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Recovering Maya Civilisation Professor Norman Hammond FSA FBA Department of Archaeology, Boston University, USA British Academy

Albert Reckitt Archaeology Lecture 14 November 2006


The Maya created one of the most notable and surprising civilisations of the ancient world, in what are now the Yucatan Pensinsula of southern Mexico and the adjacent countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. Best known from great cities such as Tikal, Copan, Palenque and Chichn Itz,the Maya reached their apogee in the Classic Period of AD 250-900, when many small polities flourished and fought across this part of Central America. The Classic is bracketed by a Postclassic, ending with the Spanish conquest of the midsixteenth century, and a Preclassic (or Formative) period extending back to the beginnings of settled agriculture in the second millennium BC. The Maya Area has three major regions: the volcanic and metamorphic highlands of Chiapas and southern Guatemala; the flat, arid limestone platform of the northern Yucatan Pensinsula, where annual rainfall rarely exceeds 500mm; and the central region of Belize, the Petn of northern Guatemala, and northern Chiapas with abundant rainfall (up to 4000mm), large permanent rivers such as the Usumacinta, and a tropical rain forest vegetation with a canopy up to 40m high. Initial human penetration occurred around 10,000 years ago, but the first forest clearance by maize farmers occurred around 3500 BC on the Pacific coast and 2500 BC in Belize, documented by pollen cores. The oldest villages on the Pacific side date from around 1700 BC and in the central zone are present by 1200 BC, where Cuello (excavated 1975-2002) documents the development of domestic architecture, pottery and stone-tool technology, and subsistence based on maize, root crops, deer hunting and domesticated dog. Long-distance procurement of jade and obsidian, and their presence in some burials, attest the emergence of interdependent communities ruled by lites who commissioned the first public buildings at sites such as Cival: the foundations of Maya civilisation were laid between 650 and 400 BC. Early in the Late Preclassic (400 BC-AD 250) the existence of Maya hieroglyphic script as a tool of governance is found at San Bartolo, where murals dating, from the second century BC in naturalistic style, document complex myths and rituals including royal accession. The existence of such monarchies prior to the Late Classic, where the evidence of major royal constructions including palaces and funerary temples had long been evident and formed the bulk of the visible remains of Classic Maya civilisation, had been doubted. The San Bartolo murals with their accompanying short texts, the coeval development of much larger communities such as Nakbe, El Mirador and Edzna with massive public works, and the discovery of proto-palaces at Uaxactun Groups E and H as well as at San Bartolo's Tigrillo complex, demonstrated an early Late Preclassic origin for kingship. At Copan, a series of tunnels, totalling more than 3 km in length into the Acropolis, uncovered a nested sequence of Early Classic dynastic temples and royal tombs, providing concrete evidence that the sixteen-ruler dynasty portrayed on Altar Q had been an historical reality. Decipherment of hieroglyphic texts on royal monuments in many cities has also shown that in the period between AD 562 and 695, the states of Tikal and Calakmul had fought a long series of wars. The initial success of the Calakmul alliance in encircling Tikal eventually negated by the latter's victory under Hasaw Chan K'awil. Such internecine warfare between Maya polities persisted through the ninth century, and is seen as a major factor in the collapse of Classic civilisation. Natural, rather than cultural, factors have long been suggested as operative in the collapse process, the most recent being the impact of severe drought during the period AD 800-1000. A recent core from the Cariaco Basin refines this argument, in demonstrating four multi-year (<6) episodes of exceptionally severe drought at roughly half-century intervals between AD 760 and 910. The Maya collapse remains mysterious in its finality, but the multiplicity of causes underlying it are becoming much clearer.

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