The World Without Us

The Maya, however, were real. Their world had seemed destined to thrive forever, and, at its zenith, it was far more entrenched than ours. For at least 1,600 years, about 6 million Maya lived in what in some ways resembled southern California—a flourishing megalopolis of city-states, with few breaks between overlapping suburbs across a lowland that today comprises northern Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Their commanding architecture, and their astronomy, mathematics, and literature, would have humbled the achievements of contemporaries in Europe. Equally striking, and far less understood, is how so many could inhabit a tropical rain forest. For centuries, they raised their food and families in the same fragile environment that today is quickly being devastated by relatively few hungry squatters.

What has baffled archaeologists even more, however, is the Maya’s spectacular, sudden collapse. Beginning in the eighth century AD, within just 100 years lowland Mayan civilization vanished. In most of the Yucatan, only scattered remnants of the population remained. Northern Guatemala’s Petén province was virtually a world without people. Rainforest vegetation soon overran the ball courts and plazas, enshrouding tall pyramids. Not for 1,000 years would the world again be aware of their existence.

But the Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations. Archaeologist Arthur Demarest, a stocky, thick-moustached Louisiana Cajun, declined a Harvard chair because Vanderbilt offered him a chance to exhume this one. During his graduate fieldwork in El Salvador, Demarest raced to salvage a bit of the ancient record from a forthcoming dam that displaced thousands, converting many of them to guerrillas. When three of his workers were accused of being terrorists, he pleaded to officials who let them go, but they were assassinated anyway.

In his first years in Guatemala, guerrillas and the army stalked each other within a few kilometers of his digs, catching in their crossfire people who still speak languages derived from the hieroglyphics his team was decoding.

“Indiana Jones swashbuckled through a mythical, generic Third World of swarthy people with threatening, incomprehensible ways, defeating them with American heroics and seizing their treasures,” he says, mopping his thick black hair. “He would have lasted five seconds here. Archaeology isn’t about glittery objects—it’s about their context. We’re part of the context. It’s our workers whose fields are burning, it’s their children who have malaria. We come to study ancient civilization, but we end up learning about now.”

By Coleman lantern, he writes through the humid night to the rumble of howler monkeys, piecing together how, over nearly two millennia, the Maya evolved a means of resolving discord between nations without destroying each other’s societies in the process. But then something went wrong. Famine, drought, epidemics, overpopulation, and environmental plunder have been blamed for the Maya’s downfall—yet for each, arguments exist against liquidation on such a massive scale. No relics reveal an alien invasion. Often extolled as an exemplary stable and peaceable people, the Maya seemed least likely to overreach and be devoured by their own greed.

However, in the steamy Petén, it appears that is exactly what happened—and that the path to their catastrophe seems familiar.

_________

The trek from the Riochuelo Petexbatún to Dos Pilas, the first of seven major sites that Demarest’s team uncovered, passes for hours through mosquito-rich stretches of strangler vines and palmilla thickets, then finally climbs a steep escarpment. In remaining groves still unplundered by timber poachers, giant cedars, ceibas, chicle-bearing sapodillas, mahoganies, and breadnut trees rise from the thin tropical soils capping the Petén limestone. Along the escarpment’s ragged edge, the Maya built cities that Arthur Demarest’s archaeologists have determined once formed an interlocking kingdom called Petexbatún. Today, what appear to be hills and ridges are actually pyramids and walls, built from chunks of local limestone hewn with chert adzes, now disguised by soil and a mature rain forest.

The jungle surrounding Dos Pilas, filled with clacking toucans and parrots, was so dense that after it was discovered in the 1950s, 17 years passed before anyone noticed that a nearby hill was actually a 220-foot pyramid. In fact, to the Maya, pyramids re-created mountains, and their carved monoliths, called stelae, were stone representations of trees. The dot-and-bar code glyphs carved into the stelae unearthed around Dos Pilas tell that, about AD 700, its k’uhul ajaw—divine lord—began to break the rules of restrained conflict and started usurping neighboring Petexbatún city-states.