Altar to the sixteen kings of Copán. (Catherwood)
Eventually, the Maya would reassert political control by slowly absorbing the foreigners into their society, most likely through marriage. But some artistic styles and other influences from Teotihuacán, with its powerful cult of the warrior, its militaristic symbols and gods, would enter Maya culture and linger for centuries.
The inscriptions also tell the story of the great rivalry between two of the largest and most formidable of the Maya kingdoms, Tikal, at the center of the Petén, and its giant northern neighbor, Calakmul, located in today’s Mexican state of Campeche. Both had developed into regional superpowers through alliances with smaller cities or by binding them as vassal states. The sixth and seventh centuries saw a succession of wars between the two giants as well as their satellite cities. First Tikal suffered major military defeats in 562 and 657, a period when the once-great city went into steep decline. Then on August 5, 695, Tikal exacted its revenge when its ruler Lord That Clears the Sky (Jasaw Chan K’awiil) delivered a decisive military victory over the king of Calakmul, marking the resurgence of Tikal and a gradual end of Calakmul’s dominion over a large number of lowland cities. It appears from the inscriptions that at least one of Tikal’s kings lost his head in the earlier wars, possibly in a ball court sacrifice. Whether Calakmul’s king, Fiery Claw (Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ak’), was taken captive during Tikal’s victory and was sacrificed is not clear. What is known is that a battle effigy representing one of Calakmul’s great gods was seized along with two important Calakmul lords. In November 695, three months after the defeat, a new ruler named Split Earth took the throne in Calakmul, likely installed by Tikal.22,23
Stephens and Catherwood had no way of knowing, when they surveyed Copán and Palenque, that each city’s king had also suffered ignominious defeat. In fact in Copán’s case, during his lone visit to Quiriguá, Catherwood saw tangible evidence of Copán’s defeat not comprehending its significance. Quiriguá’s king, Cauac Sky, enriched by his victory over Copán in 738, had gone on a building spree and reconstructed Quiriguá’s acropolis. Then, with the intention of not just emulating but surpassing his former overlord, 18 Rabbit, he set about creating a series of the tallest and most massive stelae in the Maya world—each sculpted in his image no doubt by captive Copán artists. Catherwood sketched two of them, including one now known as Stela F, which stands twenty-four feet tall and weighs thirty tons.24
Palenque and its southern neighbor Toniná were also both cloaked in mystery when Stephens and Catherwood visited them in 1840. But as more and more art and inscriptions have been unearthed and interpreted by epigraphers, or glyph experts, a fractious and violent history between the two rival states has emerged, one that resembles to a small extent the ancient Grecian wars between Athens and Sparta. While Palenque’s kings (Athens) worked for centuries to create one of the most artistically and architecturally beautiful cities in the Maya world, the smaller Toniná (Sparta) was using its energy and talents to become a military force to be reckoned with. One of Toniná’s chief sculptural programs focused on depictions of bound prisoners, some of which are arrayed on one of Toniná’s two ball courts. They represent captured rulers of obscure outlying centers over which Toniná and Palenque were fighting for control, and presumably the ball court was where they met their end.
Gigantic stela representing the king Cauac Sky at Quiriguá. (Photo by Alfred Maudslay)
Despite its seeming preoccupation with art over war, Palenque nevertheless exerted powerful military and economic influence over Maya cities to the east. And in September 687 it drove south, attacked, and overwhelmed Toniná. Though the record is unclear, indications are that Toniná’s king, known only as Ruler Two, was captured and likely beheaded in Palenque’s ball court. The struggle between the two cities continued for another twenty-four years. Finally, in 711, Toniná struck back, entering the heart of Palenque’s sacred precincts and seizing the city’s sixty-six-year-old king, Precious Yellow Tied Peccary (K’an Joy Chitam II). Though his exact fate has not been recorded, a gracefully engraved sandstone panel found at Toniná shows him crouching with his arms bound and the paper strips worn by the condemned threaded through his earlobes. The defeat was a crushing blow, for it left Palenque with a ten-year dynastic gap before a new king ascended to the throne.25
All was not war, however, and during intervening periods of peace, Maya rulers, their families, and nobles flourished. The common people may have prospered as well, especially if they were able to share in some spoils of war. Soldiers, for example, were able to take lower-class captives as slaves. But the lives of the non-elites were never easy. They worked the milpas, or cornfields, that provided food for their families and the elite, and during the off-season developed crafts or were conscripted in corvées that built their city’s causeways, public spaces, and ceremonial centers. During war they were pressed into service as common soldiers.
Because Maya art and inscriptions were exclusively the domain of the elite, little was depicted of the daily life of the lower classes. We know about their food, grinding stones, and cooking from excavations, their nutritional levels from examinations of their bones, their degree of “wealth” from pottery sherds and crude ornaments, small figurines uncovered in the remains of their dwellings. If they show up in painted murals or vases at all, it is as war captives or court servants. Unlike the elaborate costumes worn by their lords, their dress was simple, men in white cotton loincloths, sometimes wearing a cloak for warmth, and women in white sacklike shifts. The men kept their hair long and tightly braided, usually pulled back and bound or wrapped around their heads. Women’s hair was also worn long in a variety of styles. Simple deer-hide sandals with hemp straps protected their feet (the elite wore a range of intricate bindings) and if a commoner could afford it, they added anklets, wristlets, and necklaces of shells or animal teeth. Both sexes decorated themselves with nose plugs and earrings of bone or wood. According to histories recounted to Spanish chroniclers after the conquest, lower-class marriages were monogamous.
Bas relief of a king at court in Yaxchilan with captive below.
The non-elites’ residences were huts constructed with wood poles, dried mud walls, and roofs woven with thatch. The structures were usually built on raised mounds around family courtyards (as many of today’s millions of Maya Indians still live).26 And when they weren’t working in the fields, household gardens, or on civic projects, they took their crafts and any surplus food to marketplaces for barter.
The same household clusters were replicated on all levels of society, with courtiers, scribes, and artists living around family courtyards but in larger structures, made of stone with stone-corbeled roofs, finely plastered floors, artifacts of jade, pottery, and sculpture. At every level ancestors and family dead were venerated and believed to be intercessors with the spirit world. Shrines were often found in family courtyards. The bodies of the dead, elite and common people alike, were buried below their dwellings, sometimes, for nobles, in rich tombs. Kings and queens were entombed beneath the pyramids and temple complexes. The household clusters spread out from the city’s sacred and civic core in unplanned fashion, often to satellite centers, and as the density of the population thinned, the growing and hunting fields filled the uninhabited spaces.
For the ruling classes, especially the kings, a great deal is known because of the record left in Maya art and hieroglyphs. We know the holy lords lived polygamous lives surrounded by wives and courtiers in royal palaces. They sat on thrones covered with jaguar pelts, commanding their subjects, dispensing justice, and greeting emissaries, royal allies, and foreign merchants. In scenes chiseled into limestone and sandstone, on painted murals and polychrome pottery, they wear finely dyed textiles with geometric designs and flamboyant headdresses heavy with the long iridescent feathers of the quetzal and other tropical birds. They drink a frothy brew made from the cacao bean (and gave the world chocolate). They prized exotic goods brought from the coasts and the
mountains in trade or tribute: marine shells, stingray spines, coral, finely cut chert, obsidian, pyrite polished into mosaic scepters and mirrors—and, most of all, jade from the Motagua Valley and its surrounding mountains. Control and display of these prized goods reinforced their status and power.
But nothing demonstrated their supremacy like their ability to mobilize mass labor forces, corps of engineers, artisans, and artists, to build and embellish monumental centers devoted to their reigns and dynasties. Though the ceremonial complexes played a ritualistic role in the Maya’s interaction with the gods, in the end they were dedicated and inscribed to the divine kings and queens who lay buried beneath. The building projects increased in size, scope, and beauty through the Classic era and each passing century required more and more investment of resources and human labor.
The Maya lords were never satisfied. Each generation commissioned new monuments and pyramids, building one new acropolis on top of another, burying layer on layer of Maya history. Archaeologists tunneling into structures have found the remnants of the early pyramids and temples, some completely intact. The dedication of each new stratum of royal self-aggrandizement was always timed to important calendar cycles and played out by the kings in age-old, operatic rituals—human sacrifice and genital piercings. Each new cycle of construction yielded ever more refined and exquisite art. Artists, like the scribes, were esteemed by the kings, whose second and third sons sometimes joined their ranks.
By the end of the eighth century the population in the Petén—its inhabitants numbering in the millions—had reached its peak.27 Cities, even those small in scale, overflowed with extraordinary art. Important centers with such names as Dos Pilas, Piedras Negras, Naranjo, Seibal, Cancuén, Yaxhá, Bonampak, Altar de Sacrificios, Yaxchilan, and dozens more filled the landscape. The Maya had achieved such success that its civilization, which had so brilliantly adapted to the rain forests for more than a millennium, was now living beyond its means. Newer cities in north—Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil, Chichén Itzá—began to swell in stature and population, fed by immigrants from the south.
In the Maya heartland, royal excess had taken its toll. Vast sections of the protective forests had been devoured to produce more and more plaster and cement. The lower classes scavenged for wood to cook their food and in some places scoured nearly every inch of arable land for growing fields. Wars increased in number and intensity and became almost continuous in certain regions. Burgeoning ranks of nobles—many of them heirs and relatives of the polygamous kings—formed kingdoms of their own and now fought each other for space and power. No longer limiting battles to the ritual capture of rivals, the lords went to war over land, trade routes, and for tribute or sheer domination over competitors. Increasingly, defensive walls and fortifications were erected around cities and even small hamlets.
By the first decades of the ninth century, the Maya lords were losing their hold on their people. Military defeats had shattered their aura of infallibility, devastated their cities, and set in motion large-scale emigration that depopulated their kingdoms and put great strains on neighboring areas. The kings’ intercessions with the gods were no longer working. Then long periods of drought, the worst in hundreds of years, deepened the crisis. One such drought started in 810 and lasted nearly a decade, corresponding closely with the abandonment of a number of Maya cities, including Palenque.28
The political and spiritual authority of divine kingship, the unifying force that had created and sustained the Maya civilization for more than a millennium, was dissolving. Ever-larger pyramids, theatrical pageants and ritual events, even distracting wars and ball court sacrifices, were no match against forced emigrations, drought, and famine. And one by one, the great cities of the Maya heartland emptied out.
The so-called collapse of the Maya civilization did not happen overnight or in all places at the same time. Cities like Tikal and Calakmul, perhaps because of their great size, hung on to some form of weakened kingship for decades, even in the face of another major drought in 860. Toniná, a late survivor possibly due to its military prowess, recorded the last known “long count” inscription on the back of a stela—January 18, 909. The reasons for the demise of each city were multiple and complex and are still a subject of contention among archaeologists. Overpopulation, environmental degradations, and drought, followed by famine and disease, created a “perfect storm” to bring down the great lords and their kingdoms. By the end of the ninth century, the holy lords and their courtiers, scribes and the remarkable artists in the Maya heartland were gone. Finally, only squatters eked out a subsistence living among the remains of the once-great cities.
Remarkably, despite the severe droughts—another occurred in 910—Maya cities to the north, including the two greatest visited by Stephens and Catherwood, Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, were able to continue on due probably to accessible groundwater through cenotes and better-engineered reservoir systems. But by the middle of tenth century, following the death of one of Uxmal’s greatest builders, Lord Chak (Chan-Chak-K’ak’nal-Ahaw), all monumental construction ceased at Uxmal and it too was in decline.29 Chichén Itzá would hang on for another 250 years.
Chichén Itzá remains one of the last great mysteries of the Maya civilization. There is no clear consensus among Mayanist scholars on exactly where the so-call Itzá Maya came from and how much they were influenced by the Toltec, a militaristic society based in central Mexico. Some experts are convinced Toltec invaders took over Chichén Itzá, while others believe the Itzás’ proximity to the Gulf of Mexico had simply made them a true international state that exchanged and incorporated influences from across the region. There is no question, however, that the city is filled with militaristic motifs, feathered serpent symbolism, and distinctive architecture associated with Toltec.
Stephens sensed Chichén Itzá was different. He described its mix of structures, some similar to the mosaic-covered Maya buildings they had seen in Uxmal and cities to the south, and others, though well preserved, seemingly older, “ruder,” and not so elaborately ornamented. In these, what he was seeing was more simplistic but in fact more modern: warlike Toltec symbolism overlaying the final flowering of the Maya civilization.
Stephens and Catherwood, though keenly observant and prescient, still were unable to fathom what they had found in their journeys through Central America, Mexico, and Yucatán. Chichén Itzá, and especially Tulum, were the most modern, Copán and Palenque among the oldest. Stephen never felt he could accurately date them, but observed: “These cities were, of course, not all built at one time, and are the remains of different epochs.” What the two men never imagined was just how far into the past those epochs stretched. What they had discovered was the last generation, the final layer of fluorescence of the Classic and post–Classic Maya civilization—the ultimate, artistically dazzling veneer of a civilization, archaeologists would find, extending back through time nearly two thousand years.
PART FOUR
Friends
22
Views of Ancient Monuments
Stephens and Catherwood’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatán drew rapturous reviews, though by the time the critics’ articles came out the book was already a huge popular success. Some reviewers pointed out that the book was so eagerly anticipated, and so many copies had been bought before they had a chance to comment, that they were at a loss about what they could say that readers did not already know. One commentator groaned:
Who has not curiously scanned the multitudinous engravings in which the skill of Catherwood and the marvelous fidelity of the daguerreotype have given perpetuity, in representation at least, to those magnificent relics of ancient American architecture and art which the terrible energy of tropical vegetation is hurrying so rapidly to destruction? Who has not accompanied the adventurous author and his companions through all the dangers and privations of their devious route among crumbling ruins, underground vaults, caves, ranchos, desert islands, convents, haciendas, casas reales, fleas, moschetoes, garrap
utas, wild Indians, luxurious padres, bischos, black-eyed senoritas, tunlers, gamblers, smugglers, black ants and revolutions? . . . Oh that Stephens had lived and written his book a hundred and fifty odd years ago! That we, with patient research and gainful good fortune, might resuscitate him, as it were, and give knowledge of his rich treasures to the forgetting million.1
The Knickerbocker magazine went so far as to declare that “his volumes on Yucatán will take their stand, at once, as among the foremost achievements of American literature, not only in the estimation of his own countrymen, but in that of the enlightened world.”2 Stephens and Catherwood were acclaimed, famous. An English edition had already gone through 2,500 copies and it was reported that Queen Victoria was “among Stephen’s enthusiastic readers.” Yucatán would eventually be translated into six languages. As Harper & Brothers’ best-selling author, Stephens was able to command the best possible publishing agreement.3
While the book ran through edition after edition, Stephens turned his attention to Catherwood. Unlike their first journey in 1839, no record exists of the monetary arrangement the two men made for the Yucatán trip. Yet Catherwood was suffering financially from the loss of his rotunda, so he and Stephens conceived of a project they hoped would help get him back on his feet. Over the preceding decade, an ornithologist-artist named John James Audubon had produced a set of giant prints under the title Birds of America, which won him great celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. Sparing no expense to achieve the highest-quality reproductions, Audubon had financed the expensive project through exhibitions and advanced subscriptions.4 With Catherwood’s portfolio bulging from their two expeditions, Stephens reasoned that they might be able to do something similar. Money for Catherwood was certainly a large part of the motivation. But Stephens also felt that the small black-and-white, page-size engravings in their books had not come close to doing justice to Catherwood’s enormous talents.
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