The Rise of the Ancient Maya

For more than 3,000 years, the Maya built one of the Ancient world's greatest civilisations. They raised towering pyramids in the rainforest, mastered the environment and established powerful dynasties- long before the rise of the Aztecs or the Inca. Their city-states waged wars, forged alliances, and practised elaborate rituals as they competed for power across Central America. In a special mini-series, Dan travels to the remote jungles of Belize to trace the remarkable story of the Maya: from their earliest beginnings and astonishing rise to their golden age, to the enduring mystery of the ninth-century collapse that continues to puzzle historians. In episode one, Dan discovers exactly how the Maya emerged to become a dominant force in the ancient Americas. If you would like to find out how to visit the ancient city of Caracol and the many places mentioned in this podcast, visit www.travelbelize.org https://www.travelbelize.org for more information! If you want more, you can sign up to watch our History Hit documentary The Secrets of the Maya at https://access.historyhit.com/videos/secrets-of-the-maya With huge thanks to Jonnell Augustine and Simon Noralez from the Belize Tourism Board, Natalie Wilson and Gabriella Bustone from Finn Partners. Our contributors: Dr Adrian Chase, Dr Diane Chase and Jose Mes. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  I'm walking through the Central American jungle. There is now a tickle of light in the sky. I've been up since four in the morning, but I can now just about see where I'm going. Trees are thick, all sorts of different species. And the noises of the night are slowly turning into those of dawn. There's some howler monkeys up ahead. There's some parakeets that have just gone quiet as I've approached. I'm just walking under the huge big leaves of some banana trees, but there's cacao trees all around as well, a few pines. It's quite interesting because we're quite high up in the, in the mountains here. And there are jaguars here as well, but we're yet to see or hear from one of those. Oh, there's a howler monkey.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Mariana De Forch, the producer, is here, wearing her trusty off-road trainers this time, taking no chances with the snakes. Years of experience finally paying off.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  It's a landscape I'm very unfamiliar with. I've spent no time at all in the jungles of Central America. And it's a very, very special place. The sights, the sounds, the smells of the jungle. And now through the trees, I'm beginning to make out some lumps and bumps, some archaeological features that suggest I'm getting close to my target for today. Great big mounds with the topsoil exposing worked stone beneath them. I'm here to see one of the most extraordinary sights really in Central America. I'm here looking for what is the tallest building in Belize. It's not an office block, it's not a bank, it's not a hotel.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  It's an ancient Maya pyramid. And there it is, right in front of me now. As I'm coming around this corner. Oh my goodness, look at that. It is around 2,000 years old, and it is a Maya site called Karakol. And the reason I'm here is because in 2025, archaeologists uncovered something completely extraordinary here. They found what they think is a burial chamber.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  It was a very large chamber. There was red pigment on one side of the, the wall. Red is an important burial color to the Maya. And we could see bone. We knew it likely was a royal tomb.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Archaeologists believe that this might be the tomb of the great Maya king called Decarbchac, the founder of a formidable dynasty. And that's what's brought me here. Imagine that, just discovering the burial of an ancient king that we think we can actually put a name to. It's everything an archaeologist dreams of. And it's a reflection of the fact that here in Belize, there are still discoveries being made and yet to be made beneath this dense jungle canopy.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  The Maya dominated Central America for over 3,000 years. They were masters of monumental architecture and readers of the stars. They made sense of abstract time and built enormous pyramids. They commissioned dynastic histories and developed the most sophisticated writing system in Mesoamerica, millennia before the Aztecs or the Inca. They fought wars, forged alliances, engaged in complex rituals like human sacrifice, and competed for supremacy. In this special mini-series of Dan Snow's History, we're heading off the beaten track in Belize to trace this extraordinary story of the Maya. From their ancient origins to the pinnacle of their civilization, and we're going to

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  try and make sense of their mysterious collapse in the ninth century that still raises questions among historians today.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  This is episode one, The Rise of a Mighty Civilization.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  It's probably helpful to give a little fact sheet on the geography of the Maya lands and exactly who we mean when we talk about the Maya. Probably the biggest misconception is that the Maya were one kingdom or empire, like the Inca or the Aztecs. In fact, the Maya were a number of different city-states connected by one culture, all vying with each other for dominance. It's best to think of the Maya a bit like the ancient Greeks, like Athens competing with states like Sparta or Thebes, but also trading and forming alliances with them and sharing a religious worldview. These city-states stretched across an enormous area of what is now southern Mexico and modern day Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. If you've ever been to this part of the world, you'll know that the landscape varies

• 6:19Speaker 00

  a lot across this region depending on where you are. But a lot of it's pretty hostile to sustaining human life, which is one of the reasons the Maya were so remarkable to flourish as they did. They devised ingenious ways to sustain themselves in barren, dry lowlands and in the soaking humid rainforests.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  You might be familiar with the Maya from Chichen Itza in Mexico, very near Cancun. There's an enormous iconic pyramid that just dominates that site today. It's spectacular. The city of Chichen Itza actually comes much later in the story of the Maya. It was built around about the 19th century, and we think Maya civilization began far earlier, although historians and archaeologists are still pushing back the frontiers on this. We think it began over 2,000 years before that. They didn't have any metal, but they used stone tools to build great palace complexes and pyramids. So gradually powerful Maya city-states evolved. And one of those city-states was Karakol. That's where I am now.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  It's in the foothills of the Maya Mountains. Today, it's very near the Guatemala border, and it grew into one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya world. Incredibly, at its height, it's believed that this city covered roughly 75 square miles. That is three times the size of Manhattan, folks. But extraordinarily, for nearly a thousand years, it lay hidden beneath dense rainforest. It wasn't until 1937, it was a mahogany logger named Rosa Mai, and they reported the discovery of a lost city deep in the jungles. And they told the authorities, and what was at the time, British Honduras. And the following year, imagine how exciting this must have been, Archaeological Commissioner

• 8:04Speaker 00

  A. H. Anderson visited the site and, and recorded the first artifacts here. It was really just a handful of carved stone stele, and he also saw the remnants of a temple. And there was just a vast amount hidden there in the vegetation, underneath the topsoil, waiting to be discovered. One of the treasures that was subsequently found was the building that I'm staring up at now. It is a towering pyramid called Kana. It stretches into the heavens. In fact, today, the top of it is covered in the swirling mist. It is 141 feet tall. And don't worry, folks, I am going to be climbing to the top, which is actually very

• 8:48Speaker 00

  unusual because most places you can't, but in Belize, you're still allowed to climb on these ancient monuments.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  To help me get my bearings, I'm going to meet up with Dr. Adrian Chase. He's an archaeologist who has worked, well, as you'll hear, all of his life, and I mean that. Adrian, good to see you, buddy. How are you?

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Very good. How are you?

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me on site. But we should just get one thing started. When did you first come here?

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Well, so for my first trip out to Karakol, it's about two months old. I was not quite as helpful back then.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  And so you've been coming pretty much every year then for what, well?

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Well, except for minus college and then a little bit there. But yeah, for decades I've been coming on and off.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  So what we're doing now is walking around one of the biggest cities ever in the Americas before the Europeans arrived?

• 9:32Speaker 04

  So yes, exactly. One of the biggest cities in the Americas before Europeans.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Let's go back. Tell me about the Maya.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  So I think the way to think of the Maya is there's this collection of similarities, but there's a lot of diversity and a lot of different interactions. So for the ancient Maya, there are over three dozen Maya languages, and there's clearly a lot of variation as you go north, south, east and west across the region. When they're talking, there's some similarities. So it's kind of like different accents, but exaggerated to the point where sometimes you can't communicate, but a lot of the common words are similar. So they're able to communicate to some degree, but there's some similar practices. And it's sort of this central household compound. It's the idea of this sort of family ritual and activities. And then it's also building up some of these large stone architecture and pyramids and sort of the system like you see at Karakol, with a couple of variants for other regions.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  And so there was never one Maya emperor sort of ruling the whole of this territory?

• 10:24Speaker 04

  So no, there's never one Maya emperor who's ruling all the way from the top of Yucatan, hitting the Gulf of Mexico, all the way down to the Pacific coast past Highland Guatemala.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  For people who may be a little bit more familiar in Europe, listening to this podcast, the Greek world is not a million miles away. So sort of reasonably common language, people who are able to understand each other, similar ideas about mythology, religion, but shifting alliances of smaller polities.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I'd say for the Maya, you have this kind of regional state system where there are shifts between which city is within which polity, which type of organization.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  How on earth do we get small-scale farming, small-scale settlement in this region of Central America, turning into the Mayan cities, these iconic building structures that we know and love?

• 11:10Speaker 04

  It's a very slow process that happens over generations. So for Karakol, we know that there are people starting to settle this landscape around 600 B.C., and they're founding their households. They're starting to put them in place. You don't have monumental construction though until 360 B.C., when I say, you know, jungle or tropics. You probably think of a place that's hot, that's maybe a little less productive, or you think of lots of wildlife and very little human interactivity. But what we've been finding archaeologically, not just in Mesoamerica with the Maya, but also in tropical parts of Africa or Southeast Asia, is there are these really sprawling, massive tropical cities and peoples who figured out how to unlock the potential of those tropical environments. So for the Maya, in some places, they're building agricultural terraces,

• 11:54Speaker 04

  and they're building up this huge system of terraces where at Karakol, by the city's height, it's over 160 square kilometers. In other parts, they're putting in raised fields and sort of wetlands, or they're using other things that are more like chinampas from the Aztec. And so you're seeing all of these different choices and decisions that is making the landscape significantly more productive.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  So you've got a big surplus of food.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  So you can start using that to feed big workforces and build monumental buildings.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Exactly. So you get the surplus of food, you get the rising population, and then as you have this food surplus, people can start doing other things other than focusing on food. So they can be artisans. They can make jewelry, whether it's carved bone, marine shell coming in from the coast. They can start being long-distance traders. They can move salt to the inlands, or they can transport obsidian. You start having people that specialize in different activities, whether it's ritual or political or commercial.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  So you've got all these different cities, if you like, around this region, around this part of the world. How are their relations characterized? Are we intermarrying? Are we peaceful visiting? Or is there a lot of violence?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  So you get the whole gamut from violence to peaceful interaction. One of the things that I can say is at Karakol, from excavations that were in 2009, published in 2010, we have a Teotihuacan burial. So we have a cremation in the center of the northeast acropolis.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Teotihuacan being that amazing city up north of Mexico City now, right?

• 13:20Speaker 04

  Exactly. So over 1,000 kilometers away from us. And it would suggest a peaceful interaction where somebody's come in, they've married into one of the local families, and then when they're buried, they wanted to be buried in their traditional custom.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Okay, so we've got people moving vast distances.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  From the isotope data here and elsewhere, it seems like maybe 40% of people in different Mesoamerican cities, whether it's Central Mexico or Maya, are migrants who've come in from elsewhere. So you get these periods of globalization locally within Mesoamerica and then periods of isolation. And the history of the Maya and Central Mexican peoples is basically a flip back and forth between those systems.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  Well, surprise, surprise. Like everywhere else in the world.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Right. At its height in 650, it may have been the seventh largest city in the world. It's very rare to have a city that hits 100,000 people before the Industrial Revolution. And for the Maya, they have five cities probably, or six cities rather, that hit over 50,000, and then one in Central Mexico, Teotihuacan, where Karakol had connections back and forth.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  So we're now standing in this extraordinary central plaza. We've got the highest building. This is the kind of iconic heart of a Mayan city that people are familiar. We've got the massive pyramids with the steps. What is the purpose of these buildings here we're looking at?

• 14:32Speaker 04

  All right, this is sort of the political center within the downtown of Karakol. And what you have is you have a northern structure, Cana, which is still the tallest human-made building in Belize today. It's about the height of the Statue of Liberty and the base is about two American football fields. So it's this massive stone architecture, but it would have started as a small little household. And then over generations, they build it up, build it up, build it up. It's kind of like the White House. You know, it's serving this other role. So it has these three different tiers on it, and the first two tiers, you can see those public meeting rooms that are all facing front. So if you're standing in this plaza and you look up, you can see who gets to go meet with whom. You possibly have a little prison off to the side. The northern building is more related to the ruler and the ruler's family with two private compounds, the private residential areas,

• 15:16Speaker 04

  to the northeast and northwest of it, filling out the upper space on the pyramid. And then the eastern building itself, that's the ritual building, which is where the ruler's relatives are buried. So you have multiple tombs.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  As with so many structures in the past, they look gray and stony to us now. They would have been vibrant and...

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Yes, and I think, like most people, there's a favoritism. They want colorful things. They want pretty objects. So you're getting that elaborate, probably stucco design, and we have pieces of stucco so we can get a sense of these different architectural elements. But putting it all together would take a lot more effort to see how it looked like in its heyday.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  I was always told, growing up, that the Maya had social class distinctions. And you've got the rich people living up there having a lovely time, and everyone else is very, very poor and marginalized. Is that an outdated take, or do you see evidence of that here?

• 16:01Speaker 04

  So I think it's first kind of mixed in the sense that for some cities, that definitely seems to be the case. So for example, at Karakol, there's this really big focus on wealth sharing, where the difference between the elite and sort of the ordinary people is a lot more suppressed. And it's almost like it was a conscious strategy. They knew that they had a problem with all these people moving in. They're building up this big city, and they wanted some way to make sure that everybody could live together. Everybody's getting access to tombs. The market system's going at full steam. So you're getting polychrom pots. You're getting obsidian blades coming from Guatemala. You're getting marine shell made into jewelry by local artisans. And so life is pretty good here for the average person during the city's heyday in a way that really shows that you have this full, strong, middle level of society.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  It has a ruler who's probably living on Cana, but then you also have these different districts, which likely have sort of a district head, and there may be a local district council or a local system of how they manage disputes over land or other issues. You have neighborhoods, which likely then have neighborhood heads in their own meetings. So you have this multi-tiered system like you would have in a modern city with different councils and governments at different levels.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  And so if we looked out from the top of Cana, we'd have seen a landscape with sort of neighborhoods, really.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  You would look out over this larger landscape, and you'd see these plazuela residential groups. You would see these other roads leading out from the downtown to other districts, each of which has its own main temples, its own elite families, its own local families who are probably helping manage and run the public space, collecting sort of the tax to use it. And of course, all of these public plazas, they'd be used for ritual activity, political rallies, marketplaces. It's any time you have a formal public space, you can use it for whatever you need at the time. They also have range buildings, which may have been storage for other goods and materials. Or, and about half of them, they have a ball court, because of course, everybody wants to go see a ball game every once in a while, right? As soon as you step off the downtown or any other district, you're in somebody's terraced field.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Now, in terms of the terraces, there's sort of two different general types. There are these like architectural terraces where you want to increase the amount of flat space to build on. And then there are agricultural terraces where you want to farm. And what you can imagine is you have your field, you've built up this terrace. The water's designed so it's flowing back and forth as it goes down the hills. And it's helping irrigate trees. So you have medicinal trees, different tree crops, probably around the edges. And then you have the three sisters, the mix of corn, beans and squash. But you also have chili peppers or cacao. And you can imagine that unlike a modern field, you don't need to monocrop. So they're putting all of the different crops they need together and intermixing them. And that creates this system because you can manage the soil. So the Maya have a night swing. Night swinging is when you take all of your human and food wastes and you mix them together,

• 18:42Speaker 04

  and you put them back into the fields. That's part of the reason the forest is so healthy here today. You have a sandier patch there that's better for peppers. They go in that corner. You know that the cacao likes to be under shade, so you put it under this plant here. And then you have your little garden, and so you get this garden city aspect from these agricultural terraces.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Speaking of that agricultural system, there's no river that runs past it. So presumably, water engineering must have been very sophisticated.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  So this is a perfect question. You actually saw the closest river that you drove over in that brand-new bridge. And as you were passing it, I think it's about 14 kilometers direct distance from where we are now. And that is the closest perennial sort of moving body of water. What the Maya did instead is all of these public plazas, all of the household plazas, they're dedicated to drain water often into it, the reservoir. So in the downtown, you have a large and a monumental reservoir. In some of the other districts, you have large reservoirs. But by the end of the city's lifespan, there are enough household reservoirs for every two to five households to be sharing the same water source. And so those are providing water for the dry season. They are probably doing some really clever mixes of having pure water, some things covered with duckweed,

• 19:52Speaker 04

  and a couple that are dedicated to aquaculture, where they're using water lilies to gauge water purity, which is something we know the Maya did iconographically. Water gets tied in with rulership, and often also, the underworld is this watery place. So you have all of this mix of different elements suggesting water is really key and important. You're also getting a lot of consumption of marine fish here too, based on the dietary evidence. So there's active trade routes to the coast where they're getting marine fish, even though we're nowhere near the coast. They also would have, at the same time, mixed in this water system of reservoirs and, you know, water for consumption with the agricultural terraces, which are serving as this earthen reservoir for their plants. So when it rains, the water flows over the terrace and it seeps into the soil, and it's designed to be the right depth for all the

• 20:37Speaker 04

  crops they want to grow.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  And then the water is flowing along the bedrock layer at the bottom of the soil. So it's going from terrace to terrace down the system.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Nothing wasted?

• 20:46Speaker 04

  Nothing wasted.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Presumably, there's places for religious activity festivals as well?

• 20:50Speaker 04

  So actually, there's a really good example just over there. And basically, it's the ancient community centre at Karakol, and it predates everything we just talked about with Kanaa. It's this early building, this really long elongated eastern building, which is built up and remodelled about every 200 years. And then, a big western structure. It's something that helps control the calendar and put it together, the ritual lunar and the more standard sort of annual solar calendar. And so the Maya, when they're giving you their texts, the first few glyphs are all just telling you a date within that calendric system.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  How does that Maya calendar work? There is an OG date, right? In Christian culture, we have the birth of Jesus. There is an equivalent in Maya culture, right?

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Ah, so this would be good if I could actually reference exactly when it is, but it's sometime like around 3114 B.C., I think. And then that date cycled around again. So the Maya calendar, like the Maya number system, it happens in these sort of sets of 20. And you can imagine 20 as the base unit, instead of 10, if you count on fingers and toes.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  And so, they have 20 days in a month. They only have 18 in a year to help make that religious calendar kind of work out, if that makes sense. And then 20 years as a set, and then every set of 400 years, 20 times 20, et cetera. And so there was this concept that the calendar repeats. And part of this idea of counting in cycles, so you've got the cycle of days, the cycle of sort of weeks and months, the cycles of years, is the Maya are thinking about time not as an arrow, but as cycles on cycles, whether it's day/night, rainy/dry, generations of people, life/death.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  And people talk about the predictive power of the Mayas, their Maya pocalypse. Why has popular culture seized on that aspect of Maya?

• 22:33Speaker 04

  So what happened is that calendric system, that long count calendar, which the Maya weren't really using in the post-classic, they used a shorter form because they didn't need to have dates that counted, you know, within a 6,000-plus-year frame, is it reset, it started a new count in 2012.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  In December, I think 21st it was. And so that date is the same date as the start of the calendar, right? In terms of Maya dates. But because of that one text and a couple others, it's clear that it's just a repetition of the cycle.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's how it works. It just resets, yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  But some people made money out of the fact that it was the end of the world.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  Exactly. And so they're doing cycles in celebration of time every 20 years. So you can think of all the public space you've walked through, all this flat space, it's big enough for at least 71,000 people to be tightly packed. And if you had a procession going through, you can imagine, once every 20 years, there's a big ceremony to celebrate the successful governance, rule, passage of time of 20 years.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  That'd pack in some serious hate, this beautiful.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so those are birders. We just passed a group of birders. And so one of the big things about the management here is that all of the trees have been intentionally kind of kept to keep this environment where you can see a lot of wildlife. And we're an archaeological reserve in a larger natural park, national reserve. And so you do get jaguars coming through, you get to see tapirs here if you're really lucky, you'll hear the howler monkeys, you might see spider monkeys, and then, early in the morning, you see tons of birds. So if you get in your car first thing, you'll come out here and you'll see a bunch of birders looking at all the species that are present.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Guys, you're looking in the wrong direction. Look at the archaeology, folks.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  But to be fair for the ancient Maya, they would have been keeping trees and forest here, too. So you have this mix of human use of space and natural use, and it creates this fully anthropogenic or human landscape. And so the Maya are mixing natural and human elements together and making it this really fluid garden city. And so you can see echoes of that in the modern management system.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  And we are crawling towards that understanding of managing the urban landscape today, aren't we?

• 24:31Speaker 04

  And if you look at house prices, you'll notice that places that have that urban forest tend to be much wealthier and more well-endowed than places that don't have the tree canopy.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  And we shouldn't be surprised, because the Maya were aware of this 1,500 years ago, at least.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Exactly. They were aware of this, but they're also, they know which of these tree species are medicinal, they know which ones have resources they can use. Think of it like a mix of your medicine cabinet with your kitchen cupboard, but it's growing all around your household.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  This is Dan Snow's History here. More after this. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok,

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  folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

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  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cosy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table's been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

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  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  The Maya learnt how to read the environment, shape it and work with it, allowing large populations to exist in what might seem like an unforgiving landscape. And while the archaeology gives us an outline of a civilisation, it's the culture, the customs, the food, the way of life that really gives us the colour, that tells us how they thrived. And in modern-day Belize, you can learn about that everywhere. Over 50% of the Belizean population today identifies with having at least some Maya heritage. I'm heading to the Toledo district, where Maya communities and families still practise many of the pillars of Maya culture,

• 27:43Speaker 00

  as well as offering an insight into how ancient Maya mastered their environment to survive for so many centuries. I'm here to meet Jose Mess. He is a guide in this area, and he's very kindly offered to show me his Maya home, his garden, and talk me through, well, everything the modern Maya do that is derived from their ancient forebears. I'm just walking in now through the beautiful garden. There's loads and loads of different plants and trees, a real diversity here. There's some cacao, oh yeah, lovely purple fruit, the cacao plant, there's some hibiscus, and I'm just walking through all sorts of wonderful fruit trees. To my

• 28:25Speaker 00

  left, there's a huge palm roof, and I'm just walking up to the house now. Here we go.

• 28:30Speaker 06

  All right, welcome home. Watch your step. Welcome in. This is my baby, Isaac.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Hi, Isaac.

• 28:39Speaker 06

  This is my wife, Hilda, and that's my daughter, behind her.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Nice to meet you.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  All right, welcome home, okay? Feel free.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Jose, this is a beautiful house. Just to describe it for people, we have these logs, beautiful straight timbers making a frame, and then there is thatching. I'm guessing this is all locally sourced, everything I'm seeing here.

• 28:58Speaker 06

  Yes. First of all, I want to welcome you to my home. If you notice here, if you look around, the wallings, the posts, the taitai, the roofing, everything's from jungle. We naturally made these. We don't use any level or square measurement or measuring tape. Everything is arm-length, eyesight, constructing a home like this.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  And how long would it take to put up a house like this?

• 29:21Speaker 06

  You, as an owner of the home, you would collect your sticks, your posts, your rafters, your taitai. So you set the date, in three days' time, in three days' time, you already have your house.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  So once you've gathered everything, you can get this up with your friends and family and community members in three days?

• 29:38Speaker 06

  Yes. Here in the Mayan communities, Dan, our strength is the unity. We unite together, we work, meaning that I help you, you help me. In three days' time, Dan, you have your traditional home constructed without a penny.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  What I'm really fascinated by is that I can't see any nails, no iron here, because you've got these wonderful vines from the jungle that are lashing together, the uprights, the joists as well, which is great.

• 29:59Speaker 06

  Yes, Dan.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  So everything you need is right here.

• 30:04Speaker 06

  I wanted to walk with me, Dan. I really want to show you how we live. What do we do? If the Maya people get sick in the early days, how do they survive? In this section here, I have my medicinal plants. The Maya name we have. This one here is called Shchalche. Remember, almost like Ischel? The rainforest god.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Yes, it's like the god of the rain. Yeah, exactly.

• 30:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, the rain god, the forest god. So the main use is for Shchalche is for diarrhea, for stomach problem.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  It's very handy, but we normally pick them, boil them, drink it as a tea.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  So the Maya found themselves in a part of the world where if they work with nature, it would bring them enormous rewards because things grow here.

• 30:51Speaker 06

  Right, right. If we look back from the ancient time, how do these ancient Maya people live? How does my ancestors live? Do you know how to sustain or to survive with their family? When they get sick, how do they cure? When I was growing up, Dan, my family never took us to the hospital. In my backyard here, we have medicinal plant behind for toothache, to numb your gum. If you have a toothache, it helps you from pain and from cure. We have also for cutting if you're wounded because in the Maya people in the early days, they were not using any machete, but they were using obsidian that was traded.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Sharp stones.

• 31:29Speaker 06

  Yes. They still get wounded. They wounded themselves. What do they do from stopping from bleeding? There is a plant that we have now. It's very common. It's usable. If you notice here, Dan, look at this.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. It's this big scar on your forehead.

• 31:43Speaker 06

  So when I was 14 years old, my dad put me to work in the farm. In fact, at seven years of age, imagine, very young, my dad teach me how to use a machete. But, you know, I and my brother were doing cleaning and my brother wounded me, see?

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  Because we went too close together. And now I said, I'm gonna die because I was bleeding, blood all over me. I hollered at my dad and my dad came running. I said, "You're gonna be okay." I said, "No, dad, look at my blood." He says, "I'm gonna be right back." He run into the jungle, from the field into the jungle. I said, "Dad, why are you leaving me here to die?" I was crying and I was looking at my dad. Where is my dad? When I noticed my dad coming running back into the field with a handful of leaves in his hand, he quickly started to chew it and then place it on the wounded area. Not to cure, Dan, but to clot your blood, to stop bleed. That leaf has some kind of acidic that instantly, like instant, like you see when you have that PVC pipe open,

• 32:42Speaker 06

  pour in water and you close it, close it. Exactly what that leaf does to the bleeding. Just to stop bleeding, I managed to walk one hour from farm to my home.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Really?

• 32:53Speaker 06

  And I got cured after. So some of these very important for infection. We have infection plant. We have plants for headaches. When we do jungle hike, we have what we call a jungle cane. It's very sour. And that piece of jungle cane really helps for dehydration. So all of these things, you know, they are very knowledgeable on the Maya people. Up to today, Dan, we barely go to the hospital, but we would go to our natural herbal medicinal plant into the backyard. Imagine, Dan, if I would walk you into my farm more, I would point out to you some of these plants, not planted by me, but they just naturally grow there.

• 33:36Speaker 06

  What I do is I only maintain them, cleaning around them. Some of our cultivators are bats, lizard, agoutis and birds.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  They do the hard work.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  They would do, yes, they would eat the seeds, they would eat the berries and do droppings into the backyard, into the farm. And that's how we get our natural medicinal growing into the backyard.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  So the Maya were just expert farmers?

• 33:59Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  And what about maize? Because this is something you hear a lot about, isn't it? Where do you grow your maize, near the house?

• 34:05Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, yes. Here in my community, in Santa Cruz, we do have 13 species in the community, but we have four ancient local corn. We harvest, we do twice a year.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  And corn is the bedrock of the diet?

• 34:19Speaker 06

  Yes. For the Maya people, our main staple is corn, three times a day. Yes, you can hunt. You can have game meat. You can have jungle vegetable. You can do fishing, but nothing like corn.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  So corn isn't just a substance for eating, but presumably it's so important it becomes part of their religion as well?

• 34:37Speaker 06

  Yes, Dan, yes. In the Maya beliefs, in the Maya culture, we have many gods. We have gods for every harvest, every crops, every medicinal, almost everything, Dan. So we have the corn god. We have the Hunapu. He has that relation working with Ischel, which is the god of the forest, the god of the maize. So they have those relationship working. And those are the gods that provides for the Maya people.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  So the Maya, it was the bedrock of their diet and it's also hugely important, their spiritual.

• 35:10Speaker 06

  Yes. So before they do planting, before they touch the earth, they will do their ritual activities. In fact, Maya people believe they were once came from corn. They believe that the corn is what produces or give them life, sustain their living.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  So there's a synergy. They're living in balance with the natural world?

• 35:31Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Night has fallen here in Belize. You can hear that jungle wildlife really revving up. Things get so noisy here at night. Monkeys will be out soon, I expect. And what I love about coming out here at night, looking up through a clearing in the trees is how clear the night sky is in Belize. It's fantastic. You can see the stars tonight. Oh, there is Orion's Belt. Have a look for the North Star, but it's quite low on the horizon here. The ancient Maya did not think these were just lights in the sky. They believed they're all part of the sacred cosmos, deeply connected to events down here on earth. For the Maya, the universe was layered. There was the underworld below. There was where we are now, where the humans lived. And then there's the heavens above. There are multiple celestial levels.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  And they monitored all those stars and planets very closely. They were able to track the passage of time by the movement of celestial bodies. They wrote them down. They created one of the most advanced systems of astronomy in the ancient Americas. They actually wrote books known as codices that noted the movements of the sun, the moon, Venus, all written down in their complex hieroglyphs.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Sadly, most of the Maya's written books were destroyed during the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. But thankfully, not everything was lost. The Maya also carved their astronomical knowledge along with the stories of their rulers, alliances, wars and dynasties onto stone, stelae and altars and into the walls of their temples. And it's from these surviving monuments that experts have been able to piece together the story of the Maya. But at Karakol, one crucial piece of that story had been missing. American archaeologists, doctors Arlen and Diane Chase, have been excavating Karakol for more than 40 years. In that time, they've uncovered the towering Kana Pyramid,

• 37:41Speaker 00

  temples, altars and vast residential neighborhoods. But despite all these extraordinary discoveries, they had never found a ruler's burial. Until last summer, July 2025. And when they finally did, it was probably the most important tomb they could have found.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  We're in a residential plaza area and there are buildings on all sides. And the Maya typically, their houses are like that. There's a plaza in the center and then the buildings surround it. The buildings that are generally speak on the north or the west or the south are often just regular residential buildings or in this case, palaces.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  So they'd have lived here and had staff working here and stuff?

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And then the building to our right, which is to the east, that's the mortuary building. And that's where you would bury your dead.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Right. And that's why you decided to look in there when you were investigating burials, I guess?

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Yes. Look, that's a good place to look for burials and it's also a good place to look for caches. Those are other ritual deposits that are placed inside the buildings. We had done excavations in the center. We'd done excavations there, off to the side, over here. But there was an area that we also had not covered. We'd had to stop an excavation short because the fill was not necessarily as stable as it could be. We were at the end of the field season. And a number of years later, we came back.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  So you're digging in there. You've gone a few meters down. What do you find?

• 39:06Speaker 03

  We find essentially that there's an open area near the floor and the side of our excavation that we just had to move a few stones and we were inside.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness. So you're in a tunnel, basically, going down?

• 39:17Speaker 03

  A little short, a little short air.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  So at the end of this short tunnel that's open, you go through there. What do you find at the end?

• 39:24Speaker 03

  An open air tube.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  How do you know it was a tomb?

• 39:28Speaker 03

  It's a corbel vaulted. It's there's no external door. And we could see pottery vessels on the floor had not been disturbed.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was a very large chamber. There was red pigment on one side of the wall. Red is an important burial color to the Maya. And we could see bone, one person. So sometimes our chambers have more than one, but just one person inside. Multiple ceramic vessels. And at first, we knew it likely was a royal tomb. There weren't any hieroglyphs to indicate that because it's a little earlier than the time period where we would get writing on the capstones. But we thought, all right, this is probably a royal individual, someone really important. But as we went further, we began to realize that this was someone really, really important for this point in time. So the artifacts started to tell us a different story.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  There were three sets of jadeite air flares. If we get one set of jadeite air flares inside a chamber, that's pretty impressive.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  So there's unprecedented.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Three large ones, a very impressive necklace of carved jadeite beads. And really, though, until about the last days of the excavation, when it turns out that there's a life-sized death mask inside there that's made out of jadeite and shell. At that point, we knew that this was a royal family. It was a ruler. And based on the timing, we expected that this was probably the first member of our royal dynasty here at Karakol. So it was a really, really special find.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  And the jade death mask is something that's only associated with royalty?

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. And not necessarily just royalty, but rulers. So there are maybe less than 50 of them that have been found in the Maya area. And this is the first one to be found at Karakol. So they're not common. They're not common.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  So how come this very important ruler is buried here and not at the towering palace administrative complex pyramid that's the focal point of the site?

• 41:29Speaker 03

  I think this was actually a nicer place to live than at the sun of Cana. And, you know, maybe that was a ritual location rather than anything else.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  So you had these incredibly high status goods. You had the royal, the ruler's death mask. So you thought, and it was the right period. You thought you had your guy.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  What's his name?

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Te Kavchak.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  And why is he important?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  He is the first known ruler of the site. He's the the initial member of the Karakol dynasty. So he's in the hieroglyphic texts in a couple of places. And this is the first time we would have found a ruler, a definite ruler. And we actually knew his name. So for us, that was priceless.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Is it a useful comparison? Just as Rome goes from being a republic to an empire under Augustus, Augustus is the first of these emperors. Is this an equivalent figure?

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. They're calling back to him.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Historically, that he's the first in that line. Karakol was occupied long before that. And there's impressive architecture here before that. But it's his rule that everyone is counting back to when they're talking about the history of the site.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  So if you could have found anyone in the history of Karakol, he's pretty high on the list of somebody.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's very high on the list, very, very, very high on the list.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  You're an expert in human remains. What have his bones been able to tell us?

• 42:49Speaker 03

  The bones were able to tell us that he was an elderly individual.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Forty-five?

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, no, a little older.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Even, wow, super old.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  So if you think about, even in our current world, we've got great dentistry. You know, there are individuals that lose all of their teeth, right? So he had no teeth.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  And there were no places for those teeth, no sockets for the teeth left. It had all been completely reserved. So for a long period of time, he'd been eating food or, you know, mashing food, but without teeth. So that's a clear indication of his advanced age.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  So what's the burial tell us about Maya kingship? Are these people who lived behind the curtain? Or are they out there rubbing shoulders with the populace, leading them into battle, charismatic, visible kingship? What's your guess?

• 43:36Speaker 03

  I think just like today, it really does depend on the individual. And, you know, sometimes we have a lot of evidence that can tell us about them and other times less so. This time period at Karakol, we don't have the the luxury of the huge hieroglyphic history. But for some of our rulers, we know what they're saying about themselves at least, right? They're great leaders. They're leading the site in war. You know, there are battles with other sites that they're winning. They're taking captives. We also know that they're at least saying that they're doing sacrifices for the people. So that you'll see bloodletting implements, which were buried in caches that are in royal or public locations. So they're doing things for the people on one hand, but on the other hand, they're doing things for themselves.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  The amount of or the kinds of items that are located in this tomb, those are not things that would everyone on the site would have had. So there's actually a, you know, a reasonable divide between this individual and the rest of the folks that lived at Karakol. But that changes over time.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  So are you suggesting that leaders like to boast about their successes, shout about how much they're doing for people, but secretly amassed vast amounts of personal wealth? This is shocking stuff.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Sometimes, sometimes, yes. Sometimes, yes, sometimes, yes.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  So he's an enormous figure in the history of this city.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  I think he's a great indication of what Karakol was and what it's about to become in terms of the great Maya city. We know that Karakol at that point in time was on a trade network, even though it's inland and not near a river, and that it was tied across Mesoamerica. So there are also other remains that we found here are tied to the highlands of Guatemala. So it's a suggestion of of Karakol really was an important place that was lost for time, you know, in the jungle.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  He is turning into a monarchy as well. Will that affect the way that it interacts with its neighbors? Does it enter a more expansionary phase, for example? Do we know?

• 45:32Speaker 03

  What happens after Te Kavchak is all of the Maya rulers are connected with each other. Karakol sends someone who becomes the ruler of Copan in Honduras, for example. Our dynasty is related to one at Tikal. So there are a lot of relationships among the elite at these various sites. But Karakol is, you know, taking its place among the great leaders. Karakol is one of the later sites to be found compared to Tikal and Copan and the sites in Mexico. So it's taken a while for folks to realize how important it actually was to the Maya during the Classic Period.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more coming up.

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  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipscombe, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  It wasn't until Thay Kavchak founded the royal dynasty here in the fourth century that it really became a regional superpower. Under his leadership, power was centralized, long-distance trade expanded, and diplomatic ties were forged with other great Maya kingdoms. His dynasty would rule for 460 years. But ruling a Maya megacity was no easy job. As allegiances between the Maya states shifted, warfare was a near constant concern for Maya kings. Conflicts between the different states were often about territory and trade. They were usually smaller clinical campaigns rather than huge battlefield clashes.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Elite warriors and nobles led expeditions against rival cities armed with obsidian-bladed spears and darts, wooden clubs edged with sharp stones, protected by shields and padded cotton armor. The aim was not simply to kill enemies, but to capture them, especially rival kings or high-ranking nobles. Then prisoners could be paraded before the victorious ruler, forced in submission, or sacrificed in ritual ceremonies. And as Karakol became more powerful over the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, the peak of the Classic Period, it became embroiled in more conflict. Descendants of Thay Kavchak were determined to forge their reputation and Karakol's dominance

• 49:05Speaker 00

  in the region. One of the most important wars in the history of the Maya were the Tikal Wars, fought between Karakol and the nearby city-state of Tikal. You can still see its ruins in the Guatemalan jungle to the west of the Belizean border. In AD 556, Karakol suffered defeat at the hands of Tikal, when a new leader called Lord Water took the throne at Karakol shortly afterwards. He was determined to rebuild its military and political strength. To do so, he forged a powerful alliance with Kalakmul, Tikal's greatest rival. And the story of how that war played out between these great Maya powers can be found in the carved stone monuments at Karakol.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Lots of people will have heard of Tikal. It's in modern day Guatemala. Many of you will have visited. It has long been said to have been, well, one of the primary powers here in the Maya lowlands. It controlled politics and trade. It was a very important religious centre. Initially, it seems that Caracol was politically tied to Tikal. But in the middle of the sixth century, it changed its allegiance to Kalakmul. And in 562, Lord Water launched what archaeologists call a star war against Tikal. It was a destructive, brutal military campaign.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  It was timed apparently so it would align with celestial events. In this instance, we believe it was the movement of Venus. The records suggest that in an astonishing upset, the king of Tikal was defeated. He may have been captured, but either way, the results were catastrophic. And it seems like after this enormous loss, Tikal's population and its influence over the region collapsed. Caracol was in the ascendant. I'm just walking around the site now, looking for the brilliant Dr Adrian Chase. And he's going to talk me through one of these surviving stele and explain what it all says about the epic struggle with Tikal.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Adrian, how are you doing, buddy?

• 51:22Speaker 04

  I'm doing very well. How about you?

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Good, thank you. Thank you for coming back. Adrian, would you mind taking me to this amazing stele?

• 51:28Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Let's go.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  So here, this is the primary altar that's giving us a lot of the history here at Caracol. And you can see, if you look at the middle, it's pretty rough. It's a little broken up. But even with that, you can still see all of these little glyph blocks. Usually there's a key glyph that tells you, start here. And then they give you a date, which is usually five glyphs.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  So people will be familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are some similarities, right? They are pictorial. They seem to be showing shapes and objects that are sort of recognizable. What is the system here?

• 52:04Speaker 04

  So the Maya, when they make these glyphs, they're actually mixing together images representing words and sounds, but also they have a syllable. So it's logosyllabic. And then every individual scribe can have their own style. So there get to be different styles per site. In terms of the written language, it seems like there are three used for most of the Classic period with different variants to the east, to the west and to the north.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  And it's only been quite recently that you guys have been able to decipher these?

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'd say it's sort of the 1960s to present. Even today, we can't read all of the glyphs. So in some of these monuments, like you can see right over there, you might see a figure represented. And sometimes they have a glyph on their thigh or on their person, which is telling you that's their name. Or sometimes you'll see a glyph for fire inside a fire. And so little hints like that have led to this slow process of translating.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  And I always get very frustrated in ancient Egypt because you often go into a tomb and there's writing everywhere, but actually it's just incantations. It's the same thing again. Are glyphs in the Maya world quite useful to epigraphers and historians, archaeologists?

• 53:08Speaker 04

  So yes, if you can get a nice glyphs text, it's quite useful. But the thing is, the Maya on these texts, they're all these stone monuments. The Maya also had this book paper, so they fold like an accordion. That's where they would have put their poetry, their art, their history, their records, their taxes, along with ritual incantations. So there's a set of paper books from the post Classic. And all of those talk about stars and astronomy and positions and different rituals you do on certain days. But there are only four books out of what must have been hundreds of thousands of books.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  And what happened to all the others, Adrian?

• 53:41Speaker 04

  Well, so the Spanish came in and burned them. Now, on this monument here, it's put into the main ball court at Caracol. So they would have had to play around it to some degree. But it's Khan II, once he's acceded the throne after 618. He is very prolific. He puts up monuments here at Caracol. And so usually, sometimes the ruler is putting up the monument themselves. But often there are these retrospective monuments. So they're tying events together through time. And he's putting this together because his father had the successful star war, this total war against the royal family at Tikal.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  So at this point, this city we're standing in now is dominant?

• 54:17Speaker 04

  So at this point, this city is dominant within this region.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Is what we're being told here corroborated by what we see in Tikal? Does it seem like actually it did fall into eclipse for a while?

• 54:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Tikal, the glyphs go silent. When you're defeated in a star war, you stop putting up monuments. But what we see on the ground at Tikal, based on the archaeologists who were excavating back in the 60s, these rulers come in who are these stranger kings, and that's what they call them. They recognize them as foreigners. There's even a Caracol glyph on one of the vessels in one of their burials. But they try to put their mark on the city and they remake the downtown. And part of this is there are different models for how Maya rulers work. And the older, sort of outdated model is that each royal family has a glyph. Each glyph is tied to one place. And what we can see by mixing the archaeology and the glyphs and looking at trade networks and how things shift over time, is that you can see multiple cities become part of the same state over time. And this ruler, think of him as the figurehead.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  There's still a whole governing apparatus that's handling the day to day affairs.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  How do you think life here was affected in that period of hegemony and dominance? Do you think more wealth would have flowed in? Do you think normal people would have recognized the advantages of being so dominant?

• 55:25Speaker 04

  What we can see is that actually corroborating with this date and after, you see new households being founded on the landscape, probably by people migrating in. The population's growing too quickly to just be internal, unless they found magical corn or something. So it suggests immigration into the city. And then average household wealth is also going up. So they're looting a little bit of the wealth out of Tikal. But they're also taking some of the people from Tikal and bringing them here. Or rather, people from Tikal are choosing to migrate here.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  They're following the power.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Right. And then those families stay on this landscape all the way until the end.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  How long do you think this, if we can call it a golden age loosely, but how long does that last?

• 56:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's kind of complicated. But for Lord Water, there's this sort of 560 date that's really important. He goes until 600. And that seems to be doing pretty well for Caracol. You see wealth increasing. Khan II, there's an interregnum for 18 years before he can actually accede to the throne, which suggests a lot of background politics that we can't see really in the glyphs. But he accedes at 618, and then he's governing for a bit. And then the final ruler, Smokeskull, takes over for the last 22 years. And 22 years is a long time to be a ruler. He's a ruler of a very secure state. But Smokeskull, we only have from two monumental records. One is a stucco text on Cana, and the other is a monument that is at La Roja. And La Roja is one of the outlying districts for Caracol.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  It's currently the northwest part that's in Guatemala and the one that's closest to a waterway. And on that text, it basically says, "He retook Ushuitza." Ushuitza is the Maya name for the city of Caracol. And what it is, is it literally means three mountain place. And now the question is, how did he lose it? Because he doesn't talk about that part. All of these texts are always very positive. It's what we did that went well. And this is actually pretty bad that it's one of the surviving texts. And what he said is, "I retook something I shouldn't have lost."

• 57:16Speaker 00

  So the third member of that dynasty is obviously experiencing rebellion, invasion. We don't know.

• 57:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, he ends up experiencing issues. We can see other texts that talk about it. It looks like a coalition of the different peoples and places he'd incorporated, or Khan II and Lord Water had incorporated, managed to band together and they sort of kicked him out.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  So Smokeskull is certainly fighting to keep his patrimony together, this powerful state that was created by his predecessors. What period is this?

• 57:44Speaker 04

  So basically, everything collapses at 680. And you have the next couple of years, reseating of the dynasties at Tikal and at Naranjo.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  So Tikal is back.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Tikal is back.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  And Smokeskull?

• 57:55Speaker 04

  And Smokeskull? He disappears. So we don't have any other records of what happens. Caracol goes into a hiatus in terms of what the glyphs and the monuments say, which is odd only because usually when you're defeated in war, like happened to Tikal, it's kind of bad for the site and you can see this decline in wealth and well being. Instead, at Caracol, things continue to explode after they're defeated in war. So the average person at Caracol, if you were to choose to live at the site and you're not getting to choose to be the uppermost elite, you don't want to live at Caracol after 680 in this next period, which is 120 years of wealth sharing and a really strong group in the middle.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  So the powerful warrior kings have gone, but society seems to keep on flourishing?

• 58:36Speaker 04

  Society keeps on flourishing. And we can see some of the other little cities declaring their own little independence around Caracol. But Caracol itself is flourishing for that period. I don't know of another case like that.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Well, folks, I am taking giant strides here, quite literally. Big old steps leading up to the top of this pyramid. If you thought I was going to finish up this podcast without climbing to the very top of Cana, the enormous pyramid, palace, administrative centre, temple. Well, you're not a regular listener to this podcast. It's got to be done. The discoveries made here in the last 30 or 40 years have transformed the way that we understand the entire Maya world.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Because it turns out that Caracol was a serious player. It reshaped the balance of this region. We now know that Caracol was a vast city, one of the wealthiest, the most commercial, and with a military might that upended the order of the Maya for the next 200 years.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  But it wouldn't last. Because around the ninth century, something happened. Cities like Caracol were abandoned. Monuments stopped being built. Populations disappeared. Some archaeologists have called this the Maya collapse, as if one single catastrophe wiped out the civilization overnight. But that isn't quite what happened. The reality is far more complex, far more unsettling. The Maya didn't vanish. Their cities didn't all fall at once. Instead, one of the most sophisticated urban civilizations in the ancient world slowly began to unravel. Climate pressure, political instability, intensifying warfare. Systems pushed to their limits and beyond them.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  A situation that feels uncomfortably familiar. What happens when a civilization at its peak begins to fail? Join me for episode two on Thursday as we trace the decline of the Maya and try to make sense of what went wrong. And to do so, we must venture deeper into the jungle and into the earth, into the caves, the places where the Maya believed were the entrances to the underworld. Don't forget to hit follow wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. And if you want to find out more about travelling to Belize to see this history for yourself, I would really recommend it, folks. It was a fantastic experience. You can find out more at www.travelbelize.org.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  And we'll put a handy link in the show notes. With huge thanks to the team at the Belize Tourist Board. We'll see you next time.

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