Tikal and its Downfall

Today we visited Tikal, the most magnificent of the Guatemalan Mayan ruins. You probably remember it as a rebel base in a scene in Star Wars IV. The site has that sort of otherworldly aura, which attracts George Lucas, tens of thousands of tourists and us all the same.

The entire area was shrouded in a soft mist and low light, which added to the air of mystery and history. Located in lowland rainforest, Tikal is surrounded by giant ceiba, tropical cedar and mahogany trees. The ruins rise above the forest floor, towering up to two hundred feet above. Many of them are unexcavated, hidden under oddly rectilinear hills. They’re protected by huge park, which is also home to all sorts of animals. We saw coatis and occellated turkeys, heard howler monkeys and macaws, and were warned of jaguar and jaguarondi.

Tikal was settled around 900 BCE, but for the next century it was overshadowed by nearby El Mirador. Around 250 CE a massive volcanic eruption rocked the Mayan world and El Mirador fell from power, allowing Tikal and nearby Uaxactún to rise to power. The two were rivals until Tikal aligned itself with Teotihuacán, in modern day Mexico City, which armed Tikal with slings and arrows, allowing them to definitively defeat Uaxactún around 400 CE. At that point Teotihuacán appears to have taken over leadership of Tikal, starting a new royal line. Over the next half century Tikal dominated the area, growing rapidly. At its peak, Tikal was estimated to have somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 inhabitants.

At the same time Calakmul, to the north, was also expanding. Calakmul slowly surrounded Tikal with allied cities, including Naranjo and Waka’. Tikal attacked one of Calakmul’s allies, Caracol, in modern Belize, around 550 CE. In turn Caracol retaliated with reinforcements from Calakmul, defeating Tikal. For the next hundred years there was a hiatus in new construction. Eventually Tikal recovered, defeating Calakmul and undergoing a renaissance around 700 CE.

Then, around 900 CE all construction at Tikal, and most other Mayan sites, came to an abrupt halt. There are no new written inscriptions or steale after 910 CE. It’s as if the entire civilization, at the time one of the world’s most advanced, suddenly collapsed. How did it happen? It appears that Mayan civilization’s splendor and spectacular collapse may actually be connected. In Collapse, Jared Diamond’s new book, he posits that many societies exceed their ecological carrying capacities, often for empire building and conspicuous consumption (i.e. pyramid construction) purposes and are then unable to cope with changing environmental circumstances and subsequently collapse. Tikal is an extraordinary example of such a collapse.

Tikal had palaces, plazas, observatories, ball courts, residential complexes and steale. The most memorable are Tikal’s massive pyramids. Most of them were constructed in the Pre-Classic era, then renovated and expanded in the Classic area. Each successive ruler would add onto earlier pyramids in an attempt to increase their prestige. Rules would often build matching pyramids, mirror images of one another, to increase the temples’ power. By the late Classic period the pyramids were enormous, geometrically perfect, with steps up the sides and temples at the top, which were once opulently adorned, crowned by elaborate cornices.

All this construction required considerable resources. It’s important to remember that the Ancient Maya didn’t have metal tools, pulleys, the wheel or large domesticated beasts of burden. All building was done with brute strength. Stones had to be quarried, carried to the site and situated on the structures, sometimes hundreds of feet off the ground. Then, as if building massive pyramids weren’t enough, the pyramids were covered in a thick plaster. The plaster was fired at high temperatures, in furnaces fueled by massive deforestation.

Ancient Mayan farmers were incredibly agriculturally productive, especially in comparison to modern farmers, who barely eke out a living in the area. At its height the area had an estimated population density of between 500 and 1,500 people per square mile, compared to the area’s current 35 people per square mile. Despite this incredible productivity, the ruling class, with their resource intensive conquests and construction, were unsustainably parasitic. When times were hard, especially during droughts, there wasn’t enough food to go around, let alone support such aggrandizement and opulence.

The Ancient Maya also had an incredible water storage system. While we think of the Petén as a rainforest, there’s very little precipitation in the dry season. Underground there’s a layer of porous limestone, which traps little groundwater and precludes digging wells. Still, Tikal isn’t situated on a water source. Instead the city constructed a catchment system, plugging up holes in the karst to cisterns. They could store enough water for 30,000 people for six months.

As a result, the Ancient Maya’s fortunes could change very quickly, as happened around 800 CE. It appears that a series of significant drought years depleted the water supply and caused crop failures. The rulers themselves may have been ousted for failing to predict the droughts or appease the gods and prevent them, which would explain the end of new construction. The droughts probably increased the death rate and decreased birth rate more gradually, until the Ancient Maya as we know them were no more.

Let that be a lesson to modern day empire builders: Exceed your ecological carrying capacity and even the most impressive societies will collapse.