For many years modern people looked on the Maya as tranquil, thoughtful, mysterious counterpoints to the prosaic, bloodthirsty Aztecs. They were the Greeks of the New World to the Aztecs’ Romans.

The image worked fairly well. Since nobody could translate Mayan hieroglyphs, and the civilization’s great cities had become deserted long before Europeans arrived in Mexico, people were free to speculate almost whatever they wanted about the Maya. Where Cortez had Bernal Diaz del Castillo to chronicle the conquest of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire, the witnesses to the decline of Mayan civilization had been dead for hundreds of years.

The gradual unearthing and restoration of Mayan cities presented the world with a romantic vision of stolid tropical farmers who had husbanded their surpluses to build urban centers with magnificent temples, plazas and public buildings. From the tops of some of those structures, sophisticated stone-age astronomers observed the skies and created a calendar more accurate than our own Gregorian. Independent of Asian mathematicians, Mayan mathematicians conceived of the zero.

Their cities lasted hundreds of years, dotted throughout the lush rainforest of present day southeastern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. Then, seemingly overnight, they were abandoned and the civilization collapsed. Some scholars speculated that an ecological disaster, such as over-farming or the destruction of aquifers, strained the carrying ability of the land. The cities, which relied on provisioning by the countryside, could no longer function when the farmers themselves were starving.

By the 1970s, though, scholars began to reach different conclusions about the Maya. Thanks to the collaboration of two American academics, art teacher Linda Schele and archaeologist David Freidel, the long elusive Mayan writing system began to reveal its structure. The elaborate glyphs of Mayan friezes and sculptures were a syllabic system, like ancient Egyptian, where each glyph represented a consonant-vowel cluster. By sounding out the symbols in sequence, Schele and Freidel were able to interpret the messages they contained.

A different perspective

By 1990, when the pair published their seminal book, A Forest of Kings, the Maya were no longer the mysterious protagonists of a peaceable jungle kingdom. Instead, Schele and Freidel’s book told the story of warring cities, ruled over by aggressive dynastic kings, who practiced a religion almost as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs’. War was so much a part of the culture that it soon became the main suspect in the Mayan demise. Constant hostilities bled resources dry, interrupted agriculture and produced a region-wide instability that interfered with the essential workings of the society. 

But while the Mayan mini-empires lasted, a period of several hundred years, rival states arose, including Tikal, the Guatemalan city considered the greatest of all the Mayan cities. In nearby Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula in the present day state of Campeche, Calakmul grew to become Tikal’s most powerful rival. At its height, when it vied with Tikal for dominance over a large area, Calakmul probably supported a population of more than 50,000 permanent residents, living in more than 6,000 stone structures covering an area of 10 square miles. Considering the limitations of Mayan material technology – the lack of the wheel, iron or draft animals, the construction of Calakmul showed immense determination and intelligence. 

Calakmul’s golden age lasted from 514 A.D. to 830 A.D. After that, it declined precipitously, whether from war or an agricultural disaster. All the other major Mayan cities joined it in decline and eventual, abandonment well before the coming of the Spaniards. Quickly overgrown by the jungle, the cities were preserved from looters and exploiters. 

Mexico has wisely protected Calakmul by surrounding it with a huge rainforest preserve. At 1.8 million acres (2,800 square miles), the Calakmul Biosphere Preserve shelters not only the remains of the city, but a large population of cats, including jaguars and pumas, as well as foxes, deer, anteaters, reptiles and birds. UNESCO declared the area a World Heritage Site in 2002. 

Calakmul is not as extensively developed as, say, Argentinean or U.S. national parks, but it does have some amenities that can make a visit to it fairly pleasant (see the Tulane University URL below). The ruins are still undergoing excavation and it will take years for the bulk of the major buildings at the city’s center to be exposed. For those who relish observing the process of uncovering an ancient city, stopping in at Calakmul every few years can be a fine way to combine a trip to Yucatan’s dazzling beaches with a bit of archaeology.

By Patrick Totty