Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (31 page)

The moment of accession would have been symbolized by his acceptance of the royal scepter—a bizarre sculpture of a god whose long left leg, transformed into a serpent, would have been grasped by the new king in his outstretched hand. The ceremony would have been carried out as Animal Skull sat on a jaguar-fur cushion upon a great stone (or possibly wooden) throne draped with a profusion of puma, deer, and jaguar pelts.

If the scant evidence from other Mesoamerican sites is any indication, the enthronement probably took place at the summit of one of Tikal’s major palace platforms. Shielded from the direct heat of the sun by a series of beautifully crafted cotton canopies, the newly enthroned puppet king would have gazed out over a landscape of red-painted palaces, pyramid temples, and dazzling white plaster plazas, and beyond it almost endless suburbs stretching as far as the eye could see. Although Tikal’s monumental city center covered only a little over one square mile, its often quite densely populated suburbs covered up to fifty times that area.

But it was against this backdrop of urban architectural splendor that the bloody suffering of 562 also took place. For as the boy-king was being enthroned, his predecessor, the fifty-four-year-old King Double Bird, having presumably been captured by Calakmul’s soldiers, was almost certainly offered as a high-grade human sacrifice, quite possibly to Calakmul’s cosmic ally, the war god Venus.²

The fate of Double Bird and other captured Tikalis would have been gruesome in the extreme. It’s likely that the former king of what was then the greatest city of the Maya world had his back broken as his body was bent backward to form a sort of living human wheel, which was then rolled down a small flight of steps into a courtyard used for ritual ball games. It is also likely that he was then taken to the adjoining temple where, if Mesoamerican sacrificial tradition was followed, his heart would have been extracted from his body with a razor-sharp obsidian knife.

It’s probable that large numbers of Tikali prisoners were sacrificed at Animal Skull’s enthronement. Stripped naked or clad in scraps of tree-bark paper, their traditional Maya gestures of submission—hands in the mouth or across the chest—would not have saved them from painful torture prior to final death. They would have been disemboweled, their fingernails would have been ripped out, and their jaws would have been removed before the actual moment of sacrifice itself.

The conduct of Maya power politics, war, and religion were integrally linked, as in so many other parts of the world. Human bloodlust and sadism merged with Maya theology to create a murder machine that was evil by any human standard, yet also theologically just in Maya cosmic belief. For, from the Maya point of view, the gods provided sustenance to mankind, and rightly deserved prompt and appropriate gratitude and payment.

It should be added that it was not only captives who were offered as sacrifices. Members of the religious and political elite often performed painful autosacrifice, with women passing thorn-adorned cords through their tongues, while men mutilated their own private parts. Indeed, it is very likely that such autosacrifice, as well as full human sacrifice, took place on a fairly lavish scale at the installation by Calakmul of the boy-king Animal Skull at Tikal in 562. Venus must have been well satisfied.

I
t was a change in the geopolitical situation as a whole that had persuaded King Sky Witness of Calakmul to opt for war in the first place. The choice of date might have been up to Venus, but the strategic decision to conquer Tikal was almost certainly prompted by what must have been the increasing weakness of Tikal itself.

The great city had been Teotihuacan’s main protégé in the Maya region, and the drought-induced decline in Teotihuacano power in the mid–sixth century (leading very rapidly to complete collapse) had left Tikal without a superpower patron.

From the first half of the fourth century onward, Teotihuacan had maintained a presence—probably a colonial one—in the Maya world. At first, it had been the city of Kaminaljuyu, merely a foothold used to secure sources of vital raw materials: obsidian, jade, copal (incense), cotton, cacao, and bird feathers. Near this first colony in the Maya area were one of the very few sources of obsidian in Mesoamerica and one of the even rarer sources of that most valued of commodities, the pre-Columbian stone of life, jade.

Then, having established a center of influence and probably a military base at Kaminaljuyu, the Teotihuacanos seized political control of at least two more Maya cities, either through conquest or more likely through dynastic marriage and geopolitical pressure. Teotihuacano dynasties were established in Uaxactun (pronounced “washak-toon”) and in Tikal itself in January 378—and over the next half century Teotihuacano influence and/or control seems to have been extended from Tikal to several other Maya cities: nearby Yaxha; Becan, in the north; Copan, two hundred miles to the south; and even possibly the great riverside trading city of Yaxchilan, on the Usimacinta River. Some evidence—mainly architectural—suggests that Teotihuacano influence spread even farther in the fifth and early sixth centuries
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., three hundred miles north of Tikal to the northern Yucatan towns of Dzibilchaltun, Acanceh, Oxkintok, and Uxmal, and to the small but exquisitely rich eastern town of Altun Ha, not far from the Caribbean coast.³

The key to this expansion seems to have been heavy Teotihuacano political influence and/or control at Tikal itself. After 378 Tikal appears to have been Teotihuacan’s proxy in the Maya world. The man behind the 378 Teotihuacano takeover of Uaxactun and Tikal was a Teotihuacano general called Fire Born, and it was this military figure who then installed as king of Tikal a man called Nun-Yax-Ayin (Mystical Green Alligator), who was the son of a king called Spear Thrower Shield, who was himself almost certainly the ruler of Teotihuacan at the time. Whether the previous Tikali monarch, King Jaguar Paw I, had been violently removed or whether his natural death had caused a dynastic power vacuum is as yet unresolved.

As Teotihuacan’s main client/protégé in the Maya area, Tikal had become the linchpin of Maya geopolitics. So when Teotihuacan went into rapid, drought-driven decline in the mid–sixth century, Tikal felt the backdraft a thousand miles to the east. Teotihuacan’s cataclysmic collapse had to have had a profoundly unsettling effect on its culture’s religious and political credibility. The chaos at the great metropolis had also no doubt paralyzed it militarily.

Economically, the rapid decline of Teotihuacan and its empire must also have had a heavy impact on the Mesoamerican economy. As we have seen in Chapter 23, the great metropolis had been for centuries a massive trading machine, sucking in vast quantities of raw materials and other imports while spewing out substantial quantities of manufactured goods. In the Maya world there would almost certainly have been a drop in external demand for cotton textiles and copal. And the collapse of long-distance trade routes that accompanied the decline of Teotihuacan would also have impacted heavily on Tikal as the dominant Maya power. These reductions in external trade robbed Tikal and its dynasty of tax-in-kind revenue—precisely because as top dog in the Maya world, it would have been milking the trade system more than its not-so-powerful competitors. What is more, any reduction in inbound luxury goods would have deprived Tikal of the very items it needed to maintain its political patronage system.

As Tikal’s regional control began to disintegrate, its ability to extract tribute from other cities would have declined, and it would have become more vulnerable to internal dissent and external aggression. And that is precisely what appears to have happened in the fateful year 562.

T
he long-term significance of the decline and fall of Teotihuacan and the change of regime at Tikal becomes apparent only some three hundred years later, at the time of the final collapse of the major Maya civilizations. For centuries—especially since the mid– to late fourth century—the pace of political and demographic evolution within the Maya world had been to a substantial extent conditioned by the political, religious, and economic influence of Teotihuacan. Then, after the metropolis collapsed in the mid– to late sixth century, the pace of Maya political, economic, and demographic evolution was no longer constrained by Teotihuacan’s semicolonial hand.

Teotihuacan had boasted a population of between 125,000 and 200,000—some five to eight times larger than the biggest Maya city of the period. What is more, it directly or indirectly controlled a territory dozens of times bigger than any Maya city. And in religio-cosmic terms, it was the center of the Mesoamerican world. Thus its presence distorted the whole of the rest of Mesoamerican history for much of the first five centuries
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. Conversely, its rapid disappearance from the scene created a huge political vacuum and freed up the entire Maya world in political and economic terms. Within the Maya sphere, existing cities evolved rapidly into regional powers, chief among them Calakmul, Caracol, and Copan.

Caracol, an ally of Calakmul against Tikal in 562, experienced a huge increase in population—from twenty thousand to anything between forty thousand and a hundred thousand in the late sixth century and the first half of the seventh. During this expansion period, a superb radial road system was constructed within the city, the monumental buildings were refurbished and enlarged, and hundreds of miles of stone agricultural terraces and scores of water reservoirs were built. It became extremely wealthy, and the archaeological evidence suggests that the entire population shared in this prosperity. A large middle class appears to have developed, probably among the first occasions on which this occurred in the Maya world.

Over the same period, Calakmul’s population also rose by 200 percent (from around twenty thousand to about sixty thousand). Copan too saw its population begin to increase rapidly in the late sixth century. Even Tikal recovered, and its population rose substantially as well.

It is highly likely that the urban population increases of the late sixth and seventh centuries resulted directly from the freeing up of the political and economic environment following the evaporation of Teotihuacan’s semicolonial presence in the mid–sixth century—symbolized by the fall of Tikal in 562. Tragically, however, by the mid–eighth century, population expansion led to land exhaustion, food shortages, and interstate and internal conflict—and ultimately to political and demographic collapse, thus ending the great classic era of Maya civilization.

The sequence of Mesoamerican events had run its course following the Teotihuacano drought of the mid–sixth century. But
north
of Mexico, the climatic catastrophe may have triggered cultural developments that still affect America to this day.

N O R T H  A M E R I C A N 
M Y S T E R Y

T
he United States’ oldest surviving urban culture can be found in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, where thirty-seven thousand Pueblo Indians still live in thirty-one exclusively Pueblo towns—the oldest of which was founded nine hundred years ago. Through a combination of strong community values and intense cultural conservatism, they have been more successful than any other American Indian people at preserving their identity.

Their medieval ancestors, now usually called the Anasazi, developed an extraordinary civilization—building towns from
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. 1000 onward, large dams and reservoirs, up to five hundred miles of thirty-foot-wide roads, and a rapid communications system operated through a complex of signal stations. They were the first Indians north of Mexico to use looms, weaving cotton cloth as early as
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. 750. But perhaps the most intriguing aspects of the Anasazi civilization’s past are the nature and date of its origins, for in that respect, Anasazi history echoes that of so much of the rest of the world.

It’s known that the climatic chaos of the mid– to late sixth century did affect what is now the western United States, but the evidence is patchy. The only definitive data comes from tree rings obtained from bristlecone pines growing at relatively high altitude in California and Nevada; low-altitude tree-ring data, including that for New Mexico and Arizona, show no evidence of climatic problems in the years or decades following 535. And yet the archaeological evidence tells a different story—one of relatively sudden cultural change and perhaps even of geopolitical stress.

Prior to the sixth century, the Anasazi did not tend to live in villages, had an economy that was only 40 to 50 percent agricultural, and used spears for hunting. Pottery manufacture was practiced in half of the Anasazi territory but was not commonplace. Stone tool technology was relatively primitive.

Then in the mid– to late sixth century, for no apparent reason, the Anasazi totally changed their economy. They became 80 percent agricultural, and yet (in common with other Indian peoples at the time) they also improved their hunting technology by abandoning spears and adopting the bow and arrow. Settlement sizes began to increase, and the first villages appeared. Sophisticated stone axes (suitable for agricultural use) were developed, and pottery became much more widespread. Within just a few decades the foundations had been laid on which Anasazi urban culture would later develop.