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Calakmul National
Park, Mexico
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.
Some useful URLs:
http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~dhixson/calakmul/calakmul.html
By Patrick Totty