The Classic Maya Collapse: New Evidence on a Great Mystery

And then, to the intrepid Dr. Simon Martin. Thanks to Simon for participating in this virtual forum. Simon, as many of you may know, is associate curator and curator of the American section of the Penn Museum. He receives his doctorate from the Institute of Archeology University College. London and has a master's degree from the Royal College of Art, London. He is a specialist in Mayan hieroglyphic writing with research focusing on history, politics and religion since 1994. He has conducted field work at the Kalakmal site in Mexico and is known for co-wrote books on chronicles of the kings and Mayan queens from the year 2000 and court art of the ancient Mayans from the year 2004.

Her new book is now available in the UK. He says that he hasn't seen it yet and that he is on his way here. for the US, titled Ancient Maya Political A Anthropology of the Classic Period 150 to 900 CE and includes a wealth of new historical information based directly on Simón's groundbreaking decipherment of Mayan monuments. art gallery in washington dc and at the penn museum, including

maya

2012, where he played a key role. Simon was also the lead curator of our spectacular new Mexican and Central American gallery that opened to the public last November. On top of all this, Simon is the 2019-2020 holder of the prestigious Ji Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas at the John W Klug Center at the Library of Congress, so join me now to congratulate and welcome dr. simon martin, who will talk to us about the

classic

Mayan

collapse

new

evidence

about a big

mystery

simon thank you steve um I hope everyone can see me and hear me well um I'm going to share my screen well hello everyone um welcome to downtown Philadelphia um I know we have some international viewers we have people watching uh in central Europe um and up to the west coast of the US so there are some people who stay up very late and others still early in the afternoon.

I'm going to talk today about one of the most remarkable, um, strange mass social disintegrations that the world has ever seen. I'm going to talk for about an hour or so and explain to you the essential background to that, the dominant theories, and some of the new data that's out there. beginning to transform our understanding of that event, okay, around the year 800 um and up to the beginning of the 10th century, sometime just after 900, the

classic

al Mayan civilization came to an end and what we're looking at here is uh tikal, the site that The Penn Museum, excavated between 1956 and 1969, represented about a couple of decades after the

collapse

, so the city is no longer maintained, it is not being whitewashed, weeded or swept and the jungle is beginning to return because soon It will destroy all the Mayan settlements.

So I think the part of the world that most people here will know, we're talking about the tip of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, and this is just a view of a selection of the enormous number of massive Mayan sites and they reached its peak and reached its

great

est population and

great

est refinement in this era from 600 to 800 and this is when we see the most naturalistic and finely wrought Mayan art architecture, this very precise rectilinear style, temples, plazas, ball courts and palaces, Working hard. Materials like jade and other types of green stones are incredibly delicate work here with um Clint, this is flint, so it's been expertly mapped to produce these very elaborate shapes and many painted plates and cylindrical vases, and the remarkable thing about They're how they give us insight into my mythology, so there's a lot of material here that takes us into the mental landscape of the ancient Mayans, incredibly valuable from that point of view, and of course we have this system. of an enormously elaborate calendar, something that began to develop in the 19th century and will form a kind of framework and skeleton for the chronology that we are going to talk about and the writing system.

This is something that only really began to be deciphered in the 1980s. That was when the phonetic decipherment of my writing began was completed and it is an ongoing process, we are still deciphering new signs, we still have a way to go, but most of the texts can now be read with a good degree of certainty, so in that period, between 600 and 800, we have the maximum. extent of the

maya

n civilization the highest populations the greatest social sophistication this is again this vision of tikal but of course that no longer exists and it came to an end quite quickly this is what you see if you want to see the mayan architecture in the meat, this is what happens if you walk into the forests of central Mexico or Central America, you will see mounds like these, fallen buildings completely indistinct, even when we have cut back the undergrowth and we see here these larger temple structures.

They are so completely covered, they are so part of the landscape that it is very easy to confuse them with natural ones and they were only rediscovered in the 19th century and it was then when some intrepid explorers, people from Europe and the United States, began to go down to that area, I began to travel discovering new sites making wonderful illustrations and then photographs how the undergrowth like the trees like the vines were cut and this civilization came to light once again now one of the things that found a whole category of things are the Mayan monuments and here we see one of broken strangled color, this is what most Mayan monuments look like on the surface and this is one of the reasons why we need to do archeology to find well-preserved things that lie underneath. surface but, nevertheless, there is a lot of information even in stones that look like this and from that we have been able to reconstruct at least part of the story that I am going to tell tonight now, this classical period begins. as steve mentioned about 150, but the oldest monument we have comes from tikal, it was discovered by penn and is dated 292. this is in the mayan long count system and very briefly the way it works is we have units up to here which are 400 year units here which are about 20 years uh here individual years and then 20 day months and individual days so in the Mayan number system the bars um are five and the dots are one so we have eight, you see, and then twelve and then fourteen and eight and fifteen and that's how we write down that today eight twelve fourteen eight fifteen and through some pretty elaborate calculations and a lot of hard work on the part of many scholars we can align that with a high degree of certainty with the year to 92. now, the other end of my history carved in the lowlands, comes in tannin, which is actually at the beginning of the highlands and that's about 600 years later, so that gives us here , the units of 10, you can see the two bars that make 10 uh and then four and then these signs are zeros, so we're missing one at the bottom, what you're writing down is 10 4 0 0 0 and that equals 909 and this is the last dated long count monument, there are some after sometimes debatable dates, um, but this is the lot, the last long count date in this form, now after that, um, my writing continues , continues in a period we call postclassical and did not become extinct until the time the Spanish arrived, but already in this era a massive change can be seen and some sites are erecting monuments like this.

This is a place called yeshom uh in the northern lowlands, uh and this has a long account, it starts out as a long one but everything here is just mumbo jumbo, this doesn't make sense. um so this is a monument put up to look like writing but it's not and I think it's really profound in telling us the ways in which writing was still highly valued um but in this place at least there just wasn't anyone who was anymore I'm not literate, so this is a complete display that I made recently, showing the number of dated monuments, for all of these, each of these eras, so we start here in this period, it's the early classic 300 to 600, then the late classic from 600 to 800 and then this last century here, some people call the terminal classic, which I tend to avoid.

I just refer to it as the 9th century, so we can see the arc, of course, where we reach a peak in the middle of the 8th century. There is certainly a lack of monuments around here because we find broken early classical monuments deposited inside structures, so many of them have not been found yet. I'm sure they won't reach this kind of peak, but at least they would probably fill some of this this area here so let's look at the kind of heart of the south central lowlands uh and this is a selection of the dates that are terminal so these are the last dates of carved monuments in the long count system uh and they range from around 790 I showed it before so this covers just over 100 years and in that it went from peak population, greatest artistic achievements to desolation .

Now, of course, archeology has an important role to play in this chronology that we have from epigraphy and that gives us remarkable accuracy to this day, but we rely a lot, especially on sites that do not have inscriptions, to discover their fate through archeology and stories of ceramics and architecture. There is a fairly dispersed population but, nevertheless, very interesting. graph like this and you can see how closely it matches the monument count from the graph above, so we have a sort of growth period here on earth and a peak again around this same period here in the middle of the 8th century before a very rapid decline, so let's look at some of these theories.

Now we will realize that my civilization came to an end, which they discovered very early. There have been many ideas and some are much better than others. I'm going to mention them as many as I can, but really it's just scratching the surface. I've certainly left out lunatics, so several people have argued that they are sort of psychological factors, sort of psychocultural factors, um and one of them. It is simply that there is tremendous growth and an energetic civilization that has run out of steam, it is a kind of cultural exhaustion and with that sometimes it is this idea of ​​determinism so there may be something, for example, in the Mayan calendar that said that all cities should be abandoned perhaps there was some oracle that told the Mayans that they announced the end of the Mayans and they, conveniently and unhappily, accepted this.

I think there is no reason to believe that any of this is now loosely gathered together under what we might call biological. It's things like population growth, so this again is where the entire society is put under stress simply by having too many people, with too little food, and as we'll discuss a little later, there's good reason to think. which um we know that the jungle is a very difficult place to grow food now the other kind of vaguely biological idea um is pathology so disease um and this is a reproduction of a version of a scene from an Aztec so this is very late um and not from the Mayan area and it is being shown as far as I know I think that smallpox and of course these were diseases brought by the Europeans by the Spanish when they arrived in the new world and there are many experts who have serious doubts about whether the pathology of the epidemics has so much power um in the americas um because many of the diseases that we suffer come through animals they come through our livestock and in the Mayan area and throughout Mesoamerica there simply was not that type of interaction with the captive domesticated animals, however , I guarantee that, for reasons you can guess, the pathology will somehow come to the fore again.

I imagine it's a new wave of enthusiasm for looking at ancient American diseases. Now, in a way, we delve into what they are. they are most unpopular and had the most attention, um, and these are vaguely social, but they have to do with conflicts that began, in particular, in the 20th century, the idea that there was a mass revolt that the people rose up. against their tyrannical rulers, they took over the sites, killed the elite and this led to a general collapse in society, a very different view of the idea of ​​revolt, it is the second on the list, which is the idea of ​​a revolt of a nobleman.

So this is where the kind of upper classes rebel against the divine or semi-divine kings and their rebellion is something that destabilized Mayan society and led to its collapse. So we have the idea of ​​an invasion that had its peak in the past. in particular, in the 1960s, we will hear more details about all this and then finally about the Nissan war, so the internal conflict against the Mayans and I must emphasize that, in the old days, we used to think a lot about the idea of single causes and that's a very old-fashioned idea nowadays we think a lot more about multiple causes, so it could be a combination of any of the factors that I'm mentioning tonight and some others that we don't know about and that are just there .

It's not a prime mover, it's not a single magical bully that took them down, but it's something much more complex and much more intertwined, so let's first look at Peters Negras, this is the site in Guatemala where PennHe worked in the excavations. in the 1930s and one of the things that Penn found was this royal bench, this is a throne for rulers of black stones and we can see on the front there are inscriptions um and then it's carved on the back with these two faces and actually it's his two eyes here this is a big monster face with figures coming out of the eyes now these faces are completely reconstructed because the whole bench was found destroyed and this is the niche where that throne used to sit and the legs came out here and then all of these are blocks smash into pieces so that someone, be it a noble, a commoner or an invader, dismantled Black Peters at least in when it comes to royal shrines like this, now another thing that relates to the idea of ​​The type of uprising against the elite is the defacement of monuments.

Here we have one from Cancun in Guatemala and you can see the kind of faces have been smashed. You can certainly find monuments like this, but in all honesty, there. There really aren't many and there are many sites where perfectly intact monuments were never attacked or defaced in any way and I think the idea that this is

evidence

of a particular uprising is extremely weak and we really shouldn't pay anything. Heads up, now this idea of ​​the nobles' revolt comes in part from the ways that architecture and wealth were changing over about a hundred years of classical civilization at this time.

The nobles are building bigger and more luxurious buildings, but the main thing. The image here is of the Ryobek region and this is a part of the Mayan world where multiple elite residences suddenly spring up, so we lose focus on a central royal court, and some smaller subsidiaries, it becomes very difficult to distinguish one real. court of a noble court that everyone seems to be more or less on the same level and for this to happen there must be a financial and economic relationship, the more wealth remains in the hands of the nobles instead of going down here, the image of the insect comes from Kopan and within these buildings, this is a part of the site called tombs, we carve thrones very elaborately, so it's not just the magnificence of the building, they are also commissioning their own art and this comes from the yash chilan region.

It's an unidentified site that shows the new prominence of these nobles so on the right side we don't have a king but a subsidiary law the king is here but the noble is taking the prestigious position this right hand is uh the right side is where The most important person is located and for them to appear in this type of position alongside kings is an innovation in this period again, possibly a sign that nobles and kings are recalibrating power between them, so let's go ahead and talk from cebal up the usama. center on a new river system called the passion and the idea of ​​invasion now this also has a pen connection because our former director, the much respected and loved jerry sabloth, worked as an underground well as a graduate student in sabah in the 1960s and He and Dick Adams working at a nearby site found many things that to them suggested foreign influence.

This is one of sabaan. It is an unusual style. We have elements here that we haven't seen before. Some of which could. Let's say they appeared before in my area, but they become much more prominent and much stranger. The inscriptions are pretty standard, but a lot of these motifs and these ways of combining iconography are different. Some have a style that is much more typical of um. gulf coast area, so this is beyond the Mayan kingdom into west central Mexico, but particularly where central Mexico goes down to the Gulf of Mexico, so this type of imagery and this type of flow here is a large area where new forms of ceramics come in, so the great tradition during the classical period had been to paint polychrome ceramics, those practically disappear and around 800 and after that we have these vessels made with molds, now a , this one here was found in bait, but we have one in our collection, so in the newly installed gallery we have one that was made with the same mold as this one and no doubt many were made, so they were mass produced.

This was the point about molding rather than hand painting, which was obviously to each their own. Firing polychrome ceramics is very, very elaborate and requires a lot of experience. Vessels like this, once you have the mold, are very, very easy to produce. They really show a drop in experience. Now this vessel is polychrome for the last time and the style is done. Losing a lot of the elaborate work that we had in the classical period predates the classical period. Excuse me, but what I'm pointing out here is the fact that we have a pretty normal hierarchy here, but we don't here.

These are day signs, but not Mayan day signs, they are day signs in a central Mexican system and here they do not serve as a date, they actually serve as a name, they are part of this name here, so we have a name. which is partly composed of myoglyphs and partly using a calendrical system from outside the Mayan area and this was also seen as a fundamental piece of the puzzle, another thing was the architecture, so we have new architectural forms, we have C-shaped buildings , that's a The plant in the United States has a kind of extended U shape or C shape, um and particularly these circular buildings, but there are never that many of them, um, but they are a real departure from the things that we see in the classical period, so the idea is that the The great Usama River Sinter that led to the passion and all the central patent was a highway where people could have approached from the west, um new societies or new societies in the Mayan area, maybe militaristic societies that overwhelmed the Mayans and this was the idea, um no. just from the archaeologists that I mentioned, but also uh sir eric um thompson thompson was the kind of doyan, he was the kind of great thinker of the whole half of the 20th century, he was a particular proponent of the idea that all the strange features in the The Mayan area that arrived in the 9th century is the result of an invasion, so let's now mention this whole idea of ​​internecine warfare and let's mention these other two sites, Tospilas and Aguateka.

Now war had always been me, uh, war had always been part of my society. And that's not really any innovation, it's that this gained in intensity, it gained in destructiveness and some of the rules by which war was carried out were abandoned and war became more destructive and certainly we see many signs of an increase in the war now, these are two images, both of the center of two stacks, you can recognize that it's actually the same view at the top that we have in the 700s and below, what it would have looked like in the 800s.

So what happened is that a kind of town has formed in the middle of the square and they have removed the stone from the large temples to make these concentric walls around the site, so in reality it is just a small town that has defended itself with this double wall system near aguateka. Some really explicit evidence, so they were building large wall systems and we actually know they were under construction because quite a few of them were still incomplete and presumably they were in the act of building against a particular enemy and that enemy overwhelmed aguateka around. 800.

So this is a national geographic view of the assault on Aguateka and that site is like a kind of Mayan version of Pompeii when the um takeshia namata archaeologists working there started excavating the buildings and found the contents still intact, so smashed and Burned. Because the buildings had been knocked down but things were still in their original locations, they also found bodies, people just lying around and it seems that after this vicious attack, the site was completely abandoned, no one came back, no one buried the bodies, no one recovered even some of the valuable objects were completely finished as a site, so the idea of ​​internal war is one of the two main paradigms active today for the collapse of my civilization, now there are others, and we have the ecological ones, for what we have this relationship between uh, the Mayans and their environment, one of them that there is evidence of in some places is soil depletion and then deforestation.

These are based on the ideas that Mayan subsistence is what is called Swedish agriculture and this is what Mayan farmers do today. They will burn new or forest areas, they will plant corn, but the nutrients don't last long, so after several years those fields have to be abandoned, you have to move somewhere else while that warehouse recovers now for reasons we will also mention. There's really no chance that was the system the ancient Mayan civilization used. Deforestation falls into the same general category and I'll really talk about these things in a minute, but at the time when Jared Diamond was creating his well-known book about the collapse of societies, those were very important thoughts, was the idea that The Mayans had destroyed their own environment and this is something that the diamonds picked up, you know, referring to some pretty legitimate academic sources, but it was largely an idea of ​​In their time and today, very few people think that the Mayans exhausted their environment.

In fact, there is much evidence that they were excellent designers of their own ecological system. The way they built terraces and controlled dams and canals and reservoirs, um, was really quite intricate and we only have evidence of that in recent times, so the Mayans were not destructive of their environment, if anything they were fantastic users and very Very efficient, what is apparently a very poor environment, so here of course. We have modern scenes of burned forests and today, tragically, this is mainly for livestock, so this is where the jungle is really destroyed and this is a really considerable problem with the destruction of Central American nature.

Now one of the others. parts of this were lake core sediments so they drill into the heart of the lakes to show all the runoff coming from the land and how it was deposited into the lakes and this shows that again there was considerable runoff in this type of periods. This was seen as a destruction of the soil and evidence that farming was becoming more difficult. I think nowadays we tend to think that this is simply a sign of success. This was the inevitable result of the massive intensive agriculture that was taking place. and in any case this is quite irregular, there are many areas where this type of large runoff has never been detected, so these are real natural ideas on a large scale, I find it very hard to believe, but some people actually thought that Mayan civilization reached its end by an earthquake um there were a couple of places where it seems you can see the remains or fractures caused by genuine earthquakes why this would lead to the collapse of a civilization I don't know um but that was suggested and then we have hurricanes as another explanation general climatology, so I'm going to ignore the earthquakes and look at the hurricanes because hurricanes are potentially extremely damaging now that we're used to, of course, these big systems moving through the Gulf of Mexico and they don't usually come to the Maya area or the least not today, but there are many signs that the Mayans were concerned about this because if you look at the map today you will find very, very few major settlements on the coast of Belize.

It seems that they had a real interest in staying away from that coast and it could well be due to the buffeting of the hurricanes. Now the real problem with hurricanes is not so much people but agriculture. A hurricane passed through the Mayan area in the 20th century and was recorded as destroying 98 of all the corn growing in the central area at the time, of course you know there weren't many people living there at the time, but if you imagine that in intensive agriculture. system and one that is very well balanced with an essential need for food coming in as we will discover very large populations so a strong storm at the wrong time could have been um it could have been very disastrous now the idea that this would have killed everyone, I think it's very unrealistic, so what we're talking about here is more of the disruption of society, the idea that kings have let society down, gods no longer protect people and so so much, it really is What about men, maybe some of these other things like internal war, class war, all these things again, maybe in several courses or not in one because now the most important one here is drought and drought has become the most favored paradigm for the destabilization of the classic?

The Mayan civilization now, strangely, the reason we know that one of the reasons we know that and the way we discovered it is to go underground. The Mayan area is full of caves. This is a limestone platform where water descends and forms tunnels. rivers, caverns, deep cave systems now in those, of course, they filter the water and create static meshes and static mites now, whenWe cut them or when experts cut them, they are essentially like dendrochronology, they are like looking at tree rings, but what is happening is that they are deposits that have been going down, obviously, this is on the side, but the water would be dripping down or down here or there depending on whether it's a static or sonic mite and it deposits calcium, so through this you can count backwards. in time and look for perhaps certain types of markers certain types of volcanic eruptions that leave certain additional elements in the atmosphere those in which you can calibrate these rings with precise years now this is by no means a simple process, one has to take into account Take into account many factors, including the whole nature of the rock that the water seeps through, but in theory, and if done correctly, it will tell you how much water fell, how much rain there was in a given year, in fact, not even every year. each season and in theory we could reduce it to each month, so there is tremendous potential in analyzing these speleothems as a technical term and I think once we have each of these it will really cost an enormous amount of money, time and work and analysis of laboratory, so we only have in the region four or five of these data sets, once we have 50, once we have covered the entire Mayan area, then I think we will have an incredibly accurate and important record on precipitation, which What this shows is There are a lot of variations, so we have a lot of rainfall and drought, and you can see that it's really bouncing around all the time.

There is a very, very severe drought here, but you can see that it is actually a little later than the Mayans. collapse, so the date we're talking about is around here, this is much later, so if one of these spikes somewhere out there was the destabilizing factor, it has to be based on other things, for example, that the population level becomes so high. that my society becomes exceptionally vulnerable, so this must be taken into account as something that would cause such a destructive drought. Not all of these studies agree, so we will have to average the late settlements and fast FMs from different regions eventually.

I think we'll come up with something very precise by the time there's variability, so finding precisely a particular drought that could have been the cause of death, I think it's not there yet, but anyway, if you were to ask To most Mayan scholars today, they would. Let's say it is very likely that drought is some kind of factor, the evidence suggests that these are multi-year droughts and if there is a large deficit and it rains for four five six years, then this could seriously destabilize society. The thing to do now is move on, so the FM data is part of this new evidence.

This is part of the new knowledge we are gaining through archeology and technology. Now there's another one that's happening at the same time and it's. Equally notable is a system called lidar, so it's aerial laser scanning and those of you who attended the lecture I gave a couple of years ago called the urbanized jungle was one that talked particularly about lidar. What we are seeing here is a google. terrestrial view of tcar, so in the center are the central squares, temple 1, temple 2, the northern acropolis, here the great temple 4 and here the square of the seven temples, etc., etc., but still There are many forests, it covers what lidar does using a laser. in a plane that penetrates the canopy goes down to ground level it is reflected and uses a lot of sophisticated software processing, what you can do is exactly the same view, except with lidar instead of normal photography, so you can imagine what kind Ideas are possible once we can look at the terrain in that kind of detail and there are many things we can do.

There are many different types of filters. There are different ways to look at the ground. There are ways to combine this with other types of chalk and measure different ones. slope shapes and analyzing different soils and in particular looking for permanent features created by the Mayans, so terraced deposits are built and in particular structures including defensive structures and some of the really new and exciting work is the systems of field, so this is where the whole old idea arises about Agriculture in Sweden, called slash and burn, has to come to an end because we can see vast systems of fields.

In the Mayan area, the largest sites are located next to what are called lowlands, so these are the low-lying areas that are seasonally flooded as they are today. and they form a swampy area which is almost impossible in the rainy season, however now using lidar we can see that these were not empty landscapes, they were large scale agriculture, so they were covered with canals, raised fields, specially manipulated irrigation with large reservoirs in certain places too, so the idea of ​​very high population levels immediately becomes much more persuasive. The limiting factor of the jungle being a terrible place to try to grow many crops is gone.

We don't have that problem anymore. We know there was. Fertile land that was constantly used and we're not just talking about small areas here, these barrels cover thousands of square kilometers, so this is a very large area now, uh, I also mentioned about architecture, so this is a site called naactun. in guatemala and it's on the edge of a low so you can see down here this low land and you can see some of these traces of field systems and the architecture up here now the scale of the lidar scans um means that we can look not only at not individual sites like this, but entire areas, entire plots now up here, that's the low one we just looked at before we were looking south, now we're looking at the plan view north up here and that was that area, everything the rest here is a home is a house or a group of houses, so you can see two things, one is that the Mayan style um of low settlement is a low density settlement, so there is a lot of agriculture between all these houses, as well as on the ground floor, this type of cuisine. gardens where people grew herbs and medicinal plants and specialized things, chili and things like that, this whole area would also have been green with trees with small plots of corn, as well as the high levels of intensive agriculture in the Barriles imagine this not in a small two kilometer stretch here, but it extends across the entire area so you can get an idea of ​​how many people lived and this is a collection that was the top tier tunes section up there, but these are the other sections. that have been done so far here in Tikal up to the crown or more, etc.

At this moment there is a project that will cover, if not the entire area, then almost all of northern Guatemala and that will be the most revealing tool. that Mayan archaeologists have ever had will be something that we will look at so far, you can see these density maps, you can see the populations, you can see how dense that notch zone is, but also around Tikal, but also how it starts to coax dramatically to the west. These are areas that are apparently very similar to this type of terrain, maybe there aren't as many battles, but if the idea is that the Mayans lacked land, there were too many people, there wasn't enough agriculture, they could have easily moved into these areas. and earn a living. some kind of life, so it seems like they really stayed in these areas because they were calm, there really wasn't any problem, so of course what we're seeing here with this graph was a relative graph, so it's not I'm trying to tell you how many people there are, it just tells you to scale the relative scale between not many and many.

By counting the houses that the LIDAR shows us, we can create some really pretty accurate population estimates and the people who Working on this suggests that the core area, so not even the entire Mayan area, but the high-density core area, it could easily have contained about 10 million people, so again, this would have been hard to imagine without this agricultural system that would have made it possible. So the two really fit together from our point of view, talking about the collapse is very significant because it means that not only did some people disappear and move somewhere else or whatever, it means that a large number of people moved and left. to another place or they became extinct and Coming back to this, this graph where we see all kinds of extinction dates of the different sites and we have this area, this period of decline, here we can express it another way, which is a graph.

I recently did what this shows is a collection of number of sites so these are the last 70 sites that appear in the Mayan record and it only covers from 800 to here up to 920 and what you seem to see is a pretty straight line that seems to come straight up here, which suggests a gradual there were a lot of people here and then they steadily decreased during this period, although that seems very persuasive, I think it is actually very misleading, the reason it is misleading is that this counts all the sites, So many of the sites here are very small and are sites that only erect monuments in this period, so they are not part of a large continuous system.

There's something that comes up at the end and there was also a resurgence in the 9th century of sites in the north, which is It's a completely separate topic, very, very interesting, especially how that intersects with the idea of ​​drought, but it distorts things. when we talk about the southern lowlands, the denser areas, what happens if we remove that data as the graph actually changes, it also changes? for another very important reason, which is that terminal dates are significant only when you put them in context, so chica's last date is in um 869, but she didn't erect any monuments from 8 10 to 8 6 9 8 10 es where things really come to an end and many of these sites or let's say a significant number have this feature and we can see the details of how this worked around 810 by looking at aguateca, so this is the same site where we had all the uh the warriors attacking the burning and pompeii place the largest structure here is 188 this is a modern photograph of it it was excavated by takeshi anamata and what it showed was that this building was not complete it was under construction you could see that because there is a construction ramp down here, but you have exposed what we call construction containers, so these are walls, excuse me, they are small walls that are used to stabilize you, they would build a wall and then fill it with rubble and that makes a much more stable structure There's also a depression here that looks like they were building a burial chamber but never got around to it.

The fascinating thing is that in front we have monuments, we have a steel here that is 4.4 meters high and it has been smoothed ready to carve but it was never carved and we have something called alter m now alter m um you can see it, it's hard to see but there is no doubt that it remembers the date nine or how that gives you 919,000, which is the year 810. when it was found it was thought that it was simply eroded and it is eroded but in fact when you look at it closely it is not simply eroded nor was it finished never what this tells us is that um we can date the destruction of aguateka Very precisely we can say that it was destroyed before 810 and in fact they were building the monuments to celebrate that period that ended when the site was destroyed.

This is a pattern we find elsewhere, the famous Bonham Park murals, the great battle. scenes and scenes of royal arrangements and dances and all these things um it's very well known um and magnificent it's also very late and in fact it was never finished here you can see that the main text has been painted but these legends are the names of all these characters no had been completed, the latest date that is actually buried somewhere down here is 791. So the idea that they were painting this around the year 800 is not unrealistic, this is another unfinished thing and, like the building in the aguateca, we found Many structures in my area that were under construction have piles of stone carefully stacked ready to be placed and of course we don't know exactly when things were abandoned, but it seems increasingly likely that it was ordered at one point very similar, so If we look at the flowering of the Mayan civilization until 810, we have all these very active sites, but after 8 10 there is a lot, um and some of these like kopan, well, the last date is 822 or um like a trace 8 14.

So it really gets even thinner if we remove those where there were pause episodes, in other words where there were big gaps, then it gets even smaller, so I don't think we're talking about a slow decline of 100 years, I think what we're doing. What we are seeing is a very rapid event that I call the crisis of the early 19th century and that led to the abandonment of not all sites, but many sites, so I think we can replace that idea of ​​decline with the idea of a kind of scrambler that there was an event somewhere shortly before and shortly after 8 10and then it developed over the next 100 years, it was 100 years before it all finally ended, so let's look at the newest kind of evidence of what was happening at the time. we know that architectural styles are changing we know that ceramic forms are changing we know that iconographic motifs, including some deities, were changing the elements of the writing system were changing and the fluorescent power for the centers of importance were changing now this um, it's Those of you who know may recognize Bill. the museum is us moving uh caracal alter 13 into position in the new gallery and when you make a new gallery you have to do, of course, new research and really try to rethink everything in the collection and write new titles and details about them. and I knew that the 13th caracal altar was important and significant, uh, it is significant, especially because the date is 8 20.

So, this is the 10-year event that follows the great crisis of the early 9th century and is a crisis that did not affect. snail, they talk very happily about the characteristics of this text that are very interesting. We see two characters, one presenting some feathers and a captive to a lord here who is clearly the king of Karakol and, in fact, we have his name here. his name appears here too um and this character is named not once or twice but three times this is his title and he appears two more times in this now let's look at it so his name is um papa malio and aside from the fact that that is a name strange, it has a title that is chicken, this is a very late spelling, but anyway, it's part of that whole system now, kalomte is something we haven't paid some attention to, but I think I've still underestimated the important thing which is colomte kalantay is the highest title of the Mayan kings, so not all kings have kilometers, only a few and the column title is organized directionally, so there is a version for the north, there is a virgin for the east. south and west and in fact that version is the western version, it's chicken and that's actually the most common.

It seems to have all kinds of residences to do with the West and some kind of powerful forces originally linked to the great Tituakan side. The others are. More rare, but nonetheless quite significant, this information tells us that that figure, so the seemingly subordinate type of figure, actually surpasses the king and he surpasses the king that he mentions more frequently than the king and it was thanks to some another job I was doing for my book. that I began to realize that let's not jump back here that these scenes do not necessarily completely reflect the relationship between the characters represented, what I mean by this is that we seem to see the subordinate introducing himself to the lord, we have other scenes in which the text tells us it says something very different it actually tells us that the relationship is inverse what i suspect is happening is that this is a piece of rhetoric this is real rhetoric that is on display at the caracal site and they are presenting things in a way that makes your boy look good the text on the other hand I think it is more faithful and here it tells us that papa malio the western colomte is supervising uh events carried out by king caracal in fact that whole relationship is repeated here like well, this is reserved for hierarchical relationships where someone supervises where someone supervises in a hierarchical sense, so there is every reason to think that pat maliel is not the subordinate, pap malio is actually the person in charge and we know that he is based on a site called ukanal ukana was a perfectly normal Mayan kingdom but with pap malio there it becomes much more important here we go so we can see them both now one last thing about patmalia which is interesting, she wears very little clothing uh as you can see it's both of them, probably it's summer, um, but this headdress is quite significant and there is a luminous figure, um, in a museum site where you can see the same headscarf, it's a beaded headscarf, it's not really a hat, it's something that's tied across the back, in fact, you can see the knot here where it's tied along the back and the feathers, three feathers coming out of the top.

This um is typically used to identify non-Maya people from the West or, say, non-classical Mayan people. and I think this fits with what's going on now, something I came across with some colleagues of mine who were having trouble with questions, they pointed that out to me and to me it was a minor little revelation, it was published in 1983 by a scholar called um lawrence feldman and looks at the names that were in this area when the Spanish arrived, and in fact, you can see here the characteristics to look for in the list of personal names from the 8th century.

Remarkably, this is exactly what we are going to do. The same thing right now is that um prefixes for surnames are used in the Chantal language, so this is a Western Mayan people who came from the west at some point in ancient times, their names often start with power and so Of course, one can immediately see how that. is related to papamalil that name as strange as it is it is not strange if it was a chantal maya now let's expand a little more and go to some other sites here so we can see sabal and here is the karakol, but also the site of nakum which rarely appears in the discussions and that's because the work there is very new in the boot channel um instead of um things get worse things get better the population grows their temples are rebuilt and new types of pottery come in, so we have those Molded pottery and a type called fine paste that was originally made on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.

You can see these circular structures here. They are now built on top of older pyramids, so the pyramids are quite old but the temples on top are new. This was excavated by my good friends from Poland and I've been working there for about 10 years or more and what they've shown is that this whole area was rebuilt in the 9th century, so it's a time when Chicago is starting to look like that. as I did at the beginning of this talk this is being rebuilt and in this kind of style so nakum is fluorescent makum is rich nakum is having success and the excavations in the surrounding area show that its population was increasing considerably and it is very likely that nakum is attracting people who are abandoning other sites because many Mayan sites are already completely deserted or almost so this is a dynamic where there are fewer people but they are gathering in these new centers of power now people with very sharp eyes will have noticed this here circular structure. they're not myosites at all, but there are nakum, the largest circular structure is in cebal um in cebar, it's at the end of its own causeway, so these are buildings, um, excavated by Gerry in the 1960s, that's very , very interesting now, in the past, people have linked it.

These circular structures represent a new movement, in particular a new deity coming from the west, that many people have heard of, Quetzalcoatl, this is the feathered serpent, we do not have images of the feathered serpent, but the feathered serpent was celebrated in its wind aspect like a deity. They are called circular structures in central Mexico, so the idea is that this is part of a type of religious diffusion that comes from the west and in fact not only do we see these circular structures here in Yucatán in the north, we find many of them in these rivers that are coming to the central area, so here is cebal, here is nakum, there are other circular structures down here at every ton tan and morphan causeway and other sites, so the circular structures arrive late, arrive quickly and are associated with new ceramics now in prime um let's look a little more at the big changes that took place um right now I know I have very little time here so I apologize I'm going to hurry up a little um the monuments that surrounded by that structure were very interesting and this is stila 10 and we'll come back to that in a second now some of them are very conventional you can see this is a typical mayan profile but if you look at this set and these are the four buildings surrounding temple a3 at um cebal se you can see different types of faces these are typical classic faces these are not typical classic faces so it's this type of flat forehead this type of stretched nose as opposed to this type of big Meyer style nose now That's interesting, but the really strange thing is that It's the same person and it's not just the same person, it's the same person on the same day, this is a celebration and it's represented four times in four different ways and some of them are growing. maya and some of them don't and this was part of the evidence that they are actually people who come from the west and that they are versions of maya, so in the words of a colleague of mine, this is code switching, this is him showing himself in different ways and you could argue either way you could say well he's basically Mayan but here he's pretending to be somewhere else or you could say he comes from somewhere else and in a sense he's pretending to be Mayan, okay, so sebastian attends, so this We are talking about dates from the mid-9th century and this text is really crucial, it tends to have been undervalued over the years, we have known what it says for a long time, the problem is not That's what it says, the problem. is what it means up here we have the name of the king this is the watul sign so this is this guy he is the guy on all those monuments and he is the holy lord of sibel um and then we have a verb a and it is secondary clause and it tells us which was seen so this is the ceremony that he is performing here uh it was seen by this king of chicago this guy who was the king of Kalakmal this guy who was the king of muthul to san joseph and it happened in seva, so in 849 the kings of tikal kalakmal were told that san joseph come to ceba now this is a massive reversal of the political order of the classical period ceban is a podunk place um chica brings together more other great superpowers something radical has changed that they then decide to considered that they came to the minor center of seba a little thing about that name because watul cartel this is like pap malio in the sense that it is not the typical name of a Mayan king, in fact it doesn't really make any sense and It has been suggested before Even in the 1990s, this could be the interpretation of a foreign word.

It is not clear in what language. It is not easily identifiable even in Chantal Mayan, but it is certainly very strange. Now quickly, some other features, of course, this is. where papa malio is based this is a little later than his time um but here you can see they are using the square day name there is the king's name is a colomte so he is a big king uh this is his normal type of name that he has a square day name there also another guy um this is on the site of washington but this is the king of washington down here this guy is another person um he is witnessing the end of the period and his name is oloman what a strange name we have No there may be an alarm somewhere about mold-made ceramics, so this allows us to date them with even greater refinement.

We know that about 830 to about 850 people were producing the name of it there, this style of molded pottery and this particular shape is typical. from belize this is so it looks more like the eastern forms towards the caribbean coast this is more typical of the central area the type of things that were from cebal and it actually comes from washington it was discovered there and the reason why i'm showing it It is because we are seeing these gentlemen, um well, and we have a readable Mayan text, yes, everything is very predictable, but their names are the name of the square day and they have nothing else, they are not identified with any other. way and I think if we were looking at them with a completely unbiased eye we would say um well these guys are probably mold made overseas they are a feature of the Gulf Coast these are this is a Gulf Coast um mold made of ceramic and here you can see a square day name so it's actually very typical of that area this is one from the Cebal region again the square day names with these warrior characters um and then just going back to these characteristics the architectural styles the ceramics form the iconography the writing system everything has changed after 8 10.

We still have people with the conventional name of the Mayan king. um, they're still around. They are still on some sites, although they tend to be plural sites. They seem to be places even in Tikar, which have now fallen into ruins, but. They have some kind of active elite group, but the successful centers have guys with strange names, Papa Malio Olom and some others that we can't even read. They're strange people, strange names, um, I mentioned it before. Up here we saw this business about power. Being a prefix in Chantal Mayan, this is also very interesting.

Calendrical names often have no origin. 45 percent of the people now what that means is that Nawa is the language of central Mexico and the calendrical names in Nawa would be the name of the day squared, so it looks like Si papa malio and the names of the days squares make sense becausethe Mayans in contact with central Mexico we are using the name of the Mexican day and here is a selection of them very strange things um and recently many things were identified here that helped establish that. It's not just any system, it's actually Noah, so to conclude, we don't know what put an end to maya, we don't know if these changes are reacting to something, or if they are part of its instigation, but I think we can say something that is not has been said before.

There are two types of people in the 9th century Mayan country of Loveland. There are guys I call the new elite. It's all of them. They are all columns. They all have strange names. a lot of fine paste and pottery made with molds and they have round temples, the ancient elites, so they have traditional names, they are very, very rare and tend to only be in very early periods. Colón, they don't have much rhythm. They don't have a lot of mold-made ceramics and they don't have round temples, so the confusion we had in the 9th century was seeing new styles, old styles, strange things, things from central Mexico, conservative Mayans, things can be divided into two groups, one that remains very traditional others that are innovative combine new and old characteristics and one has suspicions that they are not Mayan um this of course is the obligatory complement to the book um all of this is analyzed in greater detail um in a chapter here um I should point out that it's incredibly expensive, so I know there are some hobbyists that will buy it, but these academic books have amazing prices, but eventually it will come out in paperback and with that I ended my talk, I apologize for going overboard. and I'm open to any questions people have