The Ancients - The Maya Collapse

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Just over 1,000 years ago, the ancient Maya world in Mesoamerica was turned upside down. Prominent cities like Tikal, Palenque, Copan and Calakmul, their great stone art and architecture left to be gradually reclaimed by the jungle. It's a time of decline known as the Maya Collapse. But what caused it? And did the entirety of Mayan civilisation really disappear?In today's episode of The Ancients Tristan Hughes is joined by podcaster and author Paul Cooper to explore this historic, yet mysterious collapse and delve into the trade networks, water systems, climate change, agricultural failure and civil unrest that made it possible.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.The Ancients is recording our first LIVE SHOW at the London Podcast Festival on Thursday 5th September 2024! Book your tickets now to be in the audience and ask Tristan and his guest your burning questions. Tickets on sale HERE https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients/Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscriptionVote for The Ancients in the Listeners Choice category of British Podcast Awards here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Just over 1,000 years ago, the ancient Maya world in Mesoamerica was turned upside down. Prominent cities like Tikal, Palenque, Copan and Calakmul, these incredible centres home to tens of thousands of people, were abandoned, their great stone art and architecture left to be gradually reclaimed by the jungle. It's a time of decline known as the Maya Collapse.

It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are returning to Mesoamerica to explore this fascinating yet mysterious decades-long catastrophe. It's a complex, elusive topic, intertwined with the demise of a prosperous period in Maya history known as the Classic Period, hence why it's commonly called the Classic Maya Collapse. Now to shine a light on this event and what might have caused it, well our guest today is the podcaster and author Paul Cooper. Paul, he is the host of the Fall of Civilizations podcast, he also has a very successful accompanying YouTube channel, and he has recently compiled his knowledge into a book

exploring the declines of ancient societies across the planet and the causes behind them, including that of the ancient classic Maya. Trade networks, water systems, climate change, agricultural failure and famine, civil unrest, you are going to hear about all of that as we delve into the mystery of the Maya Collapse. Paul, what a pleasure. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me on. You're more than welcome. And to talk all about the Maya Collapse, this is just one of many collapses that you cover in your book. I always hesitate with the word collapse as well because

I know sometimes it's too easy a word to say for these things throughout ancient history. But it feels like the collapse of civilizations has always fascinated people and proves to be one of the most popular topics when talking about particular civilizations. Now, why do you think that is, first of all? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think there's an element that's philosophical, that people love to meditate on the passing of time, the transience of things. It's a subject of poetry that's obsessed poets for generations, the idea of the falling blossoms, you know, the end of spring, the end of summer. And looking at our own societies in a similar way gives people a real sense of melancholy, a sense of our achievements also having this impermanence. I found that my own

show, Fall of Civilizations, gained a huge amount of listeners during the COVID pandemic. But I think people were also feeling like they were living through a time of unique crisis and disruption. And I got a lot of messages about people saying they found it comforting to hear about these stories of past people who'd been through similar times of upheaval and got through it and how they'd reacted to it and how they'd felt. Because do you think, I mean, that's something really important to highlight straight away, when we talk about these so-called collapses, that actually it normally never is a story of complete collapse. It's about something or a perfect storm of events happening,

and then it's almost the reshaping, the kind of revival and reemergence of civilizations and societies following that. Yeah, I think there are always stories of great violence, upheaval, great sadness for the people who live through them. But there are always stories of hope, ultimately, that we see shoots of human society come through the ashes of destruction, just like the green shoots that come out of a forest fire. Humans have this immense resilience that means we've always bounced back from even the most terrible catastrophes. Absolutely. Well, let's delve into the particular topic that we're focusing on today, the Maya collapse. Now, before we get

to the whole collapse itself and in what shape and form it's believed to have taken, I mean, Paul, let's set the groundwork. Let's do the background first of all. Who were the Maya, or at least the classic Maya, I believe? Yeah, the Maya were a series of interconnected city-states who all shared a somewhat similar culture and a family of languages, a descendant of which the Mayan language is still spoken today in parts of Mexico by millions of people. These people lived in an area called the Yucatan Peninsula, which is a landform in southern Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. It's a little smaller than the area of, say, England and Scotland combined, with a ridge of mountains in the south and then a heavily forested plain stretching out

to the north up to the Atlantic coast. It's a flat karstic landscape, which means that it's made up of limestone that's been burrowed away into caves and sinkholes called cenotes. So Yucatan Peninsula, this is a huge geographic area. And you mentioned, so I guess, is it quite a diverse kind of biotic landscape as well? What should we be imagining with the whole landscape, the topography that these Maya people were living in? of course. It's a tropical rainforest of broadleaf trees. And the Maya lived in the midst of this. Their society grew up in the midst of this landscape. It's a landscape with an immense series of challenges that come with it as well. A karst landscape is extremely porous, which means any rain that falls on it essentially leaches down into the rock, into these caves and sinkholes, and gathers in deep underground caverns. This means that there's virtually no rivers in the Yucatan. And so all

societies that grew up here are completely beholden to the process of capturing and storing rainwater. It's also a seasonal desert, meaning that all the rain falls in the summer, about 90% of the total rainfall. And then it's more or less a drought for the rest of the year. This means that the Maya had to work really hard to store water in big reservoirs. Because the classic Maya pool, I'm guessing then that's, let's say, 2,000 years ago, the period before the collapse, they are an agricultural society. But as you've hinted at there, the basis of their whole society, based on the terrain, it's difficult. As I said, this is a tough environment for them to live and thrive in.

Yeah, it presented an immense series of challenges. The Yucatan also has very thin soil, usually just a couple of centimetres thick before you're reaching down to the limestone bedrock. And with the water draining away, it's very difficult to keep irrigated. In the beginning, the Maya relied on slash and burn agriculture, which is a kind of crude form of agriculture still practised in some areas of the world today, where you essentially hack parts of the jungle down, burning it to create a fertile ash layer. And then you seed your crops in this layer of fertile ash. It's quite effective at making food.

And for centuries, the Maya were able to eke out a living in this way. But the process is not very sustainable. You have to leave the jungle basically to completely regenerate before that area can be cultivated again. So as the centuries went on, the Maya had to develop more ingenious methods of agriculture. They created beds of raised fields that were fed with complex series of irrigation canals that would come down from the highlands, bringing water into the fields. Then these fields, they grew maize, beans, squashes, cacao, which they used to make a heavy drinking chocolate drink that they drank from ornately patterned vases.

That is very cool. I love that you got the water technology in there as well, because that's always something I love exploring, because it's always so key to all different ancient peoples all across the world. But keeping on But we're getting more of a sense then, Paul, of what this Maya society looks like. And I'm guessing then we shouldn't also imagine one kind of classic Maya kingdom controlling all of this territory. How are the people divided up? Should we be imagining most of the populations living in cities or spread out? What do we know about that? Well, the field of Mayan studies is one that's advancing possibly the fastest of any archaeological field today. For that reason, it's an incredibly exciting field to be involved in. It was long

assumed that this was simply a series of city-states with large areas of countryside between them that were largely uninhabited. But what's happened in recent years is that new technologies have come along. Prime among them is LiDAR, which is a kind of laser scanning technology that allows you to fly over this densely forested area of the Yucatan and fire millions of laser beams down onto the ground and then digitally take down the forest cover once you've got this scan. This means that before areas that were completely inaccessible to archaeologists can actually be surveyed from the air. And this has transformed our understanding of what this area actually looked like. We now understand that the

Mayan lowlands in the first millennium were probably one of the most densely populated areas on the planet, and probably the densest outside of China. These cities were quite densely populated themselves, but between them were agricultural hinterlands that were almost entirely cultivated. That's incredible. And that just shows, isn't it, how the development of technology is revealing more about their societies, and that it's not just centred on those great cities. However, they are kind of the postcard images of the classic Maya today, aren't they? And I mean, before we get to this period of the Maya collapse, Paul, what are some of the most prominent cities on the Yucatan Peninsula at that

time? Well, there's more than 40 large cities, in this peninsula. And the way to imagine them is something like classical Greece of the Greek Golden Age. These interconnected city-states that share a language, but in constant competition with each most of Mayan history throughout the first millennium was characterized by a rivalry between two of these city-states. This is the city of Tikal and Calakmul. And Tikal is a really interesting city because it rose to power in the early centuries of the first millennium due to this symbiotic relationship it had with a northern power called Teotihuacan. Oh, yes. Now, this was a city that built enormous, stunning pyramids. The pyramids of the sun and moon in Teotihuacan really have to be seen to be believed. And it grew up in the Valley of Mexico, kind of around where Mexico City is today. And in the early centuries

of the millennium, it began extending its influence south into Central America and into the area of the Yucatan. One of Tikal's kings named Stormsky seems to have come to power actually with the cooperation of this distant power of Teotihuacan, and there's one carved stele in Tikal that shows him being crowned with Mexican warriors standing by his side. And they're quite distinctive because they have these distinctive Mexican headdresses and dart throwers that are only really found among the warriors of central Mexico. And Tikal really rose to power with the sponsorship of this foreign superpower. We can see here that North American superpowers intervening in the

elections of Central America is not a new phenomenon. It is interesting, isn't it? And I love that idea of, you know, these are over hundreds, thousands of kilometers and you have these diplomatic events that are happening. But what I also want to pick up, what you mentioned there, Paul, is for the Maya, you might immediately think of, you know, those great cities and the great remains that you see at places like Tikal today. But you also mentioned the information from that stela, so a carved stone. So are inscriptions and what they've left, what they've carved on these stones, are they also, is this a key source of information for learning more about the Maya civilization, how it's structured before the collapse and then during that turbulent period

as well? Yeah, that's one of the most, and then during that turbulent period as well. Yeah, that's one of the most fascinating aspects of the Maya, is that they weren't exactly alone in the Americas in developing a written language. There's some evidence that the Olmecs and Zapotecs perhaps had hieroglyph systems, but they were all in a similar area. But the Maya glyphs are the only American writing system that have been substantially decoded. So today we can actually read with a pretty good level of accuracy what these glyphs say. They're a really beautiful writing system that work kind of similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics in that they use pictures to represent phonetics. They work a little like the Korean writing system actually in that they look quite like logograms, but in fact, they're phonetic. They work a little like the Korean writing system actually in that they look quite

like logograms, but in fact, they're phonetic. The Maya used these in amazingly creative ways to paint on vases, on pieces of bone, and also most famously to carve onto their temples. This is really, really extraordinary. One thing I'd also like to ask there, Paul, is we sometimes get into our heads this idea of the Maya at this time being a Stone Age civilization. Now, can we call them that at this time? Well, I mean, they literally were to some extent. They didn't have any metals. Copperworking began in Mexico to the north well before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas.

Bronze working was happening in the south, in the Andes with the Inca. But the Maya never struck upon metalworking. This was partly because the natural world had provided for them a cutting edge sharper than any metal could hope to be. That is the black volcanic glass obsidian, which occurs naturally from volcanic sources all along the mountainous highlands of the Yucatan. And obsidian, when it's cut, actually has an edge sharper than surgical steel, which means that any purpose you need to use it for is perfectly functional for, and may have actually disincentivized the kind of exploration into metalworking that happened in places in the world where obsidian wasn't that available.

But it's incredible to imagine that all of the Mayan temples, all of their intricate stone carving, their ornate inscriptions, all were done without any metal tools and also without any draft animals. There were no oxen or horses in the Mayan world. There were no oxen or horses in the Mayan world. The only large mammal in the area was the tapir, which is quite reclusive and that was sometimes hunted for food. And of course, the jaguar. But good luck trying to get that to pull a car. But I think that also strikes a chord with the fact that, Paul, when you go to one of these sites today, like Tikal, and you are just blown away by the sheer monumentality

of the surviving temples, as you've highlighted right there, with the logistics that must have been involved, the manpower involved that a superpower, a Maya superpower like Tikal could have called upon to build something like that. I mean, even though it seems that there is this great rivalry between these various different Maya cities, they are still very much able to show off, to promote their power through this stunning architecture that survives. That's what always strikes out for me, I must admit.

Yeah, I mean, they're absolutely incredible to visit today. Tikal at its highest, nearly 100,000 people, and its tallest temple is 64 meters high. It's absolutely towering. And in its day, it would have been painted a vivid red with the mineral cinnabar. So you would have had these towering temple towers painted this striking red just rising out of the landscape. It would have been just an immense statement about the power and majesty of this city. It was really designed to impress. And one last kind of overview question, Paul,

do we also know much about the nature of Maya warfare at that time, before we get to the time of the collapse, and how the codes of conduct almost for warfare between various different cities like Tikal or Kakamul or elsewhere? Warfare in the Mayan world is quite poorly understood, to be honest. And a lot of it is gleaned from what we can learn from these inscriptions that are often quite cryptic. One aspect of warfare in the Mayan world is that it was mostly quite ritualized. These cities would go to war against each other, but they would be more or less low-level raids. And these were known as axe wars. They were designed usually to punish a disobedient vassal who was no longer paying tribute to intimidate a nearby smaller city-state into becoming your vassal, that kind

of thing, and usually had the end goal of decapitating a noble or bringing back prisoners that could be sacrificed at the top of your temple in a statement of your city's power. that could be sacrificed at the top of your temple in a statement of your city's power. But there were times when the Maya also engaged in a more serious kind of war that have been called Star Wars due to the particular shape of the glyph which shows a star raining down on Earth. A coincidence, in fact, that George Lucas used the site of Tikal to film his rebel base on the planet Yavin. Yeah, one of those mysterious coincidences that I could never get to the bottom of. Funny, the original Star Wars. There you go with the Maya and the Yucatan Peninsula.

Okay, then let's move on to the juicy bit, to the Maya collapse itself, Paul. We kind of set the scene of the Maya world before this happens. First off, with this time period known as the Maya collapse, when are we talking and for roughly how long are we talking? So Mayan society develops almost exponentially over the first millennium. It becomes more and more complex. The large amounts of the forest is cut down in order to grow ever larger amounts of crops for this booming population. down in order to grow ever larger amounts of crops for this booming population. And most significantly, we get a boom in the number of inscriptions and monuments that are being built. So one great example is the city of Copan, which is a kind of highland trading post, which is in

the periphery of Tikal. It's a tributary state. And around the year 500, when Mayan society is just getting going, only about 10 inscriptions are being written in Copan. But 250 years later, there's 40 being written each year. Society is booming, and most importantly, you've got this strong centralized royal power that's commissioning these monuments. But then we start to see the collapse set in, And we enter what has been called the terminal classic, which is from the year 800 to 950 or so. By 900, the construction of new monuments stops almost completely in Copan. In this way, you can kind of see the signal of Mayan life

just entering into the historical record of these inscriptions, but kind of ebbing and becoming weaker and weaker as each year goes by, until silence sets in. Is that what the collapse is defined by? That these once great cities that have all of these monuments being constructed in them, like places like Tikal, and you mentioned Kopan there, and then all of a sudden that seems to stop and it seems to reduce and then completely disappear. How should we therefore be kind of perceiving the Maya collapse? Are there multiple cycles, single process? Does it affect different regions differently? How should we therefore envisage this Maya collapse period? Well, what happens over the 150 years or so of the terminal classic is that this lively,

vibrant culture of interconnected city-states more or less comes apart like a piece of fabric. Every stitch becomes unstitched. All of these cities are abandoned, and only those near the coasts remain inhabited in any way by the year 1000. Millions of people disappear from this area, fleeing to those cities that are still capable of supporting life. And the forests simply flood back to reclaim these cities. Vines grow through the temples. And the forest had probably only reached its original old growth thickness by the time the Europeans arrived at the end of the 15th century. Are different cities affected differently by this collapse?

So are some of them abandoned later on during this period than others? Can we start building a chronology almost of how this collapse happens? And then we can kind of explore the why behind that. Yeah, unpicking the complex interrelations of these city-states has always been a bit of a difficult game. But Mayanists are wonderful puzzle solvers. And one particular glyph in the Mayan language has been incredibly useful for this. It's called the Ahau glyph. Now, Ahau means lord or master, basically. And it's so useful because when a Mayan city writes an inscription describing another city, if they use this glyph Ahau to describe that city, then we know that they're subservient to them. They're their vassal,

they're paying their tribute, they're sending their warriors to help them in times of war. And Mayanists have performed this amazing kind of enormous game of Sudoku, where they've mapped these interrelations of vassalship, so that we can almost see a kind of fluctuating picture of how power was constructed at various times in the Mayan world. Now, by the mid-800s, the city of Tikal, for instance, is really beginning to come apart. You can see that its networks of vassals are disappearing. Many of them are no longer using the Ahau glyph to describe it. And some of them, even worse, are actually describing themselves as the king of Tikal, which is a really bad sign

when you're an empire. This points to a period of civil war when there seems to have been a power struggle. And only 100 years earlier, Tikal had been at its height. Most of its most majestic temples date from this period. But around the year 900, there's no longer a king in Tikal had been at its height. Most of its most majestic temples date from this period. But around the year 900, there's no longer a king in Tikal. The central power of royal authority disappears, and people begin to live a kind of reduced existence among the ruins. Is Tikal then, Paul, would you say that it's the Maya city that suffers the biggest fall from grace, from its zenith during this collapse? It does feel like the great case study, the great example of the city that really does seem to dive during this period. Yeah, I mean, it was Tikal's world to lose,

you know, it was the top dog. And so I suppose in that sense, it was the biggest loser. But really, every one of these cities is abandoned. The process is that royal authority collapses. People continue living among the ruins for some time. But as the next century goes on, even these people drift away. There's no quality of life to be had in these ruined cities. We get a sense for their reduced existences from their midden heaps, which turn up in the palaces of kings. These Mayan peasants were wandering into

the king's palaces, living there, making simple pottery. They were leaving graffiti. We have examples of this graffiti with caricatures of other people and so on. So it was almost like if people wandered into Buckingham Palace and began just kind of spray painting the walls and setting up a shantytown. It's a really redolent period to imagine. One quite crucial detail as well is that some of these stelae, which had Mayan glyph writing on them,

were moved to more convenient places by some of these people, but they've been actually placed upside down in their new location, suggesting that the people who moved them no longer knew how to read. It is such an apocalyptic, very evocative, in a weird kind of way, beautiful setting to imagine. In a weird kind of way, in the fact that within a hundred or a couple of hundred years, you see Tikal go from one of the prime cities into a place where everyday people are walking amidst the ruins of a former palace. And then the vegetation, the jungle slowly taking root again, and great cities like Tikal becoming consumed by the jungle again. And Paul, it really begs the question, do we know what caused this Maya collapse to cities like Tikal, like Kalakumul,

and many others in that more southern area of the Yucatan Peninsula? What happened? Well, as we've seen countless times throughout my show, Fall of Civilizations, and in my upcoming book, the collapse of a society is rarely a simple phenomenon. It's always a confluence of factors that apply increasing amounts of stress to each society and apply increasing pressure to their systems. We've already discussed the immense challenges that living in the Yucatan Peninsula posed in the first place, but as the Mayan population boomed, it became increasingly difficult to feed this large population. Current estimates are that there may have been as many as 15 million people living in the Yucatan Peninsula at a time when, in England, for instance, at the same time, there was only 1 million people.

So we're talking about almost modern levels of population for a society that still was using quite low-protein crops like maize that had no substantial amount of animal protein in their diet other than chicken, some hunted game. So really that was the most immense pressure on their society. And the fact that the Yucatan is a seasonal desert meant that the biggest challenge was making sure there was enough water for everyone to drink and to irrigate the fields to give everyone enough to eat. The problem is that around the year 760, the Yucatan experienced its most devastating drought in around 7,000 years.

We can see this through various indicators. There's a substance known as impenetrable clay that appears in archaeological strata when there's been a period of immense water shortages that climate scientists and historians are always looking for. One quite clever indicator is that we can find pollen remnants of plants that usually grow on the shores of lakesides, but during this period, they're found deep in the lakes lakes meaning that the water was shrinking and shrinking into a smaller and smaller pool and these shoreside plants were encroaching upon it. We can also see in stalagmites in northern Yucatan that there was about a 40% drop in rainfall during the terminal classic period which likely contributed to the collapse. We don't entirely

know why this happened. It may have been variations in solar radiation, just variations in the zones of aridity that surround the Yucatan. But we do know the effect this had, and we can see it play out in the collapse. Does it seem to suggest then that the Maya civilization, particularly in that whole southern area, there's a caland around that area, that it was actually in a way quite fragile with the population size, with the struggles with agriculture and water, that it only needed one thing like a big drought, as you've highlighted there in evidence from the scientific record, to almost be the catalyst for perhaps a number of other factors. He said civil

war or starvation and stuff like that. That could very much well have kicked off this collapse. I know it's all theory, but it seems like it could be potentially quite plausible. I think whenever you have a story of societal collapse, what you usually find is that there was what in systems theory is called a cascading collapse. This usually means that one part of a machine or system has failed, and then it passes its load onto another part of the system. That part is in turn overloaded, which then passes its load onto another part of the system, causing a kind of complete shutdown of the system, whether that's an internal combustion engine or a human civilization.

And I think in some ways that the drought acted in that way, that it applied a pressure on one part of Mayan society that was simply too much for it to bear, which caused a kind of cascading failure just throughout the entire region. One exacerbating factor is the Mayan's deforestation of the Yucatan, which was absolutely necessary for them in order to plant enough food for them to eat. Otherwise, people would starve. And, you know, this wasn't done in a foolish or careless way. They were extremely knowledgeable about how to eke agriculture out of this challenging environment, but they really had little choice. And what we understand today is that deforestation increases the aridity of a region.

That's because trees shade the area, they reduce evaporation from sunlight, and so increase the humidity of an area, increasing rainfall. So the Maya really had begun a vicious cycle that perhaps we could say doomed their society from the start. So deforestation, because it seems to be a popular argument, isn't it? Deforestation improved the chances of some horrific event like a great drought happening because it increased the aridity of the soil. So it all, as you say, it all can kind of combine into that kind of perfect storm catastrophe. Yeah, that's it. Modern climate models suggest that a deforested area can experience about 20% less rainfall than one with a heavy forest cover, which may have been one of the tipping points that turned a survivable drought into an extinction-level event, a catastrophe. Another exacerbating factor in their society was actually water pollution.

Because they didn't have any flowing water in the form of rivers, all of their water was being stored in these vast reservoirs. And recent studies have shown some really interesting results that show that all of Tikal's major reservoirs were in fact polluted, almost beyond their ability to be used by humans. Part of this pollution was mercury. The people of Tikal painted their temples in cinnabar, which gave them that shocking, vivid red colour. But cinnabar is actually mercury sulphide, a compound of mercury. It's not quite as poisonous as liquid mercury, but it does build up in the body and has been shown to cause renal problems, even hallucinations, delirium, etc. Tikal's royalty all lived in the centre of the city, surrounded by these reservoirs, and it's likely that every time they sat down to eat or drink, they were slowly being poisoned.

This may have limited their ability to rule, it may have limited their psychological capacities, it may have damaged their health. And this was probably happening on a population-wide level. Also levels of what are called cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, which are currently causing huge problems in Norfolk at the moment where I live. Signs everywhere saying that you can't let your dog swim here because it could die. They're extremely poisonous bacterias that studies have shown were now showing up in this polluted water and were possibly making them unsafe to drink. One amazing association that the Maya had was that the water lily was their symbol for royalty and is used in inscriptions to describe a king or a member of the royal family. And that's

because when things were going well in a city, water lilies would grow in the reservoirs. Water lilies are extremely sensitive to pollution. They can only grow in water that's not too acidic, that doesn't have too much algae. So if water lilies were flourishing in your city, this was a good sign. The king had succeeded in bringing clean drinking water into the city and everything was good. But on one day, all those water lilies might start to die. And in that moment, you know, the king's not doing his job well. It would have been an incredibly bad omen for the royal family and may have damaged people's faith and their ability to rule.

Goodness, you can imagine that, you know, the bad omen, as you say, if you see the royal family and may have damaged people's faith and their ability to rule. You can imagine that, you know, the bad omen, as you say, if you see the royal symbol starting very much to die in the water reserves. It does kind of lead the question with these events that appear to have happened and potential water pollution there too. Is there a strong theory that civil unrest follows, that there is a toppling of the orders almost? What do we think follows this difficult period or is a result of this difficult period when food and water become scarce? Yeah, we don't have an especially clear picture of what happened. There's one final inscription in Copan that describes a usurper has come to the throne. And we don't really get a sense of any context behind that, but he's the last king in Tikal. And he actually has an inscription commissioned that is just

abandoned halfway through. It seems like at some point the carver just dropped his tools and left to go do something else. It seems this king wasn't able to keep the idea of a central royal authority alive in Kopan. We do get some sense that the elite buildings in some of these cities were burned and destroyed, so we could imagine a population rioting as people became thirsty, sick, hungry, and Mayan military technology meant that their warriors, the warrior caste, may not have had a significant advantage over rioting peasants. They were armed with cotton armour and their weapons were spear throwers, spears, javelins, clubs, and a kind of sword called a makwa-witil that was basically a kind of like a, imagine a cricket bat with bits of

black obsidian glass just ringed in a kind of sawtooth pattern all along the edge. So these were relatively crude weapons. And we can imagine that, you know, a thousand soldiers with these clubs maybe couldn't have fought off 10,000 peasants who had picked up sticks and stones. For that reason, we could imagine a kind of popular uprising that toppled the authority in these cities. And do you think, because what we highlighted at the beginning, how certain smaller cities were dependent on those larger centres of power like Tikal, and there's the popular phrase,

if the USA sneezes, the whole world catches a cold. Along those lines, massive power, something happens and it affects the whole rest of the world. Do you think something similar could have been if Tikal has all of these problems and then that kind of results, that kind of scatters into the rest of these other great cities? Yeah, absolutely. You get a kind of cascading effect, I think. Tikal had grown as big as it could with the amount of energy that was flowing to it, not just from its agricultural hinterlands, but from the city-states that were supplying it. As the drought worsened, as hunger got worse, it would have probably begun demanding more and more draconian tributes from its city-states, demanding that the capital is fed while the periphery has to give up its scarce food resources. This probably

created a lot of resentment. And once these periphery vassal states threw off Tikal's authority, Tikal basically didn't have enough food to continue going. From this point, it would have been like a bubble bursting and the whole mesh would have become unraveled. We can then imagine that refugees from these city-states that are coming apart would probably flee to cities where things were doing a bit better. This pattern seems to be from south to north, so people were fleeing to the north of the peninsula. When these people arrived in those cities, they would have applied their own pressure to its systems, to its food resources, to its water.

And so we could then get a kind of cascading domino effect throughout the whole region. You mentioned refugees there. So that is something we should also imagine in this period of waves and migrations, waves of people. And you say going from south to north, where it seems that Maya civilization endures, it is more robust in the face of these difficult climatic conditions. And so that's what we should be imagining, a lot of refugees and them going to pastures new. Yeah, I think this is all very speculative. And we actually don't have hard evidence of this kind of thing. Although we do see evidence of warfare, we see that some city states are becoming fortified, They're building crude

defences, sometimes using stones from beloved buildings like temples that they would never have been dismantling in times of peace. It was clearly a desperate last-ditch attempt to defend some of these city-states. But I think looking at other areas of crisis around the world, we can extrapolate what this situation might have looked like. So where does the Maya civilization prove the most resilient to these troubles at the end of the first millennium AD? Essentially on the coastal fringes of the Yucatan Peninsula, which are these amazing stretches of white sand beaches broken by mangrove forests. amazing stretches of white sand beaches broken by mangrove forests. And there you get cities like Tulum, Chichen Itza, which form kind of hybrid cultures with other peoples like the Toltecs.

These cities continue to do well for hundreds of years afterwards, while back in the central lowlands, the forest is reclaiming cities like Tikal, Kalakmul and others. And in fact, there are Mayan people living in places like Tulum when the Europeans arrive. So once again, as you've highlighted, it could be speculative and we're getting there before we completely wrap up. But is it not too far-fetched to potentially suggest then that there were groups of people who left somewhere like Tikal who headed north and ultimately settled in another Maya city let's say Tulum or Chichen Itza are those people I mean is there any evidence in the archaeology of them kind of bringing their

you know their city culture almost to this new place in the north on the coast that has survived that is resilient and then you know kind of they remember their heritage of where they originated from, and they bring parts of that with them further north in the Yucatan Peninsula. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't get as specific as city-states like Tikal, but in places like Chichen Itza, you see a combination of Toltec and Mayan architectural styles. You see a kind of hybridization, two peoples coming together, obviously welcoming each other and sharing innovations that they've developed

in their architectures. So in these places, you get quite a unique look to some of the cities. So we can imagine that these floods of refugees do seem to have been welcomed in certain places they arrived. So how different would you argue post-Maya collapse Maya civilization is to pre-Maya collapse civilization?

Well, there's plenty of continuity. Mayan culture survives in a pretty resilient form right up to the European contact, but it never quite achieves the heights that it did in places like Tikal and Calakmul. You never quite see the same towering temples, the same magnificent culture. And the Mayan people that the European arrivals witness living on this coast haven't quite reached the same heights as the glorious heights of the classic period. It's just very interesting having done interviews on the Bronze Age collapse recently, how different, you get the Hittites and then the Neo-Hittites, and they're quite

different peoples, and the Assyrians, and that's how you get these new emerging peoples following a collapse, which is interesting. But what I've also loved from this chat, Paul, is how central it appears, climate change and drought and famine, and kind of how delicate Maya civilization was with collecting of water and agriculture before this period of turmoil. It's all very interesting in trying to uncover more about the still admittedly quite mysterious time in the story of the Maya. For someone like yourself, who of course you've written a book on all of these different collapses of falls of civilizations across history. I mean, are there

any key lessons that you say we could learn from the Maya collapse that are relevant to our future potential experience of something, let's say an issue that's important today, like climate change? Yeah, absolutely. Over the course of the last few years, as I've looked at all of these stories of societal collapses, the climate is a factor in many of them. Human society is somewhere between a machine and a biological organism. There are aspects of it that are consciously designed by the people who built it, but it also adapts and evolves to match its environment and solve the problems of producing the necessities of life for its citizens. It then grows to be as big as it can be with the environment in one state. But if that environment changes too quickly or too dramatically for it to sustain, then it applies a pressure that society simply can't withstand. And I think what I always want to get across with

these stories is that people who walked through the streets of Tikal in the year 800 would have seen a city at the height of its power, height of its glory. And it must have looked to them like nothing would ever move it, that it would be around for another thousand years or 2000, that it was permanent and immovable. But these stories remind us that we can't take anything for granted. We can't be complacent. And that in our modern age, when we have scientific knowledge that allows us to predict

and look forward at the future in a way that the Mayans could never have hoped to, we have a responsibility to react and to make the changes they didn't have the warning to make absolutely learning lessons from the past paul this has been a fantastic chat last but certainly not least you have written a book all about this it is called fall of civilizations stories of greatness and decline by me paul cooper and of course you've got your your very good podcast and youtube channel which

explores all of this as well which everyone you should definitely go check that out too paul it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you tristan thanks for having me on well there you go there was paul cooper talking all the things the classic maya collapse thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. As a special gift you can also get 50% off your first three months

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