Mayan DISCOVERY: How find in 2,000-year-old city ‘reveals story of creation’

The Mayans were a civilisation known for their architecture, mathematics and astronomical beliefs, who date back as far as 2000BC. However, thanks to a discovery made at the El Mirador site in northern Guatemala, historians are able to know more about their theories over how human beings ended up on Earth. Archaeologist Richard Hansen took Morgan Freeman to see a spectacular discovery deep in the jungles during the filming of “The Story of God”.

He told Mr Freeman in 2017: “We like to think of Los Angeles and New York as being modern cities, but these guys had the same perspective of their own city. 

“They had water delivery systems. they had freeways – the very first in the world. 

“This is one of the most interesting excavations we have ever had. 

“This is art that was carved in stucco hundreds of years before Christ and it has an incredible scene showing the entire pantheon of the Mayan religion.

This is one of the most interesting excavations we have ever had

Richard Hansen

“This is the Mayan Bible, the Mayan Genesis story with all the deities that are needed to tell the story.”

Mr Hansen went on to reveal what he believed the stonework represented. 

He added: “This is the oldest version of the Mayan’s sacred story of creation that has ever been found.

“The focus is on two swimmers carrying a severed head.

“It’s this head right here that gave us the clue who this might be a the first place. 

“We think this is Hunahpu – one of the hero twins that serves the whole process of creation.”

The Mayan Hero Twins are the central figures of the oldest Mayan myth to have been preserved in its entirety. Hunahpu and Xbalanque are portrayed as complementary forces – life and death, sky and Earth or day and night.  The pair need each other to balance out the other and balance out the two sides of a single entity. It comes after another discovery was revealed when the truth was over when the Mayans thought the world would end. 

In 2012, there was a brief frenzy after it was claimed that December 21 would mark the end of the world because it was the end-date of a 5,126-year cycle on the Mayan calendar. However, thanks to the discovery of a stone slate in Tikal, Guatemala, archaeologists are able to understand more about this key date. Stanley Guenter, a world-leading decoder of Mayan inscriptions, revealed during the same series: “This is stela 10, you can see we’ve got a king – there is his head and big headdress full of feathers, [his] shoulders, all of his jewellery and down to his feet.

“If you look down below, we can actually see we have a captive and we can see his hands and even legs – all tied up for sacrifice.

“[On the back] we have a date that gives us a specific point in time – 11 years and 360 days, then we have three katuns – which are 20 years each. 

“So that is another 60, and then we have nine b’ak’tuns, because this is a date of about 525AD.

“So if you remember we had 13 b’ak’tuns ended in 2012, but the really interesting thing is the monument does not stop there.”

Mr Guenter then went on to reveal how the entirety of the discovery reveals the 2012 prediction was just a single cycle inside a number of bigger cycles.

He continued: “It tells us there were 19 of the higher unit – the pictun – and even higher, 11 at the next unit.

“Each one of those units is 20 times larger than the previous, so what we see on this monument is that 13 b’ak’tuns was not the end of any calendar – just one cycle. 

“It was just the start of a new cycle, a new beginning, that would go on for almost eternity.

“We have never found the end for the Mayans.”

Spider Monkey at Teotihuacan May Have Been a Maya Gift

The complete skeletal remains of a spider monkey — seen as an exotic curiosity in pre-Hispanic Mexico — grants researchers new evidence regarding social-political ties between two ancient powerhouses: Teotihuacán and Maya Indigenous rulers. 

The discovery was made by Nawa Sugiyama, a UC Riverside anthropological archaeologist, and a team of archaeologists and anthropologists who since 2015 have been excavating at Plaza of Columns Complex, in Teotihuacán, Mexico.

The remains of other animals were also discovered, as well as thousands of Maya-style mural fragments and over 14,000 ceramic sherds from a grand feast. These pieces are more than 1,700 years old.

The spider monkey is the earliest evidence of primate captivity, translocation, and gift diplomacy between Teotihuacán and the Maya.

Details of the discovery will be published in the journal PNAS. This finding allows researchers to piece evidence of high diplomacy interactions and debunks previous beliefs that Maya presence in Teotihuacán was restricted to migrant communities, said Sugiyama, who led the research. 

“Teotihuacán attracted people from all over, it was a place where people came to exchange goods, property, and ideas. It was a place of innovation,” said Sugiyama, who is collaborating with other researchers, including Professor Saburo Sugiyama, co-director of the project and a professor at Arizona State University, and Courtney A.

Hofman, a molecular anthropologist with the University of Oklahoma. “Finding the spider monkey has allowed us to discover reassigned connections between Teotihuacán and Maya leaders.

The spider monkey brought to life this dynamic space, depicted in the mural art. It’s exciting to reconstruct this live history.”

Researchers applied a multimethod archaeometric (zooarchaeology, isotopes, ancient DNA, palaeobotany, and radiocarbon dating) approach to detail the life of this female spider monkey. The animal was likely between 5 and 8 years old at the time of death.

Its skeletal remains were found alongside a golden eagle and several rattlesnakes, surrounded by unique artefacts, such as fine greenstone figurines made of jade from the Motagua Valley in Guatemala, copious shell/snail artefacts, and lavish obsidian goods such as blades and projectiles points.

This is consistent with the evidence of the live sacrifice of symbolically potent animals participating in state rituals observed in Moon and Sun Pyramid dedicatory caches, researchers stated in the paper.

Results from the examination of two teeth, the upper and lower canines, indicate the spider monkey in Teotihuacán ate maize and chilli peppers, among other food items. The bone chemistry, which offers insight into the diet and environmental information, indicates at least two years of captivity. Prior to arriving in Teotihuacán, it lived in a humid environment, eating primarily plants and roots.

The research is primarily funded by grants awarded to Sugiyama from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. Teotihuacán is a pre-Hispanic city recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site and receives more than three million visitors annually. 

In addition to studying ancient rituals and uncovering pieces of history, the finding allows for a reconstruction of greater narratives, of understanding how these powerful, advanced societies dealt with social and political stressors that very much reflect today’s world, Sugiyama said. 

“This helps us understand principles of diplomacy, to understand how urbanism developed … and how it failed,” Sugiyama said. “Teotihuacán was a successful system for over 500 years, understanding past resilience, its strengths and weaknesses are relevant in today’s society. There are many similarities between then and now. Lessons can be seen and modelled from past societies; they provide us with cues as we go forward.”

Lidar Survey Reveals Urban Sprawl of Ancient Maya City

Following years of research, Dr. Kathryn Reese-Taylor, PhD, professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at UCalgary, as well as her team of international colleagues, has used lidar (light detection and ranging) to help uncover more secrets of the enormous ancient Maya city of Calakmul.

As a result, researchers on the Bajo Laberinto Archaeological Project, a University of Calgary-led international and multidisciplinary research project directed by Reese-Taylor, can now better understand the density and landscape modifications of Mexico’s ancient Maya Calakmul settlement.

“By using lidar imagery, we are now able to fully understand the immense size of the Calakmul urban settlement and its substantial landscape modifications, which supported an intensive agricultural system,” says Reese-Taylor.

“All available land was covered with water canals, terraces, walls and dams, no doubt to provide food and water security for Calakmul residents.”

Although the number of people who lived at Calakmul during the height of the Snake King’s rule was not a complete surprise because of previous mapping and archaeological investigations by the Autonomous University of Campeche and INAH, the team was astonished at the scale and degree of urban construction.

Immense apartment-style residential compounds have been identified throughout the surveyed area, some with as many as 60 individual structures, the seats of large households composed of extended families and affiliated members.

These large residential units were clustered around numerous temples, shrines, and possible marketplaces, making Calakmul one of the largest cities in the Americas in 700 AD.

But that’s not all the team was able to see.

“We were also able to see that the magnitude of landscape modification equalled the scale of the urban population,” explains Reese-Taylor. “All available land was covered with water canals, terraces, walls, and dams, no doubt to provide maximum food and water security for the city dwellers.”

What’s next for the team and the technology

Going forward, the lidar survey will be used by INAH to help with policy and planning for the biosphere in anticipation of the expected increased tourism in the area.

The lidar will also continue to support the Bajo Laberinto Archaeological Project, which aims to investigate the causes of the rapid population increase at Calakmul and its effect on the region’s environment.

“We’re excited to see what else this technology will help us learn about Calakmul,” says Reese-Taylor. “It’s such a privilege to be unearthing the secrets of Mexico’s ancient settlements.”

Reese-Taylor and her colleagues on the Bajo Laberinto Archaeological Project will present their preliminary findings from the lidar survey on the INAH TV YouTube channel, on Tuesday, Oct. 25 at 5 p.m. MT. 

Archaeologists unearth 1,300-year-old statue of Mayan God in Mexico

Archaeologists have unearthed an approximately 1,300-year-old statue representing the head of the Mayan god in southeast Mexico.

Archaeologists were excavating in the Mayan city-state of Palenque, near Mexico’s Chiapas Usumacinta River. The artefact found symbolizes the birth of the maize plant with the first rays of the sun. The work was placed in an east-west direction.

Originally thought to be just a head, the statue was placed on a tripod by the Mayans and placed in an east-west position to symbolize the rise of the corn plant with the first rays of the Sun.

Similar iconography has been found at sites in the Tikal region of the Late Period (600-850 AD) and Early Classical Period (150-600 AD), and in manuscripts in which the god appears with the head severed in Dresden and Madrid.

Also known as Lakamha (“Flat-Earth-River”) in Itza, Palenque is mostly known for having some of the best architecture, sculpture, roof scallops and bas-reliefs in the world of Maya civilization.

While removing the fill in a corridor connecting House B and House F in the palace complex, researchers uncovered a vessel with a severed plaster head in a small pond.

The teams believe that this setting was to mimic the entrance to the Maya underworld. Crews believe that this setting was to mimic the entrance to the Mayan civilization’s underworld.

The Mayan civilization believed that the universe was divided into the sky, earth, and the underworld. Venerated places such as caves and sinkholes served as a portal or gateway to Xibalba, an underground kingdom ruled by the Mayan death gods and their helpers.

“The statue was part of an offering placed over a pond in an aquatic environment that mimicked the god’s entrance to the underworld,” says the National Institute of Anthropology and History in a statement.

“This discovery allows us to better understand how the ancient Palenque Mayas relived the legendary transition of the birth, death, and resurrection of the Mayan god,” said Arnoldo Gonzaalez Cruz, INAH Chiapas Center researcher says.

Because the sculpture was found in damp conditions, it was put through a slow drying process before being restored.

Pre-Hispanic Images Revealed on Early Convent Walls in Mexico

A restoration team that, under the supervision of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), an institution of the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, recovers the posa chapels of the atrium of the Temple and Ex-convent of the Nativity, in Tepoztlán, Morelos, found on the walls of three of them a mural painting from the 16th century, which alludes to an emblem of pre-Hispanic iconography, composed of the symbols of a plume, an axe, a shield or chimalli and a flower stick.

Specialists analyze if the attributes of the image are linked to the patron god Tepoztécatl or to some other deity; Beyond that, they say, it is a historical element that can connect the current population of Tepoztlán with their ancestry. 

This discovery opens the door to a different way of understanding, over time, the transformations of Tepoztecan society.

This revelation is the result of the restoration work in the atrium of the convent complex, which is part of the “First monasteries of the 16th century on the slopes of Popocatépetl”, inscribed on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (Unesco), which are possible thanks to the cooperation agreement between the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Hungary, in matters of cultural heritage affected by the earthquakes of September 2017.

The Mexican company José Morales executes the tasks in the movable property associated with the historic building, which are supervised and coordinated by INAH personnel, through the National Coordination for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (CNPCC) and the INAH Morelos Center.

The coordinator of the associated movable property project, Frida Itzel Mateos González, indicates that the tasks have included historical flattening, mural painting and carved stones and, at present, those corresponding to the attrial walls and access arches, the posh chapels 2, 3 and 4, the open chapel, the atrium cross, the baptismal font and the Plateresque portal of the Temple of the Nativity.

To do this, a delicate mechanical cleaning is carried out with the use of scalpels, so it is a surgical task, and injections of lime and sand to consolidate and repair the painted flattening.

Despite the damage caused by the earthquakes of five years ago, the chapel posed 4 was revealing the clearest pre-Hispanic emblem to the restorers María Regina Pierrelus Díaz de León, Katherine Salas Ramos and Valeria López Mancera, as well as the visual artist Mónica Morales Zuniga.

The layers of lime that covered the mural painting were removed after verifying, through microscopic observation, that there were no subsequent paint layers. What could be seen with the naked eye were parts of the red circle that, initially, they supposed should contain the hagiographical attributes of Marian or Jesus Christ, but it did not.

The team narrates that “as we worked, we discovered a well-preserved red circle. Then we saw some triangles, we thought they corresponded to the crown or splendour of the Virgin Mary, but the feathers of a plume appeared. In the centre we saw a well-defined red fret within a circle, a wand with flowers, and a tepoztli (axe), similar to the one in the Tepoztlán glyph. It was not a Christian representation, but a chimalli (pre-Hispanic shield)”.

The ancient emblem discovered in Chapel 4 was painted freehand in a diluted red, filled with glazes, and then outlined in the same colour. The circle, 11 centimetres thick and just over a meter in diameter, encloses these pre-Hispanic symbols, equal in size to the Marian shield that was also painted in the 16th century in the Posa chapels.

The image, which is repeated, less clearly, in chapels 2 and 3, has generated questions about the reason for the presence of this emblem in such an important place and, even, next to the anagram of the Virgin Mary, and about the relationship between pre-Hispanic culture and Christian worship, a few years after the Spanish invasion.

In search of understanding the meaning of these attributes, an interdisciplinary investigation has been set up involving the restorers Lucía de la Parra de la Lama and Frida Mateos González, the restorers José Morales Zúñiga and Iván Reynoso Pérez, the museologists Alejandro Sabido Sánchez Juárez and Víctor García Noxpango, the ethnohistorian Marcela Tostado Gutiérrez and the archaeologist Laura Ledesma Gallegos.

Ancient Mayan Cities are Heavily Contaminated with Mercury

The ancient Maya in Mesoamerica used mercury — predominantly cinnabar, but rarely elemental mercury — for decorative and ceremonial purposes, according to a team of archaeologists from Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Mercury is a toxic pollutant that affects human and ecosystem health. Elevated mercury concentrations in the surface systems of our planet are primarily connected with increasing industrialization and urbanization.

Mining and fossil-fuel power generation activities are responsible for at least half of known global mercury emissions today. The cycling of mercury through the environment is driven by modern emissions such as these, but also includes re-mobilized legacy mercury from past anthropogenic activities.

An important example of a multi-millennial record of mercury use is from present-day Mexico and Central America, where the Maya used mercury for many centuries before European contact in the 16th century.

The possible environmental consequence of this long, region-wide preindustrial mercury use is yet to be investigated.

“Mercury pollution in the environment is usually found in contemporary urban areas and industrial landscapes,” said Dr. Duncan Cook, a researcher at the Australian Catholic University.

“Discovering mercury buried deep in soils and sediments in ancient Maya cities is difficult to explain until we begin to consider the archaeology of the region which tells us that the Maya were using mercury for centuries.”

In the new research, Dr. Cook and his colleagues reviewed all data on mercury concentrations in soil and sediments at Maya archaeological sites in lowland Guatemala, Belize, the Yucatan of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras.

They found that at the sites of Chunchumil in today’s Mexico, Marco Gonzales, Chan b’i, and Actuncan in Belize, La Corona, Tikal, Petén Itzá, Piedras Negras, and Cancuén in Guatemala, Palmarejo in Honduras, and Cerén in El Salvador, mercury pollution was detectable everywhere except at Chan b’i.

Concentrations ranged from 0.016 ppm at Actuncan to an extraordinary 17.16 ppm at Tikal. For comparison, the Toxic Effect Threshold (TET) for mercury in sediments is defined as 1 ppm.

“The ancient Maya frequently used cinnabar and mercury-containing paints and powders for decoration,” the researchers said.

“This mercury could then have leached from patios, floor areas, walls, and ceramics, and subsequently spread into the soil and water.”

“For the Maya, objects could contain ch’ulel, or soul-force, which resided in blood,” said University of Cincinnati’s Professor Nicholas Dunning.

“Hence, the brilliant red pigment of cinnabar was an invaluable and sacred substance, but unbeknownst to them it was also deadly and its legacy persists in soils and sediments around ancient Maya sites.”

As mercury is rare in the limestone that underlies much of the Maya region, the authors speculate that elemental mercury and cinnabar found at Maya sites could have been originally mined from known deposits on the northern and southern confines of the ancient Maya world, and imported to the cities by traders.

All this mercury would have posed a health hazard for the ancient Maya: for example, the effects of chronic mercury poisoning include damage to the central nervous system, kidneys, and liver, and cause tremors, impaired vision and hearing, paralysis, and mental health problems.

It’s perhaps significant that one of the last Maya rulers of Tikal, Dark Sun, who ruled around 810 CE, is depicted in frescoes as pathologically obese.

Obesity is a known effect of metabolic syndrome, which can be caused by chronic mercury poisoning.

“We conclude that even the ancient Maya, who barely used metals, caused mercury concentrations to be greatly elevated in their environment,” said the University of Texas at Austin’s Professor Tim Beach.

“This result is yet more evidence that just like we live today in the ‘Anthropocene,’ there also was a ‘Maya anthropocene’ or ‘Mayacene.’ Metal contamination seems to have been an effect of human activity through history.”

The team’s paper was published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

1,300-Year-Old Corn God Statue Shows How the Maya Worshipped Maize

While excavating a section of the ancient Maya city of Palenque last summer, archaeologists in Mexico were surprised to see the tip of a large nose emerging from underneath the dirt.

As they carefully brushed away more debris at El Palacio, nostrils, a chin and the parted lips of a half-open mouth appeared.

Now, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has revealed that the ancient face was part of a 1,300-year-old stucco head depicting a young Hun Hunahpu, the Maya’s maize god.

The find is the first of its kind at the Palenque archaeological site, which is located in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

“The discovery of the deposit allows us to understand how the ancient Maya of Palenque constantly revived the mythical passage on the birth, death and resurrection of the maize god,” Arnoldo González Cruz, an archaeologist who was part of the find, says in a statement.

The nine-inch-tall head had an east-west orientation that archaeologists believe represents the emergence of the maize plant at dawn, per INAH. They say Palenque’s Maya residents likely placed the large stone sculpture over a pond to symbolize the entrance to the underworld.

The sculpture was intended to depict a beheaded figure, echoing other Maya art depicting various headless gods.

Maize, or corn, was not only an important source of food for the Maya—it also played a fundamental role in their beliefs. According to the Popol Vuh, the Maya’s K’iche’-language creation story, gods created humans out of yellow and white corn.

As such, the Maya worshipped Hun Hunahpu, whom they believed was decapitated every fall around harvest time, then reborn the following spring at the start of the new growing season, as Ariella Marsden reports for the Jerusalem Post. Because of this pattern, the Maya also associated Hun Hunahpu with the cycle of human life and the changing seasons.

First domesticated about 9,000 years ago in what is now Mexico, maize played an important role in both Mesoamerican culture and the history of archaeology. As author Charles C. Mann writes in Maize for the Gods: Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Corn, cobs of ancient maize discovered in New Mexico “were among the first archaeological finds ever carbon-dated.”

Archaeologists dated the stucco statue to the Late Classic Period of roughly 700 to 850 B.C.E. They believe it represents a youthful maize god because of the figure’s “tonsured,” partially-shaven haircut, which looks like ripe maize. This depiction of the deity was common at the time, per the Dallas Museum of Art, and symbolized “mature and fertile” corn.

When they first built the maize god’s pond, the Maya likely peered into it to study the reflection of the night sky. Later, researchers say, they symbolically shuttered the pond by breaking down some of the stucco and filling it in with shells, carved bone fragments, pieces of ceramics, obsidian arrowheads, beads, vegetables and the remains of animals, including quail, river turtles, whitefish and dog.

They topped the pond with a limestone slab, then surrounded it with three short walls and filled everything in with loose stones and soil.

Because it was preserved in a humid environment for such a long time, the divine head must now undergo a drying process, undertaken by INAH’s National Coordination for the Cultural Heritage Conservation, to preserve it. After more than a thousand years underground, the stone sculpture is being reborn—just like the beloved deity it depicts.

Periods of Drought May Be Linked to Fall of Maya Capital

Prolonged drought likely helped to fuel civil conflict and the eventual political collapse of Mayapan, the ancient capital city of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, suggests a new study in Nature Communications that was published with the help of a University at Albany archaeologist.

Mayapan served as the capital to some 20,000 Maya people in the 13th through mid-15th centuries but collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family. Extensive historical records date this collapse to sometime between 1441 and 1461.

But new evidence shows the drought in the century prior may have played a larger role in the city’s demise than was previously known. The study authors note this is relevant today as humans grapple with a future of increased climate change.

Marilyn Masson, an archaeologist and professor and chair of UAlbany’s Department of Anthropology, helped design and is a co-author of the study, which was assisted by an international team of interdisciplinary researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from that area and time period for signs of traumatic injury.

Masson, who serves as principal investigator for the Proyecto Económico de Mayapan, said she and the team found shallow mass graves and evidence of the brutal massacre at monumental structures across the city.

“Some were laid out with knives in their pelvis and rib cages, and other skeletal remains were chopped up and burned,” she said. “Not only did they smash and burn the bodies, but they also smashed and burned the effigies of their gods. It’s a form of double desecration basically.”

But that was hardly the most shocking discovery for the researchers.

That came when Douglas Kennett, the lead study author with the University of California Santa Barbara’s anthropology department, dated the skeletons using accelerator mass spectrometry, an advanced form of radiocarbon dating technology and found they dated some 50 to 100 years earlier than the city’s storied mid-15th century downfall.

“So then we started asking why? Because this is a case where archaeology reveals something that’s not told in history,” Masson said.

Plenty of ethnohistorical records exist to support the city’s violent downfall and abandonment around 1458, she said. But the new evidence of massacre up to 100 years earlier, together with climate data that found prolonged drought around that time, led the team to suspect environmental factors may have played a role. 

Paleoclimate scientists were able to calculate annual rainfall levels from that period using a dating process that relied on calcite deposits in nearby caves and found evidence of a drying trend throughout the 1300s. In particular, researchers found a significant relationship between a period of drought and substantial population decline from 1350 to 1430.

The Maya depended heavily on rain-fed maize but lacked any centralized long-term grain storage. The impacts of rainfall levels on food production, then, are believed to be linked to human migration, population decline, warfare and shifts in political power, the study states. 

“It’s not that droughts cause social conflict, but they create the conditions whereby violence can occur,” Masson said. 

The study authors suggest the Xiu, who launched the ultimate fatal attacks on the Cocom, used the droughts and ensuing famines to foment the unrest and rebellion that led to the mass deaths and outmigration from Mayapan in the 1300s.

“I think the lesson is that hardship can become politicized in the worst kind of way,” Masson said. “It creates opportunities for ruthlessness and can cause people to turn on one another violently.”

Following this period of drought and unrest, however, the city appears to have bounced back briefly with the help of healthy rainfall levels around 1400, the authors wrote. 

“Mayapan was able to bend pretty far and then bounce back before the droughts returned by the 1420s, but it was too soon,” Masson said. “They didn’t have enough time to recover, and the tensions were still there and the city’s government just couldn’t survive another bout like that. But it almost did.”

As food insecurity, social unrest and drought-driven migration in parts of the world continue to be of great concern, Masson said there are lessons in how other empires have handled environmental hardships. The Aztecs, for example, survived the infamous “Famine of One Rabbit,” which had been fueled by a catastrophic drought in the year 1454.

The emperor emptied out stores of food from the capital to feed citizens and when that ran out, encouraged them to flee, Masson said. Many sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf Coast where conditions were better but eventually bought their way out, returned to the capital, and the empire was stronger than ever.

This strategy enacted by the Aztec imperial regime is likely what allowed for their recovery, Masson said.

“Overall, we argue that human responses to drought on the Yucatan Peninsula…were complex,” the study concludes. “On the one hand, drought stimulated civil conflict and institutional failure at Mayapan. However, even after Mayapan fell, despite decentralization, intervals of mobility, temporary impacts on trade, and continuing military conflict, a resilient network of small Maya states persisted that were encountered by Europeans in the early 16th century. These complexities are important as we attempt to evaluate the potential success or failure of modern state institutions designed to maintain internal order and peace in the face of future climate change.”