National Geographic: Lost Kingdoms of the Maya Page #4

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of new buildings.

Some cities were even connected

by roads,

and trade among them flourished.

Copan lay on the southern frontier.

But to the north

events had taken place

in the Maya world

that would eventually shake it

to its core.

Tikal was one of

their greatest Maya cities,

a prosperous urban center

that the envy of its neighbors.

It was probably inconceivable

to the kings of Tikal

that any other kingdom posed a threat,

but in the spring of 562,

Caracol attacked Tikal and defeated it

During the upheaval that followed

in Tikal,

members of the royal family

moved away into the jungle

and established their own city.

Today, a research base camp

marks the spot.

What was once the great city

of Dos Pilas

has again been reclaimed by jungle.

The effort to piece together a picture

of its dramatic rise to power

is being led by Arthur Demarest.

What he has learned is changing

the way we think about the Maya.

Forty or fifty years ago

we thought of the Maya

as this peace-loving,

theocratic society, these scholarly

kings who studied the movements

of the planets and lived kind

of in a world of their own.

Now we know, from the

recent hieroglyphic decipherments

and from excavations like these

that have found fortifications;

that the Maya were a

very violent people,

one of the most warlike peoples

of the New World,

and that they were constantly engaged

in warfare,

battles of dynastic succession,

and earthly pursuits.

In 1990

Demarest's team discovered concrete

evidence to support this view.

It is a large,

perfectly preserved hieroglyphic text,

and on it it talks about

a series of wars, battles,

and conquests involving

the big players-Tikal,

Dos Pilas battling each other.

And it records the outcomes.

It's tremendous piece of information,

and its decipherment,

I think, is going to change the way we look

at this very critical period

in Maya history.

This is really amazing.

They're saying that he is

the subordinate of this lord,

presumably of Calakmul.

It's an incredible title.

It's saying we were competitive

with Tikal.

Well, we have to think about it.

I mean is it subordination or...

Epigraphers David Stuart

and Steve Houston

are called in to see

how much of the text they can read.

...with references to

Bonampak and Tonina.

And then after that-X.

And look, there it is.

Katun.

Yeah. This, Arthur,

refers to a kind of altar.

And here it refers to a dedication.

It's referring to the stair.

And look! It's a step. It's a step!

It's a pyramid.

Okay,

what it's saying is that this event,

this war event...

And then over here you've got a new

event involving Ruler A's father.

The skull glyph here is the name

of the ruler of Tikal.

Initially, it seems that Maya warfare

was to some extent ritualized.

It was more devoted to religious ends.

Literally, these guys dressed up

in silly outfits,

archaic costumes with

big Paleolithic spears

and went out there and met

in some place

and knocked each other around.

One of them was captured

and brought back and sacrificed.

What the hieroglyphs on the stairway

seem to confirm

is that sometime

in the 8th century A.D.

ritualized warfare gave way

to campaigns of expansion.

The kings of Dos Pilas attacked town

along the Pasion River,

and thereby seized control

of a vital trade route.

It looks like there was a change

in warfare

that led to an intensification and

to a shifting to warfare for conquest,

actually absorbing the territory

of others.

This seems to have somehow gotten out

of hand.

An arms race, in a way, started.

Attacking centers becomes acceptable.

Attacking population bases,

burning temples, that kind of thing.

The new warfare would eventually

come to Caracol as well.

The eighth century and ninth century

at Caracol and throughout

the Maya area

was a time of tremendous change

and a lot of warfare.

Caracol, up to that point in time,

had been very successful in warfare.

What happens, we think at least,

is that in this late time horizon,

it's not just a question of defeating

a neighboring civilization

and taking them into your realm,

but talking large numbers

of captives to sacrifice.

I think people were really scared.

Picture yourself in a Maya city.

And here you're been having warfare

and you say okay,

I'm going to be captured and

I'm going to be put to work

probably have to give three months out

of the year

to that foreign country over there.

But rather than that happening to you,

you've got this marauding army

that comes in,

pulls all the men together,

and rather than marching them off

to work in the fields,

they instead cut off their heads

and mount them on sticks

and make huge skull platforms.

Now that would strike terror into you.

That would be enough to say,

"My god, let's get out of here!"

Even Dos Pilas would finally face

the terror.

On the Hieroglyphic Stairway

itself lie the ruins

of a hastily erected stockade.

Archeologically,

this defensive wall is one

of the most important

and exciting features

that we've found here.

One of the reasons why

this masonry line is so neat

and is placed so well is that

it is made out of neatly carved blocks

which were ripped off.

They're the facings from

the palaces around you.

So they literally tore down

the royal palace and built this,

running it up against

their hieroglyphic stairway

to create this desperate

defensive system.

A picture of the city

in its final days begins to emerge.

In a frantic attempt to keep

the invaders out,

the citizens of Dos Pilas erect

two defensive walls

around the center of the city

and move inside for protection.

These are low house platforms

that held little huts

that filled the central

ceremonial plaza here at Dos Pilas

at the time of the siege

and the collapse.

And it indicates that again

the desperation

of those final moments

of this great kingdom

was so great and its fall had been

so complete that,

at this point, you had the population

living within the ceremonial plaza,

below the towering temples,

below the monuments

of the strutting great kings.

It's almost as if you had a

population

squeezed in living

on the White House lawn,

holding out at the very end of

the collapse of American civilization.

That's what you have here

that moment in time.

Copan, meanwhile, is struggling

with problems of a different sort.

When one of its most powerful rulers

is captured and beheaded,

faith in the divine authority

of the kings wavers.

At the same time, the population in

the Copan Valley continues to grow.

Basically, the Copanecs

became the victims

of their own success.

And as this city grew

and became more vibrant

and more attractive,

eventually all this nice, fertile,

alluvial bottomland was covered

by houses,

and they were basically

cutting themselves off

from their own food source.

As time went by, all of the forest

was eliminated.

This caused wide scale erosion

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