The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(57)

The Holy Lord’s remains were covered with gorgeous jade and shell jewelry, and he wore a peculiar goggle-eyed headdress made of cut shell. His bones showed that he had taken quite a beating over the course of his life: His skeleton was peppered with healed fractures, including two broken arms, a shattered shoulder, blunt trauma to the chest, broken ribs, a cracked skull, and a broken neck. The physical anthropologist who analyzed his remains wrote that, “In today’s world, it would appear that the deceased had survived an auto accident in which he had been thrown from the vehicle.” But in the ancient world, the injuries were probably caused by playing the famed Mesoamerican ball game called pitz in classical Mayan. (Maya warfare, which used piercing weapons such as the spear and atlatl and close-quarter engagement involving thrusting, stabbing, and crushing, would likely have produced a different mix of injuries.) We know from early accounts and pre-Columbian illustrations that the game was extremely fierce. One sixteenth-century friar, a rare eyewitness, spoke of players being killed instantly when the five-pound ball, made of solid latex sap, hit them on a hard rebound; he also described many others who “suffered terrible injuries” and were carried from the field to die later. The ball game was a vital Mesoamerican ritual, and playing it was essential to maintaining the cosmic order and keeping up the community’s health and prosperity. Because most of Quetzal Macaw’s injuries occurred when he was young, before he arrived in Copán, he might have achieved his leadership role by playing the ball game; alternatively, it is possible that he was required to play the game because of his high status. Either way, the burial confirmed he had not ascended dynastically to the throne from a local elite; he was definitely a foreigner to Copán. Symbols on his shield and the Groucho Marx–style goggle-eyed headdress connected him to the ancient city of Teotihuacan, located north of Mexico City, which in his day was the largest city in the New World. (Today it is a magnificent ruin containing some of the greatest pyramids in the Americas.) An analysis of isotopes in his bones, however, showed he had grown up not in Teotihuacan, but probably in the Maya city of Tikal, in northern Guatemala, two hundred miles north of Copán. (Drinking water, which varies from place to place, leaves a unique chemical signature in the bones.)

Four centuries after Macaw’s rule, at its apex around AD 800, Copán had become a large and powerful city of perhaps 25,000 inhabitants, spread out over many square miles. But all was not well; a creeping rot—environmental, economic, and social—had been undermining its society for some time and would eventually lead to destruction. Scholars have long debated the mystery surrounding the collapse and abandonment of Copán and the other magnificent cities of the Maya realm.

Skeletons speak with eloquence, and the many graves unearthed at Copán show that after AD 650, the health and nutrition of the common people appeared to decline. This happened even as the ruling classes apparently swelled in size over succeeding generations, with each generation larger than the last—in what archaeologists call the “increasingly parasitic role of the elite.” (We see the same process today in the gross expansion of the Saudi royal family into no fewer than fifteen thousand princes and princesses.) This proliferation of noble lineages may have triggered vicious internecine warfare and killing among the elite.

Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, argues that the destruction of Copán was caused by environmental degradation combined with royal neglect and incompetence. Beginning around AD 650, the rulers of Copán engaged in a building spree, erecting gorgeous temples and monuments that glorified themselves and their deeds. As is typical of Maya inscriptions, not a single one at Copán mentions a commoner. Working folk had to build all those buildings. Farmers had to feed all those laborers along with the holy lords and nobles. This type of class division usually works when everyone believes they are part of a system, with each person occupying a valued place in society and contributing to the vital ceremonies that maintain the cosmic order.

In Maya culture, the holy lords had a responsibility to keep the cosmos in order and appease the gods through ceremonies and rituals. The commoners were willing to support this privileged class as long as they kept up their end of the bargain with effective rituals. But after 650, deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion began reducing crop yields. The working classes, the farmers and monument builders, may have suffered increasing hunger and disease, even as the rulers hogged an ever-larger share of resources. The society was heading for a crisis.

Diamond writes: “We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)

Other archaeologists say this conclusion is too simple, and that the holy lords did indeed see things were going awry. They tried to solve these problems with solutions that had worked in centuries past: increased building projects (a jobs program) and more raiding (resource acquisition), both of which involved moving workers from outlying farms into the city. But this time the old solutions failed. The ill-advised building projects speeded up the deforestation that was already reducing rainfall, and it accelerated soil loss, erosion, and the silting of precious farmland and rivers.