Buenas dias! We have just returned to La Paz from a voyage of a different kind than we normally undertake. We left Hawk behind for this trip and, instead of navigating our way across the sea, we were navigating the ancient past. This voyage took us by plane and van to Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico that borders Guatemala. There we spent a week exploring the Mayan ruins that litter the lush jungles in the foothills of the La Candon mountain range of Guatemala. Alonso Mendez from the Maya Exploration Center (www.mayaexploration.org) acted as our mentor, guide and navigator. Alonso's adventurous Brooklyn-born mother was working for the archaeologists at the Mayan site called Palenque in the 1970s when she met, fell in love with and married Alonso's father, a high-ranking Mayan from a nearby highland community who was also working with the archaeologists. Alonso grew up on the archaeological site at Palenque, and he returned there after graduating from Middlebury College with a BA in Fine Arts to participate as an artist and draftsman in the exploration of the ruins. Alonso has been directly involved with many of the projects on the site over the course of the last two decades, and he has also spent a great deal of time exploring the other Mayan sites in the area.



We had spent the last few months reading about Mayan culture and history, looking at photos of the sites we would be visiting and trying to understand something of the Maya. But when we first arrived at Palenque and climbed the stairs to the temple-lined ceremonial plaza, we were completely overwhelmed. Ahead of us, a row of three pyramids standing shoulder to shoulder and each taller than the last were connected by horizontal rows of stone steps so steep and high that we could often touch the step two up from the one we were standing on without bending over. A rectangular palace larger than a football field was set across the end of the long plaza fronting this line of pyramids, and beyond more temples topped the steep hills. Lush jungle surrounded these buildings; a jungle that had once twined over the ruins and sent roots deep within their masonry structures, completely hiding them from view. This jungle still holds captive more than a third of the buildings at Palenque, buildings that have been mapped but never excavated. The green-hued light filtering through the trees gave the whole scene a fairy-tale feel, softening the strong lines of the buildings and the harsh sunshine. We felt as we did standing in the Forum in Rome or the Acropolis in Greece, only in this case there was no living, vibrant city surrounding us, only the jungle sounds of exotic birds.



Mexico is awash in archaeological sites, and a vast number have never been explored. After visiting Palenque, which receives 700,000 tourists every year, Alonso took us to Plan de Ayutla, a recently discovered ruin that has yet to be excavated that very few people ever see. There we came to really appreciate what had been accomplished at Palenque. We climbed a hundred feet or more up two steep mounds covered with dense jungle, with vines overhead and roots that twined like snakes through the masonry between massive blocks at our feet. These mounds were capped by temples similar to Palenque, but covered with such a dense growth that they would have been invisible from the air. We scrambled around pulling apart bushes to pass through tiny openings into large rooms with arched ceilings whose walls were coated with a thick layer of lime. Those walls could be painted with murals; the lintels we ducked under could be carved with glyphs; the buried staircases we scrambled over could be covered with masks and incense burners; there might well be a tomb at the heart of the mound with jade masks and a carved sarcophagus.



But Mexico has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to archaeological sites and a paucity of resources to explore them. Alonso told us that if the known sites were excavated and studied at the rate that the current sites have been, it would be 2,000 years before they would all be catalogued - and they discover more every few years. Once uncovered, the sites are even more vulnerable to deterioration than they were when entombed in lime and dirt and covered with jungle growth, and there is no money to keep most sites up to the level of Palenque. At Plan de Ayutla, they could no longer afford to keep a few guards on the site to prevent looting, and the locals had begun excavating stones to use in the foundations of their houses.



It is very difficult to put the Mesoamerican civilizations into context, largely because as impressive as what remains today may be, it represents a tiny fraction of what existed pre-contact. When Cortez reached what is now Mexico City in 1520, the city was quite likely the most populous in the world with something over 200,000 people. Twenty years later, the Spanish priest Las Casas estimated that 12 to 15 million people had died in Mesoamerica as a result of disease brought by Cortez to the New World - he later increased his estimate to 20 million people. It's entirely possible that the pre-contact population of the Americas exceeded that of Europe. Most of the sites we visited had been looted by the Spaniards, who took anything they considered to be of value and destroyed much of the rest. Just one example: they burned thousands - and maybe tens of thousands - of written codices produced by the Maya on stucco-covered bark leaving only three in existence. Those three proved essential in unraveling the meaning behind Mayan glyphs, and one can only wonder what we would have learned about Mayan life and culture had the other codices not been destroyed.



The roots of Mayan culture extend back to about 300 BC, and many of their achievements built upon an earlier culture called the Olmecs that overlapped with the beginning of the Mayan rise. Olmec culture dates back to 2000 BC and earlier, and it may have originated in Costa Rica before extending its influence across much of Central America and southern Mexico. By the end of the Olmec period and the rise of the Mayas, the Olmecs had developed a primitive form of pictorial writing and created a complex calendar based on Venus's movements as well as the sun's which was more accurate than Western calendars of the day. The Mayans refined the calendar and the writing, creating a sophisticated written language that mixed pictograms and syllabic symbols. The zero date for their calendar has been determined to be in August of 3114 BC, and Alonso told us that he has calculated that this was when Orion, a constellation critical to the Maya, appeared on the horizon for the first time. Their mathematics included the use of zero as a placeholder, something the Romans never developed, which allowed them to do complex mathematical calculations.



The Olmecs also bequeathed the Maya agriculture, though they too were probably the recipients of the practice rather than its originators. The first small cobs of domesticated corn found in Mexico have been carbon-dated to 7000 BC, which is roughly the same time that agriculture was developing in Mesopotamia and in China. Corn is the most difficult of all plants to domesticate because the husk prevents seeds from dispersing - not an adaptive evolutionary trait! Modern genetic engineers still do not know how the domestication of corn was achieved or even what the precursor wild plant was, though most believe it to be a grass called teosinte. Corn figures prominently in the mythology of the peoples of Mesoamerica, who believe corn to be a gift from the gods and themselves "people of the corn." In Mayan iconography, the corn plant is often portrayed as a cross-shaped man and is shown sprouting from the god of the earth's forehead. By the time of the Mayas, complex irrigation systems were used to raise corn, beans and squash in milpas, a mixed agriculture that replenished the soil and provided a balanced diet. This agricultural innovation eventually found its way throughout the Americas and was the technique the Indians shared with the Pilgrims when the Pilgrims were starving to death.



The Mayans were not as bloodthirsty as Mel Gibson suggests, though they did believe in the power of blood in propitiating the gods. Various forms of self-mutilation were practiced to draw blood which was burned as a sacrificial offering. As the Mayan city-states came into increasing conflict when Mayan culture started to decline, and as the beliefs of the more blood-thirsty cultures that flourished around what would become Mexico City were incorporated into Mayan religions, blood offerings of all types increased and the sacrifice of nobles taken in warfare became a common practice. Ironically, the blood sacrifices and the idea of resurrection common in Mayan religion paved the way for easy acceptance of Catholicism with the substitution of wine for blood and Christ on the cross for the cross-shaped corn/man iconography.



The Mayan civilization is shrouded in mystery, but the single biggest mystery is the sudden decline and abandonment of city-states we visited like Palenque, Bonampak and Yaxchilan in the southern part of the Mayan empire over a period of about 100 years. Archaeologists have put forward a variety of explanations for this sudden reversal of fortune. Jared Diamond's Collapse attributes the fall of the southern Mayan cities to deforestation and drought; others blame internecine warfare and overpopulation. All of these factors likely contributed, but the actual causes are probably more complex than we can imagine. Alonso believed that part of the problem was a lack of flexibility and resiliency in the society. The leaders had built their power on being able to predict the seasonal cycles, to "control" the elements and bring rain, and the society had become highly specialized. Drought would have done more than cause crops to wither and die, therefore. It would have undermined the religious and political beliefs of the peasants who supplied food to the great cities, and broken the covenant that bound them to their leaders. Their leaders lacked the skills to grow their own food, run the irrigation systems, or make the most basic items. Alonso painted a picture of the great Mayan rulers, priests and scribes starving to death in a city virtually abandoned by the peasants, bereft of a labor force to maintain the monuments, of worshippers, and, eventually, of food.



One of the books we read suggested that if a millennia from now someone asks why the Soviet Union collapsed in less than a decade, it would be overly simplistic to say that it disintegrated after drought caused a series of poor harvests in the 1970s. While drought might have been a contributing factor, the Soviet Union would have withstood that if other cultural, social and economic factors hadn't come into play.We underestimate the Maya if we view their fall as any less complex.



We've posted some images from our Mayan voyage in our photo gallery on the Mexico page. Hope you enjoy them!



Beth and Evans



s/v Hawk