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In Our Time: History
The Maya Civilization
00:46:33
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Maya civilization in central America.
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Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our Terms of Use, please go to BBC.co.uk radio4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The Maya people of Central America have an extraordinary history with roots 2 or 3,000 years BC for over a thousand years before the Spanish arrived in 1511, they created great cities in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, El Salvador and Belize. Much of these are many of these are overgrown by jungle now, but their largest buildings remain. Among the massive flat top pyramids, there are carved hieroglyphs, there are structures arranged for astronomy and broad stone plazas. The radical reduction of the Maya through war and disease to the Spaniards. When the Western explorers in the Victorian times discovered what was going on there, they couldn't comprehend that people living near the ruined cities were descended from those who built them. But they are still there. With me to discuss the Maya civilization are Elizabeth Graham, professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology at University College London, Matthew Restall, Edwin Earl Sparks, professor of Latin American History and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University and Benjamin Wiess, Eastern ARC Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Kentucky. Elizabeth Graham, can you outline the range of places where the Maya lived then and where they live now, then being, say, the first millennium?
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C
In a sense, their Maya are unusual because they occupy today the same places that they did in the past. And the modern countries would be Guatemala, Belize, Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, as well as Tabasco and Chiapas, which are along the Gulf coast and parts the western parts of El Salvador and Honduras. And those are the places where we find the ruins of past civilizations as well.
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A
And how long I mentioned 2000 BC, 3000 BC the roots are very deep indeed.
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C
Yes, archaeologically they've been pushed back now to about 1100 BC and by that I mean in the last few years, people are finding monumental architecture that dates to that early in the Maya area. But linguists who have studied the languages think that the root language of the Maya existed about 3,000, between 3,000 and 4,000 B.C. so there are probably earlier periods that we don't know about yet archaeologically. But yes, it's a very deep history.
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A
There was a prominent city in the center of Mexico, Tauquiuacan. I've been rehearsing it all morning. About 30, 30, 40 kilometers from the present Mexico City. It was massive. Can you tell us when it was massive and how it affected the Mayas?
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C
Teotihuacan, which is not a Maya city, in fact, we're not really sure who lived there, although recent work looks as if they might have been people who spoke the same language as the later Aztecs. But we're not sure. It was a huge city. It rose in about the second century is when the largest buildings second century AD and it declined around 600. And it was the largest city as far as we know in Mesoamerica. And it did have a huge effect on Maya civilization. For one thing, trade was very extensive and people from Teotihuacan traveled in the Maya area looking for, well, trade goods. But also the hieroglyphic inscriptions in some places indicate, particularly a place called Tikal, that there were actually people from Teotihuacan who came to that area and married, probably married into the local royal family. We think that people from Teotihuacan influenced sites of Copan. So it was a very powerful city that probably not only engaged in trade, but also probably intermarried with some of the dynasties.
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A
So that great city sitting there, which is massive city in the Mayan in many different places, is there a dynamic interaction, particularly when the city in about 600 ish ad fell or was depleted?
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C
Yes, it's interesting because when Teotihuacan declined, that is when we begin to see many Maya cities, well, they were in existence before, of course, but they tend to increase their monumental architecture. We see an increase in hieroglyphic inscriptions, we see an increase in inscriptions that tell us about interact in these cities. So between about 600 and 800. Some would say that that was the pinnacle of Maya civilization. And some of it may have had to do with the fact that Teotihuacan declined and left a power vacuum.
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A
Or maybe there was some power relationship which, having been released, set them free in some psychic way.
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C
That could be too. There's a big debate about whether Teotihuacan was an actual empire. And some people think it was so that they actually sent out armies and conquered cities, but other people think it was more of a trade relationship.
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Now, Matthew Russell, what do we know about the languages and the writing of the Maya? This is sort of a health warning to listeners here. It's very difficult to pin this down. It's very complicated. You're just the man to simplify it without losing any authority at all.
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D
I don't know about that. But language is important. Understanding any civilization, but particularly Maya civilization, for a couple of reasons. One is it's elemental to how we define who the Maya were and are. All Maya people spoke one or other Mayan language. There were 32 Maya languages still being spoken when the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century, and 20 something of those are still being spoken today by some 10 million Maya peoples who still speak those languages. And they're all part of the Mayan language family. At one point, thousands of years ago, there was probably a single proto Mayan language.
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A
When you're talking about 3500 BC. So was this. Was this housetech language that. Yes, that was supposed to be the prototype language?
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D
That's right, yes.
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A
I'm speaking probably from your notes, obviously.
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D
Yeah, well, that's your. That's your problem right there.
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A
So you're on your own now.
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D
Thank you. The other reason why language is so important to the Maya and the one that gets Mayanists so excited, particularly, is the writing. Maya writing. It's really difficult to look at a book page or block of my hieroglyphs without being absolutely fascinated by the intricacy and complexity and beauty of the script. I mean, I'm obviously biased, but I would argue that Maya writing is the most beautiful writing system ever invented by any human society.
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A
What's specific to it?
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D
What's specific to it is its combination of. Well, it's a logosyllabic script, which means that the logo part means some of the symbols or signs convey whole words, but some of those are pictographic in origin. So if you want to convey the word shield, for example, in Maya's Pakal, and you can draw a very simple sign that actually Looks a little bit like a shield. Some of the logograms or symbols that convey words don't appear to have any pictorial element left to them. But the syllabic part means that you can convey pretty much any syllable in any Mayan language. So the Maya had almost a complete syllabary, not a perfect one, but almost a complete one. So going back to Pakal, for example, there's a symbol you can write that conveys PA and then one for ka, and then you have your l at the end, where you can't just write an L, but you can do la. And then the A is silent, and often the two would be combined. So you have a beautiful, relatively simple, but beautiful sign that conveys Pakal twice over.
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A
How does this compare the rumors at one stage when Kon Tiki went over the ocean and we all got excited that Egyptians had taken their civilization to America and so on. That's been put aside now. But how does it look like Egyptian? Ancient Egyptian?
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D
I mean, perhaps in a very superficial way.
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Yeah, because it's fascinating that they're not related, but they still look alike a little bit.
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I think. I think because we're not used to seeing writing systems in which any of the symbols look like pictures to us, and that, that, that initially in the early days of efforts to decipher hieroglyphs, and it took a long time, a very long time for scholars to figure out how to read the glyphs. And they're still working at it because it's a very sophisticated system and was written over many, many hundreds of years. And so there were variants in different parts of the Maya area and so on. But I think the idea that it was all pictographic was one of the sort of red herrings that misled people. And you, you can, you can write anything in Maya hieroglyphs that. It's not any less flexible than our Alphabet.
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And they went into great errors. We, as we all know from, from childhood, of youngsters, anyway, of massive errors, particularly of astronomy and so on. So there's a lot to write about. But just to clinch this, could Mayan, the different speaking. You said 32 different languages. Kathleen has explained it over Elizabeth. Sorry, Elizabeth explained it over a large, large area. Could they understand each other?
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D
No.
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A
So why do you call them all Mayan then?
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D
So the, The. I'm going to get in trouble with linguists now to make this parallel, but if you, if you imagine walking across Europe, say from the Netherlands, where, Where Ben is originally from, walking your way down to Portugal as you walked, you would find you're crossing from one language to another, and there's some mutual intelligibility. But once you get all the way from the Netherlands to Portugal, those languages are far enough apart that you might have a hard time. And so there's some kind of similarity with what happened in the Maya area. So as you walk from Yucatan south, you would be able to understand to some extent the next languages that you're coming to. By the time you get down to highland Guatemala, you'd have a hard time.
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A
So, briefly, before I go across to Benjamin, what makes the Maya Maya then?
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That's a really good question. That's a. That's a great. Now we get. Now we're digging in deep. I mean, we invented. We invented the, the category, right?
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It's a.
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It's a Maya Civilizationism is a 20th century invented category to help us to understand better.
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But you must think something went on. You can't just invent it if you think nothing went on. I mean, you call them the Maya because of what.
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D
So the language is a crucial part of it because all those 32 languages are tied together as being part of the Mayan language family. But then there are other elements of their civilization, like the Glyphic writing system, like the Long Count calendar, which is their linear reckoning of time. It's a little bit like our millennium. But theirs was 5,126 years long, for example. That's used only by Maya people in the Classic period.
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A
I've got to turn to Benjamin now. Another thing that we know about them, this is just a platform for the conversation, is they had great cities. How are these great cities planned? And can you give us some idea of how great these great cities were?
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E
Well, they're very big. They're, in fact, in terms of aerial extend, they're so big that there was a lot of discussion about whether they were cities at all till about 20, 30 years ago in academic literature.
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Well, what have they been if they hadn't been sitters?
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E
Well, that's a good question. But what you encounter when you travel through the jungle is big ruins or very big monumental architecture. And that is what you tend to see. What you do not see is the sprawling landscape of settlement that is around it. And this is. I mean, if you're in a jungle and it's all overgrown, you just literally do not see what is right next to you. So for a long time, people needn't have recognized that these were hugely developed landscapes. And on top of that, because we are in a completely different environmental zone. We are in the tropics, it's humid. And the mode of life was very different. So the way that they decided to dwell in cities was very, very different. Different. And that meant that they took their space, as it were. They. They had vast expanse of open space associated with their sort of houses, plazas, as it were. Oh, it's. No, no, not just. That's. That's sort of the gray open space. We're talking also more green open space.
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So.
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E
So we have city landscapes that incorporated big green open spaces as well. As, well, Very, very large gardens, as we would potentially say nowadays. I mean, they were not really meant for leisure, I think, so much as for craft production and growing foodstuffs within the household. But the household groups have large open space around them as well. So the effect of that is that you get a very sort of difficult to recognize, archaeologically sprawling landscape of very, very large expanses of space in which a lot of intensive development did take place. So all of these spaces were very intensive development used. Exactly how we are still figuring out. But that throws into question with our western mode of very compact, very architecturally oriented ways of building cities, whether this would be cities at all.
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And the recent development which has excited all of you in the research I've read over the last 50 or 60 years has been this new technology from the air, going through the jungle and discovering many more cities, bigger than you thought, more complicated than you thought, but on a much larger scale than had been anticipated.
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E
Yes, yes. This development started with aerial photography and then moving on to satellite imagery and in multispectral Landsat imagery, Landsat being a satellite program that has run for quite a long time. People started recognizing that the chemical makeup that is caused by. By the decline of the cities in the jungle actually changes the soils in such an extent that the biological activity in the trees changes. And that is something you can pick up in multispectral bands in satellite imagery. That was sort of a first step to start to recognize that there is many more cities, many more sites that are there. So this was a first step in this remote sensing, as we call it in archaeology, way of. Of aerial reconnaissance in this area. That first step was only really to recognize where other sites were located. What is really exciting in the last. Well, we're not even talking 10 years here is that we have a new technology called lidar light detection and ranging. And this is where you put a laser pulse shooting device on an airplane and you fly systematically over an expanse of space. And it just very, very rapidly shoots multiple pulses of laser beams down to the ground, and you get returns, echoes of these laser beams that are received back up. What this allows you to do is to calculate height differences. And now, because Maya cities were largely abandoned underneath the trees, you have height differences that alert you to the location of archaeological architectural remains. So you get a very, very minute detail in terms of height. And because the pulses of the laser are so dense, you can actually see below the trees because there's always a few of these pulses that reach the ground.
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Elizabeth Graham, can we develop this city idea? Because it's turned it, in a way, as I understand, from what I've read, from being thought of as a great civilization to being a massive civilization, the whole, the scale of the operation has changed. Can you talk a bit? People know about the flat top pyramids and so on, but can you develop the city from what, from what Benjamin has said, all the cities?
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C
Well, one of the things that Lidar has done is to show us a bit about what the area around these central precincts, the flat top pyramids that you talk about, the tallest ones were really ritual or civic buildings, and they often had buildings on top, and they formed the city centers. The thing about Maya cities, though, is that they tended not to form a grid pattern. All of the buildings, whether they were ritual, ceremonial, civic, were organized around plazas, as Ben was talking about. So then as the city develops, it looks different from what we would expect, because what you see are all of these plaza or patio groups, and they're not arranged according to a grid. And with LiDAR, what we have been able to see is that in addition to having these groups of various sizes and function, that as Ben was saying, they were manipulating all of the land between these stone buildings. I guess you could say there are terraces, there are gardens.
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A
Were there quarries nearby? Were there lots of quarries?
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C
Yeah. In fact, a lot of the, a number of the, what we call reservoirs, places that were turned into reservoirs, were actually, actually originally limestone quarries, quarries for something for lime, for producing plaster on buildings, and also for processing corn. They quarried clay. And all of those quarried areas, once they used up the material or moved on, that they would turn those into, usually into reservoirs. But there's one thing that's really important about Maya cities and people don't realize it, is that in the New World or in Mesoamerica, there was never a grazing animal complex. So you didn't have cattle, you didn't have sheep, you didn't have goats, and you didn't have people clearing forest to grow grass for grazing animals. And that makes for an entirely different landscape that I think many of us can't envision because we've all grown up in a culture of hamburgers and beer and bread.
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A
No wheat either, was there?
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C
No, no wheat. And it is true that maize is a grass, but it grows under quite different conditions. You can grow maize along with some tree crops you can grow with other vegetables. So it does. When you ask me about the cities, I try to envision what it would like, what it was like, but to some extent it's difficult.
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A
The flat top pyramids, the gory, livid mind, also patronizing and looking down on previous persons. Oh, they must have been used for human sacrifice, were they not?
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C
Not that I'm aware. And well, I've written about this before that the whole human sacrifice idea is, is bogus in that there, in none of the Mayan languages or the script is there any such concept.
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A
Well, I'm pleased to hear it. Matthew Russell, how are these cities ruled?
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D
Well, in, in parallel to the, the physical pyramids that Liz was just mentioning, there was a social, political pyramid. And at the top of that pyramid were the nobility, who comprised, we think something like 10, 15% of the population. And at the top of that was the royal family, royal dynasty, and a king who in Maya was called Khul Ahau. Aha means lord and kuhul means sacred.
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A
So divine light was there as well?
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D
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. He claimed descent from an ancestral deity. Ancestral, localized deity.
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A
Was it the sun or was it just a deity?
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D
It was, it was a deity. And his, his connection to that, to that deity, his sort of privileged link underpinned his right to rule. So there is an interesting parallel, the divine right to rule. And that, that meant that he could claim that his rule kept everything in order. If you want the rains to come, then not there not to be a drought. And there were a series of devastating droughts all through the centuries of the Classic Maya period and before and after it. Then don't rock the boat. You need your, your, your Kuhul Ahau to stay in power and, and for him to pass the throne on to his son. It was a patrilineal line.
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A
You've got the king, you've got the nobility. Well, they're the warrior class as well. Then what happened then what happened next on the pyramid?
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D
Well, most, most Maya farmers, then they're corn farmers. That's, that's, that's the majority.
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A
The.
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D
The what? The other members of the nobility are Doing various, performing various functions, including higher level artisans, artists, writers and so on. And, and those people appear to be in many cases, if not in all cases, part of the nobility, even members of the royal family. King had a lot of wives, so there were a lot of. The dynasty was large in terms of number. That meant there were a large number of people, some of whom were high ranking warriors. Most warriors farmed, except in the, in the war season.
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A
Like Cincinnatus.
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D
Yes. Yeah.
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A
So we've got 85% left. What happened? What about them, Benjamin? You've got the king and the warriors. That's, that's 15. What about the other 85%?
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E
So archaeologically this is, this is much more difficult and has been for a long time. So I mentioned the monumentality and that is really what a lot of archaeology focused on. We have the writing and that is what a lot of, of the linguistic work and eventually historical work also has focused on. And then we're only really talking about elites. It's much more difficult to actually get to the evidence for the commoners. So Maya society, you have a.
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A
They built the cities, presumably they actually went out and did stuff and built the cities.
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E
We have to assume that somebody, that somebody built them and probably not the king himself. What seems to have been in place though is that there was a sort of a corvette labor system in place, especially in the Classic Maya period, where the ruling class could demand tributes. Also in terms of labor for these large public works to be constructed. So that is where we really see the evidence when we go down to the household level, you need a much more detailed type of archaeology. So even with these new developments of lidar that actually do give us the expense and the layout, we've got a few main problems. One of them is the that that evidence doesn't give you any dating, so you don't know when it happened. The other thing is that you do not have any archaeological material, so you don't necessarily know what is going on. So one of the big challenges there is of course, if you only have that data, how do you actually make sense of it? And this is something that we really need to work on. But in terms of household archaeology, you need to really get to the ground. Geophysics and geochemical analyses of how soils were used can, can go some way, but you need to collect the, the archaeological materials.
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A
But it is reasonable to assume that the 85% were people who tilled the land or so. But they would be the builders of the cities and they'd be the artisans who decided which stone went on, which stone, which angle went on which angle that will be going on there with the 85%. I'm just quite concerned about this 85% who I know you can't find out much about, but you can have a guess. Elizabeth is going to have a guess.
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C
Yes, there. We do have evidence that there was a very strong trading class. There were merchants, there were craftspeople, there were people, craftspeople who worked in elite households. There were craftspeople who made goods for the rest of the community. So it was actually really quite a varied society. And one of the things that's very interesting about Maya society is that we talk about objects like jade, spondylus, the things that were valued by the elites. And you do find the finest jade objects in elite tombs. But in fact, all people had, almost everyone did have access to jade and to what we would call items that tended to be appropriated or monopolized by the elite class. There was a wide distribution. Even dietary data show that what we would call the common people had access to meat.
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A
Not be deer, would it?
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C
And, well, they didn't have goats. And it's interesting because what it shows, one of my friends does faunal analysis, is that the better cuts did go to the upper classes and the other cuts went to everyone else. But it doesn't show a real division in which resources were heavily appropriated by the rulers. It shows quite a wide distribution.
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A
Ben wants to come in for a moment.
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E
Yes. So it's also quite important to say that we don't have just one kind of Maya city. So new evidence in cities like Chunjuk Mil actually do show that even in the Classic period, where we have a regal ritual.
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A
Classic period is from about 250 to 900.
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E
Indeed AD yeah, indeed, that we have cities that were organized in a slightly different way. So we don't have just all of that investment going into one Acropolis of monumental architecture, but we have a much more dispersed level of monumentality on a sort of a lower level. And indeed these. These wide distribution of goods. So we could potentially really be talking about market towns. And this is repeated also in the Post Classic after. After the. The initial sort of flourishing.
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A
Matthew, two things. First of all, the, the. The. There's this idea around that Maya civilization collapsed. Is that collapse? Is that a useful word?
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D
No, that's the short answer.
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A
So what word you use? This is. This is about 980. This is. This collapse took place. What happened then if it didn't? Well, there was a. There was a depletion of the cities? Yes. Some of the cities were abandoned, yeah, it seems. So what happened?
- [28:38]
D
There was a, it was a, there was a transition.
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A
Yeah.
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D
If you just focus in, or if one focuses in on one particular city, in some cases the abandonment was fairly dramatic and accompanied by warfare. And so it does look like a collapse. But if you pull back your focus and look at the Maya area as a whole, or even just the lowland Maya area of highland Guatemala and Belize, then that collapse word starts to look less and less useful because it becomes a process that takes several hundred years. And so that's not much, that's not much of a collapse, particularly as cities to the north are flourishing at the same time that those cities are becoming abandoned.
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A
Elizabeth?
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C
Well, the sites that I've excavated in belize for almost 40 years didn't collapse. They were not abandoned at all. There is a collapse. I mean, there is a huge political change, but there were many cities and places that stayed occupied. And as Matthew says there, it varied throughout the Maya area. But we tend to emphasize the very large cities in Guatemala because they were abandoned. And you have these structures, you know, decaying in the jungle. But in fact, most of the coastal areas, and as Matthew said, northern Yucatan still maintain very, very lively cities and trade. And so it's a kind of mystery, really.
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A
Matthew, Matthew, Aristotle. When the Spanish arrived at the beginning of the 16th century and through the 16th century, what did they make of the Maya in their writing and what we have, what did they make of it?
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D
Well, they were very impressed and we were just talking about cities. When the Spaniards are sailing along the coast of Yucatan in the late 1510s, they see Maya coastal cities and that's their first experience of urban Mesoamerica. They haven't yet discovered the Aztecs and they, and, and these are cities that did not exist in the islands of the Caribbean. And they're impressed enough that there are written reports of those early voyages that are published in different languages in Europe. This is something that amazes them. They have various interactions with Maya people that are diplomatic, hostile. That's their first impression. Then the Spaniards discover the Aztec empire and invade and attack it. And there's a really violent two year war against the Aztecs, which you know about, Melvin. And after that, the Spaniards return to the Maya area and then their impression changes. First of all, they start to see the Maya as very bellicose, very warlike. They're not easily conquered or subdued. The wars of conquest in the Maya area go on for years and years, and a very brutal and bloody and secondly, they're disappointed. They're disappointed by the resistance that the Maya show and the fact that the Maya don't appear to have sources of precious minerals like gold and silver that can sustain wealthy colonies. They're hoping that the Maya are going to be like the Aztecs, and they're not quite like the Aztecs, or at least this sort of the Spanish image of what the Aztecs are like.
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A
Benjamin so how did the Maya respond to the Spaniards? What do we know about that?
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E
Well, as many as there is Maya groups, there's probably as many different responses. What I think really goes on is after the conquest of the Aztec Empire, is that you have to separate two levels of conquest. You have the highland Guatemala conquest, and this was a story of, in a way, intrigues politically. So the Kachikal Maya, they were represented already in the Aztec empire, and they had a big foe, a big enemy of them, the K'. Iche. So they collaborated with the Spanish to overthrow the Kiche, and that is how large part of the process of conquest there went. So that is one of the response that you get. If we then go to the conquest of the lowland Maya area, you see that there is a lot of resistance by all separate groups, and a lot of different campaigns need to take place in order to persuade that. And again, sometimes Maya would actually try to collaborate to settle all disputes with their already existing enemies. And sometimes there's just a plain war.
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A
Can I come back to you, Matthew? How technologically developed were the Maya at this time, particularly when it came to warfare?
- [33:17]
D
The trickiness of that question, when we talk about the conquest and battle between Maya warriors and Spanish conquistadors, is that it's very easy to slip into arguing that the Spaniards had technological superiority, which is not an argument that we like. And that's based on the fact that they had steel and guns. Right. But the reason we don't like that is because we feel as if that leads into a larger analysis whereby the Spaniards conquered the Maya because they were superior in. In some larger sense. It's true that the Maya were a Stone Age civilization, but I would argue that that simply meant that technologically they were different from the Spaniards, not inferior. And I know you asked about war, but let me kind of shift the question a little bit. If we were to go back to, say, the year 700, and the four of us would get to live for a week in a European city and live for a week in a Maya city, and then we have to decide which one we want to live in for the Next five years, I'm betting all four of us would choose the Maya city. And that would partly be a question of technology, that the Maya developed a technology for managing and manipulating the natural environment, water resources and so on, that created cities that I think were more pleasant places to live in. The provision of food and so on worked, worked better. So they didn't have ocean going ships and gunpowder and steel and therefore weren't crossing the ocean to attack the Spaniards. But I don't think that that made them technologically inferior. Let me make one more point about. Because you did ask about battle.
- [35:11]
A
Yeah.
- [35:11]
D
And Ben was talking about the Spaniards invading highland Guatemala. The Spaniards aren't going anywhere in the Maya area on their own. Any, at any time that you have small groups of conquistadors on their own, they are defeated in battle. The only way they can subdue the Maya is by bringing thousands and thousands of warriors from central Mexico, including people that we would call Aztecs, who went in with the Spaniards and engaged in a series of campaigns over many years with extremely high mortality rates. So arguably it wasn't the Spaniards who conquered the Maya, it was actually the central Mexicans in the end.
- [35:52]
A
Well, I've never heard that. That's really good.
- [35:54]
D
It's a slightly rhetorical argument, but it's, it's. I think the others would agree that it's.
- [35:59]
A
Do you all agree with that? Yes, Elizabeth.
- [36:02]
C
The other factor is that rules of engagement in warfare were very different. And among the Spaniards, what you did was engage in, in battle and kill as many people as possible on, on during that battle. And even if your opponent turned and left the battlefield, you followed them and you killed them. Whereas with, with the Maya, it was dishonorable to die on the field of battle. And there are these very interesting descriptions in with Montejo and Yucatan of the Maya not trying to kill anyone. They're, they're trying to pull the officers, the captain off their horses and then they bring them back to their town and they're killed later. That, I think, is where the idea of human sacrifice came in as well. But it's their warfare rules of engagement were very different.
- [36:52]
A
Benjamin, can you briskly tell us about the huge impact of diseases, the diseases the Spanish brought, What were they, what impact do you think from your research did they have?
- [37:04]
E
So one of the big diseases that really started wiping out Maya population is smallpox. There's probably some other typhoid. And those diseases just didn't exist on the continent. So of course there was a lot of casualties in warfare, but actually the Major, major casualties did take place in major epidemics just because these diseases were brought in, imported essentially from overseas, and they had absolutely no immunity to that at all.
- [37:32]
A
Have we any statistical measure for this at all?
- [37:38]
D
Yes, but it's, there's a lot of guesstimates because we don't know exactly what the population was before. The population loss number that is usually used is if we go from 1500, before any contact with Europeans to 100 years later, population has been reduced by about 90%.
- [37:57]
A
By 90%? Yeah. Wow.
- [37:59]
D
Yeah, it's catastrophic.
- [38:02]
C
There's some debate about those figures, but it was, it was in that region. Large percentage. I mean, maybe it was 85, but it's.
- [38:10]
A
We haven't talked about the thing that lots of people would know about the Mayas, which is the, their great advances in astronomy and the great stone building. Can you give us some idea of the magnificence of that and how fine it was and how it endured for thousands of years and so on?
- [38:25]
C
You mean the astronomical techniques? Yes. What's interesting about the Maya is that they didn't make the mistake that the Greeks made, which was to envision that the heavens were heavenly spheres, that the planetary motions were symmetrical, were circular. And that held astronomy back in Europe even until the, well, 16th or 17th century. They observed the night skies for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and mapped the motions of the heavenly bodies. And that is why their calendar was so accurate, because they could predict the cycles of the planets, of the sun, the moon. And it is an achievement, I think, that isn't recognized sufficiently because you often don't read about their astronomical observation.
- [39:17]
A
Sorry. As I understand it, it was dominant in their culture. The cities were laid out on to do with the planetary system and so on. Is that right?
- [39:23]
C
Well, they were laid out, in a sense, they were like our cities in that they were laid out cardinally oriented directions. So they had a concept of north, south, east, west and center. So to that extent, we do often find that the buildings have east, west or north, south orientation. The claims that they were situated, some of them were situated to observe the heavens, but they varied hugely. So it is. It's really difficult to say exactly what, what criteria other than something like cardinal, what we would call cardinal direction.
- [39:59]
A
Once or twice, Benjamin, we mentioned how much there is undiscovered except by this laser photography. How much more and how much more do you expect to learn from this? Are you going to get many more carvings and hieroglyphics and so on? What are you looking for? Are you Looking for new stuff or do you think it'll be more of this Intensely.
- [40:14]
E
Well, I think the real innovations for archaeological research aren't necessarily in the carvings. They are to do with finding out how actually this society functioned, how the settlements functioned. And for that we need both this lidar technology, but we also need more work on the ground. We need to find out what happened in these open spaces. In order to really get down to the dynamics of the city, we need to know how that is encapsulated, how social groups would actually be organized. And this means a much greater focus on the commoners. The other major element of new research coming on. And we have a new generation of researchers really sort of cracking this as we speak is a more ecological angle. So Liz has talked about how they manipulated a lot of the landscape for environmental reasons. So the dynamic of the environments, and they inhabited several different kinds of environments to the social structure of it. That is something that we really need to unpick.
- [41:19]
A
Finally, Matthew, to what extent? You're very keen to point out that the Maya today still exist, that they. Although their hieroglyphics were burnt or burnt by Catholic priests, all those great books, there's only four remaining and they're in Europe. It's a disaster. This killing of culture goes on all over the place. But they use the Alphabet to maintain their traditions and maintain them. And you, you've said there's 10 million. I'm sorry, I'm rushing a bit. 10 million Mayan people still there. What are they doing? Do. Are they recognizably in the tradition of many hundreds, even thousands of years ago?
- [41:53]
D
So, yes, the Maya is still with us. The Maya have, have survived. One of the reasons why we don't like words like collapse and disappearance is because I think all may is to constantly trying to remind everybody and make the argument the Maya is still here. They didn't go away talking about Maya civilization in that sense, it's like talking about Western civilization. It has changed and evolved, but it hasn't disappeared. If we look at Maya civilization In the year 1000 and then 1500, there are a lot of changes. The long count is not being used. Cities might look different, but it hasn't disappeared. Then we jump to 2000. There's a lot of changes as a result of the Maya interaction with outsiders, the Spanish conquest the modern world, but the Maya is still there. And many aspects of their culture still survive and persist throughout the Maya zone in Yucatan and in highland Guatemala and Belize.
- [42:50]
A
Well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed that. Thanks to Elizabeth Graham, Matthew Restall, Benjamin Biss. Next week we'll be talking about the early history of Bethlehem Hospital, which was also known as Bedlam. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:08]
C
No, that's fine. I was going to say, you usually.
- [43:10]
A
Tell me what I have now, so where you go.
- [43:12]
C
I was just going to say that. And it's probably important for the listeners that there are many real Maya archaeologists today. I mean, you know, I'm originally from North America, but there are, you know, people from Chiapas and Yucatan and Maya who are both archaeologists, epigraphers. There are Maya communities that have taken it upon themselves to learn hieroglyphic inscriptions, have gone back to writing inscriptions. So it's. They're very active in their, researching their history. Am I correct?
- [43:46]
D
Yeah, I think, I think that's really important because, well, things that we thought we might get to say that of course we don't have a chance to say everything is. We see Maya civilization through the lens of Western civilization. We invented the concept of, of the Maya just like we invented, you know, concept of Mesoamerica. We invented this period of the Classic.
- [44:05]
A
Is it just like we invented, did we invent the concept of the Greeks early on? Is it, is that a parallel? Because each one probably isn't it?
- [44:14]
C
I expect it is because.
- [44:16]
A
Because there's city states all over the place.
- [44:18]
C
And I often say, like Boudicca of the Iceni, when she fought the Romans, she didn't think of herself as a European. And to some extent when we use the term Maya, it's kind of equivalent to using our present day term European to explain people's motives in the past. And so I often use that as an example that it's an invention, but it can be helpful.
- [44:43]
D
So the more that we can understand how the Maya saw themselves hundreds of years ago, the better. But also the more that living Maya Maya today can be involved in the reclamation of Maya knowledge systems. The saving, I don't know if that's the right word of Maya languages. Some Maya languages are now growing, right? There are more Maya the same.
- [45:07]
A
Can they. And could they have understood people a couple of thousand years ago?
- [45:11]
C
Actually, that was one thing that didn't come up. There is an elite language. The hieroglyphic conscriptions actually represent a language that was spoken by the upper classes or the rulers, but, but not necessarily the community. And so you might have a multilingual community, but, well, again, it's like Latin in Europe.
- [45:29]
D
You'll like that parallel like medieval Latin.
- [45:32]
C
Which was shared among the powerful people.
- [45:35]
D
This classic chulte in your chulte.
- [45:37]
E
And this has helped of course also to create this label because then the material culture and the language and that is the markers that you see, see the things that you really encounter when you go into the jungle because they have survived. That is what helps. Creating this culture area that is seemingly the same. But really when you get down to society at a deeper level, isn't necessarily so.
- [45:59]
C
It's a fascinating world, I think.
- [46:01]
A
Amazing. Amazing that it's sort of being rediscovered. People you had an impression when you were in school that they'd sort of sorted most of it out. We did have that sort of impression.
- [46:11]
D
I think we can keep studying the Maya literally for another thousand years because that's how much more there is to. That's the new discoveries. I mean, the San Bartolo site, it's like complete. This is a new site in Guatemala, just discovered a few years ago. Completely changing how we see the Maya pass. It pushes almost everything back 500 years. So the way we define the classic period as beginning or in the third century, all of a sudden in Sambartolo, they're doing things that writing things and the art and buildings and the whole way in which they're conceiving of their built and natural environment, the way we think of as a classic. And it's 500 years before that.
- [46:51]
C
And what about Karak Moore?
- [46:53]
A
We're being interrupted by Simon Tillotson, the producer of the program, who's going to make you an offer you can't refuse.
- [46:57]
C
Okay.
- [46:59]
A
But also listeners are asking about hot.
- [47:00]
D
Chocolate and whether the connection between the Meyer and chocolate.
- [47:04]
C
Well, it was a domesticate.
- [47:06]
E
I mean, we are always keen to sort of point out the differences and how different they are. And then we have something like chocolate and we've really embraced that and we all love it. Well, the Maya did too. And really in the post classic, I think there's a lot of evidence of a lot of Maya throughout layers of society, all drinking chocolate. And they were using that. Stimulating.
- [47:27]
C
Chocolate's an acid.
- [47:28]
D
Well, our word cocoa comes from the Maya word cocoa.
- [47:31]
C
There are many more history and discussion.
- [47:33]
A
Programmes from Radio 4 to download for free.
- [47:36]
C
Find these on the website@BBC.co.uk radio4.
- [47:44]
A
At TheBC we go further so you see clearer. Through Frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to BBC.com, giving you unlimited articles and videos, ad free podcasts and the BBC News Channel streaming live 24. 7. Subscribe to trusted independent journalism from the BBC. Find out more at BBC.com. join.