They were here thousands of years before Columbus.
While Paris was still a village,
they were carving cities out of the jungle.
They played a ball game for life or death.
They planned their lives according to the heavens.
Their writing is a puzzle we're still learning to decipher.
Wow! Look at this.
Really something.
Now the pace of discovery is quickening.
We are finally finding out who they were.
Bone? There's a lot of bone.
Look. It's a black kind of a...
Oh, man!
This is really a powerful work of art.
They are the people who say that the gods made them from corn.
They are the Maya.
The year is 1839.
The place-western Honduras.
An American explorer named John Lloyd Stephens
is leading an expedition in search of an abandoned Maya city called copan.
Almost nothing is knows about the Maya
Stephens is about to learn more.
Draped with a thousand years of tropical growth,
the brooding temples and tumbled stones sprawl for miles.
Stephens is overwhelmed by a sense of mystery.
Who built this place?
What happened here?
In the following days Stephens and English artist Frederick Catherwood
record their impressions of the ruined city.
It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean,
her masts gone, her crew perished.
And none to tell when she came,
or what caused her destruction.
All was mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery.
During the next three years Stephens and Catherwood
visit the better known Maya sites to the north.
In Yucatan they ecplore Uxmal and chichen ltza.
In Chiapas they visit Palenque.
And still questions plague them.
Who built these cities?
Why had they been abandoned?
The land of the Maya spread from parts of Honduras,
El Salvodor, and Guatemala in the south
to Belize and Mexico in the north
It was dotted with hundreds of small kingdoms,
each with its own unique history.
The heartland of what scholars call
the "Classic" Maya civilization lay in the southern lowlands.
It is there that our story takes place
starting at the site where scientific excavations first began... Copan.
Today, this partially restored site still retains its air of mystery.
Bill Fash is the director of the Copan Acropolis Project.
Copan was one of the premiere Maya cities.
Now we can't say that in terms of its size.
Cetainly there were other cities that were larger.
But while it was booming for about 400 years there,
it was quite a place.
It had incredible artists, sculptors,
architects, engineers, astronomers, scribes, and so forth.
So I suppose if you had to put it in our cultural terms
...if Tikal were like say New York, Copan was like Paris.
Every year of the past few decades,
a handful of Maya specialists and hundreds of workers have been trying
to piece Copan's history back together
The story of what happened here is still unfolding,
stone by stone.
There are over 30,000 fragments of stone sculpture
that once adorned these buildings.
The problem is, for this particular puzzle,
there is no box top.
There is no picture that enables us to know how they went back together.
We have to try and figure that out.
And the problem is made worse by things like this.
This is what we call a GO piles
and pull out the examples that are just like those we have dug up,
and try and put the whole thing back together.
But in spite of the difficulties,
Fash's team of experts has reassembled thousands of sculptures
and conserved dozens of buildings.
Every year the pictures of what Copan
was like more that a thousand years ago becomes clearer.
Many clues still lie hidden
in the temples where the Maya elite buried their dead
The Classic Maya had virtually no interest in metal,
so there is no gold buried here.
But sometimes something even more valuable is unearthed.
Watch the wire. See this face.
All right. It's repainted. It's a stucco coating over...
In 1992 Robert Sharer discovered the tomb of a royal family member.
Buried with him were some pots.
One glyph is there.
What makes these vessels especially significant
are the painted designs
and the hieroglyphic writing.
Well, those are fantastic vessels,
although I don't know if I can say much about the glyphs on them.
Forty years ago we could read only a few Maya hieroglyphs.
Today we can read about half.
But it takes an expert.
There's another pot just like the one with the feet in the tomb.
David Stuart is the son of Maya scholars
and one of the world's foremost epigraphers.
By being able to read the glyphs now,
it makes the Maya a little bit more normal.
It makes them more human because we see that they did have history,
that they were a people that had real concerns about themselves
and the events in their lives.
One kind of Maya writing was almost lost forever.
When Spanish priests arrived in the 16th century,
they found hundreds of folding books called codices,
and promptly burned them.
Today, only parts of four codices remain,
but they have helped to shape the way we think about the Maya.
The books are almanacs,
filled with astrological information.
The men and women who wrote the almanacs were scribes,
well versed in astronomy.
Using a sophisticated mathematics,
they calculated the movements of the night sky
thousands of years into the past and thousands of years into the future.
They knew that the universe moved in cycles,
some very large, some very small.
They even predicted eclipses of the sun.
They seem to have been fascinated by the relationship between time
and the events in their own lives.
The Maya also left a record in a medium much more permanent than paper.
And this writing contains much more than dates and numbers.
On these stone the Maya recorded the important events
in the lives of their rulers.
This is the Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copan,
the longest inscribed text in the New World.
But early archaeologists reassembled it out of order,
so today we can read it only in segments.
Sculpture specialist Barbara Fash is making a catalog
of the 1,200 glyphs on the stairway.
Someday, these drawings may tell a more complete story of Copan's kings
This means "to plant with a stick in the ground."
Other hieroglyphs are more accessible,
thanks to dramatic breakthroughs in the past few decades.
This is the date. It's a...
Epigrapher Linda Schele has done her share of the recent detective work
This is a little tree-tey.
And on this side, facing the east, he's young.
But on the west side you can see...
Look at the beard.
It is a rare thing when a people develop historical consciousness
and make recorded history a part of what they do.
What we are participating in now
is the recovery of lost history...
...because American history does not begin in 1492 with Columbus.
It begins in 200 B.C.
With the first Maya king who wrote his name on a stone.
Long before the first king wrote his name on a stone,
the Maya were living in the fertile Copan valley.
They were corn farmers.
Their lives were ruled by the rhythms of the natural world,
planting and harvesting, birth and death.
But around A. D. 400,
at about the time Rome was starting to collapse,
a change swept through the valley.
On a lazy bend in the Copan River,
buildings made from stone were rising from the jungle floor.
Brilliantly colored buildings surrounded a whitewashed central plaza
where thousands of people could gather
There was trade in shells and cacao beans,
tobacco, jade, and feathrs.
At the center of the city stood the ball court.
The object of the ball game seems to have been to keep
the heavy rubber ball in motion,
without using hands or feet.
Stone carvings at some sites show
ballplayers with severed human heads dangling from their belts.
But no one knows if they depict what actually happened to the losers,
or illustrate something more symbolic.
The ball was supposed to be a metaphor for the movement of the sun
and by extension, also the moon and the stars.
And you wanted to make sure that there was regularity in that movement.
They thought that if they played the game in the right way,
and honored the gods in the right way,
that they would ensure the agricultural cycle
and enable the sun to rise and the rains to come on time
and for there to be a bountiful harvest.
In the secret world of the Maya
the gods were the source of all life,
and only the kings had the power to intervene with them.
The gods sustained the physical universe with sun and rain
and expected humans to nourish them in return.
The supreme source of that nourishment was blood.
When the Maya wanted to acknowledge
the sacredness of the moment or an important event,
they would let blood.
Blood was the vehicle that carried a quality that they called chu'lel,
which means their soul.
It was something that not only permeated human bodies,
it permeated buildings, it permeated the trees, the sky.
It permeated all things sacred in the world.
And when they gave blood,
what they were doing was they were activating the chu'lel.
It's like George Lucas's the "Force."
If you can think of Obi-wan-kenobi,
you know,
calling the "Force"out, or Luke, as he guides the plane in
you know, in the final Death Star battle.
That's what the Maya were doing by these rituals.
They were touching what they considered to be
the living force of the univers and it's still here.
On special occasions
the king himself would give blood.
This was one of the most secret rituals in Maya life.
After days of fasting and spiritual preparation,
the king would pierce his foreskin with a stingray spine
and let the blood drip onto paper strips.
With this act of sacrifice
a doorway to the gods was opened.
When the paper strips were burned,
the Maya believed they could see their gods in the rising smoke.
Today, the descendants of the ancient Maya
still live much like their ancestors did.
The myths they remember
and the ceremonies they perform are all part of a tradition
that the Maya say God gave them at the beginning of time.
Casimiro Sagajau is a Maya priest who blesses the fields at harvest time
We are Cakchiquels, direct descendants of the ancient Maya.
Our religion is from a long time ago.
I learned as a child from the Maya priests.
In dreams we learned from the Maya gods
when to plant and when to harvest,
when to set the fires, and when to do the corn ceremony.
The Maya passion for ritual
was one of the first things Spanish missionaries observed
when they arrived in Yucatan almost 500 years ago.
When the Catholic Church banned traditional forms of worship,
the old ways went underground.
Today the religion the Maya follow is a blend of these two ancient faiths
The Maya have clung tenaciously to many aspects of the old culture.
In the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala
their unique dress not only defines them as Maya,
but identifies the particular village where they live.
It is said that when a Maya woman
puts on her traditional blouse, called a huipil,
her head emerges at the very center of a world woven from dreams,
just as the great tree of life emerges from the earth.
In the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico,
Chip Morris had been working with weavers for 20 years.
The weavers have always said that
their designs come from the beginning of the world,
meaning the beginning of their culture
When I started looking at the archaeology of the sculptures
and the statues, the things that show what the weaving was like,
there are a number that are all but identical to the weavings of today.
What's in the designs is a map of the Maya world,
but not the surface of the earth,
not where we are standing now, but it's the dream world.
It's that world where the gods are,
where the beings that control rain, where Angel, the lightning bolt lives.
There are no trucks, there are no houses on a blouse.
It's all images of that sacred universe that creates rain,
that creates life, that maintains the world.
In a world where the line between the secular and the sacred
is almost imperceptible,
everything is more than is seems.
Pyramids symbolize sacred mountains where the ancestors dwell.
Doors represent the mouths of caves
passageways into the mountian's dangerous underworld.
The Maya believed they went to that underworld when they died.
They called it Xibalba.
It was the "place of fright"
a watery realm of disease and deacy that ordinary people
had little hope of escaping.
How the Maya treated their dead is being investigated here
at a site 130 miles north of Copan.
These are the ruins of a city called Caracol.
Once it was a prosperous administrative center.
Today it is remarkable for the scores of tombs discovered here.
I think we'll leave the rest of this until we move the rocks.
Okay.
Arlen Chase is a potter expert.
Diane Chase is an authority on human bones.
They're trying to understand how the Maya thought about death.
We tend to think of things in Westernized terms.
The Maya were not a Western society;
they didn't do anything the way Europeans do.
It's so hard for our own society to understand how the Maya lived.
I mean we don't have dead living with us, you know, every day.
We don't put them in a room in our house and maintain them there.
Well, the Maya essentially did that in their living groups.
Okay. Oh, this is nice. Arlen.
This is real nice.
We've definitely got a royal tomb here
Ordinary people were usually buried under the floors of their houses.
The vessels are nice and they're in good shape.
The elite were placed in tombs.
This polychrome over here
is in better shape on the back than the front side.
What about the bone?
Bone? There's a lot of bone.
There are at least two individuals whose heads are to the south.
They're in pretty good shape.
Someone else's legs are up in this corner.
It doesn't go with either one of the first two individuals.
It's not the man and the possible woman.
It's somebody different.
It wasn't uncommon for the Maya to bury more than one family member
in the same space.
I like to think of it more like a family mausoleum
where grandpa may have died and you place him inside first.
Grandma dies. You put her inside too.
A number of years pass and maybe the son or daughter dies.
You might move grandpa to the side a little bit, grandma too,
and stick the son in.
And a little bit further along a few more people in the family die
and eventually the mausoleum has quite a lot of bone material inside.
This one's got a ring...
For archaeologists, tombs are like time capsules.
The objects buried with the dead
sometimes yield precise dates and names.
These help to fill out our picture of
how the ancient Maya lived. ...in the lab it should pop out.
And sometimes what they find is simply beautiful.
Like the tombs at Caracol,
the buildings of Copan contain their share of buried history.
But finding it has often been an elusive undertaking.
Honduran archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia has been working at Copan since 1978.
My primary interest was finding out what happened to these people.
It's something that's part of my heritage too.
It's something that's part of my country.
And I grew up I mean I wasn't very young
when I came to these ruins the first time.
But it impacted me and it was a fascinating issue-question that
you were always thinking about.
What happened to these people? Who were they?
How did they do the things they did?
For the past four years
Agurcia has been excavating a temple pyramid
that may tell us more about how the people of Copan lived.
Temple 16 is a typical royal structure in terms of its construction.
And there in lies the archaeologists' challenge.
For the Maya, certain spaces were sacred,
so they built their temples one on top of another.
Workers would collapse the upper levels of an existing structure,
encase what was left with heavy fill, and build a new structure around it.
As Agurcia's crew remove the fill,
they create a labyrinth of tunnels.
Working in tunnels tends to be very confusing.
You're working like in three dimensions.
You're going up, down, sideways, in between.
And oftentimes you get lost
and you can't really understand what you're looking at.
The flat wall on the left
used to be the outer wall of an older temple.
Only by following its walls to their ends
can Agurcia determine building's original dimensions.
I only traveled a short distance
and bingo, we hit another wall.
It still goes farther on towards the south.
So we then tried going up to see
whether we had the bottom part of a substructure
or the higher part of it and started going up.
And you can see here the terraces going up of
what was a very large pyramid.
It goes up, as far as we've traced it,
eight stories high and each one curving back and going further up.
What Agurcia found next was totally unexpected.
There was yet a third structure inside the first two,
this one was different.
The building Agurcia calls Rosalila was perfectly preserved.
The loose dirt was removed,
exposing a set of giant masks
still tinged with traces of the original paint.
Most of the masks we found before were perhaps a meter or two tall
and would extend as much as five, six meters.
But these masks just kept going and going and going
and to this moment we still haven't found the end of them
Hey, partner.
How's it going, boss?
Wo-o-o.
You haven't been here in a while, have you?
Wow! Whoa!
Can you believe it?
Red paint all over the place.
Yeah, we've got lots of good paint.
We're coming down below the molding
and we've got two birds out.
We've got one over here on the left
and he's facing north.
And I think we have another one.
You see, he's got his beak bent over his eye.
All the feathers behind him.
All the feathers radiating out
and also it's higher up than anything else in the Acropolis.
So this thing shone out for miles around.
It's outrageous, it's just outrageous.
Adorned with brightly painted sculpture
Rosalila once crowned the highest point in Copan.
Framing the central doorway, two giant birds face the setting sun.
Above them undulating serpents extend their bodies toward the sky.
For the archaeologists,
the careful treatment given Rosalila poses a question.
We're all just itching to know what Rosalil is all about.
Why was it left there for 150 years
and nobody touched it other than to maintain it?
Why was it buried intact?
They didn't touch any of it when they buried it.
All the rest of them they smashed to pieces
to build something bigger and better over it.
Why was it so revered that is had to be mummified when it was buried?
And most of all, what's inside of it?
What is that thing housing?
And that's what we're hoping Ricardo will find.
But before any new discoveries are made
the rainy season descends on Copan.
The archaeologists return home
and all excavations are suspended until it ends.
Nearly six months later the rain is over.
The weather clears.
At last the excavation of temple 16 can be resumed.
For another half year workers continue to peel away the dirt from Rosalila.
And just before the rains resume,
the enigmatic temple yields one more surprise.
> From a small cache found in a doorway,
Agurcia removes something buried 1,300 years ago.
Look at this. It's a black kind of a...
Oh, man!
It doesn't fit.
It's close enough.
You would not believe how sharp the edges on these things are.
What they have found is a bundle of blades
chipped from an especially sacred material
flint, the firestone.
They were probably used on ceremonial occasions
and the faces may depict royal ancestors,
or sacrificial victims.
No one knows how long it took to create these delicately flaked blades
since no one today has the skill to make one.
In all, nine flints were found in Rosalila
perhaps corresponding to the nine Maya "Lords of the Night."
It's been here for 1,300 years
and it's unbelievable.
It's a beautiful piece of art. I mean
the finesse, the work in it is incredible.
And I just feel like
incredibly privileged, you know.
You get caught up in the heat of the battle
and you try not to forget to
take your pictures, take your measurements.
And at times you forget to think about it
and to think of the face that it's human beings
that did this a long time ago and that
when they did it, this was very important to them.
I'm touched by it, I really am.
And it's a special feeling.
It doesn't happen every day.
It is likely the flints Agurcia found in Rosalila
were placed there sometime in the 7 th century A. D.
When the classic Maya civilization was at its peak.
In many Maya kingdoms
there was a boom in the construction of new buildings.
Some cities were even connected by roads,
and trade among them flourished.
Copan lay on the southern frontier.
But to the north
events had taken place in the Maya world
that would eventually shake it to its core.
Tikal was one of their greatest Maya cities,
a prosperous urban center that the envy of its neighbors.
It was probably inconceivable to the kings of Tikal
that any other kingdom posed a threat,
but in the spring of 562,
Caracol attacked Tikal and defeated it
During the upheaval that followed in Tikal,
members of the royal family moved away into the jungle
and established their own city.
Today, a research base camp marks the spot.
What was once the great city of Dos Pilas
has again been reclaimed by jungle.
The effort to piece together a picture of its dramatic rise to power
is being led by Arthur Demarest.
What he has learned is changing the way we think about the Maya.
Forty or fifty years ago
we thought of the Maya as this peace-loving,
theocratic society, these scholarly kings who studied the movements
of the planets and lived kind of in a world of their own.
Now we know, from the recent hieroglyphic decipherments
and from excavations like these that have found fortifications;
that the Maya were a very violent people,
one of the most warlike peoples of the New World,
and that they were constantly engaged in warfare,
battles of dynastic sucession,
and earthly pursuits.
In 1990
Demarest's team discovered concrete evidence to support this view.
It is a large, perfectly preserved hieroglyphic text,
and on it it talks about a series of wars, battles,
and conquests involving the big players-Tikal,
Dos Pilas battling each other.
And it records the outcomes.
It's tremendous piece of information,
and its decipherment,
I think, is going to change the way we look
at this very critical period in Maya history.
This is really amazing.
They're saying that he is the subordinate of this lord,
presumably of Calakmul.
It's an incredible title.
It's saying we were competitive with Tikal.
Well, we have to think about it. I mean is it subordination or...
Epigraphers David Stuart and Steve Houston
are called in to see how much of the text they can read.
...with references to Bonampak and Tonina.
And then after that-X.
And look, there it is. Atun.
Yeah. This, Arthur, refers to a kind of altar.
And here it refers to a dedication.
It's referring to the stair. And look! It's a step. It's a step!
It's a pyramid.
Okay, what it's saying is that this event,
this war event...
And then over here you've got a new event involving Ruler A's father.
The skull glyph here is the name of the ruler of Tikal.
Initially, it seems that Maya warfare was to some extent ritualized.
It was more devoted to religious ends.
Literally, these guys dressed up in silly outfits,
archaic costumes with big Paleolithic spears
and went out there and met in some place
and knocked each other around.
One of them was captured and brought back and sacrificed.
What the hieroglyphs on the stairway seem to confirm
is that sometime in the 8th century A. D.
Ritualized warfare gave way to campaigns of expansion.
The kings of Dos Pilas attacked town along the Pasion River,
and thereby seized control of a vital trade route.
It looks like there was a change in warfare
that led to an intensification and to a shifting to warfare for conquest,
actually absorbing the territory of others.
This seems to have somehow gotten out of hand.
An arms race, in a way, started.
Attacking centers becomes acceptable.
Attacking population bases, burning temples, that kind of thing.
The new warfare would eventually come to Caracol as well.
The eighth century and ninth century
at Caracol and throughout the Maya area
was a time of tremendous change and a lot of warfare.
Caracol, up to that point in time,
had been very successful in warfare.
What happens, we think at least, is that in this late time horizon,
it's not just a question of defeating a neighboring civilization
and taking them into your realm,
but talking large numbers of captives to sacrifice.
I think people were really scared.
Picture yourself in a Maya city.
And here you're been having warfare and you say okay,
I'm going to be captured and I'm going to be put to work
probably have to give three months out of the year
to that foreign country over there.
But rather than that happening to you,
you've got this marauding army that comes in,
pulls all the men together,
and rather than marching them off to work in the fields,
they instead cut off their heads and mount them on sticks
and make huge skull platforms.
Now that would strike terror into you.
That would be enough to say, "My god, let's get out of here!"
Even Dos Pilas would finally face the terror.
On the Hieroglyphic Stairway itself lie the ruins
of a hastily erected stockade.
Archaeologically,
this defensive wall is one of the most important
and exciting features that we've found here.
One of the reasons why this masonry line is so neat
and is placed so well is that it is made out of neatly carved blocks
which were ripped off.
They're the facings from the palaces around you.
So they literally tore down the royal palace and built this,
running it up against their hieroglyphic stairway
to create this desperate defensive system.
A picture of the city in its final days begins to emerge.
In a frantic attempt to keep the invaders out,
the citizens of Dos Pilas erect two defensive walls
around the center of the city and move inside for protection.
These are low house platforms that held little huts
that filled the central ceremonial plaza here at Dos Pilas
at the time of the siege and the collapse.
And it indicates that again the desperation
of those final moments of this great kingdom
was so great and its fall had been so complete that,
at this point, you had the population living within the ceremonial plaza,
below the towering temples,
below the monuments of the strutting great kings.
It's almost as if you had a population
squeezed in living on the White House lawn,
holding out at the very end of the collapse of American civilization.
That's what you have here that moment in time.
Copan, meanwhile, is struggling with problems of a different sort.
When one of its most powerful rulers is captured and beheaded,
faith in the divine authority of the kings wavers.
At the same time, the population in the Copan Valley continues to grow.
Basically, the Copanecs
became the victims of their own success.
And as this city grew
and became more vibrant and more attractive,
eventually all this nice, fertile,
alluvial bottomland was covered by houses,
and they were basically cutting themselves off
from their own food source.
As time went by, all of the forest was eliminated.
This caused widescale erosion throughout the valley.
This eventually resulted in less rainfall,
and people just weren't table to live here any more.
It is now the middle of the eighth century.
Throughout the southern Maya world the power of the kings is waning.
Disease and hunger are becoming commonplace.
People begin to drift away from the cities.
In Europe the Dark Ages are halfway over.
Here in the jungle,
they are just beginning.
Slowly, one by one,
the great southern cities are abandoned
In 761
the king of Dos Pilas is captured and killed.
> From that point on there are no more hieroglyphic inscriptions here.
The last written date at Palenque is 799.
Twenty years later, Copan falls silent
Caracol stops recording in 859.
The last inscription date at Tikal is written in 879.
Only a handful of Maya cities
in the south survive beyond the first years of the tenth century.
The northern cities of the Yucatan Peninsula
places like Uxmal and Chichen itza
will prosper for several hundred years longer.
But they are no longer ruled by divine kings,
and gradually the old ways of building
and writing, and worshiping slip away.
The Classic Maya civilization is at an end.
One of the thins, I think,
that strikes the public consciousness about the Maya civilization is
to see this sophisticated culture with its monuments and architecture
and science and writing system in the jungle,
covered, destroyed
an area that's now abandoned today.
I think that there's an immediate
impact when you see that.
It reminds us that we can fail,
that civilization is a complex phenoneman, and we can screw up.
And the consequences can be totally catastrophic.
Yet, while the Classic Maya civilization may have disappeared,
the Maya people have not.
For 3,000 years they have survived the ambitions of their own kings
and those of foreign conquerors.
And once again they are under assault.
In Guatemala, during the past three decades,
the Maya have been caught in a civil war they barely comprehend.
In that time, 100,000 Maya have been killed
and another 40,000 have "disappeared."
No one can count the number of widows and orphans.
And through it all, they endure.
They weave their huipils.
They farm their corn.
I feel that the Maya of today are very much
in the same traditions as the Classic Maya.
What they've lost is that big covering
that overlay of nobility, and they dropped it themselves.
They basically told the kings, that's it.
You're not working anymore.
And they went and they continued their own lives.
I don't like it when people talk about the Maya collapse,
because they never collapsed.
They evolved. They went through different hard times
good times, bad times, but they're still with us.
They still maintain their customs;
they still maintain their ways of organizing their societies.
And it's very exciting to see how much of the ancient
Maya way of life is still alive and well.
What we're digging up or coming up with,
it's part of our history.
And the men that lived here
are some of the greatest men we've ever had.
And it's a fact that we're getting to know more and more and more
about the life of these people
more than I ever thought was possible.
I think if somebody had asked me as a graduate student whether
we would know what we know today
about the Maya at Copan,
there's no way I would have believed him
What is happening now
is the people who made these places
people like Yax Pak or Bird Jaguar or Pacal
are getting back their voices
They are becoming real to us
and speaking to the people of the 20th century
about who built this place and why,
and what they felt,
and what they thought about the world.
These are not anonymous people any more.