The Classic Period of Mesoamerican culture extended from roughly ad 250 to ad 900 and saw two of the marvels of the pre-conquest New World, the city Teotihuacan on the central Mexican plateau and the Mayan cities of southeastern Mexico. The ad 250 date corresponds to the earliest date in the Mayan calendar appearing on a carved monument, or stela, in the area. Classic cultures differed from their forebears in having more complex political organization, larger populations, full-time craft specialization, increased social stratification, and more centralized political authority.16
By the fourth century of the Christian era, a new civilization had emerged in central Mexico. When the Aztecs later encountered the remains of its capital, located thirty miles northeast of the present site of Mexico City, they named it Teotihuacan (the City of the Gods). The ethnic identity of the city’s builders remains unclear. This city, with a population of 100,000 or more, covered eight square miles, an area larger than Rome, which flourished at the same time. Between AD 250 and AD 700, Teotihuacan’s trading and tribute empire dominated central Mexico, and its influence was felt from present-day Guatemala to the dry non-agricultural areas far north of the city. The city relied on the highly fertile lands of the Valley of Mexico and a special resource—obsidian— for tool making. Obsidian was so far superior to other available stones for producing cutting tools that archeologist Robert Cobean noted that obsidian was to ancient Mesoamerica what steel is to modern civilization. More than 10 percent of the city’s labor force appear to have been obsidian workers. In addition to the city’s distinctive architectural style, its ceramic style influenced potters throughout Mesoamerica.17
The city’s planners laid out more than 2,000 rectangular city blocks. Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Sun, whose construction required an estimated 10,000 laborers working for twenty years, still inspires visitors. Its base covers an area equal to that of the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. Archeological evidence also indicates that the notion of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, which had a temple built there in its honor, originated in the city. Along with the Virgin of Guadalupe, Quetzalcoatl is a quintessential symbol of Mexico.18
Figure 1.2 Teotihuacan
Source: Copyright Michael E. Calderwood
The city met its end in the seventh century through deliberate burning by the hand of unknown invaders. By AD 750, its population had fallen below 10,000. A likely culprit for the city’s decline is deforestation. Trees were felled to supply fuel to burn the lime used in constructing the city. The loss of forests may have led to erosion and desiccation, thus undermining Teotihuacan’s agricultural base.19
At the same time as the Olmec culture was flourishing, a distinctive Maya culture was emerging to its east. This culture developed over a 39,000-square-mile area extending from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to modern Honduras. By 1000 BC the inhabitants of this region had settled in villages and were making pottery, and by 800 BC they were erecting small temples. Later, the population of this area soared, and a stratified social system emerged. Polities with centralized political power dominated the area.20
For a 650-year period, the area reached intellectual and artistic heights no other New World culture, and few in the Old World, could match. When Maya civilization was in full flower, it featured enormous ceremonial centers crowded with masonry temples and palaces facing spacious plazas covered with white stucco. These ceremonial centers, even though they shared a common culture, were never united into a single state. Rather they formed numerous small city-states, as was the case with classical Greece and Renaissance Italy. In the eighth century, these city-states numbered at least twenty-five.21
Maya urban centers, some of which may have exceeded 75,000 in population, had administrative, manufacturing, commercial, and religious roles. In each city-state there was a marked division of labor. Nearby peasants produced an agricultural surplus large enough to support an intelligentsia, craftsmen, traders, and corvee laborers who erected massive public structures such as temples. Maya potters achieved chromatic effects of great brilliance by firing their vessels at low temperatures. Traders distributed manufactured goods, including pottery, cotton cloth, and obsidian tools, over a wide area, using both overland trails and seafaring canoes. The urban intelligentsia used a numerical system employing the zero and was so sophisticated astronomically that its members could predict eclipses.22
These city-states were ruled over by individuals, including a few women, who formed a hereditary nobility. Rulers emphasized their connection to the supernatural world and controlled rituals that their subjects believed to be essential to life and prosperity. Such rituals were perceived to ensure water, food, and protection.23
Warfare was a staple feature of classic Maya society. Unlike the Inca to the south, the Maya did not use war to expand territorially. Extinguishing a vanquished kingdom and its dynasty was perceived as a threat to the world order. Rather, tribute obligations and vassalage were imposed. War allowed individual Maya rulers to display their prowess by sacrificing prisoners they had
Figure 1.3 Drawing from lintel 1, Yaxchilan temple 33, showing accession of Ruler Bird Jaguar IV, holding scepter, with his wife Lady Great Skull at right. Maya writing appears in corners and to left of the illustration
Source: Drawings by Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, vol. 3, Pt. 1, Yaxchilan, reproduced courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College
THE MAYAN WRITING SYSTEM
Up until the middle of the twentieth century, a number of factors prevented the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics:
¦ There was a prevailing racist assumption that the Maya were intellectually incapable of developing a complex writing system on a par with Egyptian hieroglyphics.
¦ Most of the scholars studying the Maya were unfamiliar with the early Old World writing systems, which would have given insight into how the Maya system functioned.
¦ It was assumed that if the Maya had phonetic writing, it would be alphabetic as is the case with European languages.
¦ Finally, Cold War rivalries delayed acceptance of a Russian's correct assertion that Maya writing combined symbols with phonetic value and those that conveyed ideas (logographs).
Progress on deciphering Mayan writing began in earnest with a 1952 publication by Yuri Knorosov, a Russian linguist who was familiar with early scripts such as the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese, all of which combined phonetic symbols and logographs. He suggested that it was quite likely the Maya followed the same pattern. Once Knorosov's view became accepted, rapid progress at deciphering the hieroglyphs commenced. Anthropologist Michael Coe referred to the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs as "one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of our age, on a par with the exploration of space and the discovery of the genetic code." Coe also commented on the vast collaborative effort that finally led to an almost complete understanding of the Maya hieroglyphs: "Hardly a day or week seemed to pass without some amazing new fact coming to light, or a new reading being made for a glyph, or someone coming forth with a revolutionary new interpretation of older data."a
Eventually it became clear that the Mayan hieroglyphs, which took the form of squares with rounded corners (see Figure 1.3), combined logographs with phonetic symbols that represented the classic Mayan language that was spoken at the time the writing system was codified. The logo-graphs convey an idea, much as the "2" does in modern writing systems. The phonetic component is not alphabetic, with symbols corresponding to a given sound, as our letter "T" does. Rather each phonetic symbol corresponds to a consonant and to the vowel that follows, just as occurs in the modern Japanese writing system. The Maya had a distinct symbol for each consonant + vowel combination occurring in their language. As a result of deciphering the Maya hieroglyphs, the written history of the New World now extends back nearly 2,000 years. a Coe (1999: 138, 7, 214) and Sharer (2006: 141).
Captured on the battlefield. The blood and gore of this constant warfare was frequently depicted on stelae, which were erected to glorify rulers and their ancestors.24
At its peak in roughly AD 700, the Maya population numbered perhaps 10 million. Slash-and-burn agriculture produced much of the food they consumed. However, as population densities rose, more intensive practices were adopted to increase yields. These included terracing, household gardens, irrigation, raised-bed agriculture, and tree crops such as cacao, allspice, avocado, and papaya. The chief ground crops were corn, beans, squash, chile, and tomatoes.25
Perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of the Maya was the development of a hieroglyphic writing system (see the box on the Mayan writing system). Once modern scholars learned how to read the hieroglyphs in the late twentieth century, they gained insight into a dazzling panorama of Maya history, beliefs, and experiences. Hieroglyphs recorded information on Maya kings and queens, their claims to power, supernatural patrons, alliances, wars, triumphs, and defeats.26
One of the outstanding Maya city-states was Palenque, set in the lower foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas. The city occupied a commanding position overlooking the Gulf Coastal Plain. Maya architects working there in the seventh century AD had learned to construct lightly built vaults and mansard roofs, so the city has a spacious appearance lacking in earlier Maya sites. Carved stelae reveal the dynastic history of the city. Palenque expanded rapidly after AD 615 when K’inich Janab Pakal assumed the throne. During his reign, the city became the dominant political, religious, and cultural center of the area. The Maya erected at least thirty-five major building complexes at Palenque, and they walled stream banks and built aqueducts to manage the 120 inches of rain that fall on the city annually. The city’s existence was long lost to Europeans. One of the early visitors to the rediscovered Palenque was American diplomat and lawyer John Lloyd Stevens, who visited the area between 1839 and 1842.27 He observed:
Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations; reached their golden age, and perished, entirely unknown. . . We lived in the ruined palace of their kings; we went up to their desolate temples and fallen altars; and wherever we moved we saw the evidence of their taste, their skill in arts, their wealth and power.28
A later Maya city-state, Chichen Itza, dominated the Yucatan peninsula between ad 850 and AD 1000. At its peak it was the most powerful and successful of the Maya city-states. It was more commercially oriented than earlier Maya city-states and traded with various regions within and beyond the Maya area. Much of its power was derived from its dominance of newly developed coastal trade networks using seafaring canoes.29
Figure 1.4 Palenque, showing the palace, center right, with the Temple of the Inscriptions in the background
Source: Copyright Michael E. Calderwood
Figure 1.5 El Castillo at Chichen Itza
Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, the University of Texas at Austin
An enduring mystery is why the Maya city-states, which flourished for centuries, went into irreversible decline. This decline can be accurately dated since the production of monumental structures and stelae bearing dates ceased. The last date in the Maya calendar carved in stelae for Peten corresponds to January 15, 910. This decline did not follow a uniform trajectory and played out differently in different polities. However, the result was always the same—within 100 or 200 years of reaching their peak population levels, most of the central and southern Maya lowlands lost about 90 percent of their population.30
Apparently this decline in part resulted from overpopulation, which led to environmental degradation, whose impact was vastly amplified by climate change. As the Maya population expanded, formerly forested hillsides were cultivated. This resulted in erosion that exceeded the rate of soil formation. Rather than husbanding resources, Maya kings further depleted them by attempting to erect more grandiose monuments than their rivals did. Maya warfare, already endemic, peaked just before the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization. Greatly compounding the Maya’s problems of overpopulation and resource scarcity was the worst drought in the last
7,000 years, which began in ad 760.31
At the same time as the Maya and Teotihuacan were flourishing, the Zapotecs developed Monte Alban in the Valley of Oaxaca. This city-state, whose population peaked at about 25,000, served as a political and religious center from which the Zapotecs dominated more than 1,000 smaller towns in the valley. Zapotec craftsmen constructed a very long, large plaza there as well as magnificent tombs with lovely murals on the walls. The Zapotecs also developed a writing system, but unlike that of the Maya, it has yet to be deciphered. While there is no sign that Monte Alban suffered a violent demise such as that suffered by Teotihuacan, by ad 900 most of the city was in ruins and the Valley of Oaxaca was divided into dozens of petty city-states.32
World History
