David Stuart, The Four Heavens: a New History of the Ancient Maya (2026)Back in the 1970s, major breakthroughs were made in translating the ancient Maya script. Since then our knowledge has steadily grown and the body of translated texts, most either carved in stone or painted on pottery, now reaches into the thousands. What do they tell us about the Maya world?
David Stuart thinks they tell us a great deal. He admits, though, that not everyone agrees. He has written a whole book trying to convey the knowledge gleaned from these texts, but all his conclusions are hedged around with limitations. For example, almost all of these texts come from royal courts, and they mainly commemorate key events in the lives of kings and queens: their births, marriages and deaths, their victories in battle, their major construction projects, and the festive days when they celebrated the great events of the complex Maya calendar. Everyone else — peasants, potters, traders, soldiers, fishermen, stone carvers — is ignored. Not only that, but these texts are for the most part very short, a sentence or two, recording facts but never giving us the analytical perspective of a Thucydides or Sima Qian, some framework that might help us understand what was really going on. Since there are so many texts, and since texts from one city sometimes reference events or people from others, we can construct a narrative from them. But I, at least, was left thinking that the real new knowledge gleaned from fifty years of study could be written out in two or three pages of modern text.
This is a drawing of the Oval Palace Tablet from Palenque, which provides a good example of the sort of thing we have learned. It shows a young man being crowned as the city's new ruler. The woman offering the crown to him is his mother. And she, we know from other texts, was the daughter of a more powerful ruler in a different city, who forced Palenque's ruler to bow to him and take one of that overlord's daughters as his wife. Palenque's future ruler would therefore be the overlord's grandson. Notice that it is the mother, not the father, who crowned the son, suggesting that that poor, defeated fellow had been shoved aside.
Which is fascinating and gives us some insight into both rivalries between Maya cities and the machinations of powerful Maya dynasties. Rivalries between ruling clans, notably the Kanul or Snakes and the Mutul, seem to have driven most of the politics in the Classic period of 200 to 800 AD.
But look at what is missing. For starters, military history; I did not notice a single sentence in Stuart's book about armies, fighting, sieges, strategy, or any of that. Given that these cities were in constant conflict with each other, it seems an important omission. I found myself wondering frequently how big the armies involved were. One ruler of some importance took the title "Lord of Twenty Hostages;" does that mean his victory involved defeating a force of only twenty men, or that only nobles of above a certain rank counted?
Economic life is even more of a black hole. The texts tell us nothing about taxation or labor service; how were all those pyramids and palaces built? Trade only appears in that exotic goods were often mentioned as war booty, but we have no idea how they moved around. Who served in armies and how were they paid or fed?
In particular, a point I will come back to, the texts say nothing about the role of elites in the broader economy. Some Maya communities had elaborate irrigation systems, and presumably somebody managed them, but those somebodies never put up inscriptions describing their achievements. One of the great puzzles about the May was the relationship between the elite world of the temples and the texts and the lives of the peasantry, and the inscriptions tell us absolutely nothing about it.
What does everyone wants to know about the Maya? What happened to them. This is a vexed question and has been ever since Europeans wandered into the central American jungles and found vast cities overgrown with trees. David Stuart has framed his whole book around answering this question, and he does have some thoughts, but I found that his attempts to use Maya texts to do this all fell flat.
One important part of this question is: what, exactly, fell? There is an archaeological site in El Salvador known as Joya de Cerén. It appears to have been an ordinary village or small town that was buried by a volcano around 600 AD. Studying the well-preserved houses, archaeologists have been stunned by how much they resembled Maya houses of the 1930s. The houses were the same size and shape and built in the same way, and the same kind of pots were hanging on the same posts. The gardens were laid out in the same way. There was, it seems, a Maya peasant culture that endured for millennia. Somewhere off in the distance elites were building stone cities, fighting wars with each other, inventing a writing system, and all that stuff. One naive view would be that the elite culture was just a sort of flower that sprouted from the top of an otherwise unchanging tree, having no impact on most lives. I don't think this can be right, but it is one interpretation of the gulf between the event-filled world of the inscriptions and the slowly changing world of village life.
The reason I don't think that can be entirely right is that populations within the Maya world probably rose and fell dramatically over the past 2,000 years. Archaeologists think that there may have been five times as many people in the Maya world at its peak around 650 AD as there were a thousand years later. There has been a lot of fighting about this, with some people wanting the population to remain high until the arrival of Europeans and their diseases, but David Stuart gives a robust defense of the view that populations plummeted when the cities of the central Maya world were abandoned in the 800s and 900s. Somehow, therefore, the elite world existed in a symbiosis with a rich agricultural economy that sustained high populations until it did not. Opinions differ as to the direction of the causation — did an agricultural collapse, driven by climate change or overfarming, cause the fall of the cities, or did the disappearance of the managerial elite via intense warfare lead to agricultural collapse? — but there was a relationship.
So what caused the collapse? David Stuart thinks the key is understanding that the Maya way of life was inherently unstable. He quotes one archaeologist as saying "The lowland Maya seem to have been uncommonly restless for a people described as sedentery." (21) Many inscriptions describe royal families moving from one city or fortress to another, some inscriptions seem to have been pulled from one city and erected in another. To Stuart, this is a sign that the Maya just did not expect their cities to endure and therefore walked away form them whenever circumstances seem to require it.
There have been times and places within the human story when things endured. Cities like Rome, kingdoms like ancient Egypt, worlds where the central truths and their physical embodiments remained unchanged for centuries or millennia. Other human societies lacked those enduring monuments. Consider the kingdoms of the Asian steppes, which rose and fell and rose and fell again. One example I know well is northern and central Europe in the centuries before the Roman empire. We know there were powerful kingdoms and mighty tribes, but we think they rarely endured for more than a generation or two. Towns and fortresses were built with great effort only to be abandoned in a few decades.
The Mississippian Indians of North America are another good example; none of their mound cities endured for more than 150 years.
David Stuart thinks the Maya were another people prone to instability, and that the famous collapse at the end of the Classic era was only the biggest in a long series of collapses. Stuart focuses in particular on the collapse of the pre-classic Maya world around 100 AD, when centers like el Mirador were largely abandoned; some were re-occupied during the Classic era, but most were not. Maya rises and collapses continued after the end of the Classic period in the 800s. You may have read that the famous city of Chichen Itza dates to after the collapse of the Classic era, but it also did not endure; it emerged as a city around 1000 AD and was largely abandoned in the 1200s.
Stuart thinks the overall instability of the Maya was connected to their cyclical calendar. The dates circled around again and again, with important cycles lasting 20 and 400 years. Maya royal monuments sometimes explicitly link current rulers to past ones, noting that they did things just like their ancestors. It is intriguing that the glory period of Copan corresponds almost exactly to one Bak'tun of 400 years, which would have been written by the Maya as 9.0.0.0.0 to 10.0.0.0.0 (117). So maybe it just seemed natural to the Maya for a city to have a life cycle, rising and then falling and being abandoned. And maybe this was connected in some way we don't understand to agricultural cycles, such as the exhaustion of water supplies or the deterioration of soils.
Stuart's reading of the inscriptions from the last decades of the Classic era is that intensifying warfare was part of the problem. I found this utterly unconvincing. He says there were more texts about war, displacement, and the fall of dynasties, but there had always been such texts and he doesn't offer any numbers to back up his claim. (To take just one example, the famous Classic period pyramid at Tikal, once known as the Temple of the Jaguar God, was actually a war monument that displayed booty from its's builders' victory over a rival dynasty.) Did they already very violent Maya get even more violent after 800 AD? Maybe, but Stuart doesn't prove it.
So I do not think that Stuart's reading of inscriptions tells us much that is new about the great Maya collapse. But I do think that his picture of a people who were just not that into permanence has much to recommend it. The apparent gulf between the world of the royal courts and the mass of the people may be another part of the story.
The Maya texts we have been able to read are wonderful. It is amazing just to know the names of hundreds of people from so long ago, and fascinating to learn about their wars and political intrigues. But I found, as I said, that they did very little to change my overall view of the Maya. In focusing on them, Stuart made his book much less useful than it might have been. Will somebody please write about a book about the Maya that zeroes in on the questions that interest me: how was all of this building and fighting done? What sustained it? And what role did the elites, who chose to portray themselves mainly getting married, fighting wars, and raising temples, have in the broader economy and society of their world? Did the elites and the peasants care about each other at all?
Except for the drawing of the Oval Palace Tablet, all the illustrations are from Frederick Catherwood's Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1844)
