The Mayan Empire was a highly advanced but bloodthirsty civilization that lasted
hundreds of years before being suddenly and completely wiped out. If you caught the
four misconceptions in that one sentence, you probably don’t get your history lessons from
Mel Gibson movies. But if you have a hard time telling your Maya from your Aztecs,
or, are unsure of the fate of this once-thriving civilization, or just have questions about
that whole end-of-the-world-prediction business, this episode of Misconceptions is for you. Let’s
get started.
My first misconception in that intro was a small one.
Scholars today *generally* agree that the preferred nomenclature is Maya,
not Mayan, even in adjectival form. So you’d refer to the Maya civilization,
Maya culture, and the group of people known as the Maya (or in Spanish, usually, Los Maya).
The word Mayan actually doesn’t exist in Spanish or in Mayan languages.
And no, I didn’t slip up at the end of that last sentence. That distinction—between a people
and their language, or languages—is one place that this somewhat small misconception comes into play.
The one field of study where Mayan is still widely used is in linguistics. In that field,
Mayan refers to the family of around 30 languages used by the Maya. That brings
us to our next misconception, actually.
The many Mayan languages include Yucatec, Quiche, Kekchi, and Mopan,
and there was a time when the various groups in the Yucatan Peninsula were identified primarily
by these individual languages, not by the more all-encompassing label Maya. (There
is also one specific Mayan language called Maya, by the way.) The people we call the
Maya today spanned thousands of miles of area *and* thousands of years of history.
In the second half of the 20th century, a movement arose recognizing some of the shared interests of
these various indigenous groups. It’s been called the Maya Movement and the Pan-Maya Renaissance,
amongst other names. So yes, in some context the Maya can be talked about
as one group. But the diversity within that group indicates an important point: By most definitions,
the Maya were never really an empire. Many consider a necessary condition of
empire-dom to be a ruling central power. That was true, to various degrees,
of the Roman Empire, and it was true of the Aztec and Inca Empires (which, for the record,
came into being more than a millennium after the Maya first hit the central American scene).
But while the different city-states comprising the Maya often had meaningful commonalities, from
their religious beliefs to their understanding of the cosmos, they never unified in the way that
empires do. There were local kings who sometimes gained prominence and dominated nearby factions,
but there was never a single emperor of the entire Maya civilization. And these interconnected
city-states didn’t always get along.
There was a time in the 1900s when the
popular understanding of the Maya, perhaps in contrast to the Aztecs, was of a uniquely
peaceful people. Yes, this framing acknowledged, the Maya had engaged in forms of human sacrifice,
but even this seemed in some ways less violent than other cultures: by organizing their warfare
around capturing and sacrificing specific elite rivals, the Maya avoided total warfare
and left most members of the civilization untouched by intercity-state conflict.
The fact that ancient Mayan writing could not be deciphered by modern sources until the past
few decades may have helped this misconception persist. And there may well have been an element
of truth to it. There is evidence of Maya leaders apparently bragging of being “he of the twenty
captives,” or even “he of the three captives.” This has tempted some to conclude that the Maya
were uniquely peaceful, with a society built entirely around agriculture and astronomy.
But a full examination of the historical record complicates this bucolic image. Some Maya leaders
evidently waged war for old-fashioned goals like territory and resources. And while academics once
believed that large-scale violent conflict amongst city-states arose only in the late Maya period,
newer evidence casts doubt on that account. In 2019 a researcher from the University of
California Berkeley, along with colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey, dated a layer
of thick charcoal at the bottom of a lake in Northern Guatemala to between 690 and 700 CE,
the classic Maya period. That geological evidence, combined with a written record of a
“burning” campaign undertaken by a nearby rival city, suggests that a version of
total warfare had been conducted in the area. If the researchers’ analysis is correct, fighting
amongst the Maya wasn’t just carried out in a quasi-ritualistic fashion. Measures were evidently
taken to ensure that an entire population would be affected by the conflict—in this case,
by the razing of an entire city with fire. It’s just one site, but other evidence is mounting
to give us a more bellicose picture of the Maya, including mass burial sites and fortified cities.
Professor David Webster was partially responsible for excavating some of those defensive
fortifications and concludes “we can no longer regard them as paragons of political tranquility.”
At the same time, Dr. Webster acknowledges that “the ordinary Maya person was assailed…by
war only on rare occasions, and…witnessed only a handful of human sacrifices
(if any) during an entire lifetime.” About those human sacrifices. While they
may be exaggerated in the popular imagination, they’re a real part of Maya history. There is
evidence for infant sacrifices and religious practices involving decapitation, personal
bloodletting, and the mutilation of captives. We can understand that these acts came out of
a completely different culture than our own while still acknowledging they were sometimes
startlingly violent. But I do think it’s worth putting this violence in some perspective:
in the European Conquest of the New World, tens of millions of indigenous people were killed.
Millions more died during World War I, but our picture of most of those combatants
isn’t of a one-dimensional killing machine. Alongside violence, ritualistic and otherwise,
the Maya carved out a widespread civilization amongst the rather inhospitable rainforests
of central America. Though there’s heavy regional and temporal variation between groups,
in general they grew maize as a staple crop alongside secondary crops like beans and squash,
and they helped give the world corn and corn products like tortillas. As we touched on in
an episode of Food History, they grew cacao and enjoyed chocolate drinks derived from it.
Big props to ancient Mesoamericans for that one. The Maya incorporated the concept of the number
zero, or a placeholder, more than a thousand years before it was introduced to modern Europe
from the East. They also had an advanced system of hieroglyphics, but unfortunately the Spanish
destroyed much of their written record, deeming it heretical. The surviving Mayan texts reveal
careful observation of astronomy—tracking the appearance of stars and planets,
and predicting celestial events like eclipses. This focus on cycles of time, which was evidently
tied into their religious practices, extended to the famous Maya calendar. Or, more accurately,
calendars. Actually…
If you want a good laugh sometime, watch an
interview with someone who was predicting the end of the world on 12/21/12 from, say, December 22nd
of that year. Kinda hard to walk that one back. These doomsayers can be forgiven,
though: after all, the Maya calendar said the world would end on that date. Right?
First of all, the Maya actually had a number of calendars, including the 260 day
Tzolk’in (tzolkeen) (on-screen: sometimes called Chol Q’ij) and the 365 day Haab. Those two could
be mashed together to create an approximately 52 year Calendar Round. When people referenced
“the Mayan calendar” ending in 2012, they were (perhaps unknowingly) referring to a different
calendar system, the Long Count Calendar. This calendar splits time up into a number of units:
kins, or individual days; uinals, which we might call months of 20 kins; and tuns, which
are made of 18 “uinals.” Units of time continued to ascend all the way through the alautun,
equivalent to more than 63 million years. They weren’t kidding when they said Long Count.
The Long Count calendar began with a creation date, usually calculated to be August 11, 3114
BCE. And it did indeed have a big cycle (called the 13th baktun) that was set to end sometime
around late December 2012. It may not have been December 21st, exactly, but even if it was,
there was never any evidence that the Maya thought this would coincide with the end of the world.
There are only a couple known Mayan inscriptions that referred to this date at all, and the main
reference is on a monument that had been damaged and is therefore not perfectly legible. Experts in
Mayan languages believe it’s more likely looking to the future, not the apocalypse. At the end of
the Baktun, the Maya probably would have just started a new cycle, as they had done before.
That’s not to say it wouldn’t have been seen as a significant day; the Maya surely would have placed
some type of special importance on the end of the Baktun. Unfortunately, they had been completely
wiped off the planet by the time 2012 rolled around. …You know where this is going, right?
By the time the Spanish made contact with
the Maya in the early 1500s, the civilization’s peak (in terms of sheer scope) had long passed.
Scholars debate the reasons for this. Given the disparate composition of the civilization—with
city-states occupying different locations and presumably facing unique challenges—it
seems safe to assume that there was not any one reason for a downturn in the region. Some
areas may not have collapsed at all, while others were completely abandoned. Factors like drought,
deforestation, and warfare likely all played a part in reducing the population by as much as
90-95 percent from its peak around 800 CE. So while I can’t definitively tell you what
reduced the Maya population so severely in the post-Classic Period, I can dispel one myth:
The Maya never fully disappeared. There was, in fact, an independent Maya Kingdom
that remained unconquered until 1697. And while war with the Spanish and the
introduction of “old-world” diseases like smallpox further devastated the region’s population,
there are still around 7 million Maya today. Many of these people speak Mayan languages
and preserve elements of their culture, from spiritual beliefs to traditional
medicine. Some belong to groups who evaded “Christianization” by fleeing from the Spanish,
while others intermixed with Europeans and speak Spanish alongside their indigenous language.
Descendants of the Maya civilization make up a significant percentage of
the population in Guatemala and in the Mexican state of Yucatan. So while the
Maya civilization may be a part of history, the Maya people are very much of the present.
Thanks for watching Misconceptions. Make sure to subscribe so we can keep dispelling age-old myths,
and make sure to let us know in the comments how you celebrated the end of the world on
December 21st, 2012. I personally woke up late and rewatched The Dark Knight Rises while periodically
checking out the window for meteors. It was a pretty good day. I’ll see you next time.