Mayan Collapse?
Never happened
Antigua was almost too charming for words, but my next stop was Petén Itzá and the island of Flores which, also, is almost too charming for words. My hostel was a lot more basic than the last one, but it turns out that even cold showers are a good thing when the climate is muggy enough.
Like many tourists, I wanted to see Tikal. It was here that the Maya bult one of their greatest capitals in the region, where they, even though they didn’t know about the wheel, constructed pyramids that rival those in Giza, then destroyed their environment and went extinct.
It’s a very familiar story, but it’s not true.
I am an archaeology buff, but monumental architecture is a bit like theatre scenery: it sets off the actors while they are performing, but when they are gone, one has the urge to peek behind the scenery. Giant piles of stone are fun in their own way, but king Great Jaguar Paw is far less fascinating than the sweating labourers who built his palace, the scientists that worked out how the movement of the stars relates to the best time to plant corn, or the peasants who did the planting. Unfortunately, only Jaguar Paw and the guy who killed him got to sponsor monumental inscriptions, so the lives of real people are a puzzle.
The word pyramid is misleading too. It recalls to mind a photoshopped skyline of Giza along with a host of anachronistic references: the Sphynx, Rameses the self-promoting Second, even Cleopatra the Seventh who lived two and a half millennia after the pyramids, but only two millennia before our own time.
Pyramids might not make you think of Sudan, even though more pyramids were built in the kingdom of Kush than in the Black Land of Kmt. A note to self-righteous American filmmakers: Cleopatra was not black, but the Kushite queens who occasionally conquered Egypt certainly were. Where is the documentary about queen Pebatjma? Of course shooting it would require doing research beyond asking your grandma’s opinion.
Where were we? Oh, yes, Mayans pyramids. Well, Egyptian pyramids were basically overgrown tombstones, their shape being their function: here’s an enormous pile of stone, aren’t you impressed?
Mayan pyramids were also designed to impress, but they weren’t buildings in their own right, they were pedestals. Their purpose was to raise something above — ridiculously high above — the surrounding area. Build a pyramid and top it with a temple and you have a Very Important Temple. Leave the top flat and put instruments for measuring declination and ascension on top, and you have the Royal Astronomic Observatory.
Or build changing rooms on top and hope your football team will make it to the finals. Granted, the pyramid that supported those changing rooms had a rectangular base rather than a square one, but the principle was the same and you wanted your team to have plenty of room before the game.
When your team won the finals, the captain was trussed up, drugged to the gills and had his throat cut by the high priest.
Imagine the scene: the game has been going on for three days and no goal has been scored yet. Both teams have been kicking, kneeing and elbowing the four kilo rubber ball and each other, but the two stone rings above their heads have remained pristine. It takes strength, skill, teamwork and luck to score in this game. Even more, it takes commitment, so, during the last break of the day, the home captain calls his team together. “Guys, we have about an hour of sunlight left and if we don’t score, the game will be a draw. I know you’re all tired, but so is the other team. Come on, give me this last push. Let’s get the ball through that hoop and I promise you my blood will flow like water!”
That sort of thing must have happened time and again, and it makes no sense. None. Why would you train for years to be the best of the best, then walk into that narrow space between the two hoops with the goal of having your throat cut? What did they dream of? To brave the journey through Xibalba? To face the gods? To become one?
The words tell us what happened, but the real meaning is lost. You can build a cult on a death wish, and many have, but you cannot build a millennia-spanning culture. The baker who came around in the morning with fresh tortillas, the brewer, the weaver, the farmer, the fisher, they weren’t angsty teenagers with torn black tights, razor blades, and too much makeup. They had a drink and a laugh with their friends in the evening, they made sure their children had breakfast in the morning, and they cheered for the neighbour’s boy who was getting to be so good at the game he might have his throat slit one day.
No pop psychology can explain this. We can appeal to cultural differences, but we only have the vaguest ideas of what their culture was like. It’s like trusting Mel Gibson with a trowel — you might tell a good story, but it will be a lie.
The Maya did have wheels, by the way. They not only had wheels, they mass-produced them and put them on figures that could be pulled along by a string. Whether those were the children’s toys that they appear to be, or puppets for a theatre, or props for a religious ritual, or all of that at once, is something for archaeologists to argue about. The reason they didn’t put them on ox carts, though, is clear: they didn’t have oxen. For that matter, Egyptians, too, moved their giant statues with sleds, not carts. They even chiselled out bas-relief pictures of the transport operation for the edification of next generation’s engineers and the puzzlement of Egyptologists everywhere.
Early Mayan states were knowledge-seeking ones. They funded research, developed technologies, and organized public works based on those technologies, then they over-reached.
They saw that clear-cutting forests would give them room for agriculture and for population expansion, but they did not know it would cause the water reservoirs to dry out. They saw that mono-cropped fields had a higher hectare yield than the balanced multi-cropped ones did, but they did not factor in soil exhaustion. Like every collapse, theirs happened very slowly, then all at once.
The final stage took just a few years. The peasants saw the lakes dry out and their fields turn barren and simply left. The rich and the powerful lingered for a while, trying to beat food out of the few remaining peasants who had none to give. Then the smarter ones moved to Cancún to mooch on their relatives and the rest died.
Meanwhile, the lower classes thrived. They went back to the land their ancestors abandoned to the lure of the city and stayed there. They remain here on the shores of the lake Atitlán. The women, even young girls, still wear their colourful high-waisted skirts and embroidered blouses. Men’s clothes could be mistaken for “western” (except that Guatemala is farther west than most of “the West”), but at closer look, they are just traditional clothes made with modern fabrics. And young boys, too, proudly wear their embroidered white trousers on weekends. They still speak Tz’utujil, a language to confuse and delight the ear, its rhythms dictated by soft glottal stops, its timbre by sibilant consonants.
And they remember to live in the land, not on it. They cultivate tiny fields in the middle of forests, high up a volcano’s slope, where last season’s corn stalks support this season’s beans and excess avocados are left on the ground as fertilizer. They fish their lake, but they take only what is needed and never hesitate to tell off a neighbour who would take more than their share.
Today, many live off the tourists who come to marvel at their land. They feed them tortillas, platanos and frijoles and drive them around in the noisy three-wheel tuktuks that easily take ridiculous one-in-five slopes which would stop many SUVs. But when oil for those tuktuks dries up and tourists go away, they won’t miss a beat. They still know how to walk the land, how to work it with their hands, how to receive its riches without reaching for more. They remember the lessons of Tikal.
