Short History Of... - The Maya

Episode Date: October 10, 2021

In 1511, a Spanish lifeboat makes land on the Yucatán coast in modern-day Mexico. Thirteen days ago, the crew's caravel was wrecked on a reef. But their adventure is far from over. Now, they are about to become some of the first Europeans to make contact with the Maya. Custodians of an ancient civilisation, at one time tens of millions of Maya people inhabited a swathe of the Americas. But who were they and what did they do? Where did they go once their society collapsed? And how are their modern-day descendants beginning to bring the past back to life? This is a Short History of the Maya. Written by Dan Smith. With thanks to David Stuart, Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

July the 12th, 1562, is a typically hot day in Mani, a Maya city on the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America. But on a large esplanade opposite Mani's Franciscan monastery, the temperature is more stifling than ever. A great fire rages. Its fuel is an extraordinary collection of religious and cultural artifacts, over 5,000 items altogether, including a priceless and unique library of books written in the Maya language. It's a day of great sadness for the local population, who can only watch on as the fire crackles away. crackles away. This though is no terrible accident. It's a deliberate enterprise ordered by Diego de Landa, the Spanish-born Bishop of Yucatan.

Welcome to Short History Of, the show that transports you back in time to witness history's most incredible moments and remarkable people. In this episode, we explore the Maya, one of the great civilizations of antiquity, dating back to at least 2000 BC, and one which remains alive and prospering today. At its peak, tens of millions of Maya people inhabited a swathe of the Americas, comprising modern-day Belize and Guatemala, as well as parts of Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador. Overlapping with other great Mesoamerican cultures, including the Olmec and the Aztecs, the Maya developed a distinct identity and belief system.

Their cultural achievements are myriad too, not least an extraordinary architectural heritage, the highly advanced form of mathematics, and the creation of one of a handful of ancient writing systems. The unlocking of this language in the last few decades has opened a window to this often misunderstood civilization. There's much more to the Maya than the chocolate drinking, human sacrifice and lost cities of the popular imagination. The Maya boast a record of extraordinary achievements and a complex narrative of success and failure, expansion, decline and rebirth. Parts of their past remain shrouded in mystery, but with each passing year, more light illuminates their incredible story.

This is a short history of the Maya. When he arrived in Yucatan in 1549, Delanda was in his mid-twenties and energized by religious zeal. Delanda was in his mid-twenties and energised by religious zeal. His task was to go among the Maya villages and cities, built up over the centuries and millennia. His goal? To turn them away from their own long-held religious beliefs, in favour of the doctrines of the Catholic Church, imported from Europe. Officially, he cannot force anybody to convert, but the reality is rather different.

Delander sees the Maya as practitioners of paganism. More seriously, he is aware of their fondness for human sacrifice. Conversion, he convinces himself, is not only God's will, but necessary to protect further victims. If he and his fellow Franciscans need to exert a little pressure, even resort to violence, then so be it. The trouble in Maniz starts a month before the book burning. Two boys come across a cave showing evidence that the local Maya have been continuing their old customs in secret, in particular the worship of their deceased ancestors. Inside the cave are clay figurines containing the ashes of the dead.

There are human skulls too. The boys rush from the cave, their hearts racing, and reveal to a local official what they have seen. The matter soon comes to the attention of de Landa. He calls for an investigation, during which a team of Franciscan inquisitors question the citizens of Mani and its surrounding villages. Their methods are rough. Some interviewees have their hands bound and looped over a line

that is then hoisted up until they are entirely suspended in the air. They have weights attached to their ankles or are subjected to whiplashing. Under such extreme duress, many crumble and confess, even though the language barrier often means they have no idea to what they are confessing. Those convicted of lesser offences are compelled into the service of local dignitaries, or face long sentences of forced labour. Some have their hair cut off, others are flogged. The most unlucky are burned at the stake. The Franciscans add insult to injury by desecrating Maya burial places, scattering bones in the fields, or tossing them unceremoniously onto a pyre on the Esplanade.

Where are your ancestors now? They seem to be taunting. It's a terrible day in Maya history. But this is a civilization that has seen many ups and downs. This is a low, but it is not the end. Let's rewind some 2,750 years to around 1200 BC. Imagine you're a bird emerging from the rainforest canopy of Guatemala and taking to the sky. Below you see a series of clearings. On the ground, workers toil in the intense humidity, beads of sweat gathering on their skin as they tend their crops, maize, squashes,

chili peppers and beans. Others on the ground go hunting, silently trekking their prey before striking with bow and arrow or blowpipe. They bring back their hall to the small villages where they live. Several generations inhabit each simple, thatched-roofed wooden hut, coated in adobe, a mixture of mud and straw. Family and community mean everything to them. They venerate their elders, and when a family member dies, they're buried beneath the property, and their spirit is worshipped. These people do not think of themselves as Maya.

That's a label that will be imposed by others much later on. The individual villages do not see themselves as part of a larger unified entity. Nonetheless, their ancestors have been working the land here for a long time, several centuries at least. Over the coming centuries, a greater sense of unity does evolve. Villages merge together to form ever larger settlements, and eventually cities. Among the first of these cities, in what we call the pre-classic era of the Maya, is Nakbe. Not far from it, around the 6th century BCE, a much larger city, El Mirador, emerges. David Stewart, an expert on Mesoamerican civilizations from the University of Texas, explains.

I think in these early, early days, this is what we call the pre-classic period, right? You see this rapid growth of a cultural identity. I'm thinking here of these very large cities or ceremonial spaces with massive architecture, places like El Mirador. But there are lots of others. There are scores of other sites out there from the same time.

And they all look kind of the same, right? They all have the same style about them. They all have the same kinds of architecture. These sites are characterized by fabulous public buildings. They require vast numbers of workers to construct them. They also depend on a well-developed system of civic governance and highly advanced architectural and engineering knowledge. This is the pre-classic civilization that really grows.

It's this first wave, you might say, of the ancient Maya. They did have a sense of common cultural identity. They knew they were part of this innovative, religious identity, this ideology that involved rulers and this expression of kind of a place in the universe. They expressed this through their pyramids and their remarkable paintings from that era. Huge stone pyramid temples,

beautifully decorated with paintings and bas-reliefs are erected, along with palaces and plazas, causeways, ornate monuments known as stele, and even ball courts. These courts, shaped like a capital letter I, provide the setting for a sport that serves both as recreation and religious ritual. The game involves an extremely heavy rubber ball, and although the exact rules are unknown, it's played by two teams. It seems like an ancient version of volleyball, or a strange inversion of soccer.

Dr. Edwin Barnhart is director of the Maya Exploration Center and host of the RKO-Ed podcast. Well, the Maya developed a ball game and, very importantly, a ball. I mean, Europe had one version of a ball before contact. It was basically a blown-up pig bladder. But the Maya region had rubber trees, and through that, they created a super bouncy ball. And with that ball, they created a ball game. It's got a court. It's got two teams. There's a center line of the court. As it bounces through this court, they're not allowed to hit it with their hands or their feet. They have to hit it with their chest or their feet. They have to hit it with their chest or their hips. They can't hit it with their head either,

which would be a bad idea because it wasn't like a basketball that's all air inside. It was a solid Super Bowl. So, you know, if you got hit with this ball, it could likely explode one of your organs. You definitely didn't want to get a hit in the head with it. You get knocked out. But this was a game that we know they were playing very, very early on. But how does this game fit into a religious belief system?

The spirituality of this age is a subject on which our knowledge remains incomplete. Nonetheless, it's clear that the ancient Maya believe in a spiritual realm inhabited by multiple deities. The Maya had a pantheon of deities, you might say. In a very kind of simplistic way, it's a bit like the Greek and Roman gods, right? In some cases, it seems like an unending list of these sacred beings and characters. They actually described it as the 8,000 earthly gods and the 8,000 heavenly gods. That's the exact phrase they used to describe, I think, their religious system. So many you can't count. And this reflects this idea, I think, of an animate worldview where elements of nature

that we wouldn't necessarily think of as living can have an animate quality. It doesn't mean that they're gods, so to speak, but that they have a life force about them, a mountain, even a special stone on the landscape. Mesoamerica in general had this worldview that saw kind of living forces in the wider universe, in the landscape, within the earth and above the earth. And they're part of the social fabric and political fabric as well. Sometimes these myths really differ from city to city. So you might even get different narratives about how the world began, depending on where you were. And I think this is reflecting this idea that every kingdom, every city-state was a world into itself, right? Every city-state was a microcosm. And so they developed their own religious ideas

within this grander system, right? It really isn't that much different, let's say, than ancient Greece, where you have city-states, where you have religious specialists and rulers, they all agree on a lot of mythical narrative, but they also have their local spins on this stuff, right? One of the great sacred texts, the Popol Vuh, includes a Maya creation myth. Every culture has their creation story. For the Maya, it's called the Popol Vuh. And it tells a story that basically there are four creations before our current world, that we are people who live in the fifth creation. And it tells us these fun little tales of what happened in the first four briefly, but then it mainly focuses on the final moments of the fourth creation that lead to this one, the fifth.

And it talks about a set of hero twins who do all these magical deeds. Their fathers were twins as well. were twins as well. There's a tale in which they eventually get invited down into the underworld to play a ball game against the Lords of Death. And through a number of trials and tribulations, they ultimately defeat the Lords of Death and they make the surface of the world safe. This game is a key element of the Popol Vuh's creation story. The boys are innate ball players, just like their dads before them, these sets of twins. And they're up on the surface of the earth

bouncing their ball around, and it's making a bunch of noise down for the Lords of Death, who also love to play the ball game. And so they go down there, they play this ball game against the Lords of Death. The hero twins win. And on the line was, you know, if you lose, you die. But they didn't lose. So the Lords of Death are like, all right, best two out of three.

You guys are invited to stay in this little house. And this little house has these dangers. I think the first one was they say, we're going to give you these cigars, but you've got to keep these cigars lit all night and then give them back to us whole. And so that's an impossible task. If you screw up, you die. So they convince these fireflies to sit on the end of the cigars. And when the guards look in all night, it looks like they're smoking them. But actually, it's just fireflies. And so they give them back hold. They go and play the game again. Okay, they win again. Best three out of five. Here, we invite you to stay in this house.

Each one of the houses have a different danger. One of them, I think at like game four or something, is a house full of bats that are flying around with razor sharp wings. And the boys hide inside their blowguns so that the bats can't get them. So they're hiding in these blowguns all night. Ultimately, they realize they're never going to get out of this unless they allow them to sacrifice them. So they do allow them to sacrifice them and they ground their bones up, put them in a river and they reconstitute. I personally think when we see a ball court in a big city center, when it's right there under the temples, it's not a sporting court per se. I think these ball courts are places of ritual reenactment where they are playing out essential moments in the Popol Vuh.

And the king is putting himself in the place of the hero twins who ultimately make the world safe for us. As we've already heard, the worship of ancestors is another vital component of Maya spirituality. Ancestors are venerated, and the Maya believe that they continue to have an influence on earthly life, even in death, perhaps even more so than when they walk the earth. Indeed, the ability to communicate with one's forebears is a crucial requirement for those who wish to attain power. The procedure typically involves a rather gruesome process of bloodletting.

An ambitious king might extract blood from his penis by cutting it with a stingray spine or using a knife crafted from razor-sharp obsidian. His queen might pull a rope covered with thorns through her tongue. That is a really interesting element of Maya society. The right to rulership was all about their ability to contact their ancestors in the other world. put that blood on paper, and then burn it. And that smoke became a supernatural telephone or conduit that would go directly to their ancestors who lived up in the sky and could act as liaisons to the gods. No one talked directly to the gods, so there was this liaison set up.

And only people of the royal blood, the dynasty, could do this. Any Joe Maya could burn his blood and contact his granddad. But if his granddad was a corn farmer, he lived down underneath in the underworld and wasn't going to have much influence on the lives and deeds of men. The right to rulership was all about your sacred bloodline and the ability to burn, physically burn that blood and turn it into a conduit to talk to the heavens. An offering of blood is not always sufficient for the gods, though. The deities sometimes require the sacrifice of a living thing to nourish them. And on the most auspicious occasions, the inauguration of a new building or the dedication of a new ruler, for instance, the living creature may be a human.

Typically, a high-status prisoner of war is chosen. His body is covered in blue dye, and he's crowned with an impressive headdress. The ceremony is overseen by a priest, assisted by a number of officials. The victim, who customarily has already been beaten, is held down by four men, one on each arm and leg, in the courtyard, or even at the summit of a temple. An official called the Namkom takes a knife, cuts into the victim's chest, and pulls out his heart.

It's a breathtaking moment for those in attendance. Less horror show, more communion with the gods. The heart is passed to a priest who smears the blood on the effigy of a deity. Meanwhile, a shamanic figure goes into a trance, seeking to communicate with the divine. The body is then passed to assistant priests, who flay the corpse. The shaman dons the macabre coat of skin and performs a dance associated with rebirth. But this is by no means an everyday ritual. with rebirth. But this is by no means an everyday ritual. No, no, a human sacrifice was a real thing, especially in wider Mesoamerica. And the Maya, their attitudes and practice of human sacrifice

changed over time. The pre-classic period, there's almost no evidence of it whatsoever. no evidence of it whatsoever. We look at the classic period, we do see human sacrifice, but it is almost always warriors who were captured in some sort of ritual battle and brought back to be killed. There's lots of heads getting chopped off, but it's not just anybody and it's not terribly often. We see it in the art, but it is not the predominant theme. It's really central Mexico, the cultures up there that in the post-classic influence the Maya. And, you know, in all archaeology, what we mostly see is the last layer of occupation. So in Yucatan, especially, most of the ruins we encounter today are records of the final days before contact. So in a place like Chichen Itza, we all of a sudden see all of this imagery of sacrifice specifically in the evidence of skull racks. The influence of religion spills into all aspects of Maya life, from the preparation

of food to high politics. It also prompts a remarkable climate of intellectual curiosity. Astrology, for example, is a prized discipline. The sky is viewed from state-of-the-art observatories, the movement of the constellations mapped, and the passage recorded of various celestial bodies, especially Venus. Such phenomena are considered indicators of the divine at work. A highly sophisticated calendar system is developed. This is in large part to ensure the correct observance of religious rituals and cosmological events like eclipses and equinoxes.

It guarantees, too, that important activities, especially those of the elite, are scheduled for significant days of the year. The Maya use various calendar cycles, including 20-day months. They have two standard yearly cycles, one of 260 days and another of 365, that coincide every 52 years. An additional long count calendar also operates, working in cycles of 400 years from what's considered the date of the current creation, around 3114 BC. These cycles of time are reflected in the cycles of the Maya civilization itself. These cycles of time are reflected in the cycles of the Maya civilization itself. The pre-classic period gives way to the Classic Era, which begins around the middle of the third century AD. This transition is marked by a widespread reformulation of society.

Not least, there is the population explosion that spurs the emergence of many new city-states. These are led by powerful kings, and occasionally queens, who achieve semi-divine status. Other smaller cities then join with the metropoles to form kingdoms with significant clout. David Stewart That pre-classic culture undergoes a major transformation after a few centuries. By about 100 AD, you see what I would call a collapse of that system. El Mirador, the great city of that time, is abandoned, as are many other cities.

Maya culture, the elites, the rulers, it takes a couple of centuries, but they reformulate into a new system that we call the classic period. And this is what is really mostly on the surface at a lot of sites one visits today. It's an arrangement where you have these city-states, many of them are allied with each other, many of them are at war with each other. There's this ebb and flow of these connections and these disruptions. So it's a really complicated political landscape at that point. Each city-state is largely self-regulating, ruled by an elite class, headed by the royal family and their appointees, who form a layer of supporting bureaucracy.

There's a priestly class too, and further classes of politicians and warriors. Merchants and artists also hold an elevated place in the social hierarchy, but the lot of the ordinary folk is less clear. There's a hierarchy, of course, that puts the rulers and the royal courts at the very top. And within those court societies, we have lots of different people who have lots of different roles. Now, below that,

it's a bit more murky in terms of what we can see. The ancient Maya of the classic period certainly had a complex social structure, right? So it's not just the elites and the commoners. I think there is a middle ground there as well that we're still trying to understand. Most of our study of Maya society on that scale is going to come through not looking at the texts and the histories, but looking at the archaeology to see how people were living on the land and how they were administering agriculture. For all its social complexity, the classic era heralds great steps forward. Architecture becomes bigger and bolder. An elegant mathematical system is in use too, with a dot representing one and a bar signifying 5. This allows for complex arithmetic,

which is essential for the development of trade and commerce. The Maya are among the first civilizations to explicitly adapt the notion of zero into their counting system, no later than the mid-4th century AD. It will be more than 800 years before Europe catches up. But surely their greatest intellectual achievement is the development of a written language. Some glyphs or symbols are used to represent whole words, while other glyphs stand for sounds that can be combined to form words. In some cases, there are glyphs that have both roles. Ed Barnhart.

One of the real standouts of Maya civilization that puts it on a different scale globally is the hieroglyphic writing system they developed. It's actually one of only five, maybe four, one of only five, maybe four original writing systems on the planet. You have Maya, which is the only one in all of the Americas. Then you have Egyptian, you have Indus script, you have Chinese, and you have cuneiform, which comes, you know, Sumeria. So the Maya really distinguished themselves in all of the Americas as the only one that developed a true writing system. This language, though, is largely lost to the world from the late 16th century. Only four original codices or books written in the Maya script are known for certain to exist today.

Otherwise, the language lives on in archaeological finds, inscriptions on buildings, and stele and the like. For hundreds of years, knowledge of how the language should be read disappeared entirely. But in recent decades, the code has begun to reveal itself. Today, it's possible to read some 80 to 90% of the written material we have. Well, the story of the breaking of the code, so to speak, is a very long one. It involves a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds. You know, it wasn't ever just one person. A bit different than, say, the breaking of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was really two people.

For the Maya, we have some really gradual insights in the late 1800s, early 1900s. The reading of the calendar came first. And so, ironically, archaeologists could read dates for decades and decades and decades that's all that anyone could read in these long inscriptions were just dates and it created this really skewed idea of the maya as being obsessed with time it really started to change in the 50s when the first real breakthroughs came through just small little steps steps, just little inklings. Oh, okay,

they're writing in sounds. It's a phonetic system. And then very short time after that, the realization, oh, they're writing about history. This is the name of a king. This is the name of a queen. This is a birth glyph. This is a death glyph, right? So just the bare bones structure of history started to come out then in the 60s. Now, the real advances took place in the decipherment of the system much more recently. So in the 80s and 90s, that was the real golden age of Maya decipherment. age of Maya decipherment. One of the results of this is that we're beginning to understand more about the lives of some of the great figures of the Maya world. One eminent figure was Pakal, the ruler of the city-state of Palenque in the 7th century. Palenque has a ruler that we know that they adored and loved, named Pakal. His full name is K'nitch Hanab Pakal II, that sun-faced flower shield.

And he lived to the age of 80, and he has a very interesting life. He actually gets pulled into the city by his mother from some outer subsidiary city. After their arch enemy and much larger city than them, Calakmul comes in and manages to kill the king and the queen of Palenque. They're without a dynastic ruler. And somehow or another, Pakal fits the bill. But he gets brought in by his mother at the age of nine. And at 12, he becomes crowned as king. So a 12-year-old boy is sitting in a city that's just suffered a major attack.

And through his 68 years of reign, he creates these giant building programs. He has three sons. He reestablishes Palenque's dominance over the entire region. And then he's buried in this absolutely fantastic tomb in the Temple of the Inscriptions, where there's a staircase leading all the way down inside the pyramid. And he's sitting in a stone sarcophagus that, the box and the lid is about 20 tons of stone. Khan Balam, his son, his first heir designate, his oldest son, becomes king. His name translates as Snake Jaguar, which is a pretty cool name.

But he is a brilliant guy. He's a brilliant guy. He exhibits all sorts of knowledge of mathematics and astronomy and calendar studies, all in the buildings that he makes. You can see these elements. He's watching the planets. He's really playing with concepts of geometric form when he makes his buildings. and he talks a lot about supernatural mythology, about how his father was connected to these mythological three kings and how he also is connected to them through planetary conjunctions that come back around only every so once in a while. So all of that, I mean, that's one small example

of the kind of interesting stories that we could tell about the real human exploits of classic Maya kings and queens. It's fair to say that the Maya is a broadly patriarchal civilization. But there are women who make their mark in the upper echelons too. In the absence of a male heir, for example, a throne might pass to a daughter or wife. Nor are they merely keeping the throne warm for the next male to turn up. One such is Lady Six Sky. Ishwak Chan, Lady Six Sky, we sometimes call her.

And she was a daughter of a king of a place called Dos Pilas. There's all this networking going on between all of these different kingdoms, and the women marrying between different courts become major factors in all of these geopolitical machinations and positionings. They're actually ruling and calling the shots. This particular woman I'm talking about, the daughter of the Dos Peles king, she is portrayed on these monuments in these royal portraits where she is exerting her military power and her political and ritual power. son who becomes a great king himself. The father is kind of a non-factor in all of this, right? But she is the one who really jumpstarts this entire new era of history in this one particular kingdom where she was established. So we're tracking in these royal histories, not just the kings. Yes, it's a patriarchal society, but we're looking at many different powerful women who are warriors and ritualists and political players. The Maya elite enjoy a rich cultural and social life.

Feasting is a pleasure, but also a tool of diplomacy. There are artistic depictions of eating and drinking and of dances. diplomacy. There are artistic depictions of eating and drinking, and of dances. The archaeological record suggests that some events are quite raucous, with ceramic cups smashed after their contents are drained. Alcohol is popular, and so too chocolate, a drink reserved for special occasions, and served as a sign of wealth. Well, I think if you would have walked into a Maya city around 700 AD and spent a few weeks mingling about, you would have seen a lot of pomp and ceremony. You would have seen performances and dances

out in the plazas, commemorating various occasions and sacred days. There are wonderful depictions of some of these ceremonies in paintings, these colorful views of dancers and amazing headdresses with feathers and banners and flags and attendees. And it's just remarkable. Musicians, it looks like a Las Vegas stage show of some sort, right? And they were just all into this display. The costumes, just amazing things. That wouldn't have been every day, but it

would have happened, I think, with some regularity, this kind of performative aspect of the courts and the cultures. And I think these also existed in more mundane settings and maybe with the smaller towns and communities. Festivals and performances are important to this day, really in any traditional Miss American town. So again, not just something the elites would have been doing. Then, all of a sudden, in the ninth century, there seems to be some sort of social collapse. Cities are inexplicably deserted, rulers fall from power, whole kingdoms up sticks and disperse. Rulers fall from power, whole kingdoms up sticks and disperse. War, famine, climate change, overpopulation, and top heavy elites have all been offered

as possible explanations for the decline. But there are other theories too. The Maya calendar has this sequence. It's days, months, years, 20-year periods, 400-year periods. 400-year period is a bok tune. It's basically equivalent to the Western's idea of a millennium. But the Maya believed that the major time periods as they went in their cycles, that when you hit from one cycle to the new cycle, that these were times of change and renewal. Maya today will tell you that. And it's interesting to note that the ninth

Bakhtun in their sequence, this fifth creation, ends in 835. The classic period ends as the 10th Bakhtun begins. So I think that the Maya are actually timing major changes in society, leaving one place, beginning another, trying new political forms based on their calendar. And since calendar and religion is basically the only thing this group of warring city-states held in common, it's a good idea that that's what was motivating them to make this change. David Stewart sees things slightly differently. The Maya are kind of held up as a case study of social failure or political failure sometimes. They're the poster boys for a collapsed civilization.

And I don't think that's necessarily fair. I think what we're seeing across the ancient world are kind of finite systems of existence on a landscape. If you look at the Mediterranean world, if you're looking at Southeast Asia, if you look at lots of places in the Americas, there are communities and cities and cultures if you're looking at Southeast Asia, if you look at lots of places in the Americas, there are communities and cities and cultures even that, you know, don't last forever, obviously. And there are different reasons for this. You know, I guess this is a much bigger statement that goes well beyond the Maya, but I do think that there might be a sell-by price

for some ancient cultures and civilizations. Whatever the reason, the jungle slowly wraps its tendrils around great mega-cities of the classic era, like Tikal and Pelinque. Where once humans dominated, the spider monkeys and jaguars and quetzal birds find sanctuary in the deserted temples and abandoned homes. But the Maya have not gone away. They are merely reinventing themselves again. We enter the post-classic period. For some, there's a return to the land

and simpler ways of life. To the north of the main area of decline, existing cities continue to prosper, even if the age of the despot kings is virtually at an end. New cities gain prominence, like Chichen Itza. There seems to be greater cultural exchange with other Mesoamerican cultures too, bringing new ideas about religion and forms of government. Perhaps there is a cultural decline. Art and architecture, that's just a little less spellbinding than previously. Evidence of decadence suggestive of a society on the way

down. But then again, perhaps this is ungenerous. Some archaeologists used to call it right where they weren't building things quite so nicely, they weren't building things quite so nicely. They weren't doing things quite so well. But I think we realized that it was just a different culture. It was a different expression of whatever it is to be Maya. They come up with their own solutions, their own ideas about authority, their own kind of religious ideas. So it's just another iteration. It goes through these ups and downs.

It's an adaptation, I think, right? It's a relatively short-lived new sense of being Maya, and it's involving other parts of Mesoamerica, right? They're tapping into other cultures and regions and networks. But those also go through their own kind of downturns and collapses as well, right? So that by 1200 AD, Chichen Itza is a shell of its former self and not the center of anything anymore. It flared out after about three centuries. This is the pattern we just see across the board, I think, in Maya history is cities come and go. They last for a few centuries, maybe a bit more than that, depending on the case. But new things appear on the horizon and people are moving and starting new things.

And then those go through the same cycles, right? So it's just a fascinating, complex thing. You can't talk about the rise and fall of the Maya. It's rises and falls and rises and falls and rises and falls across the landscape. It's the 12th of February, 1524. In the fertile Quetzaltenango mountain valley, the air reverberates with the sound of horses' hooves speeding across the ground. The air reverberates with the sound of horses' hooves speeding across the ground. These formidable beasts belong to the Spanish cavalry, headed by a charismatic but ruthless general called Pedro de Alvarado. He has revenge on his mind.

A little earlier, a band of his indigenous allies was ambushed in the same valley by warriors from the Maya Ca'aiish kingdom. He's here to teach the K'aiisha a lesson. His red hair and beard glisten in the sunlight. To some of the local warriors who fight with him, he reminds them of their sun god, a figure often depicted as red in color. Alvarado would rather inspire awe in those he commands than have their affection. It's not long before Alvarado would rather inspire awe in those he commands than have their affection. It's not long before Alvarado sights the enemy. He approaches with caution, waiting until the Caish bowmen are close enough to shoot their arrows.

He then gives the order to charge, his forces smashing into their opponents. The Caish are terrified. They've never encountered horses before. Desperately ill-equipped to counter the careering advance of their enemy, their lines split. Fear engraved into their faces, they wonder what they have done to anger the gods, to bring such retribution upon themselves.

Those who are not killed where they stand, flee. upon themselves. Those who are not killed where they stand flee. The Spanish advance to the nearby city of Celahu. There will be another engagement in the valley a week later. The Caish will lose again. Most of their nobles will perish. They have no fight left in them. They plead for peace and offer tribute to the invaders. Alvarado accepts, but the Maya prove a more difficult nut to crack than the Aztecs, who succumbed relatively quickly after the Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernan Cortes, arrived in the region in 1519. Cortes had claimed the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, as soon as 1521. But the campaign against the Maya is long and brutal. The Maya devise ways to deal with the challenge of

their unfamiliar enemy. They open shafts and pits to fell the Spanish horses, lining them with sharp sticks. The Europeans hit back with devastating ferocity. As one Spanish observer, Bartolomé de las Casas, notes, one could make a whole book out of the atrocities, barbarities, murders, clearances, ravages, and other foul injustices perpetrated. My legend has it that the sacred quetzal bird, with its green plumage and white breast, starts to display a red spot on its chest after Alvarado stabs to death the queix king, Tecunaman. But it's not until the 1540s that the Spanish

achieve anything like domination. Early on, there were Spanish conquistadores who were very interested in penetrating the Maya region. Hernán Cortés's lieutenant, this rather despicable character named Pedro de Alvarado, decided that he wanted to conquer the kingdoms of Guatemala. And so in 1524, he took an army of indigenous soldiers and some Spaniards down, all the way down into highland Guatemala. And over the course of several years was also victorious in conquering a number of those Maya kingdoms. And Spain established itself pretty early on up there. Yucatan, right? Very different up in the northern part of the

Maya area, the peninsula that shuts up into the Gulf of Mexico. Another conquistador who participated in the Aztec conquest was Francisco de Montejo. And he wanted his slice of the pie, right? So he wanted to get approval to go to Yucatan and conquer there. They didn't know anything about what was in the interior of these places. Montejo gets to Yucatan and he finds that it's a huge slog. The jungle is almost impossible to deal with. The Maya are scattered across the landscape. There's no central authority, right? Unlike the Aztec emperor. And so it's a series of battles and just a painful, painful process. It takes decades for the Spanish to establish themselves securely in Yucatan.

But it's in a very restricted area. And on the periphery of that, you have independent Maya who were resisting the Spanish, but maybe quietly, but they're in the forests and they're just out of sight, out of mind. and 1800s and 1900s, those Maya who had fled Spanish control maintained themselves in this sort of uncharted territory. The Maya resistance is assisted by one particular Spanish defector. The actual very first contact of the Maya, though, with the Spanish was a Spanish shipwreck where those guys were completely helpless. They were shipwrecked. A few of them got on a rowboat and floated for two weeks before they hit the coast of Yucatan. And there were only a few of them alive at that point. The Maya captured them. They escaped. They killed a few of them. The Maya captured them.

They escaped. They killed a few of them. And then there were just a few left. The two that really survived were Gonzalo Guerrero and Aguilar. Aguilar becomes the prisoner of probably the Lord of Tulum. But he gets ransomed eight years later by Cortez. And he becomes Cortes' translator because he's learned to speak total Maya. The other one, Gonzalo Guerrero, goes completely native.

He becomes renowned for his ability as a warrior. He marries the princess of a king down near Chetumal, has like four children with him. But he teaches the Maya how to fight the Spanish and does a number of tricky things, tricking the Spanish into battles, which they horribly lose. He's an interesting character. I mean, the Maya really, the Maya of Yucatan love him. There's statues of him and his wife and children. He's envisioned as the very first ever what they call mestizo, half Spanish, half Maya. So, you know, there's certainly no

love lost for the general invasion, but Gonzalo Guerrero stands out as a hero to the Maya people, who's a fusion of the two cultures. out as a hero to the Maya people, who's a fusion of the two cultures. The truth is, though, that the Mayas suffer much less as a result of Spanish military might than they do from the infectious diseases that colonizers import from Europe. The Maya have little or no immune resistance to these illnesses. By the time Spain claims hegemony, some 80 to 90% of the Maya have perished from smallpox, influenza and measles. But still the civilization survives,

even if now it's in small pockets rather than great cities. Today there are perhaps 6 million Maya spread across the same territory that their ancestors roamed in millennia past. Repeated social collapses have not extinguished the Maya flame, nor even the brutal efforts of Alvarado and Delanda. I'm very intent on reminding people that the Maya are not some extinct civilization, that they still are around today

and that they have gone through incredible trials and tribulations to maintain their culture and their thinking. And today something amazing is happening that the Maya of this generation are relearning how to read and write their hieroglyphs. For a long time, they were considered just, you know, subhuman, you know, second class citizens at best in their countries of origin like Guatemala and Mexico. But we're living in a different time where their indigenous roots are finally being respected in the way they should.

roots are finally being respected in the way they should. So there's a number of places in the Maya world right now where they are having seminars, teaching little kids how to not just read hieroglyphs, but actually write things in them. And there are at least eight new stela that are up in various places around the Maya world. There's an archaeological site called Ixchimche, which was the capital of the K'iche' people that was burned to the ground by Pedro Alvarado. But in 2012, when the Maya calendar was supposed to end and didn't, the Maya there built a new stela and wrote it in modern Maya hieroglyphs that talk about Pedro Alvarado burning that city and trying to annihilate

the Maya. And then it goes on to say, but now it's December 21st, 2012, a new dawn for the Maya, and we're still here. And I think it's so cool that, you know, when in world history has ever a culture or civilization lost the ability to write in their own written language for 500 years and then regained it. I think that's what we're seeing in this generation. And it's a beautiful thing to see and a testimony to the resilience of Maya civilization. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of Alcatraz. And the feds just swooped in and said,

you know, here's a ready-made prison for us. All we have to do is put up a few towers. And it was used as a hammer. It was designed to be the threat. You screw up, you're going to go to Iraq in the middle of San Francisco Bay. That's next time on Short History Of.