Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise of the Maya

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

For more than 3,000 years, the Maya built one of the Ancient world's greatest civilisations. They raised towering pyramids in the rainforest, mastered the environment and established powerful dynasties- long before the rise of the Aztecs or the Inca. Their city-states waged wars, forged alliances, and practised elaborate rituals as they competed for power across Central America.In a special mini-series, Dan travels to the remote jungles of Belize to trace the remarkable story of the Maya: from their earliest beginnings and astonishing rise to their golden age, to the enduring mystery of the ninth-century collapse that continues to puzzle historians.In episode one, Dan discovers exactly how the Maya emerged to become a dominant force in the ancient Americas.If you would like to find out how to visit the ancient city of Caracol and the many places mentioned in this podcast, visit www.travelbelize.org for more information!If you want more, you can sign up to watch our History Hit documentary The Secrets of the Maya at https://access.historyhit.com/videos/secrets-of-the-mayaWith huge thanks to Jonnell Augustine and Simon Noralez from the Belize Tourism Board, Natalie Wilson and Gabriella Bustone from Finn Partners. Our contributors: Dr Adrian Chase, Dr Diane Chase and Jose Mes.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. I'm walking through the central American jungle. There is now a tickle of light in the sky, but not since 4 in the morning, but I can now just about see where I'm going. The trees are thick, all sorts of different species.

And the noises of the night are slowly turning into those of dawn. There's some howler monkeys up ahead. There's some parakeets that have just gone quiet as I've approached. I'm just walking under the huge big leaves of some banana trees. but there's cacao trees all around as well. A few pines. It's not interesting because we're quite high up in the mountains here. And there are jaguars here as well,

but we're yet to see or hear from one of those. Oh, there's a howler monkey. Marianna DeForge, the producer, is here, wearing her trusty off-road trainers this time, taking no chance with the snakes. Years of experience finally paying off. It's a landscape I'm very not familiar with. I've spent no time at all in the jungles of Central America.

And it's a very, very special place. The sights, the sounds, the smells of the jungle. And now through the trees, I'm beginning to make out some lumps and bumps, some archaeological features that suggest I'm getting close to my target for today. Great big mounds with the topsoil exposing worked stone beneath them. I'm here to see one of the most extraordinary sites really in Central America. I'm here looking for what is the tallest building in Belize. It's not an office block, it's not a bank, it's not a hotel.

It's an ancient Maya pyramid, and there it is, right in front of me now. So I'm coming around this corner. Oh my goodness, look at that. It is around 2,000 years old, and it is a Mayan site. called Caracol. And the reason I'm here is because in 2025, archaeologists uncovered something completely extraordinary here. They found what they think is a burial chamber.

It was a very large chamber. There was red pigment on one side of the wall. Red is an important burial color to the Maya. And we could see bone. We knew it likely was a royal tomb. Archaeologists believe that this might be the tomb of the great Maya king called Tekkab Chak, the founder of a formidable dynasty. And that's what's brought me here.

Imagine that, just discovering the burial of an ancient king that we think we can actually put a name to. It's everything an archaeologist dreams of. And it's a reflection of the fact that here in Belize, there are still discoveries being made and yet to be made beneath this dense jungle canopy. Maya dominated Central America for over 3,000 years. They were masters of monumental architecture and readers of the stars. They made sense of abstract time and built enormous pyramids. They commissioned dynastic histories and developed the most sophisticated writing system in Mesoamerica,

millennia before the Aztecs or the Inca. They fought wars, forged alliances, engaged in complex rituals like human sacrifice, and competed for supremacy. In this special mini-series of Dan Snow's history, we're heading off the beaten track in Belize to trace this extraordinary story of the Maya, from their ancient origins to the pinnacle of their civilization, and we're going to try and make sense of their mysterious collapse in the 9th century that still raises questions among historians today.

This is episode one, the rise of a mighty civilization. It's probably helpful to give a little fact sheet on the geography of the Maya, lands and exactly who we mean when we talk about the Maya. Probably the biggest misconception is that the Maya were one kingdom or empire, like the Inca or the Aztecs. In fact, the Maya were a number of different city-states connected by one culture, all vying with each other for dominance. It's best to think of the Maya a bit like the ancient Greeks, like Athens competing with states like Sparta or Thebes, but also trading and forming alliances with them, and sharing a religious worldview. These city-states stretched across an enormous area of what is now southern Mexico and modern-day Guatemala,

Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. If you've ever been to this part of the world, you'll know that the landscape varies a lot across this region, depending on where you are. But a lot of it's pretty hostile to sustaining human life, which is one of the reasons the Maya were so remarkable to flourish as they did. They devised ingenious ways to sustain themselves in barren, dry lowlands and in the soaking humid rainforests. You might be familiar with the Maya from Chichenitzer in Mexico, very near Cancun. There's an enormous iconic pyramid that just dominates that site today. It's spectacular. The city of Chichenitsa actually comes much later in the story of the Maya. It was built around about the 19th century and we think Maya civilization began far

earlier, although historians and archaeologists are still pushing back the frontiers on this. We think it began over 2,000 years before that. They didn't have any metal, but they used stone tools to build great palace complexes and pyramids. So gradually powerful Maya city states evolved. And one of those city states was Caracol. That's where I am now. It's in the foothills of the Maya mountains. Say it's very near the Guatemalan border. And it grew into one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya world. Incredibly, at its height, it's believed that this city covered roughly 75 square miles. That is three times the size of Manhattan folks. But extraordinary for nearly a thousand years

it lay hidden beneath dense rainforest. It wasn't until 1937. It was a mahogany logger named Rosa Mai. And they reported the discovery of a lost city deep in the jungles. And they told the authorities

and what was at the time British Honduras. And the following year, imagine how exciting this must have been, Archaeological Commissioner A.H. Anderson visited the site and recorded the first artefacts here. It was really just a hand full of carved stone steely and he also saw the remnants of a temple and there was just a vast amount

hidden there in the vegetation underneath the topsoil waiting to be discovered one of the treasures that was subsequently found was the building that i'm staring up at now it is a towering pyramid called kana it stretches into the heavens in fact today the top of it is covered in the swirling mist. It is 141 feet tall. And don't worry folks, I am going to be climbing to the top, which is actually very unusual because most places you can't, but in Belize you're still allowed to climb on these ancient monuments. To help me get my bearings, I'm going to meet up with Dr. Adrian Chase. He's an archaeologist who has worked it well, as you'll hear, all of his life, and I mean that. Adrian, good to see you, buddy. How are you?

Very good, how are you? Thank you for having me on site. But we should just get one thing, When did you first come here? Well, so for my first trip out to Caracol, it's about two months old. I was not quite as helpful back then. And so you've been coming pretty much every year then for what? Well, except for minus college and then a little bit there. But yeah, for decades, I've been coming on and off. So what we're doing now is walking around one of the biggest cities ever in the Americas

before the Europeans arrived. So yes, exactly. One of the biggest cities in the Americas before Europeans. Let's go back. Tell me about the Maya. So I think the way to think of the Maya is there's this collection of simoleal, similarities, but there's a lot of diversity and a lot of different interactions. So for the ancient Maya, there are over three dozen Maya languages, and there's clearly a lot of variation as you go north, south, east, and west across the region. When they're talking, there's some similarities.

So it's kind of like different accents, but exaggerated to the point where sometimes you can't communicate, but a lot of the common words are similar. So they're able to communicate to some degree, but there's some similar practices. And it's sort of this central household compound. It's the idea of this sort of family ritual and activities. And then it's also building up some of these large stone architecture and pyramids and sort of the system like you see at Caracol, with a couple variants for other regions. And so there was never one Maya emperor sort of ruling the whole of this territory?

So no, there's never one Maya emperor who's ruling all the way from the top of Yucatan hitting the Gulf of Mexico all the way down to the Pacific coast past Highland, Guatemala. For people who may be a little bit more familiar in, Europe listening to this podcast. The Greek world is not a million miles away. So sort of reasonably common language, people are able to understand each other, similar ideas about mythology, religion, but shifting alliances of smaller polities. Yeah, and I'd say for the Maya, you have this kind of regional state system where there are shifts between which city is within which polity, which type of organization. How on earth do we get small-scale farming, small-cell

settlement in this region of Central America turning into these, the Mayan cities, these iconic building structures that we know and love? It's a very slow process that happens over generations. So for Karakol, we know that there are people starting to settle this landscape around 600 BC, and they're founding their households. They're starting to put them in place. You don't have monumental construction, though, until 360 BC. When I say, you know, jungle or tropics, you probably think of a place that's hot that's

maybe a little less productive, or you think of lots of wildlife and very little human interactivity. But what we've been finding archaeologically, not just in Mesoamerica, with the Maya, but also in tropical parts of Africa or Southeast Asia, is there are these really sprawling massive tropical cities and peoples who figured out how to unlock the potential of those tropical environments. So for the Maya, in some places, they're building agricultural terraces, and they're building up this huge system of terraces where at Caracol, by the city's height, it's over 160 square kilometers. In other parts, they're putting in raised fields in sort of

wetlands, or they're using other things that are more like Chinampas from the Aztec. And so you, you're seeing all of these different choices and decisions that is making the landscape significantly more productive. So you've got a big surplus of food. Right. So you can start using that to feed big workforces and build monumental buildings. Exactly. So you get the surplus of food.

You get the rising population. And then as you have this food surplus, people can start doing other things other than focusing on food. So they can be artisans. They can make jewelry, whether it's carved bone, marine shell coming in from the coast. They can start being long-distance traders. They can move salt. to the inlands or they can transport obsidian.

You start having people that specialize in different activities, whether it's ritual or political or commercial. So you've got all these different cities, if you like, around this region, around this part of the world. How are their relations characterized? Are we into marrying? Are we peaceful visiting? Or is there a lot of violence?

So you get the whole gamut from violence to peaceful interaction. One of the things that I can say is at Karakol from excavations that were in 2009 published in 2010, we have a Teotihuacan burial. So we have a cremation in the center of the northeast of Crockolis. Teotihuacan being that amazing city up north of Mexico City now, right? Exactly.

So over 1,000 kilometers away from us. And it would suggest a peaceful interaction where somebody's come in, they've married into one of the local families, and then when they're buried, they wanted to be buried in their traditional custom. Okay, so we've got people moving vast distances. From the isotope data here and elsewhere, it seems like maybe 40% of people in different Mesoamerican cities, whether it's Central Mexico or Maya, are migrants who've come in from elsewhere.

So you get these periods of globalization, locally within Mesoamerica and then periods of isolation. And the history of the Maya and Central Mexican peoples is basically a flip back and forth between those systems. Well, surprise, surprise, like everywhere else in the world. Right. At its height in 650, it may have been the seventh largest city in the world. it's very rare to have a city that hits 100,000 people before the Industrial Revolution. And for the Maya, they have five cities probably, or six cities rather, that hit over 50,000.

And then one in Central Mexico, Teutu Khan, where Carckel had connections back and forth. So we're now standing in this extraordinary central plaza, I've got the highest building. This is the kind of iconic heart of a Mayan city, people are familiar, we've got the massive pyramids with the steps. What is the purpose of these buildings here we're looking at?

All right, this is sort of the political, within the downtown of Karakol. And what you have is you have a northern structure Kana, which is still the tallest human-made building in Belize today. It's about the height of the Statue of Liberty and the base is about two American football fields. So it's this massive stone architecture, but it would have started as a small little household.

And then over generations, they build it up, build it up, build it up. It's kind of like the White House. You know, it's serving this other role. So it has these three different tiers on it, and the first two tiers, you can see those public meeting rooms that are all facing front. So if you're standing in this plaza and you look up, you can see who gets to go meet with whom. You possibly have a little prison off to the side.

The northern building is more related to the ruler and the ruler's family with two private compounds, the private residential areas, to the northeast and northwest of it, filling out the upper space on the pyramid. And then the eastern building itself, that's the ritual building, which is where the ruler's relatives are buried, so you have multiple tombs. As with so many structures in the past, they look grey and stony to us now. they would have been vibrant and overwhelming. Like most people, there's a favoritism. They want colorful things.

They want pretty objects. So you're getting that elaborate probably stucco design, and we have pieces of stucco so we can get a sense of these different architectural elements. But putting it all together would take a lot more effort to see how it looked like in its heyday. I was always told growing up that the Maya had social class distinctions. And you've got the rich people living up there every lovely time

and everyone else is very very poor and marginalized. Is that an outdated take? or do you see evidence about it here? So I think it's first kind of mixed in the sense that for some cities, that definitely seems to be the case. So for example, Caracol, there's this really big focus on wealth sharing

where the difference between the elite and sort of the ordinary people is a lot more suppressed. And it's almost like it was a conscious strategy. They knew that they had a problem with all these people moving in, they're building up this big city, and they wanted some way to make sure

that everybody could live together. Everybody's getting access to tombs, the market system's going at full steam. So you're getting polychrom pots, You're getting obsidian blades coming from Guatemala. You're getting marine shell made into jewelry by local artisans. And so life is pretty good here for the average person during the city's heyday in a way that really shows that you have this full, strong, middle level of society. It has a ruler who's probably living on Kana, but then you also have these different districts, which likely have sort of a district head.

And there may be a local district council or a local system of how they manage disputes over land or other issues. you have neighborhoods which likely then have neighborhood heads in their own meetings. So you have this multi-tiered system like you would have in a modern city with different councils and governments at different levels. And so if we looked out from the top of canal, we'd have seen a landscape with certain neighborhoods, really. You would look out over this larger landscape and you'd see these plasuela residential groups. You would see these other roads leading out from the downtown to other districts, each of which has its own main temples, its own elite families, its own local families who are probably helping. manage and run the public space, collecting sort of the tax to use it. And of course, all of these public plazas, they'd be used for ritual activity, political rallies, marketplaces. It's anytime

you have a formal public space, you can use it for whatever you need at the time. They also have range buildings, which may have been storage for other goods and materials. Or, and about half of them, they have a ball court, because of course everybody wants to go see a ball game every once in a while, right? As soon as you step off the downtown or any other district, you're in somebody's terraced field. Now, in terms of the terraces, there's sort of two different general types. There are these like architectural terraces where you want to increase the amount of flat space to build on, and then there are agricultural terraces where you want to farm. And what you can imagine is you have your field, you've built up this terrace, the water's designed so it's flowing

back and forth as it goes down the hills. And it's helping irrigate trees. So you have medicinal trees, different tree crops, probably around the edges. And then you have the three sisters, the mix of corn, beans, and squash. But you also have chili peppers or cacao. And you can imagine that unlike a modern field, you don't need to monocrop. So they're putting all of the different crops they need together and intermixing them. And that creates the system because you can manage the soil. So the my other night swelling is when you take all of your human and food wastes and you mix them together and you put them back into the fields. That's part of the reason the forest is so healthy here today. You have a sandier patch there that's better for peppers. They go in that corner. You know that

the cacao likes to be under shades. You put it under this plant here. And then you have your little garden, and so you get this garden city aspect from these agricultural terraces. Speaking of that agricultural system, there's no river that runs past it, so presumably water engineering, water engineering must have been very sophisticated. So this is perfect question. You actually saw the closest river that you drove over in that brand new bridge, and as you were passing it, I think it's about 14 kilometers direct distance from where we are now. And that is the closest perennial sort of moving body of water. What the Maya did instead is all of these public plazas,

of the household plazas, they are dedicated to drain water often into it, a reservoir. So in the downtown, you have a large and a monumental reservoir. In some of the other districts, you have large reservoirs. But by the end of the city's lifespan, there are enough household reservoirs for every two to five households to be sharing the same water source. And so those are providing water for the dry season. They are probably doing some really clever mixes of having pure water, some things covered with duckweed, and a couple that are dedicated to aquaculture, where they're using water

to gauge water purity, which is something we know the Maya did iconographically. Water gets tied in with rulership, and often also the underworld is this watery place. So you have all of this mix of different elements suggesting water is really key and important. You're also getting a lot of consumption of marine fish here, too, based on the dietary evidence. So there's active trade routes to the coast where they're getting marine fish, even though we're nowhere near the coast. They also would have, at the same time, mixed in this water system of reservoirs and, you know, water for consumption with the agricultural terraces, which are serving as this

earthen reservoir for their plants. So when it rains, the water flows over the terrace and it seeps into the soil, and it's designed to be the right depth for all the crops they want to grow. And then the water is flowing along the bedrock layer at the bottom of the soil. So it's going from terrace to terrace down the system. Nothing wasted. Nothing wasted. Presumby there's places for religious activity festivals as well.

So actually, there's a really good example just over there. And basically it's the ancient community center at Carcol. And it predates everything we just talked about with Kana. It's this early building, this really long elongated eastern building, which is built up and remodeled about every 200 years. And then a big Western structure. It's something that helps control the calendar and put it together, the ritual lunar and the more standard sort of annual solar calendar.

And so the Maya, when they're giving you their texts, the first few glyphs are all just telling you a date within that calendric system. How is that Maya calendar works? There is an OG date, right? In Christian culture, we have the birth of Jesus. There's an equivalent in Maya culture, right? So this would be good if I could actually reference exactly when it is, but it's sometime like around

3,114 BC, I think. And then that date cycled around again. So the Maya calendar, like the Maya number system, it happens in these sort of sets of 20. And you can imagine 20 is the base unit instead of 10 if you count on fingers and toes. Yeah. And so they have 20 days in a month.

They only have 18 in a year to help make that religious calendar kind of work out, if that makes sense. And then 20 years of the set, and then every set of 400 years, 20 times 20, et cetera. And so there was this concept that the calendar repeats. And part of this idea of counting in cycles, so you've got the cycle of days, the cycle of sort of weeks and months, the cycles of years, is the Maya are thinking about time not as an arrow, but as cycles on cycles, whether it's day night, Rainy dry, generations of people, life, death. And people talk about their predictive power of the Maya, their Maya Apocalypse.

Why is popular cultures have seized on that aspect of Maya? So what happened is that calendric system, that long-count calendar, which the Maya weren't really using in the Post-Classic. They used a shorter form because they didn't need to have dates that counted, you know, within a 6,000-plus-year frame, is it reset.

It started a new count in 2012. In December, I think 21st it was. And so that date is the same date as the start of the calendar, right, in terms of Maya dates. But because of that one text and a couple others, it's clear that it's just a repetition of the cycle. That's how it works. It just resets, yeah. But some people made money out of the fact that it was the end of the world. Exactly. And so they're doing cycles and celebration of time every 20 years. So you can think of all the public space you've walked through, all this flat space.

It's big enough for at least 71,000 people to be tightly packed. And if you had a procession going through, you can have a procession going through, you can imagine once every 20 years there's a big ceremony to celebrate the successful governance, rule, passage of time of 20 years. I pack in some serious heat this beautiful. Yeah, so those are burders. We just passed a group of burders. And so one of the big things about the management here is that all of the trees have

been intentionally kind of kept to keep this environment where you can see a lot of wildlife. And we're an archaeological reserve in a larger natural park, national reserves. And so you do get jaguars coming through. You get to see tapirs here if you're really lucky. You'll hear the howler monkeys. You might see spider monkeys. And then early in the morning, you see tons of birds. So if you get on your car first thing, you'll come out here and you'll see a bunch of birders

looking at all the species that are present. Guys, you're looking in the wrong direction. Look at the archaeology, folks. But to be fair for the ancient Maya, they would have been keeping trees and forest here too. So you have this mix of human use of space and natural use. And it creates this fully anthropogenic or human landscape. And so the Maya are mixing natural and human elements together. and making it this really fluid garden city.

And so you can see echoes of that in the modern management system. And we are crawling towards that understanding of managing the urban landscape today, aren't we? And if you look at house prices, you'll notice that places that have that urban forest tend to be much wealthier and more well-endowed than places that don't have the tree canopy. And we shouldn't be surprised, because the Maya were aware of this 15 hundred years ago, at least.

Exactly. They were aware of this, but they're also... They know which of these tree species are medicinal, they know which ones have resources they can use. Think of it like a mix of your medicine cabinet with your kitchen cupboard, but it's growing all around your household. This is Dan Snow's history here. More after this.

The Maya learned how to read the environment, shape it, and work with it, allowing large populations to exist in what might seem like an unforgiving landscape. And while the archaeology gives us an outline of a civilization, is the culture, the customs, the food, the way of life that really gives us the color, that tells us how they thrived.

And in modern-day Belize, you can learn about that everywhere. Over 50% of the Belizeian population today identifies with having at least some Maya heritage. I'm heading to the Toledo district where Maya communities and families still practice many of the pillars of Maya culture, as well as offering an insight into how ancient Maya mastered their environment to survive for so many centuries. I'm here to meet Jose Mess. He is a guide in this area. and he's very kindly offered to show me his Maya home, his garden and taught me through, well, everything the modern Maya do that is derived from their ancient forebears. I'm just walking in now through the beautiful garden. There's loads and loads of different plants and trees. A real diversity here. There's some cacao. Oh yeah, lovely purple fruit. The cacao plant. There's some hibiscus.

And I'm just walking through all sorts of wonderful fruit trees off to my left. It's a huge palm roof and I'm just walking up to the house now. There we go. All right, welcome home. Watch your step. Welcome in. This is my baby, Isaac. Hi, Isaac.

This is my wife, Field and that's my daughter. I'll have you. Nice to meet you. All right, welcome home, okay? Feel free. Jose, this is a beautiful house. Just to describe it for people. We have these logs, beautiful, straight timbers making a frame,

and then there is thatching. I'm guessing this is all locally sourced. Everything I'm seeing here. First of all, I want to welcome you to my home. If you notice here, if you look around, the wallings, the poes, the tie-tie, the roofing, everything's from jungle. We naturally made these. We don't use any level or square measurement or measuring tape.

Everything is arm length, eyesight, constructing a home like this. And how long would it take to put up a house like this? You, as an owner of the home, you would collect your sticks, your post, your rafters, your tie-tie. So you set a date in three days' time, in three days' time, you already have your house. So once you've gathered everything,

you can get this up with your friends and family and community members in three days. Yes. Here in the mine communities, Dan, our strength is the unity. We unite together, we work, meaning that I help you, you help me. In three days' time, then,

you have your traditional womb constructed without a penny. What I really fascinated by is that I can't see any nails, no iron here, because you've got these wonderful vines from the jungle that are lashing together, the uprights, the joists as well, which is great. Yes, Dan.

So everything you need is right here. I want you to walk with me, Dan. I really want to show you how we live. What do we do if the Maya people get sick in the early days? How do they survive? In this section here, I have my medicinal plants. The Mayan name we have. This one here is called Shalche.

Remember, almost like a chel, the rain forest god. Yes, it's like the god of the... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the rain god, the forest god. So the main use is for a schalchele is for diarrhea, for stomach problem. Okay. It's very handy, but we normally pick them, boil them, drink it as a tea. So the Maya found themselves in a part of the world where if they work with nature,

it would bring them enormous rewards because things grow here. Right, right. If we look back from the ancient time, how do these ancient Maya people live? How does my ancestors live? Do you know how to sustain or to survive their family? When they get sick, how do they cure? When I was growing up then, my family never tick us to the hospital.

In my backyard here, we have medicinal plant behind for toothache to numb your gum. If you have a toothache, it helps you from pain and from cure. We have also for cutting if you wounded, because in the Maya people in the earth, early days, they were not using any machete, but they were using obscenes that was traded. Shadstone. Yes. They still get wounded.

They wounded themselves. What do they do from stopping from bleeding? There is a plant that we have now. It's very common. It's usable. If you notice here, Dan, look at this. Oh, yeah. It's a big scar on your floor.

So when I was 14 years old, my dad put me to work on the farm. In fact, at seven years of age, imagine, very young, my dad teach me how to use a machete. But, you know, I and my brother were doing cleaning, and my brother wounded me, see? Yes. Because we went too close together. And now I said, I'm going to die because I was bleeding blood all over me. I hollered at my dad, and my dad came running.

I said, oh, you're going to be okay. I said, no, Dad, look at my blood. He said, I'm going to be right back here. Run into the jungle. From the field into the jungle. I said, Dad, why are you leaving me here to die? I was crying, and I was looking at my dad. Where is my dad?

When I noticed my dad coming running back into the field with a handful of the of leaves in his hand. He quickly started to chew it and then place it on the wounded area. Not to cure them, but to clot your blood, to stop bleed. That leaves has some kind of acidic

that instantly, like instant, like you see when you have that PVC pipe open, pour in water and you close it, close it, exactly what that leaves does to the bleeding. Just to stop bleeding, I managed to walk one hour from farm to my home.

Really? And I got cured after. So some of these very important, for infection. We have infection plant. We have plants for headaches. When we do jungle hike, we have what we call a jungle cane. It's very sour. And that piece of jungle cane really helps for dehydration.

So all of these things, you know, they are very knowledgeable on the Maya people. Up to today, day, we barely go to the hospital, but we would go to our, natural herbal medicinal plant into the backyard. Imagine then if I would walk you into my farm more, I would point out to you some of these plants. Not planted by me, but they just naturally grow there. What I do is I only maintain them cleaning around them. Some of our cultivators are bats, lizard, agoutis, and birds.

They do the hard work. They would do, yes, they would eat the seeds, they would eat the berries and do droppings into the backyards into the farm. And that's how we get our natural medicinal growing into the backyard. So the Maya were just expert farmers? Yes, yes. And what about maize? Because this is something you hear a lot about, isn't it?

Do you grow your maize near the house? Yes, yes, yes. Here in my community, in Santa Cruz, we do have 13 species in the community, but we have four ancient local corn. We harvest, we do twice a year. And corn is the bedrock of the diet? Yes. For the Maya people, our main staple, is corn three times a day.

Yes, you can hunt, you can have game meat, you can have jungle, vegetable, you can do fishing, but nothing like corn. So corn isn't just a substance for eating, presumably it's so important it becomes part of their religion as well. Yes, then, yes. In the Maya believes, in the Maya culture, we have many gods. We have gods for every harvest, every crops, every medicinal, almost everything then. So we have the corn god. We have the Hunahpuk. He has that relation working with Ischelle, which is the god of the forest, the god of the maize.

So they have those relationship working, and those are the gods that provides for the Mayan people. So it was the bedrock of their diet, and it's also a hugely important, they're spiritual. So before they do planting, before they touch the earth, they will do their ritual activities. In fact, Maya people believe they were once came from corn.

They believe that the corn is what produces or give them life, sustain their living. So there's a synergy. They're living in balance with the natural world. Yes. Yes. Night has fallen here in Belize. You can hear that jungle wildlife really revving up. Things get so noisy here at night.

Monkeys will be out soon, I expect. And what I love about coming out here at night looking up with through a clearing in the trees is how clear the night sky is in Belize. It's fantastic. You can see the stars tonight. There is Orion's belt. We can have a little look for the North Star,

but it's quite low on the horizon here. The ancient Maya did not think these were just lights in the sky. They believed they're all part of the sacred cosmos, deeply connected to events down here on Earth. For the Maya, the universe was layered. There was the underworld below. There was where we are now, where the humans lived, and then the heavens above.

There are multiple celestial levels. And they monitored all those things. and planets very closely. They were able to track the passage of time by the movement of celestial bodies. They wrote them down, they created one of the most advanced systems of astronomy in the ancient Americas. They actually wrote books known as codices that noted the movements of the sun, the moon, Venus, all written down in their complex hieroglyphs. Sadly, most of the Maya's written books were destroyed during the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, but thankfully not everything was lost. The Maya also carved their

astronomical knowledge, along with the stories of their rulers, alliances, wars and dynasties, onto stone, steli and altars, and into the walls of their temples. And it's from these surviving monuments that experts have been able to piece together the story of the Maya. But at Caracol, one crucial piece of that story had been missing. American archaeologist, Doctors Arlen and Diane Chase, had been excavating Caracol for more than 40 years. In that time, they've uncovered the towering Kana pyramid, temples, altars, and vast residential neighborhoods. But despite all these extraordinary discoveries, they had never found a ruler's burial until last summer, July 2025. And when they finally did, it was probably

the most important tomb they could have found. We're in a residential plaza area. And they're buildings on all sides. Yeah. And the Maya, typically, their houses are like that. There's a plaza in the center and then the buildings surrounded. The buildings that are generally speak on the north or the west or the south are often just regular residential buildings or in this case palaces. So they'd have lived here and had staff working here and stuff?

Absolutely. And then the building to our right, which is to the east, that's the mortuary building. And that's where you would bury your dead. Right. And that's why you decided to look in there when you were investigating burials, I guess. Yes, look, that's a good place to look for burials, and it's also a good place to look for caches. Those are other ritual deposits that are placed inside the buildings.

We had done excavations in the center. We'd done excavations there, off to the side over here. But there was an area that we also had not covered. We'd had to stop an excavation short because the fill was not necessarily as stable as it could be. We were at the end of the field season. And a number of years later, we came back. So you're digging in there.

You've gone a few meters down. And what do you find? We find essentially that there's an open area near the floor and the side of our excavation that we just had to move a few stones and we were inside. Oh my goodness, you're in a tunnel basically going down. A little short, a little short air. So at the end of this short tunnel that's open, you go through there, what do you find at the end? An open air tomb.

Wow. How do you know it was a tomb? It's a corbel vaulted. There's no external door. And we could see pottery vessels on the floor had not been disturbed. Incredible. Yeah. It was a very large chamber.

There was red pigment on one side of the wall. Red is an important burial color to the Maya. And we could see bone, one person. So sometimes our chambers have more than one, but just one person inside, multiple ceramic vessels. And at first, we knew it likely was a royal tomb. There weren't any hieroglyphs to indicate that because it's a little earlier than the time period where we would get writing on the capstones. But we thought, all right, this is probably a royal individual, someone really important. But as we went further, we began to realize that this was someone really, really important for this point in time.

So the artifacts started to tell us a different story. There were three sets of jade-air flare. If we get one set of jade air flares inside a chamber, that's pretty impressive. So there's unprecedented? Three large ones. a very impressive necklace of carved jadeite beads. And really, though, until about the last days of the excavation, when it turns out that there's a life-size deaf mask inside there

that's made out of jadeite and shell. At that point, we knew that this was a royal family. It was a ruler. And based on the timing, we expected that this was probably the first member of our royal dynasty here at Carcull. So it was a really, really special find. And the jade death mask is something that's only associated with royalty. Absolutely, absolutely.

And not necessarily just royalty, but rulers. So there are maybe less than 50 of them that have been found in the Maya area. And this is the first one to be found at Carckel. So they're not common. They're not common. So how come this very important ruler is buried here and not at the towering palace administrative complex pyramid that's the focal point of the site?

I think this was actually a nicer place. place to live than at the summit of Kana. And, you know, maybe that was a ritual location rather than anything else. So you had these incredibly high status goods. You had the royal, the ruler's death mask. So you thought it, and it was the right period, you thought you had your guy. Yeah. What's his name?

Take up check. And why is he important? He is the first known ruler of the site. He's the initial member of the Karakul Dynasty. So he's in the hieroglyphic text in a couple of places. And this is the first time we would have found a ruler, a definite ruler, and we actually knew his name. So for us, that was priceless.

Is it a useful comparison? Just as Rome goes from being a republic to an empire under Augustus, Augustus is the first of these emperors. Is this an equivalent figure? Yeah, I think so. They're calling back to him historically, that he's the first in that line. Carcall was occupied long before that,

and there's impressive architecture here before that. But it's his rule that everyone is counting back to when they're talking about the history of the site. So if you could have found anyone in the history of the historical, he's pretty high on the list of somebody. Yeah, he's very high on the list. Very, very, very high on the list. You're an expert in human remains. What have his bones been able to tell us? The bones were able to tell us that he was an elderly individual. 45. Oh, yeah, no, a little older than that.

Even, oh, wow, super old. So if you think about, even in our current world, we've got great dentistry. You know, there are individuals that lose all of their teeth, right? So we had no teeth. Wow. And there were no places for those teeth, no sockets for the teeth left. It had all been completely reserved. So for a long period of time, he'd been eating food or, you know, mashing food, but without teeth.

So that's a clear indication of his advanced age. So what's the burial tell us about Maya kingship? These people who lived behind the curses? Or are they out there rubbing shoulders with populace leading them into battle charismatic Visible kingship? What's your guess? I think just like today, it really does depend on the individual. And sometimes we have a lot of evidence that can tell us about them and other times less so.

This time period at Carcol, we don't have the luxury of the huge hieroglyphic history. But for some of our rulers, we know what they're saying about themselves at least. right they're great leaders they're leading the site in war you know there battles with other sites that they're winning they're taking captives we also know that um they're at least saying that they're doing sacrifices for the people so that you'll see bloodletting implements which were buried in caches that are in royal or public locations so they're doing things for the people on one hand but on the other hand they're doing things for themselves the amount of or the kinds of items that are located in this tomb, those are not things that everyone on the site would have had. So there's

actually a, you know, a reasonable divide between this individual and the rest of the folks that lived at Carcall. But that changes over time. So are you suggesting that leaders like to boast about their successes, shouted about how much they're doing for people, but secretly amassed vast amounts of personal wealth? This is shocking stuff. Sometimes. Sometimes, sometimes, yes. Sometimes, yes. So he's an enormous figure in the history of this city. I think he's a great indication of what caracol was and what is about to become in terms of the great Maya city. We know that car coal at that point in time was on a trade network, even though it's inland and not near a river, and that it was tied across Mesoamerica.

So there are also other remains that we found here are tied to the highlands of Guatemala. So it's a suggestion of car coal really was an important place that was lost for time. you know, in the jungle. He is turning it into a monarchy as well. Will that affect the way that it interacts with its neighbors? Does it enter a more expansionary phase, for example? Do we know? What happens after Tecob Chak is, well, all of the Maya rulers are connected with each other. Karakol sends someone who becomes the ruler of Kopan in Honduras, for example. Our dynasty is related to one at Tikal. So there are a lot of relationships among the elite at these various sites. But Carcol is, you know, taking its a place among the great leaders.

Carcol is one of the later sites to be found compared to Tikal and Copan and the sites in Mexico. So it's taken a while for folks to realize how important it actually was to the Maya during the classic period. You listen to Dan Snow's history at there's more coming up. It wasn't until Thai Kabchak founded the royal dynasty here in the fourth century that it really became a regional superpower. Under his leadership, power was centralised, long-distance trade expanded, and diplomatic ties were forged with other great Maya kingdoms. His dynasty would rule for 460 years. But ruling a Maya mega-city was no easy job. As allegiances between the Maya state shifted, warfare was near constant concern for Maya kings.

Conflicts between the different states were often about territory and trade. They were usually smaller clinical campaigns, rather than huge battlefield clashes. Elite warriors and nobles led expeditions against rival cities, armed with obsidian-bladed spears and darts, wooden clubs edged with sharp stones, protected by shields and padded cotton armour. The aim was not simply to kill enemies, but to capture them, especially rival kings or high-ranking nobles. Then prisoners could be paraded before the victory. notorious ruler, forced in submission or sacrificed in ritual ceremonies. And as Caracol became more powerful over the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, the peak of the classic period, it became imbriol

in more conflict. Descendants of Thai Carbchak were determined to forge their reputation and Caracol's dominance in the region. One of the most important wars in the history of the Maya were the Tikal Wars. For between Karakol and the nearby city state of Tikal, you can still see its ruins in the Guatemalan jungle to the west of the Belizean border. In AD 556, Caracol suffered a defeat at the hands of Tikal. When a new leader called Lord Water took the throne at Caracol shortly afterwards, he was determined to rebuild its military and political strength. To do so, he forged a powerful alliance with Kalakmul, Tikal's greatest rival. And the story of how that war played out between these great Maya powers can be found in the carved stone monuments at Caracol.

Lots of people will have heard of Tikal. It's in modern-day Guatemala. Many of you will have visited. It has long been said to have been one of the primary powers here in the Maya lowlands. It controlled politics and trade. It was a very important religious centre. Initially it seems that Cadacol was politically tied to Tikal but in the middle of the 6th century it changed its allegiance to Kalak-Mul

and in 562 Lordwater launched what archaeologists call a star war against Tikal. It was a destructive brutal military campaign. It was timed apparently so it would align with celestial events in this instance we believe it was the movement of Venus The record suggests that in an astonishing upset, the king of Tikal was defeated, he may have been captured, but either way, the results were catastrophic.

And it seemed like after this enormous loss, Tikal's population and its influence over the region collapsed. Caracol was in the ascendant. I'm just walking around the site now looking for the brilliant Dr. Adrian's. Chase and he's going to talk me through one of these surviving steely and explain what it all says about the epic struggle with Tikal. Adrian, how you doing, buddy? Oh, doing very well. How about you? Good, thank you. So thank you for coming back. Adrian, would you mind take me to this amazing steely? Sure. Let's go. So here, this is the primary altar that's giving us a lot of the history here at Karakol. And you can see, if you look at the middle, it's pretty rough, it's a little broken up.

But even with that, you can still see all of these little glyph blocks. Usually there's a lot of a key glyph that tells you start here, and then they give you a date, which is usually five glyphs. So people will be familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are some similarities, right? They are pictorial. They seem to be showing shapes and objects that are sort of recognizable. What is the system? So the Maya, when they make these glyphs, they're actually mixing together images representing words and sounds, but also they have a syllable. So it's logosyllabic, and then every individual scribe can have their own style. So there get to be different styles per site. In terms of the written language, it seems like they're three used for most of the classic period with different variants to the east,

to the west, and to the north. And it's only been quite recently that you guys have been able to decipher these. Yeah, so I'd say it's sort of the 1960s to present. Even today, we can't read all of the glyphs. So in some of these monuments, like you can see right over there, you might see a figure represented, and sometimes they have a glyph on their thigh or on their, person, which is telling you that's their name. Okay. Or sometimes you'll see a glyph for fire inside a fire. And so little hints like that have led to this slow process of translating.

And I always get very frustrated in ancient Egypt because you often go into a tomb and there's writing everywhere, but actually it's just incantations. It's the same thing again. Are glyphs in the Maya were quite useful to epigraphers and historians, archaeologists? So yes, if you can get a nice glyphic text, it's quite useful. But the thing is, the Maya on these texts, they're all these stone monuments. The Maya also had this book paper, so they fold like an accordion. That's where they would have put their poetry, their art, their history, their records, their taxes, along with, you know, ritual incantation.

So there's a set of paper books from the Post Classic, and all of those talk about stars and astronomy and positions and different rituals you do on certain days. But there are only four books out of what must have been hundreds of thousands of books. And what happened to all the others, Adrian? Well, so the Spanish came in and burned them. Now, on this monument here, it's put into the main ball court at Karakol, so they would have had to play around it to some degree. But it's Khan the second, once he's a seat of the throne after 618. He is very prolific. He puts up monuments here at Karakol.

And so usually sometimes the ruler is putting up the monument themselves, but often they're these retrospective monuments. So they're tying events together through time. And he's putting this together because his father had the successful Star War, this total war, against the royal family at Tikal. So at this point, this city we're standing in now is dominant. So at this point, this city is dominant within this region. Is what we're being told here corroborated by what we see in Tikal? Does it seem like actually it did fall into eclips for a while? Yeah, so Tikal, the glyphs go silent.

When you're defeated in a Star War, you stop putting up monuments. But what we see on the ground at Tikal, based on the archaeologists, we're excavating back in the 60s, these rulers come in who are these stranger kings, and that's what they call them. They recognize them as foreigners. there's even a carckel glyph on one of the vessels and one of their burials, but they try to put their mark on the city and they remake the downtown. And part of this is there are different models for how Maya rulers work, and the older sort of outdated model is that each royal family has a glyph,

each glyph is tied to one place. And what we can see by mixing the archaeology in the glyphs and looking at trade networks and how things shift over time is that you can see multiple cities become part of the same state over time. And this ruler, think of him as the figurehead. there's still a whole governing apparatus that's handling the day-to-day affairs. How do you think life here was affected

in that period of hegemony and dominance? Do you think more wealth would have floated? Do you think normal people would have recognized their advantages of being so dominant? What we can see is that actually, corroborating with this date and after, you see new households being founded on the landscape, probably by people migrating in.

The population's growing too quickly to just be internal unless they found magical corn or something. So it suggests immigration into the city, and then average household, wealth is also going up. So they're looting a little bit of the wealth out of Tikal, but they're also taking some of the people from Tikal and bringing them here, or rather, people from Tikal are choosing to migrate here. They're following the power. Right. And then those families stay on this landscape all the way

into the end. How long do you think this, well, if we can call it a golden age loosely, but how long does that last? Yeah, so it's kind of complicated, but for Lord Water, there's this sort of $560 date that's really important. He goes until $600. And that seems to be doing pretty well for Carcule, you see wealth increasing. Khan the second, there's an interregnum for 18 years before he can actually accede to the throne, which suggests a lot of background politics that we can't see really in the glyphs. But he accedes at 618, and then he's governing for a bit. And then the final ruler, Smokskull takes over for the last 22 years.

And 22 years is a long time to be a ruler. He's a ruler of a very secure state. But Smokskull, we only have from two monumental records. One is a stucco text on Kana, and the other is a monument that, is out at La Rojoia. And La Rojoia is one of the outlying districts or Karakol. It's currently the northwest part

that's in Guatemala and the one that's closest to a waterway. And on that text, it basically says, he retook Ushwitsa. Ushwitsa is the Maya name for the city of Karakol.

And what it is is it literally means three mountain place. And now the question is, how did he lose it? Because he doesn't talk about that part. All of these texts are always very positive. It's what we did that went well. And this is actually pretty

bad that it's one of the surviving texts and what he said is, I retook something I shouldn't have lost. So the third member of that dynasty is obviously experiencing rebellion, we don't know. Yeah, he ends up experiencing issues. We can see other texts that talk about it. It looks like a coalition of the different peoples and places he'd incorporated, or Khan the second and Lord Waterhead incorporated, managed to band together and they sort of kicked him out. So Smoke Skull is certainly fighting to keep his patrimony together, this powerful state that was created. by his predecessors. What period is this?

So basically everything collapses at 680, and you have the next couple of years reseeding of the dynasties at Tikal and at Naranjo. So Tikal is back. Teakal is back. And Smok'skull? And Smokskull disappears. He disappears.

So we don't have any other records of what happens. Caracol goes into a hiatus in terms of what the glyphs and the monuments say, which is odd only because, usually when you're defeated in war, like happened to Tikal, it's kind of bad for the site

and you can see this, decline in wealth and well-being. Instead at Caracol, things continue to explode after they're defeated in war. So the average person at Caracol, if you were to choose to live at the site and you're not getting to choose to be the uppermost elite, you don't want to live at Caracol after 680 in this next period, which is 120 years of wealth sharing and a really strong group in the middle. So the powerful warrior kings have gone, but society seems to keep on flourishing. Society keeps on flourishing. And we can see some of the other little cities declaring their own little independence. around Caracol, but Caracol itself is flourishing for that period.

I don't know of another case like that. Well, folks, I am taking giant strides here, quite literally, big old steps leading up to the top of this pyramid. If you thought I was going to finish up this podcast without climbing to the very top of Cana, the enormous pyramid palace administrative center, Temple, well, you're not a regular listener to this podcast. It's got to be done. The discoveries made here in the last 30 or 40 years have transformed the way that we understand the entire Maya world. Because it turns out that Caracol was a serious player. It reshaped the balance

of this region. We now know that Caracol was a serious player. It reshaped the balance of this region. We now know that Caracole was a vast city, one of the wealthiest, the most commercial, and with a military might that upended the order of the Maya for the next 200 years. But it wouldn't last. Because around the 9th century, something happened. Cities like Caracol were abandoned. Monuments stopped being built. Populations disappeared. Some archaeologists have called this the Maya collapse, as if one single catastrophe wiped out the civilization overnight. But that isn't quite what happened. The reality is far more complex and far more unsettling.

The Maya didn't vanish. Their cities didn't all fall at once. Instead, one of the most sophisticated urban civilizations in the ancient world slowly began to unravel. Climate pressure, political instability, intensifying warfare. Systems pushed to their limits and beyond them. A situation that feels uncomfortably familiar. what happens when a civilization at its peak begins to fail?

Join me for episode 2 on Thursday as we traced the decline of the Maya and tried to make sense of what went wrong. And to do so, we must venture deeper into the jungle and into the earth, into the caves, the places where the Maya believed were the entrances to the underworld. Don't forget to hit follow wherever you get your podcast, so you don't miss the next episode. And if you want to find out more about traveling to Belize to see this history for yourself, I would really recommend it, folks. It was a fantastic experience.

You can find out more at www.com. And we'll put a handy link in the show notes. With huge thanks, the team at the Belize Tourist Board. We'll see you next time. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era.

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