Science / Medicine : Mayas’ Demise: A War Within? : Site Reveals Heavy Fortifications

The mystery of the Maya demise has haunted anthropologists for centuries, but researchers may be on the verge of solving the sudden disappearance of one of history’s most advanced civilizations.

The Maya were “the most sophisticated, literate, complex people in the New World,” according to anthropologist Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University. They erected massive pyramids, created a highly accurate calendar, perfected the art of astronomical observation, produced beautiful multicolored pottery and intricately carved stone monuments and established widespread trade routes.

But after flourishing throughout much of Central America from the 3rd to the 8th Century, they all but disappeared in the 9th Century, dispersing into small villages and seemingly losing most of their talents.

Historians and archeologists have long pondered the reasons for this downfall, arguing at different times that losses of trade routes, changes in climate, endemic disease and many other related factors contributed to their downfall. In the past, most of the theories shared the premise that the Mayas were largely a peace-loving people who engaged in limited warfare only for ritualistic purposes and who met their demise through little fault of their own.

But new discoveries made this summer in the lowlands of Guatemala by a team headed by Demarest present a sharply different picture of the end of the Maya era. Demarest has discovered a heavily fortified Mayan city, called Punta de Chimino, that is “more massive than a medieval castle” in Europe.

In the nearby city of Dos Pilas, he has found hastily erected stoneworks that suggest that the city was under heavy siege. These new discoveries, combined with previous excavations in the area, indicate that, at the height of the Mayan hegemony, the Mayan people were involved in ferocious internecine warfare that sapped their vitality and tore apart the fabric of their civilization.

The researchers have few clues yet about what caused the sudden escalation of warfare that brought about the end of Mayan civilization--although some evidence suggests the haunting possibility that it was triggered by over-exploitation of the environment, deterioration of the soil and pressure on food resources.

But even though they do not know why the warfare started, the scientists believe they know who started it. Stelae (stone pillars with intricate carvings) from Dos Pilas identify a leader, known only as Ruler 2 because archeologists have not had time to translate his name, “who appears to be one of the kings from the beginning of the 8th Century who embarked on a program of territorial conquest,” Demarest said.

Based on many recent discoveries of evidence of warfare, especially this summer’s, Demarest has concluded that, for a period of perhaps 50 to 60 years beginning about AD 825, warfare spread like a contagion throughout the region. Eventually, the economic system collapsed under the weight of the strain imposed by the intense combat and defensive measures and individual states within the area fell “like dominoes.”

By far the most important discovery made this summer is the Punta de Chimino site, which sits on a peninsula that juts into Lake Petexbatun in northwestern Guatemala, four days’ journey from Guatemala City by plane, Jeep, canoe and mule. Researchers had known that a village existed on the site but had not explored it.

“We went there to do a survey for a week,” Demarest said by telephone from Antigua, Guatemala, where he has been recuperating from pneumonia and the parasitic diseases that are the bane of archeologists. The 36-year-old Demarest is the leader of a team of several American and Guatemalan archeologists, a dozen Vanderbilt graduate students and 50 Guatemalan workers that has been granted an exclusive permit by the Guatemalan government to dig up hundreds of square miles of the Mayan heartland in the Peten jungle. The $1-million project is funded by the National Geographic Society, the H. F. Guggenheim Peace Foundation and the largest archeological grant ever awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Punta de Chimino “was not a very important component of our work,” Demarest said. But what they found there made them change their plans instantly.

The Mayas who lived in Punta de Chimino excavated a massive ditch, 450 feet long and 50 feet deep, that cut the city off from the mainland, making it completely surrounded by water. In excavating the ditch through bedrock, Demarest said, the Mayas moved three times as much rock and stone as had been used to construct the city itself. “It’s as if the United States were spending 75% of its budget on defense,” he said.

Punta de Chimino also had walls around its sides to protect it from attacks by canoes, and protected portages through which food could be brought in during a siege. “One of the reasons people have used to argue that Mayans were not warlike was the fact that their centers were completely indefensible,” he said. “This is the exact opposite of that.”

Inside the walls of Punta de Chimino, Demarest found “a kind of shrunken Mayan state. It has all the characteristics of a Mayan ceremonial center, but on a smaller scale.” Included were a single ball court (the Mayas played a sort of hybrid between soccer and basketball with great intensity; losers were sometimes sacrificed), one temple, one funerary, one set of stairways with hieroglyphics, and so on.

The fortress also had a large open area within the innermost wall that could have been used as a refuge for the population from the mainland.

“It would have been almost impossible to take the place. It was really impregnable,” Demarest said. “Those are terms you don’t normally use in discussing Mayan architecture.”

Punta de Chimino is “probably one of the few sites where the stereotype of archeology is accurate,” he said. “It’s like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

At nearby Dos Pilas, evidence of a different kind also suggests a sudden intensification of warfare. Dos Pilas is the classic, indefensible Mayan city, in the middle of the jungle with ready access from all sides. But sometime toward the end of the 8th Century, the inhabitants of Dos Pilas erected two concentric rings of walls around the center of the city, defacing monuments and burying important artifacts in their haste.

Debris recovered from inside the walls indicates that large numbers of people inhabited the area at least briefly, suggesting that the city was under siege. When and how it fell, however, is still a mystery.

But before it did, Ruler 2 apparently conquered a number of smaller fortresses.

Demarest and his colleagues also discovered, but have only tentatively explored, an extensive series of caves near Dos Pilas that have not been entered by humans for more than 1,000 years. He believes that the caves may also have been used as a place of refuge during a siege.

In one of the caves, they discovered ritual offerings of broken pots and flint knives, as well as the mummified remains of a boy who had been sacrificed and painted with red ocher. Exploring the unexpected caves “was one of the first times I’ve found myself irrationally exhilarated,” Demarest said.

Demarest’s discoveries are so recent that few of his colleagues, aside from those on the expedition itself, are aware of them. One who has been informed is anthropologist Richard E. W. Adams of the University of Texas at San Antonio, who thinks Demarest’s discoveries are “swell stuff.”

The new discoveries, Adams said, “go a long way toward documenting in detail this whole business of warfare as an element in the collapse of the Mayan civilization.”

Archeologists’ picture of the Mayan civilization has been gradually changing over the last 20 years. Historians of Mayan art, in particular, had begun to paint a picture of a more warlike population than had been previously believed.

Mayan hieroglyphics show repeated images of warriors clad in jaguar pelts or bird-like costumes, bearing woven shields and lances, capturing the noble elite of nearby tribes and bringing them back to their own temples for ritualistic bloodletting, removal of their hearts and decapitation.

But this war was sharply circumscribed. Mayan art shows no instances of cities under siege, temples ransacked, or any of the other depredations of large-scale conflict. Instead, the fighting seems to be representative more of a rite of passage for prestige than an actual combat for resources or plunder.

But about AD 825, Adams said, “something went terribly wrong” and kings like Ruler 2 began actual conquest of nearby cities and settlements. By the middle of that century, Dos Pilas had extended its hegemony to cover an area of nearly 690 square miles--a huge amount of land in comparison to the areas controlled by other Mayan cities--before it ultimately collapsed.

“But if one group changes the rules (of warfare), other groups have to adopt the new rules and you get a kind of arms race,” Demarest said. “Intensification of warfare spreads by contagion, and the ultimate result can be regional devastation. In this case, the Dos Pilas hegemony broke up into heavily fortified sites, small independent states warring rather savagely with each other. It may not be the principal cause of the collapse of the Mayan civilization, but it is certainly a principal cause.”