural complex still considered among the most massive in the world, reaching 230 feet, or the height of an eighteen-story building. Constructed on multilevel terraces with millions of cubic meters of fill, the city’s plazas and ceremonial structures were covered in plaster and coated in red paint made from cinnabar, along with yellows, blues, and greens. With up to a thousand surrounding structures and house mounds, the site covered seven to ten square miles. In addition to its central precincts, six causeways radiated out through the jungle to nearby smaller centers, one causeway measuring eighteen miles in length. These remarkable ancient thoroughfares, some still visible from the air today, rose from the swamps and forest floor ten or more feet in places, with widths of thirty to sixty feet. The superstructures in El Mirador were also planned: the temples are carefully aligned with the constellation Orion and are arranged in triadic patterns representing the three hearthstones in the Maya creation myth.

  On discovering these two cities in 1960s through the 1990s, archaeologists were stunned. Here was material proof that an advanced civilization had sprung forth with amazing speed and much earlier than they had ever thought. They could only speculate at the social organization and the millions of man-hours of labor required to build a city as extraordinary as El Mirador. With its hundreds of structures, monumental architecture, and causeways, El Mirador has been described by one of its principal researchers, Richard Hansen, as the first well-defined political state in the Western Hemisphere.8

  Though highly evolved, these first cities did not arise from the jungle fully formed and without assistance. Even though the Maya lived deep within the Petén, they were still in contact with surrounding Mesoamerican populations and cultures, some of which were also advanced. One of the most developed, the Olmec, flourished between 1200 and 350 B.C. along the Gulf coast near the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. During the culture’s height, the Olmec constructed several large settlements complete with rudimentary ceremonial centers, earthen mounds, stylized pottery, and sculpture that included gigantic heads carved from volcanic rock. More important, there is some evidence, though not conclusive, that the Olmec created a so-called long-count calendar system, early logographic writing, the Mesoamerican ball game, and bloodletting rituals, all of which would become vital elements of Maya civilization. After the Olmec disappeared by 350 B.C., their influence continued to spread widely through other population groups, some with Maya roots located south of the Petén in the Guatemala highlands and along the Pacific coast.

  Thus, following centuries of gradual agricultural development, the Maya civilization evolved rapidly from 800 to 200 B.C.—a precipitous ascent due in part to two abundant resources surrounding them and beneath their feet: wood and limestone.

  First, the most significant innovation in the Maya’s diet resulted from the immersion of corn kernels in water mixed with burnt-lime powder. The procedure began with the burning of limestone blocks on huge pyres of wood to reduce the stone to powder. Then the corn was soaked in the lime powder solution, a procedure called nixtamalization, which breaks down the walls of the kernels, frees calcium, lysine, and tryptophan, and greatly boosts corn’s nutritional value and taste.9 The resulting dough or masa was then easily worked into food staples like tortillas, a mainstay in the Maya Indian diet even today.

  Second, when limestone was quarried (with stone tools) into blocks for use in architecture, the Maya discovered that burning large fragments—employing the same process used in the preparation of corn—also yielded a construction material essential for building structures on a grand scale. They combined the burnt-lime powder with water and fragments of mudstone, called marl, and produced a cement of tremendous strength. They also mixed the lime powder with water and binding agents such as sap from trees to create a light cream-colored plaster of great durability.10 The plaster was then applied as stucco to create smooth surfaces over their stone temples and palaces, and to fashion sculptural art such as the colorfully painted zoomorphic faces of Maya deities that decorated their façades. One such mask at Nakbe measures sixteen feet high by thirty-five feet wide.11 These innovative practices, as Catherwood had noted, no doubt took centuries of trial and error, failure and success.

  By 200 B.C., most of the material components that would come to characterize Maya civilization, particularly its art and architecture, were in place. But there were essential cultural elements already at work as well. Digging near El Mirador in 2001, archaeologists uncovered a set of ruins, now known as San Bartolo, and found a stunning mural stretching across four walls of a buried vault. The vivid painting displays gods from the Maya’s complex creation story, the mythological basis of a worldview that would bind and carry the Maya through the next millennium of their civilization. The well-preserved mural, intricately painted in black, red, yellow, orange, and blue, shows five gods next to the five sacred trees that in Maya mythology hold up the sky from the earth. It also includes images of the maize god, the deity at the center of the Maya’s belief system, and royal lords practicing genital piercing, a ritual blood sacrifice symbolizing regeneration. The maize god also pres
ides over the coronation of a king, the first visual portrayal so far found of the concept of divine right of kingship. Carbon dating has determined the paintings were made around 100 B.C., making them the oldest paintings yet found. The mural provided the first evidence that by that date the mythic gods had become intertwined and expropriated by Maya kings.

  Also discovered at the site is the one of oldest known royal tombs, dating from 150 B.C., further evidence of the establishment of divine kingship, the central political principle that would govern all future Maya city-states. The archaeologists dug deeper and found a stone block painted with a hieroglyphic text believed to be the earliest identifiable Maya writing, carbon-dated from between 200 and 300 B.C.. One of the oldest ball courts, in which the Maya played ritual ball games, was also uncovered and may have been constructed as early as 600 B.C.. These recent finds at San Bartolo and the Mirador Basin have pushed back previous datings of the Maya civilization by hundreds of years. They have also blurred the lines between the pre-Classic (1800 B.C.–A.D. 150) and the Classic (A.D. 350–900) epochs, the broad categories archaeologists assigned the Maya civilization decades ago.

  Indeed, in many ways, El Mirador and San Bartolo were more evolved than many classic Maya sites that developed hundreds of years later. Suddenly, however, a mysterious rupture in the Maya’s development in the Mirador Basin occurred. Around A.D. 150 the cities of Nakbe and El Mirador and many of the surrounding centers were abandoned, and for many of the same reasons, archaeologists now believe, that the Classic-era Maya civilization would dissolve eight hundred years later.

  Within a century of the Mirador collapse, however, the Maya were on the rise again. Dozens of small centers throughout the Petén began to grow in power and sophistication, initiating the first phase of a 650-year “golden age” that, according to archaeologist Michael Coe, “reached intellectual and artistic heights no others in the New World, and few in Europe, could match at that time.”12 And while the cosmology and belief in sacred royal power illustrated by the San Bartolo murals would unify the civilization, its political expression took the form of scores of independent kingdoms scattered across the lowlands, some of which would become the great city-states of Tikal, Calakmul, Caracol, Palenque, and Copán.

  Belief in the supernatural and ancestor worship infused every aspect of Maya life, from the offerings of farmers to the rain god Chaac, to meticulously staged rituals played out before thousands gathered in plazas during temple dedication ceremonies or the investiture of their rulers. Pyramids, temples, sculpture, and art were created as statecraft to legitimize the royal lines. The kings themselves served as shamanistic intermediaries, the divine “vessel” and “axes of the universe,” between the people and the gods.13,14,15 Dressed in elaborate costumes and feathered headdresses, covered with jade pendants and earrings, they performed ritual dances on temple platforms to the accompaniment of flutes, drums, and trumpets, and engaged in self-mutilation, piercing their genitals with obsidian blades or stingray spines and running ropes through their tongues to summon the gods and regenerate the world with their blood.

  With the rise of more and more separate city-states, conflict became inevitable. Maya kings, however, unlike our leaders, went into battle with their warriors, often carried on litters. In the early Classic period the wars were launched not for territorial gain but to capture the high nobles of the enemy, with the opposing king the ultimate prize. Each side carried royal battle standards and shields that they believed were invested with the spirits of their war gods, symbolized by animals such as serpents, jaguars, and owls. The earthly battles were fought on the supernatural plane as well, and a loss by the defeated king was considered a humiliating spiritual failure, and at times resulted in ruin for his entire kingdom.

  As David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker described in their book, Maya Cosmos:

  Maya kings and their noble vassals put not only their bodies but also their souls in jeopardy every time they clashed. It is no exaggeration to say that they lived for those moments of truth, those trials of the strength of their spirits. Every major political activity in their lives—the dedication of every public text, image, and building of royal and community importance—required the capture and sacrifice of rival peers. Only in this way could the proper rituals of sanctification be fulfilled, the gods nourished, and the portals of communication opened between the human and the divine.16

  Captured nobles and their kings were sacrificed by the victors following ritual ball games (captured common soldiers often became slaves). Virtually every Maya center of any size had a ball court—a long alley set between two sloping parallel walls open at both ends. The game was played with a large, hard rubber ball. The ball courts were considered a portal through which the Maya interacted with the spirit world; the games were ritual re-creations of the Maya creation story, in which humans, represented by mythological “Hero Twins,” had defeated the underworld lords of death in a ball game. Scholars studying Maya art and inscriptions believe that the ball games, as ritual battles between good and evil, were used as reenactments of the defeat and capture of the rival lords, in which the captives were again defeated and then beheaded.17,18

  Human sacrifice took other forms as well in the veneration and deification of the Maya lords. Archaeologists have found skeletons, sometimes of adolescents and children, buried in royal tombs beside their kings, a practice also found in Egypt, where retainers were sacrificed to continue to serve the pharaohs in the afterlife.

  Every war, festival to the gods, temple dedication, and coronation was timed to important dates in the complex Maya calendar, reflecting the culture’s obsession with time. The scribes kept the calendars and recorded the movement of the sun, moon, and stars, keeping track with 260-day and 52-year cycles along with the solar year. They were able to predict celestial events and eclipses with great accuracy. They also refined and perfected a second ancient Mesoamerican calendar called the “long count.” It recorded a great cycle of time, restarting every 5,126 years to celebrate the continual re-creation of the universe. Long-count dates are commonly found with hieroglyphic inscriptions on monuments and paintings. And since Mayanist scholars now have broken the hieroglyphic code and worked out the correlation between the long count and our Gregorian calendar, they are now able to determine to the exact day when events occurred and to put together entire historical records of the Maya kings and queens and their dynasties.

  By at least A.D. 300 the scribes had perfected writing, crucial to the transfer of knowledge between generations, as Catherwood noted, but also essential in the Maya world to establish sacred royal lineage and to legitimize the elites’ authority. Their hieroglyphic inscriptions were the only true writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, which meant the Mayan language could be transcribed phonetically as spoken, as well as through logograms or symbols for whole words or names. More than a thousand years later the Aztecs and Incas, for example, had not developed a system of phonetic writing (a transcription system common in the West today in alphabetic form). Experts estimate that thousands of Maya texts were written in accordion-like books made of pounded bark paper that have since perished in the tropical climate of the lowlands.19 But the Maya left behind enough of their history chiseled in stone and painted on pottery and murals that scholars have been able to piece together the stories of individual kings and queens, the weak and the powerful, the rise and fall of the city-states, political intrigue, alliances, and wars.

  We know now, for example, that on January 31, A.D. 378, a lord named Fire Born (Siyaj K’ak’) arrived at the already powerful city of Tikal, undoubtedly accompanied by warriors, and established a new dynasty with strong if not direct ties to the dominant city in Mesoamerica at the time, Teotihuacán, located in central Mexico. On the same day, the seventh ruler of the old Tikal dynasty met his death, either in battle or possibly by sacrificial beheading. For the next half century, Teotihuacán would hold sway over not only Tikal but a large swath of central lowland king
doms as well.20

  Maya scribe god holding paint brush, drawn on a clay vessel.

  Teotihuacán’s influence stretched all the way to the Maya’s southeastern frontier, where a lord named Great Sun First Quetzal Macaw (K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’) arrived in A.D. 427 at the pre-Classic settlement that would become Copán. If not Mexican himself, he brought with him many of the trappings and artistic symbols of the Teotihuacán culture, probably from Tikal. He went on to found the dynasty in Copán that would last seventeen generations.21 Stephens and Catherwood would later stand before a large square altar in the Copán forest that was wrapped with the sculpted figures of sixteen of the seventeen holy rulers. Yax K’uk Mo’, the founder, is shown handing off the scepter of power to Copán’s penultimate ruler, who dedicated the monument in A.D. 776. Though unaware of their significance, Catherwood made sure he captured the figures on all four sides of the altar and the rows of glyphs engraved on its top.