Strangers in the Land

By 800 CE, the Classic Maya had scaled remarkable, even improbable, heights. In an outwardly hostile, resource-poor rainforest, they created a dense network of cities graced with temples, palaces, plazas, ballcourts, and reservoirs, all of them built only with tools available during the Stone Age. Their artistic and intellectual achievements are just as impressive: most notably their naturalistic artstyle, their sophisticated writing system, and the complex arithmetic they used for calendrical and astronomical computation. The decipherment of their hieroglyphs—which only got going in the 1990s—has revealed a great deal about their culture and history, making clear that the Maya homeland was never politically unified but rather divided into well over a hundred competing kingdoms.

New technologies such as Lidar—which uses an airborne laser to pierce the forest canopy and show what lies beneath—have revealed further wonders. These scans show landscapes carpeted with humble house-mounds, confirming that the ancient population was very large, numbering 10 million or more. Lidar also reveals how the Maya transformed seasonal swamps into extensive wetland field systems, modified hillsides into agricultural terraces, and constructed large fortresses ringed by ditches and ramparts.
Yet all these glories would soon come to a shattering end. Within a century of 800 CE, the population of the central heartlands had plummeted by 50% or more amid a complete sociopolitical breakdown. A century later it was down by as much as 80%, after another it was 90% from its peak. By then all the great cities had been abandoned and reclaimed by a voracious jungle. Though much diminished in number, the Maya steadily rebuilt societies elsewhere, in the northern lowlands as well as in the southern highlands. With governments that conspicuously lacked the quasi-divine kings of the Classic era, this Postclassic civilization endured until the Spanish conquest of the 16th century. Despite suffering a long history of exploitation and oppression since then, millions of Maya people still live on the lands of their ancestors to this day.

But what happened to the Classic Maya civilization? How did startling success turn to abject failure so quickly and completely? Why did so few people return to reoccupy their old heartlands, even centuries later?

COMPETING EXPLANATIONS

The truth is that we’re still trying to find out. Even though ideas have never been in short supply and year-by-year archaeologists have amassed ever greater quantities of relevant evidence, a definitive answer continues to elude us. Each generation of scholars seems to settle on a favored option, only for it to be superseded in the next, as a solution more in line with fresh data and the shifting tide of anthropological theory comes to the fore. The most popular solutions today divide between the environmental and social, although in ways that are often entwined. In the 1980s, suggestions emerged that the 9thcentury Maya had stripped the land of trees, creating erosion that carried away already over-exploited and increasingly infertile soils. As a result, harvests failed, and people died. Here was an apocalypse of the Maya’s own making, a vision captured in Jared Diamond’s widely read book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The scenario was seductive because the mismanagement of nature in the past could be seen as a warning about the environmental abuses of our own time. Yet further research challenged this thesis, as a greater understanding of ancient Maya farming revealed its sophisticated conservation strategies, which blended the products of field and forest to create a sustainable mosaic of food resources.

Another explanation gained traction in the 1990s. This took its cue from the discovery of hastily built fortifications, burned-out palaces scattered with flint points, and later even a mass grave of high-born individuals who had been bludgeoned to death. It was argued that the Maya had been gripped by a spiraling sequence of wars, first between kingdoms and then within them, as social bonds broke down and a vicious class conflict escalated. In such chaos, trade networks disintegrated and normal life became impossible. People voted with their feet to find a safer existence elsewhere.

However, for other researchers the key to the collapse still lay in the environment, although now pointing to a factor beyond human control. Documents from the era of Spanish rule (1524-1821 CE) show that the Maya region has suffered severe droughts persisting for years, creating a series of deadly famines. Evidence for ancient droughts first came from the analysis of lake sediments and then from the microscopic examination of stalactites—whose layered deposits of lime are a fossilized record of the rain that has percolated its way down into caves. Rapid starvation could certainly explain both the dramatic demographic decline and the sociopolitical disintegration, while invoking its own modern-day counterpart, this time the climate crisis.

But again, not all specialists are convinced. They note the lack of evidence for people moving to the permanent water sources of lakes and rivers, only patchy signs for late malnutrition, and an appreciation that the Maya understood the unpredictability of the rains and invested in drought-resistant root crops and other measures that guarded against the failure of rain-dependent maize. It is also noteworthy that the precipitation records drawn from lakes and different caves do not align particularly well, and that none show a devastating dry episode close to 800 CE.

This last point resonates for those of us who study the inscriptions. Archaeologists are right to say that the collapse was a process spanning a full century, lasting at least until the last dated inscription in 910 CE. At first sight this seems to point to a slow, steady decay, but the chronology of the monuments tells a different story. This makes clear that something calamitous occurred close to 810 CE, the point at which most major kingdoms fell silent.

THE HIDDEN OVERLORD

Truth be told, the collapse had never ranked high in my interests as a Maya writing specialist. With the dwindling number of monuments commissioned between 800 and 900 comes a correspondingly meager number of inscriptions to study. Even those we have tend to be short and very light on historical information, describing formulaic rituals instead. Should we, in any case, expect the Maya to describe their own decline and fall? Societies under stress often project a “business as usual” façade as they desperately, and in this case vainly, seek to restore normality.

Yet first slowly and then quickly, I changed my mind. Today I believe that late monuments contain critical clues to what was going on, with anomalies in art, architecture, ceramics, and writing that speak to a telling transformation within the collapse process.

My change of heart came in 2018 as we were busy remaking the Mexico and Central America Gallery, home to the significant collection of Maya artifacts housed at the Museum. As lead curator, it was my task to write most of the new captions, taking a fresh look at every object put on display. One of these was Altar 13 from Caracol, a very large site now in western Belize. Dated to 820 CE, Altar 13 shows two standing figures with another kneeling, surrounded by an eroded but mostly legible inscription. On the prestigious right side of the scene stands the local king K’inich Yukbil Yopaat, while to the lower status left we see someone captioned by the name Papmalil or Papamalil (the spelling doesn’t allow us to decide which). We know from a second monument at Caracol, Altar 12, that Papmalil was based at Ucanal—a sometime rival city located 30 km to the west. But all is not what it seems. Papmalil’s name appears three times on Altar 13, whereas the king is named only twice. Moreover, the term that links them is an “overseeing” that only otherwise connects a lord to an overlord, making Papmalil not the inferior but the superior actor. He does not use Ucanal’s local political title but rather carries the higher epithet of ochk’in kaloomte’, roughly meaning the “Great Lord of the West”—firm evidence that he outranked the Caracol king. Papmalil is ascribed the same title at another major Maya capital, Naranjo, where he again outranks and exerts authority over the local king, who submissively visited Ucanal in 820 CE.

In short, the image and text of Altar 13 present different messages. The scene boosts the status of the Caracol ruler for a home audience, whereas the inscription offers a more accurate reflection of political reality.

This is intriguing, but the anomalies do not stop there. Papmalil is in no way a typical Maya king’s name. Its closest parallels come from the west, where Papa-, Pap and Pa- are male prefixes in Chontal, a Mayan language from the Gulf Coast of Mexico, modern-day Tabasco (see panel 1, p. 28). This region was a melting pot where Maya people were in contact with other cultures and languages. This seems to be reflected in Papmalil’s costume, with his padded and knot-tied headband and surmounting three-feathered insignia, items we normally associate with Nahua-speakers from Central Mexico. In several different ways, the creators of Altar 13 sought to tell us that Papmalil was a powerful outsider.

The idea that foreigners came into the Maya area after 800 CE is not a new one. Indeed, in the 1960s several scholars suggested that an invasion from the west sparked the collapse. Jeremy Sabloff, a former Penn Museum Williams Director, was one of them, citing his research at the site of Ceibal (formerly Seibal) in Guatemala. By at least 849 CE, Ceibal had shown clear stylistic shifts in its ceramics, architecture, and monuments, which included the depiction of nonMaya deities originating far to the west.

But any enthusiasm for a conquest model was short-lived. Although a late pottery type at Ceibal bore non-Maya imagery, further analysis proved that it was of local manufacture, not an import from elsewhere. The western features at Ceibal did not appear at most Maya sites and, even where they did, could be explained in other ways—for example, as cultural borrowings or as a late evolution in Maya style. It is also hard to overestimate the importance of the theoretical currents of this time, ones that still flow strongly today. These take a skeptical view of invasion and migration, considering them to be overly simplistic solutions to complex problems.

The consensus against a late incursion is now almost universal. To give one example, in a book published in 2021 in which 31 authors re-examine the last years of the Classic era, not one of its 19 chapters mention the possibility of a foreign intrusion. Yet the non-local features of Papamalil compel us to re-assess that position. It would be one thing if he were an isolated and aberrant case, but if we look elsewhere, we find that he is not.

KINGS TURNED INTO REFUGEES

For a further interaction between a local and an outsider, we can turn to the region around Tikal. That immense city, excavated by the Penn Museum between 1956 and 1969, was a Classic Maya superpower whose military successes gave it a commanding position over neighboring kingdoms in the decades before 800. Yet this late golden age ended abruptly with its last regular stela commission in 810—a monument that was found smashed into dozens of fragments.

Recent evidence demonstrates that some portion of the Tikal dynasty fled the city at this time, setting up shop at Zacpeten, a peninsula on Lake Salpeten, 29 km to the south. A modest, even pitiful site, Zacpeten was nonetheless defended by substantial, newly built earthworks that sealed it off from the mainland. It was here that the holed-up exiles created monuments in 820 and 830, each a consummate display of continuity in Tikal traditions that gives no hint of their beleaguered situation and the crisis that had driven them into it.

The severe threat of this initial period must have abated by the time this royal remnant shifted home again, this time to the much grander and undefended Ixlu, just across the lake from Zacpeten. There we find Stela 1 from 859, dominated by the portrait of a flamboyantly plumed dynast—the very picture of orthodoxy—who is dressed as a specific patron deity of Tikal. But he is observed by a seated figure to the lower right who wears unusual clothing. Previous work had noted the foreign tinge to this character but couldn’t say more. Today we can.

New information comes from the all-text record on Ixlu Altar 1. Although this stone was long dated to 879, 20 years later than the stela, I have shown that this is erroneous and that the true date matches the one on the stela. This means that both monuments refer to the same ceremony performed on the same day: the stela showing it, the altar describing it. Most importantly, the altar does two things the stela does not. Employing the same “oversight” term seen on Caracol Altar 13, it tells us that the seated observer is the presiding authority under whom the ceremony takes place, and it provides his name and title. That nominal phrase includes the very same Papmalil monicker seen at Caracol and Naranjo, although, at three decades remove, this is presumably a later namesake. The critical part comes at the end, where he is said to be a xaman kaloomte’ “Great Lord of the North”—a title only otherwise seen in the northern Maya lowlands. This is an unambiguous statement that he was both politically ascendent and an outsider to the central lowlands. We know that by now the northern zone had close ties to western cultures and that its hybridized style in art, architecture, and ceramics was reaching down into the central area. The Ixlu mon uments offer the first concrete evidence for the political context within which this took place.

The reason the itinerant Tikal dynasts left their fortress at Zacpeten is evidently linked to this new political reality. No longer their own masters, they were instead beholden to a stranger in the land.

A STRANGER CAPITAL

We can now return to Ucanal, the earlier Papmalil’s base of operations. Situated in northeastern Guatemala, it was anciently known as K’anwitznal “Yellow Hill Place,” and its ceremonial core occupies a plateau-like hill that had been modified over many centuries. It was a notable, but by no means remarkable Classic Period capital.

That changed in the 9th century as, unlike the great majority of its contemporaries, Ucanal thrived, with new construction projects and a buoyant population. It now showed many of the foreign features seen at Ceibal. Notably, both centers built circular temples, an innovation in this period that marks the arrival of some new religious idea (see panel 2, p. 32). There is even a textual link between the two, with one Ceibal stela telling us that its most famous king arrived there at the behest of an Ucanal lord in 829.

Ucanal monuments are often badly eroded and none survive from Papmalil’s time. But we do have Stela 4, erected in 849 CE, which shows two richly dressed lords and, floating above them, the Central Mexican sun deity the later Aztec called Tonatiuh. Both lords bear conventional Maya names, but also thoroughly alien ones of western origin (see panel 3, p. 34). This is a strong hint that the ruling dynasty was now of mixed ancestries.

In 2014, new archaeological investigations at Ucanal were initiated by Christina Halperin of the University of Montreal and her Guatemalan colleagues, and I have been fortunate to collaborate on their project. My hope was for fresh discoveries of monuments and, indeed, in 2019, a carved stone, now known as Stela 29, was uncovered at the foot of a pyramid dubbed K-2.

Ucanal Stela 29 shows a standing male wearing a battle jacket and holding a spear-thrower in one hand and three long darts in the other. In Maya art, spear-throwers usually serve as ethnic markers for non-Maya westerners, while the long ornament that pierces his nose can also be linked to western inspiration. Another notable feature is this lord’s very slender physique, which matches those of similarly armed warriors on painted ceramics of this time— some of the last ever made by the Maya. Sadly, the inscription of Stela 29 is badly damaged, and almost nothing of it can now be read, robbing us of any name or political title. However, small details of the date strongly suggest that it was dedicated in 879.

In 2022, Halperin and her team dug into the K-2 pyramid and uncovered a desecrated, but once very wealthy, tomb. The contents had been extracted and burnt on a pyre, leaving only shattered fragments of bone and jade finery. She suggests that it was Papmalil who wrought this destruction, aiming to break with the past and entrench his new regime.

A NEW UNION

The idea that the newcomers married into the existing elite is supported by evidence I have only recently come across. It emerges from a carved bone, the foot-long mandible of a dolphin, now in the Dayton Art Institute.

It shows a standing male figure holding a knife, who wears a severed trophy head around his neck and a headdress of knotted rattlesnakes. Elements of the carving style and costuming resemble monuments dedicated in 864 and 869, suggesting that our undated bone was made close to that time. Its inscription begins with four hieroglyphs that identify the pictured lord, whose personal name is damaged but might read Upakal Chan Ahk “Shield of the Sky Turtle.” The significant part of this text comes next, where two short statements identify his parents.

The name of the father contains a sign whose spiked form has no counterpart in Maya writing. It resembles abstracted versions of the first day of the 20-day calendar used in Central Mexico and along the Gulf Coast, the spiny and fanged “Crocodile” the Aztec knew as Cipactli. The mother is not identified with a name but only as a k’uhul ixik “holy woman,” a title ubiquitously carried by Classic Maya royal women. The lack of a personal monicker is surely significant. The enthusiasm with which Classic Maya rulers normally recorded their mother’s names was provoked less by sentiment and more to signal the status and kin relationships she bestowed upon them. Since such connections were probably irrelevant in a cross-cultural marriage occurring during a time of crisis, her name was superfluous; it was enough to know that she was a high-born Maya. That their son is here given an exclusively Maya identity shows a process of assimilation at work, as foreign bloodlines were absorbed into late Maya society.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Classic Maya collapse remains one of the most startling social reverses in world history and one of the most momentous and enduring archaeological enigmas. What had once been a fabulously energetic, sophisticated, and populous civilization disappeared within a scant few decades. Given the anxieties and uncertainties of our own day, it is perhaps unsurprising that we are drawn to such dark historical parallels, ones we fear might foretell our own future.

The four inscriptions described here are part of a wider body of evidence indicating that outsiders were present in the Maya region soon after 800 CE— visible directly after the first clear signs of collapse begin—and that they achieved positions of influence and power. The centers they ruled, such as Ucanal and Ceibal, were marked by new religious ideas and styles in ceramics and architecture, both thriving while their neighbors declined.

This “new elite” used previously unseen names, sometimes spelled in foreign glyphs, and in all cases carried the most elevated of political titles, outranking the more traditional “old elite” who governed other enduring centers—who seem cowed into submission while struggling to preserve old traditions.

But were these arrivals the cause, or only a symptom of the calamity? There is no reason why an outside intrusion, even a violent one, should lead to mass depopulation. They may simply have been filling a political vacuum and exploiting an opportunity presented by some other factor or factors. Yet, unless and until we can identify what those other factors might be with certainty, we are left with a complete restructuring of the political landscape led by outsiders at a critical moment. Could Classic Maya success have been so finely balanced, so tenuous, that a single blow could tip them into irreversible decline? Whatever the explanation, the crisis came quickly and powerfully, and there was no subsequent recovery. The decay continued throughout the 9th century, and, by its end, all the elite groups, both old and new, were gone, and large swathes of the central region were effectively empty of people.

Centuries later, soon after the Spanish conquest, Maya sources make a few, very brief references to events said to fall between the late 8th and early 10th centuries CE. While these make no mention of plagues or pestilence, droughts or famine, they do refer to the arrival of “Mexicans” who became their political masters and, separately, to a “Great Descent” that came from the west. And this had happened before. Thanks to the decipherment, we know that forces from the mega-city of Teotihuacan, close to modern-day Mexico City, arrived in the Maya area in 378 CE and installed a foreign overlordship.

We are not done with the puzzle of the 9th century collapse yet, but I believe we have been missing an important piece we now need to put into the mix.

Simon Martin, Ph.D., Associate Curator in the American Section, is a political anthropologist and specialist in Maya hieroglyphic writing.

FOR FURTHER READING

Halperin, C.T. 2023. Foreigners Among Us: Alterity and the Making of Ancient Maya Societies. London: Routledge. 98(399):758–776.

Halperin, C.T., and S. Martin. 2020. Ucanal Stela 29 and the Cosmopolitanism of Terminal Classic Maya Stone Monuments. Latin American Antiquity 31(4):817–837.

Halperin, C.T., M.L.P. Carrera, K. A. Miller Wolf, and J.B. LeMoine. 2024. A Pivot Point in Maya History: Fire-burning Event at K’anwitznal (Ucanal) and the Making of a New Era of Political Rule. Antiquity.

Martin, S. 2020. Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, S. 2024. The Long Twilight of the Tikal Dynasty: What Ninth Century Tikal, Zacpeten, Ixlu, and Jimbal Tell Us About the Classic Maya Collapse. In Substance of the Ancient Maya: Kingdoms and Communities, Objects and Beings, ed. A.K. Scherer and T.G. Garrison. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

All unattributed photos are courtesy of the author.
All technical drawings are by the author.