The Rise of the Ancient Maya

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0:32Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

1:10You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S. offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

1:57I'm walking through the Central American jungle. There is now a tickle of light in the sky. I've been up since four in the morning but I can now just about see where I'm going. The trees are thick, all sorts of different species and the noises of the night are slowly turning into those of dawn. There's some howler monkeys up ahead, there's some parakeets that have just gone quiet as I've approached. I'm just walking under the huge big leaves of some banana trees but there's cacao trees all around as well. A few pines it's really interesting because we're quite high up in in the mountains here and there are jaguars here as well but we're yet to see or hear from one of those.

2:41Oh there's a howler monkey.

2:46Marianna Deforge the producer is here wearing her trusty off-road trainers this time taking no chances with the snakes. Years of experience finally paying off.

3:01It's a landscape I'm very unfamiliar with. I've spent no time at all in the jungles of Central America and it's a very very special place. The sights, the sounds, the smells of the jungle. And now through the trees I'm beginning to make out some lumps and bumps, some archaeological features that suggest I'm getting close to my target for today. Great big mounds with the topsoil exposing worked stone beneath them. I'm here to see one of the most extraordinary sights really in Central America. I'm here looking for what is the tallest building in Belize. It's not an office block, it's not a bank, It's not a hotel.

3:47It's an ancient Mayan pyramid. And there it is, right in front of me now. As I'm coming around this corner. Oh my goodness, look at that. It is around 2 ,000 years old. And it is a Mayan site called Karakol. And the reason I'm here is because in 2025, archaeologists uncovered something completely extraordinary here. They found what they think is a burial chamber. It was a very large chamber. There was red pigment on one side of the wall. Red is an important burial color to the Maya. And we could see bone. We knew it likely was a royal tomb. Archaeologists believe that this might be the tomb of the great Maya king called Tekkab Chak, the founder of a formidable dynasty.

4:41And that's what's brought me here. Imagine that, just discovering the burial of an ancient king that we think we can actually put a name to. It's everything an archaeologist dreams of. And it's a reflection of the fact that here in Belize there are still discoveries being made and yet to be made beneath this dense jungle canopy.

5:03The Maya dominated Central America for over 3 ,000 years. They were masters of monumental architecture and readers of the stars. They made sense of abstract time and built enormous pyramids. They commissioned dynastic histories and developed the most sophisticated writing system in Mesoamerica, millennia before the Aztecs or the Inca. They fought wars, forged alliances, engaged in complex rituals like human sacrifice, and competed for supremacy. In this special miniseries of Dance Notes History, we're heading off the beaten track in Belize to trace this extraordinary story of the Maya from their ancient origins to the pinnacle of their civilization and we're going to try and make sense of their mysterious collapse in the 9th century that still raises questions among historians today.

5:55This is episode one, the rise of a mighty civilization.

6:15It's probably helpful to give a little fact sheet on the geography of the Maya lands and exactly who we mean when we talk about the Maya. Probably the biggest misconception is that the Maya were one kingdom or empire, like the Inca or the Aztecs. In fact, the Maya were a number of different city-states connected by one culture, all vying with each other for dominance. It's best to think of them are a bit like the ancient Greeks, like Athens competing with states like Sparta or Thebes, but also trading and forming alliances with them, and sharing a religious worldview. These city-states stretched across an enormous area of what is now southern Mexico, and modern-day Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

6:56If you've ever been to this part of the world, you'll know that the landscape varies a lot across this region, depending on where you are, but a lot of it's pretty hostile to sustaining human life, which is one of the reasons the Maya were so remarkable to flourish as they did. They devised ingenious ways to sustain themselves in barren, dry lowlands and in the soaking, humid rainforests. You might be familiar with the Maya from Chichen Itza in Mexico, very near Cancun. There's an enormous, iconic pyramid that just dominates that site today. It's spectacular. The city of Chichen Itza actually comes much later in the story of the Maya.

7:35It was built around the 19th century, and we think Maya civilisation began far earlier, although historians and archaeologists are still pushing back the frontiers on this. We think it began over 2 ,000 years before that. They didn't have any metal, but they used stone tools to build great palace complexes and pyramids. So, gradually, powerful Maya city-states evolved. And one of those city-states was Caracol. That's where I am now. It's in the foothills of the Maya Mountains. Today it's very near the Guatemalan border. And it grew into one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya world.

8:10Incredibly, at its height, it's believed that this city covered roughly 75 square miles. That is three times the size of Manhattan, folks. But extraordinarily, for nearly a thousand years, it lay hidden beneath dense rainforest. It wasn't until 1937, it was a mahogany logger named Rosa Mai, and they reported the discovery of a lost city deep in the jungles. And they told the authorities, and what was at the time British Honduras. And the following year, imagine how exciting this must have been, Archaeological Commissioner A.H. Anderson visited the site and recorded the first artefacts here. It was really just a handful of carved stone stele, and he also saw the remnants of a temple.

8:56and there was just a vast amount hidden there in the vegetation underneath the topsoil waiting to be discovered. One of the treasures that was subsequently found was the building that I'm staring up at now. It is a towering pyramid called Kana. It stretches into the heavens. In fact today the top of it is covered in the swirling mist. It is 141 feet tall and don't worry folks I am going to be climbing to the top, which is actually very unusual because most places you can't, but in Belize you're still allowed to climb on these ancient monuments. To help me get my bearings, I'm going to meet up with Dr.

9:36Adrian Chase. He's an archaeologist who has worked it well, as you'll hear, all of his life. And I mean that. Adrian, good to see you buddy. How are you? Very good. How are you? Thank you for having me on site, but we should get one thing started. When did you first come here? Well, so for my first trip out to Caracol, it's about two months old. I was not quite as helpful back then. And so you've been coming pretty much every year then for what? Well, except for minus college and then a little bit there. But yeah, for decades I've been coming on and off. So what we're doing now is walking around one of the biggest cities ever in the Americas before the Europeans arrive.

10:11So yes, exactly. One of the biggest cities in the Americas before Europeans. Let's go back. Tell me about the Maya. So I think the way to think of the Maya is there's this collection of similarities, but there's a lot of diversity and a lot of different interactions. So for the ancient Maya, there are over three dozen Maya languages, and there's clearly a lot of variation as you go north, south, east, and west across the region. When they're talking, there's some similarities. So it's kind of like different accents, but exaggerated to the point where sometimes you can't communicate, but a lot of the common words are similar.

10:40So they're able to communicate to some degree, but there's some similar practices, and it's sort of this central household compound. It's the idea of this sort of family ritual and activities. And then it's also building up some of these large stone architecture and pyramids and sort of the system like you see at Caracol with a couple of variants for other regions. And so there was never one Maya emperor sort of ruling the whole of this territory. So no, there's never one Maya emperor who's ruling all the way from the top of Yucatan, hitting the Gulf of Mexico, all the way down to the Pacific coast, past Highland Guatemala.

11:15For people who may be a little bit more familiar in Europe listening to this podcast, The Greek world is not a million miles away, so sort of reasonably common language. People are able to understand each other, similar ideas about mythology, religion, but shifting alliances of smaller polities. Yeah, and I'd say for the Maya, you have this kind of regional state system where there are shifts between which city is within which polity, which type of organization. How on earth do we get small-scale farming, small-scale settlement in this region of Central America turning into these, the Mayan cities, these iconic building structures that we know and love?

11:49It's a very slow process that happens over generations. So for Curacol, we know that there are people starting to settle this landscape around 600 BC, and they're founding their households. They're starting to put them in place. You don't have monumental construction, though, until 360 BC. When I say, you know, jungle or tropics, you probably think of a place that's hot that's maybe a little less productive, or you think of lots of wildlife and very little human interactivity. But what we've been finding archaeologically, not just in Mesoamerica with the Maya, but also in tropical parts of Africa or Southeast Asia, is there are these really sprawling, massive tropical cities and peoples who figured out how to unlock the potential of those tropical environments.

12:29So for the Maya, in some places, they're building agricultural terraces and they're building up this huge system of terraces where at Karakol, by the city's height, is over 160 square kilometers. In other parts, they're putting in raised fields instead of wetlands, or they're using other things that are more like chinampas from the Aztec. And so you're seeing all of these different choices and decisions that is making the landscape significantly more productive. Ah, so you've got a big surplus of food. Right. So you can start using that to feed big workforces and build monumental buildings. Exactly.

12:59So you get the surplus of food, you get the rising population, and then as you have this food surplus, people can start doing other things other than focusing on food. So they can be artisans. They can make jewelry, whether it's carved bone, marine shell coming in from the coasts. They can start being long distance traders. They can move salt to the inlands or they can transport obsidian. You start having people that specialize in different activities, whether it's ritual or political or commercial. So we've got you've got all these different cities, if you like, around this region, around this part of the world.

13:34How are their relations characterized? Are we intermarrying? Are we peaceful visiting? Or is there a lot of violence? So you get the whole gamut from violence to peaceful interaction. One of the things that I can say is at Caracol, from excavations that were in 2009 published in 2010, we have a Teotihuacan burial. So we have a cremation in the center of the northeast Acropolis. Teotihuacan being that amazing city up north of Mexico City now, right? Exactly. So over a thousand kilometers away from us. And it would suggest a peaceful interaction where somebody's come in, they've married into one of the local families, and then when they're buried, they wanted to be buried in their traditional custom.

14:11Okay, so we've got people moving vast distances. From the isotope data here and elsewhere, it seems like maybe 40 % of people in different Mesoamerican cities, whether it's Central Mexico or Maya, are migrants who've come in from elsewhere. So you get these periods of globalization locally within Mesoamerica and then periods of isolation. and the history of the Maya and Central Mexican peoples is basically a flip back and forth between those systems. Well, surprise, surprise, like everywhere else in the world. Right. At its height in 650, it may have been the seventh largest city in the world.

14:43It's very rare to have a city that hits 100 ,000 people before the Industrial Revolution. And for the Maya, they have five cities probably, or six cities rather, that hit over 50 ,000 and then one in Central Mexico, Teotihuacan, where Curacol had connections back and forth. So we're now standing in this extraordinary central plaza. We've got the highest building. This is the kind of iconic heart of a Mayan Sith. People are familiar. We've got the massive pyramids with the steps. What is the purpose of these buildings here we're looking at? All right. This is sort of the political center within the downtown of Caracol.

15:15And what you have is you have a northern structure, Cana, which is still the tallest human-made building in Belize today. It's about the height of the Statue of Liberty. And the base is about two American football fields. So it's this massive stone architecture, but it would have started as a small little household. And then over generations, they build it up, build it up, build it up. It's kind of like the White House. You know, it's serving this other role. So it has these three different tiers on it. And the first two tiers, you can see those public meeting rooms that are all facing front. So if you're standing in this plaza and you look up, you can see who gets to go meet with whom.

15:46You possibly have a little prison off to the side. The northern building is more related to the ruler and the ruler's family with two private compounds, the private residential areas, to the northeast and northwest of it. filling out the upper space on the pyramid. And then the Eastern building itself, that's the ritual building, which is where the ruler's relatives are buried. So you have multiple tombs. As with so many structures in the past, but they look gray and stony to us now, they would have been vibrant and overwhelming. Yes, and I think like most people, there's a favoritism. They want colorful things.

16:15They want pretty objects. So you're getting that elaborate, probably stucco design. And we have pieces of stucco so we can get a sense of these different architectural elements. But putting it all together would take a lot more effort to see what it looked like in its heyday. I was always told growing up that the Maya had social class distinctions and you've got the rich people living up there every lovely time and everyone else is very, very poor and marginalized. Is that an outdated take or do you see evidence of that here? So I think it's first kind of mixed in the sense that for some cities that definitely seems to be the case.

16:46So for example, at Caracol, there's this really big focus on wealth sharing where the difference between the elite and sort of the ordinary people is a lot more suppressed. And it's almost like it was a conscious strategy. They knew that they had a problem with all these people moving in, they're building up this big city, and they wanted some way to make sure that everybody could live together. Everybody's getting access to tombs, the market system's going at full steam, so you're getting polychrome pots, you're getting obsidian blades coming from Guatemala, you're getting marine shell made into jewelry by local artisans, and so life is pretty good here for the average person during the city's heyday in a way that really shows that you have this full, strong middle level of society.

17:24It has a ruler who's probably living on Kana, but then you also have these different districts, which likely have sort of a district head, and there may be a local district council or a local system of how they manage disputes over land or other issues. You have neighborhoods, which likely then have neighborhood heads in their own meetings. So you have this multi-tiered system, like you would have in a modern city with different councils and governments at different levels. And so if we looked out from the top of Kana, we'd have seen a landscape with certain neighborhoods, really. You would look out over this larger landscape and you'd see these plazuela residential groups.

17:57You would see these other roads leading out from the downtown to other districts, each of which has its own main temples, its own elite families, its own local families who are probably helping manage and run the public space, collecting sort of the tax to use it. And of course, all of these public plazas, they'd be used for ritual activity, political rallies, marketplaces. It's any time you have a formal public space, you can use it for whatever you need at the time. They also have range buildings, which may have been storage for other goods and materials. Or, and about half of them, they have a ball court.

18:29Because, of course, everybody wants to go see a ball game every once in a while, right? As soon as you step off the downtown or any other district, you're in somebody's terraced field. Now, in terms of the terraces, there's sort of two different general types. There are these, like, architectural terraces where you want to increase the amount of flat space to build on. And then there are agricultural terraces where you want to farm. And what you can imagine is you have your field, you've built up this terrace. The water's designed so it's flowing back and forth as it goes down the hills. And it's helping irrigate trees.

18:55So you have medicinal trees, different tree crops, probably around the edges. And then you have the three sisters, the mix of corn, beans, and squash. But you also have chili peppers or cacao. And you can imagine that unlike a modern field, you don't need to monocrop. So they're putting all of the different crops they need together and intermixing them. And that creates the system because you can manage the soil. So the Maeda Night Soiling is when you take all of your human and food wastes and you mix them together and you put them back into the fields. That's part of the reason the forest is so healthy here today.

19:25You have a sandier patch there that's better for peppers. They go in that corner. You know that the cacao likes to be under shade, so you put it under this plant here. And then you have your little garden, and so you get this garden city aspect from these agricultural terraces. Speaking of that agricultural system, there's no river that runs past it, so presumably water engineering must have been very sophisticated. So this is a perfect question, you actually saw the closest river that you drove over in that brand new bridge. And as you were passing it, I think it's about 14 kilometers direct distance from where we are now.

19:58And that is the closest perennial sort of moving body of water. What the Maya did instead is all of these public plazas, all of the household plazas, they're dedicated to drain water often into it, a reservoir. So in the downtown, you have a large and a monumental reservoir. In some of the other districts, you have large reservoirs. But by the end of the city's lifespan, there are enough household reservoirs for every two to five households to be sharing the same water source. And so those are providing water for the dry season. They are probably doing some really clever mixes of having pure water, some things covered with duckweed, and a couple that are dedicated to aquaculture, where they're using water lilies to gauge water purity, which is something we know the Maya did iconographically.

20:39Water gets tied in with rulership, and often also the underworld is this watery place. So you have all of this mix of different elements suggesting water is really key and important. You're also getting a lot of consumption of marine fish here too, based on the dietary evidence. So there's active trade routes to the coast where they're getting marine fish, even though we're nowhere near the coast. They also would have, at the same time, mixed in this water system of reservoirs and, you know, water for consumption with the agricultural terraces, which are serving as this earthen reservoir for their plants.

21:11So when it rains, the water flows over the terrace and it seeps into the soil. And it's designed to be the right depth for all the crops they want to grow. And then the water is flowing along the bedrock layer at the bottom of the soil. So it's going from terrace to terrace down the system. Nothing wasted. Nothing wasted. Presumably there's places for religious activity festivals as well. So actually there's a really good example just over there. And basically it's the ancient community center at Carcol. And it predates everything we just talked about with Kana. It's this early building, this really long, elongated eastern building, which is built up and remodeled about every 200 years.

21:46And then a big western structure. It's something that helps control the calendar and put it together, the ritual lunar and the more standard sort of annual solar calendar. And so the Maya, when they're giving you their texts, the first eucalyphs are all just telling you a date within that calendric system. How does that Maya calendar work? There is an OG date, right? In Christian culture, we have the birth of Jesus. There is an equivalent in Maya culture, right? Maya calendars. So this would be good if I could actually reference exactly when it is, but it's sometime like around 3 ,114 BC, I think.

22:20And then that date cycled around again. So the Maya calendar, like the Maya number system, it happens in these sort of sets of 20. And you can imagine 20 as the base unit instead of 10, if you count on fingers and toes. And so they have 20 days in a month. They only have 18 in a year to help make that religious calendar kind of work out, if that makes sense. And then 20 years in a set, and then every set of 400 years, 20 times 20, etc. And so there was this concept that the calendar repeats. And part of this idea of counting in cycles, so you've got the cycle of days, the cycle of sort of weeks and months, the cycles of years, is the Maya are thinking about time not as an arrow, but as cycles on cycles, whether it's Day, night, rainy, dry, generations of people, life, death.

23:06And people talk about the predictive power of the Maya, the Maya apocalypse. Why is popular culture so seized on that aspect of Maya? So what happened is that calendric system, that long count calendar, which the Maya weren't really using in the post-classic, they use a shorter form because they didn't need to have dates that counted, you know, within a 6 ,000 plus year frame, is it reset. it started a new count in 2012, in December. I think 21st it was. And so that date is the same date as the start of the calendar, right, in terms of Maya dates. But because of that one text and a couple others, it's clear that it's just a repetition of the cycle.

23:42Yeah, that's how it works. It just resets, yeah. Yeah. But some people made money out of the fact that it was the end of the world. Exactly. And so they're doing cycles and celebration of time every 20 years. So you can think of all the public space you've walked through, all this flat space, it's big enough for at least 71 ,000 people to be tightly packed. And if you had a procession going through, you can imagine once every 20 years, there's a big ceremony to celebrate the successful governance, rule, passage of time of 20 years. I'm packing some serious heat. So those are birders. We just passed a group of birders.

24:12And so one of the big things about the management here is that all of the trees have been intentionally kind of kept to keep this environment where you can see a lot of wildlife. And we're an archaeological reserve in a larger natural park, national reserve. And so you do get jaguars coming through. You get to see tapirs here if you're really lucky. You'll hear the howler monkeys. You might see spider monkeys. And then early in the morning, you see tons of birds. So if you get in your car first thing, you'll come out here and you'll see a bunch of birders looking at all the species that are present.

24:42Guys, you're looking in the wrong direction. Look at the archaeology folks. But to be fair for the ancient Maya, they would have been keeping trees and forest here too. So you have this mix of human use of space and natural use and it creates this fully anthropogenic or human landscape. And so the Maya are mixing natural and human elements together and making it this really fluid garden city. And so you can see echoes of that in the modern management system. And we are crawling towards that understanding of managing the urban landscape today, aren't we? And if you look at house prices, you'll notice that places that have that urban forest tend to be much wealthier and more well-endowed than places that don't have the tree canopy.

25:19And we shouldn't be surprised because the Maya were aware of this 1 ,500 years ago, at least. Exactly. They were aware of this, but they're also, they know which of these tree species are medicinal. They know which ones have resources they can use. Think of it like a mix of your medicine cabinet with your kitchen cupboard, but it's growing all around your household. This is Dan Snow's History here. More after this.

25:49This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

26:21Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com slash discovermore.

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27:09you just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?

27:58Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddy Pelling. And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre. From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals, to which trials and folklore feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

28:33The Maya learned how to read the environment, shape it and work with it, allowing large populations to exist in what might seem like an unforgiving landscape. And while the archaeology gives us an outline of a civilization, it's the culture, the customs, the food, the way of life that really gives us the color, that tells us how they thrived. And in modern-day Belize, you can learn about that everywhere. Over 50 % of the Belizean population today identifies with having at least some Maya heritage. I'm heading to the Toledo district where Maya communities and families still practice many of the pillars of Maya culture, as well as offering an insight into how ancient Maya mastered their environment to survive for so many centuries.

29:17I'm here to meet Jose Mess. He is a guide in this area and he's very kindly offered to show me his Maya home, his garden and talk me through, well, everything the modern Maya do that is derived from their ancient forebears. I'm just walking in now through the beautiful garden. There's loads and loads of different plants and trees, a real diversity here. There's some cacao. Oh yeah, lovely purple fruit. The cacao plant. there's some hibiscus and I'm just walking through all sorts of wonderful fruit trees off to my left there's a huge palm roof and I'm just walking up to the house now there we go all right welcome home watch your step welcome in uh this is my baby Isaac hi Isaac this is my wife Hilda and that's my daughter I have behind her nice to meet you all right welcome home okay feel free um it's a beautiful house just to describe it for people We have these logs, beautiful straight timbers making a frame, and then there is thatching.

30:21I'm guessing this is all locally sourced, everything I'm seeing here. Yes, first of all, I want to welcome you to my home. If you notice here, if you look around, the wallings, the pools, the tie-tie, the roofing, everything's from jungle. We naturally made these. We don't use any level or square measurement or measuring tape. everything is arm length, eyesight, constructing a home like this. And how long would it take to put up a house like this? You, as an owner of the home, you would collect your sticks, your posts, your rafters, your tie-tie. So you set a date in three days time, in three days time, you already have your house.

30:58So once you've gathered everything, you can get this up with your friends and family, and community members in three days? Yes, yes. Here in the mine communities, Dan, our strength is the unity. We unite together, we work, meaning that I help you, you help me. In three days' time, Dan, you have your traditional home constructed without a penny. What I'm really fascinated by is that I can't see any nails, no iron here, because you've got these wonderful vines from the jungle that are lashing together, the uprights, the joists as well, which is great. Yes, Dan. So everything you need is right here.

31:30I want you to walk with me, Dan. I really want to show you how we live, What do we do if the Maya people get sick in the early days? How do they survive? In this section here, I have my medicinal plants. The Maya name we have. This one here is called Xchalche. Remember, almost like Xchal, the rain forest god. Yes, it's like the god of the... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the rain god, the forest god. So the main use for Xchalche is for diarrhea, for stomach problems. Okay. It's very handy, but we normally pick them, boil them, drink it as a tea. So the Maya found themselves in a part of the world where, if they worked with nature, it would bring them enormous rewards because things grow here.

32:17Right, right. If we look back from the ancient time, how do these ancient Maya people live? How do my ancestors live? Do you know how to sustain or to survive with their family? When they get sick, how do they cure? When I was growing up, my family never took us to the hospital. In my backyard here, we have medicinal plant behind for toothache to numb your gum. If you have a toothache, it helps you from pain and from cure. We have also for cutting if you're wounded, because in the Mayan people in the early days, they were not using any machete, but they were using obsidian that was traded. Shot stones.

32:56Yes. They still get wounded. They're wounded themselves. What do they do stopping from bleeding? There is a plant that we have now, it's very common, it's usable. If you notice here, Dan, look at this. Oh, yeah, it's a big scar on your forearm. So when I was 14 years old, my dad put me to work on the farm. In fact, at seven years of age, imagine, very young, my dad teach me how to use a machete. But, you know, I and my brother were doing cleaning and my brother wounded me, see? Yes. Because we went too close together. And now I said, I'm going to die because I was bleeding blood all over me. I hollered at my dad and my dad came running.

33:32I said, are you going to be okay? I said, no, dad, look at my blood. He says, I'm going to be right back here. Run into the jungle, from the field into the jungle. I said, dad, why are you leaving me here to die? I was crying and I was looking at my dad. Where's my dad? When I noticed my dad coming running back into the field with a handful of leaves in his hand, he quickly started to chew it and then place it on the wounded area. Not to cure them, but to clot your blood. To stop bleeding. that leaf has some kind of acidic that instantly, like instant, like you see when you have that PVC pipe open, pour in water and you close it, close it, exactly what that leaf does to the bleeding.

34:15Just to stop bleeding, I managed to walk one hour from farm to my home. Really? And I got cured after. So some of these very important, for infection, we have infection plant, we have plants for headaches. When we do jungle hike, we have what we call a jungle cane. It's very sour. And that piece of jungle cane really helps for dehydration. So all of these things, you know, they are very knowledgeable on the Maya people. Up to today, we barely go to the hospital, but we would go to our natural herbal medicinal plant into the backyard. Imagine, Dan, if I would walk you into my farm more, I would point out to you some of these plants, not planted by me, but they just naturally grow there.

35:02What I do is I only maintain them, cleaning around them. Some of our cultivators are bats, lizards, agoutis and birds. They do the hard work. Yes, they would eat the seeds, they would eat the berries and do droppings into the backyards of the farm. and that's how we get our natural medicinal growing into the backyard. So the Maya were just expert farmers? Yes, yes. And what about maize? Because this is something you hear a lot about, isn't it? Do you grow your maize near the house? Yes, yes, yes. Here in my community in Santa Cruz, we do have 13 species in the community, but we have four ancient local corn.

35:40We harvest, we do twice a year. And corn is the bedrock of the diet? Yes. Yes, for the Maya people, our main staple is corn, three times a day. Yes, you can hunt, you can have game meat, you can have jungle vegetable, you can do fishing, but nothing like corn. So corn isn't just a substance for eating. Presumably it's so important it becomes part of their religion as well. Yes, Dan. Yes. In the Maya beliefs, in the Maya culture, we have many gods. We have gods for every harvest, every crop, every medicinal, almost everything. So we have the corn god, we have the Hunahpuh. He has a relation working with Ischel, which is the god of the forest, the god of the maize.

36:26So they have those relationships working, and those are the gods that provide for the Mayan people. So the Maya, it was the bedrock of their diet, and it's also hugely important in their spiritual. Yes. So before they do planting, before they touch the earth, they will do their ritual activities. In fact, Maya people believe they once came from corn. They believe that the corn is what produces or gives them life, sustain their living. So there's a synergy, they're living in balance with the natural world. Yes. Yes.

37:09Night has fallen here in Belize. You can hear that jungle wildlife really revving up. Things get so noisy here at night. Monkeys will be out soon, I expect. What I love about coming out here at night looking up through a clearing in the trees is how clear the night sky is in Belize. It's fantastic. You can see the stars tonight. There is Orion's belt. Let's have a look for the North Star, but it's quite low on the horizon here. The ancient Maya did not think these were just lights in the sky. They believed they were all part of the sacred cosmos, deeply connected to events down here on Earth. For the Maya, the universe was layered.

37:45There was the underworld below. There was where we are now, where the humans lived, and then the heavens above. There are multiple celestial levels. and they monitored all those stars and planets very closely. They were able to track the passage of time by the movement of celestial bodies. They wrote them down. They created one of the most advanced systems of astronomy in the ancient Americas. They actually wrote books known as codices that noted the movements of the sun, the moon, Venus, all written down in their complex hieroglyphs.

38:23Sadly, most of the Maya's written books were destroyed during the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, but thankfully not everything was lost. The Maya also carved their astronomical knowledge, along with the stories of their rulers, alliances, wars and dynasties, onto stone, steli and altars, and into the walls of their temples. And it's from these surviving monuments that experts have been able to piece together the story of the Maya. But at Caracol, one crucial piece of that story had been missing. American archaeologists, Drs. Arlen and Diane Chase, had been excavating Caracol for more than 40 years.

39:03In that time, they've uncovered the towering Kana Pyramid, temples, altars, and vast residential neighborhoods. But despite all these extraordinary discoveries, they'd never found a ruler's burial. Until last summer, July 2025. And when they finally did, it was probably the most important tomb they could have found. We're in a residential plaza area, and there are buildings on all sides. And the Maya, typically, their houses are like that. There's a plaza in the center, and then the buildings surround it. The buildings that are, generally speak, on the north or the west or the south are often just regular residential buildings, or in this case, palaces.

39:47So they'd have lived here and had staff working here and stuff. Absolutely. And then the building to our right, which is to the east, that's the mortuary building. And that's where you would bury your dead. Right. And that's why you decided to look in there when you were investigating burials, I guess. Yes. That's a good place to look for burials. And it's also a good place to look for caches. Those are other ritual deposits that are placed inside the buildings. We had done excavations in the center. We'd done excavations there off to the side over here. but there was an area that we also had not covered.

40:20We'd had to stop an excavation short because the fill was not necessarily as stable as it could be. We were at the end of the field season and a number of years later, we came back. So you're digging in there. You've gone a few meters down. What do you find? We find essentially that there's an open area near the floor and the side of our excavation that we just had to move a few stones and we were inside. Oh my goodness, you're in a tunnel basically going down. A little short, a little short area. So at the end of this short tunnel that's open, you go through there. What do you find at the end?

40:50An open-air tomb. Wow. How do you know it was a tomb? It's corbel vaulted. There's no external door. And we could see pottery vessels on the floor. It had not been disturbed. Incredible. Yeah. It was a very large chamber. There was red pigment on one side of the wall. Red is an important burial color to the Maya. and we could see bone, one person. So sometimes our chambers have more than one, but just one person inside, multiple ceramic vessels. And at first we knew it likely was a royal tomb. There weren't any hieroglyphs to indicate that because it's a little earlier than the time period where we would get writing on the capstones.

41:36But we thought, all right, this is probably a royal individual, someone really important. But as we went further, we began to realize that this was someone really, really important for this point in time. So the artifacts started to tell us a different story. There were three sets of jadeite air flares. If we get one set of jadeite air flares inside a chamber, that's pretty impressive. So there's unprecedented. Three large ones. A very impressive necklace of carved jadeite beads. And really, though, until about the last days of the excavation when it turns out that there's a life-size death mask inside there that's made out of jade itenshell.

42:14At that point, we knew that this was a royal family, it was a ruler, and based on the timing, we expected that this was probably the first member of our royal dynasty here at Caracol. So it was a really, really special find. And the jade death mask is something that's only associated with royalty? Absolutely, absolutely. And not necessarily just royalty, but rulers. So there are maybe less than 50 of them that have been found in the Maya area. And this is the first one to be found at Karkul. So they're not common. They're not common. So how come this very important ruler is buried here and not at the towering palace administrative complex pyramid that's the focal point of the site?

42:55I think this was actually a nicer place to live than at the summit of Kana. And, you know, maybe that was a ritual location rather than anything else. So you had these incredibly high status goods. You had the royal, the ruler's death mask. So you thought, and it was the right period, you thought you had your guy. Yep. What's his name? Tehkovchuk. And why is he important? He is the first known ruler of the site. He's the initial member of the Karakol dynasty. So he's in the hieroglyphic texts in a couple of places. And this is the first time we would have found a ruler, a definite ruler. And we actually knew his name.

43:35So for us, that was priceless. Is it a useful comparison just as Rome goes from being a republic to an empire under Augustus? Augustus is the first of these emperors. Is this an equivalent figure? Yeah, I think so. They're calling back to him historically that he's the first in that line. Caracol was occupied long before that. And there's impressive architecture here before that. But it's his rule that everyone is counting back to when they're talking about the history of the site. So if you could have found anyone in the history of carcass, he's pretty high on the list of some. Yeah, he's very high on the list.

44:09Very, very, very high on the list. You're an expert in human remains. What have his bones been able to tell us? The bones were able to tell us that he was an elderly individual. 45. Oh, yeah. No, a little older than that. Even old? Wow, super old. So if you think about, even in our current world, we've got great dentistry. You know, there are individuals that lose all of their teeth, right? So we had no teeth. Wow. And there were no places for those teeth, no sockets for the teeth left. It had all been completely resorbed. So for a long period of time, he'd been eating food or, you know, mashing food, but without teeth.

44:45So that's a clear indication of his advanced age. So what's the burial tell us about Maya kingship? These people who lived behind the curtain or are they out there rubbing shoulders with populace, leading them into battle, charismatic, visible kingship? What's your guess? I think just like today, it really does depend on the individual. And, you know, sometimes we have a lot of evidence that can tell us about them and other times less so. This time period at Caracol, we don't have the luxury of the huge hieroglyphic history. But for some of our rulers, we know what they're saying about themselves, at least.

45:22Right. They're great leaders. They're leading the site in war. You know, their battles with other sites that they're winning, they're taking captives. We also know that they're at least saying that they're doing sacrifices for the people so that you'll see bloodletting implements which were buried in caches that are in royal or public locations. So they're doing things for the people on one hand, but on the other hand, they're doing things for themselves. The amount of or the kinds of items that are located in this tomb, those are not things that everyone on the site would have had. So there's actually a reasonable divide between this individual and the rest of the folks that lived at Caracol.

46:02But that changes over time. So are you suggesting that leaders like to boast about their successes, shouted about how much they're doing for people, but secretly amassed vast amounts of personal wealth? This is shocking stuff. Sometimes, sometimes yes. Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, yes. So he's an enormous figure in the history of this city. I think he's a great indication of what Caracol was and what it's about to become in terms of the great Maya city. We know that Caracol at that point in time was on a trade network, even though it's inland and not near a river, and that it was tied across Mesoamerica.

46:37So there are also other remains that we found here are tied to the highlands of Guatemala. So it's a suggestion of Caracol really was an important place that was lost for time in the jungle. He is turning into a monarchy as well. Will that affect the way that it interacts with its neighbors? Does it enter a more expansionary phase, for example? Do we know? What happens after Tecab Chac is all of the Maya rulers are connected with each other. Caracol sends someone who becomes the ruler of Copan in Honduras, for example. Our dynasty is related to one at Tikal. So there are a lot of relationships among the elite at these various sites.

47:17But Caracol is taking its place among the great leaders. Caracol is one of the later sites to be found compared to Tikal and Copan and the sites in Mexico. So it's taken a while for folks to realize how important it actually was to the Maya during the classic period. You listen to Dan Snow's History, there's more coming up.

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49:49It wasn't until Tai Kabchak founded the royal dynasty here in the 4th century that it really became a regional superpower. Under his leadership, power was centralised. Long-distance trade expanded, and diplomatic ties were forged with other great Maya kingdoms. His dynasty would rule for 460 years. But ruling a Maya megacity was no easy job. As allegiances between the Maya states shifted, warfare was near constant concern for Maya kings. Conflicts between the different states were often about territory and trade. They were usually smaller clinical campaigns rather than huge battlefield clashes.

50:33Elite warriors and nobles led expeditions against rival cities, armed with obsidian-bladed spears and darts, wooden clubs edged with sharp stones, protected by shields and padded cotton armour. The aim was not simply to kill enemies but to capture them, especially rival kings or high-ranking nobles. Then prisoners could be paraded before the victorious ruler, forced in submission or sacrificed in ritual ceremonies. And as Caracol became more powerful over the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, the peak of the Classic period, it became in brawl in more conflict. Descendants of Tai Kabchak were determined to forge their reputation and Caracol's dominance in the region.

51:19One of the most important wars in the history of the Maya were the Tikal Wars. Fought between Caracol and the nearby city-state of Tikal, you can still see its ruins in the Guatemalan jungle to the west of the Belizean border. In AD 556, Caracol suffered a defeat at the hands of Tikal. When a new leader called Lord Water took the throne at Caracol shortly afterwards, he was determined to rebuild its military and political strength. To do so, he forged a powerful alliance with Calakmul, Tikal's greatest rival. And the story of how that war played out between these great Maya powers can be found in the carved stone monuments at Caracol.

52:06Lots of people will have heard of Tikal, it's in modern-day Guatemala, many of you will have visited. It has long been said to have been one of the primary powers here in the Maya lowlands. it controlled politics and trade it was a very important religious center initially it seems that Karakol was politically tied to Tikal but in the middle of the sixth century it changed its allegiance to Calak Mool and in 562 Lord Water launched what archaeologists call a star war against Tikal it was a destructive brutal military campaign it It was timed, apparently, so it would align with celestial events.

52:53In this instance, we believe it was the movement of Venus. The record suggests that in an astonishing upset, the king of Tikal was defeated. He may have been captured. But either way, the results were catastrophic. And it seems like after this enormous loss, Tikal's population and its influence over the region collapsed. Karakol was in the Ascendant. I'm just walking around the site now looking for the brilliant Dr. Adrian Chase and he's going to talk me through one of these surviving stele and explain what it all says about the epic struggle with Tikal. Adrian, how are you doing buddy? I'm doing very well, how about you?

53:37Good, thank you. Thank you for coming back. Adrian, would you mind taking me to this amazing stele? Sure. Let's go. So here, this is the primary altar that's giving us a lot of the history here at Caracol. And you can see, if you look at the middle, it's pretty rough. It's a little broken up. But even with that, you can still see all of these little glyph blocks. Usually there's a key glyph that tells you start here, and then they give you a date, which is usually five glyphs. So people will be familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are some similarities, right? They are pictorial. They seem to be showing shapes and objects that are sort of recognizable.

54:16What is the system? So the Maya, when they make these glyphs, they're actually mixing together images representing words and sounds, but also they have a syllable. So it's logosyllabic, and then every individual scribe can have their own style. So there get to be different styles per site. In terms of the written language, it seems like there are three used for most of the classic period with different variants to the east, to the west, and to the north. And it's only been quite recently that you guys have been able to decipher these. Yeah, so I'd say it's sort of the 1960s to present. Even today, we can't read all of the glyphs.

54:51So in some of these monuments, like you can see right over there, you might see a figure represented, and sometimes they have a glyph on their thigh or on their person, which is telling you that's their name. Or sometimes you'll see a glyph for fire inside a fire. And so little hints like that have led to this slow process of translating. And I always get very frustrated in ancient Egypt because you often go into a tomb and there's writing everywhere, but actually it's just incantations. It's the same thing again. Are glyphs in the Maya were quite useful to epigraphers and historians and archaeologists?

55:21So yes, if you can get a nice glyphic text, it's quite useful. But the thing is, the Maya on these texts, they're all these stone monuments. The Maya also had this book paper, so they fold like an accordion. That's where they would have put their poetry, their art, their history, their records, their taxes, along with, you know, ritual incantations. So there's a set of paper books from the post-classic, and all of those talk about stars and astronomy and positions and different rituals you do on certain days. But there are only four books out of what must have been hundreds of thousands of books.

55:52And what happened to all the others, Adrian? Well, so the Spanish came in and burned them. Now, on this monument here, it's put into the main ball court at Caracol, so they would have had to play around it to some degree. but it's Khan II, once he's a seat of the throne after 618, he is very prolific. He puts up monuments here at Karakol. And so usually, sometimes the ruler is putting up the monument themselves, but often they're these retrospective monuments. So they're tying events together through time. And he's putting this together because his father had the successful star war, this total war against the royal family at Tikal.

56:26So at this point, this city we're standing in now is dominant. So at this point this city is dominant within this region. Is what we're being told here corroborated by what we see in Tikal? Does it seem like actually it did fall into a glyphs for a while? Yeah, so Tikal, the glyphs go silent. When you're defeated in a Star War, you stop putting up monuments. But what we see on the ground at Tikal, based on the archaeologists we're excavating back in the 60s, these rulers come in who are these stranger kings and that's what they call them. They recognize them as foreigners. There's even a caracal glyph on one of the vessels in one of their burials, but they try to put their mark on the city and they remake the downtown.

57:02And part of this is there are different models for how Maya rulers work. And the older, sort of outdated model is that each royal family has a glyph. Each glyph is tied to one place. And what we can see by mixing the archaeology and the glyphs and looking at trade networks and how things shift over time is that you can see multiple cities become part of the same state over time. And this ruler, think of him as the figurehead. There's still a whole governing apparatus that's handling the day-to-day affairs. How do you think life here was affected in that period of hegemony and dominance? Do you think more wealth would have flowed in?

57:34Do you think normal people would have recognized their advantages of being so dominant? What we can see is that actually corroborating with this date and after, you see new households being founded on the landscape, probably by people migrating in. The population's growing too quickly to just be internal, unless they found magical corn or something. So it suggests immigration into the city, and then average household wealth is also going up. So they're looting a little bit of the wealth out of Tikal, but they're also taking some of the people from Tikal and bringing them here, or rather people from Tikal are choosing to migrate here.

58:05They're following the power. Right. And then those families stay on this landscape all the way into the end. How long do you think this, if we can call it a golden age loosely, but how long does that last? Yeah, so it's kind of complicated, but for Lord Water, there's this sort of 560 date that's really important. He goes until 600. and that seems to be doing pretty well for Karkul. You see wealth increasing. Khan II, there's an interregnum for 18 years before he can actually accede to the throne, which suggests a lot of background politics that we can't see really in the glyphs. But he accedes at 618, and then he's governing for a bit, and then the final ruler, Smokeskull, takes over for the last 22 years.

58:44And 22 years is a long time to be a ruler. He's a ruler of a very secure state, but Smokeskull we only have from two monumental records. One is a stucco text on Kana, and the other is a monument that is out at La Rajoya. And La Rajoya is one of the outlying districts for Caracol. It's currently the northwest part that's in Guatemala and the one that's closest to a waterway. And on that text, it basically says he retook Ushuiza. Ushuiza is the Maya name for the city of Caracol. And what it is, is it literally means three mountain place. And now the question is, how did he lose it? Because he doesn't talk about that part.

59:20All of these texts are always very positive. It's what we did that went well. And this is actually pretty bad that it's one of the surviving texts. And what he said is, I retook something I shouldn't have lost. So the third member of that dynasty is obviously experiencing rebellion, invasion. We don't know. Yeah, he ends up experiencing issues. We can see other texts that talk about it. It looks like a coalition of the different peoples and places he'd incorporated, or Khan the Second and Lord Waterhead incorporated, managed to band together and they sort of kicked him out. So Smokeskull is certainly fighting to keep his patrimony together.

59:53this powerful state that was created by his predecessors. What period is this? So basically everything collapses at 680 and you have the next couple of years reseeding of the dynasties at Tikal and at Naranjo. So Tikal is back. Tikal is back. And Smokeskull disappears. He disappears. So we don't have any other records of what happens. Karakul goes into a hiatus in terms of what the glyphs and the monuments say, which is odd only because usually when you're defeated in war, like happened to Tikal, it's kind of bad for the site and you can see this decline in wealth and well-being. Instead at Caracol, things continue to explode after they're defeated in war.

1:00:31So the average person at Caracol, if you were to choose to live at the site and you're not getting to choose to be the uppermost elite, you'd want to live at Caracol after 680 in this next period, which is 120 years of wealth sharing and a really strong group in the middle. So the powerful warrior kings have gone, but society seems to keep on flourishing. Society keeps on flourishing, and we can see some of the other little cities declaring their own little independence around Caracol, but Caracol itself is flourishing for that period. I don't know of another case like that.

1:01:04Well, folks, I am taking giant strides here, quite literally. Big old steps leading up to the top of this pyramid. if you thought i was going to finish up this podcast without climbing to the very top of canna the enormous pyramid palace administrative center temple well you're not a regular listener to this podcast it's got to be done the discoveries made here in the last 30 or 40 years have transformed the way that we understand the entire Maya world. Because it turns out that Caracol was a serious player. It reshaped the balance of this region. We now know that Caracol was a vast city, one of the wealthiest, the most commercial and with a military might that upended the order of the Maya for the next 200 years.

1:02:13But it wouldn't last, because around the 9th century something happened. Cities like Caracol were abandoned, monuments stopped being built, populations disappeared. Some archaeologists have called this the Maya Collapse, as if one single catastrophe wiped out the civilization overnight. But that isn't quite what happened. The reality is far more complex, far more unsettling. The Maya didn't vanish. Their cities didn't all fall at once. Instead, one of the most sophisticated urban civilizations in the ancient world slowly began to unravel. Climate pressure, political instability, intensifying warfare.

1:02:55Systems pushed to their limits and beyond them. A situation that feels uncomfortably familiar. What happens when a civilisation at its peak begins to fail? Join me for episode two on Thursday as we trace the decline of the Maya and try to make sense of what went wrong. And to do so, we must venture deeper into the jungle and into the earth. into the caves, the places where the Maya believed were the entrances to the underworld. Don't forget to hit follow wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. And if you want to find out more about travelling to Belize to see this history for yourself, I would really recommend it, folks.

1:03:38It was a fantastic experience. You can find out more at www.travelbelize.org and we'll put a handy link in the show notes. With huge thanks to the team at the Belize Tourist Board. We'll see you next time.

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