Lizzie Wade
More than a millennium ago, a Maya community collapsed in the face of a devastating drought. One writer joined an intrepid archaeologist to upend what they thought they understood about why it all happened.
Ancient glyphs, forgotten temples, abandoned cities decaying in the jungle: The collapse of the Maya Empire is one of archaeology’s most notorious apocalypses. It’s also been presented to us as one of the most mysterious, and the most frightening. Millions of people seem to simply disappear from the archaeological record, in one city after another, during a time of devastating drought. It sends shivers down our spines—and tourists flocking to the ruins.
But as I researched the Classic Maya (250-900 C.E.) collapse for my book Apocalypse, I came to think this was the past apocalypse that most resembles the intertwined crises we’re facing today. The way it turned out shouldn’t scare us. It should inspire us to take the future into our own hands.
Whether it’s driven by human or natural forces, or a combination of both, apocalypse is a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a society’s way of life and sense of identity. Archaeologists use objects, buildings and bones to reconstruct these cataclysmic events and the cultures and people they affected. They can see what happened before a world-shattering event, and they see what happened after. They can see the trends that made a society vulnerable, and they can see how survivors regrouped and transformed.
For archaeologists, the most important piece of the story is not the apocalypse itself but how people reacted to it—where they moved their settlements to escape, how they changed their rituals to cope, what connections they made with other communities to survive. That’s where they find countless stories of resilience, creativity and even hope. And that’s what I saw in the Maya world, especially in a mysterious ancient city called Aké.
Aké is less than an hour’s drive from Mérida, the capital of Mexico’s Yucatán State, but it feels like a world apart. During a recent visit, even the archaeologist Roberto Rosado-Ramirez, who has been working in Aké for 20 years, worries that he missed the turnoff. But soon we are on the correct one-lane road, driving through a tunnel of green formed by tree branches arching overhead. We’re visiting during Yucatán’s rainy season, when the region’s scrub forest bursts to life. Pendulous, teardrop-shaped birds’ nests dangle from the branches, and kaleidoscopes of marigold butterflies flutter ahead of our car. An iguana lounges in the middle of the road, unperturbed by passing bike and motorcycle traffic.
After about 15 minutes, the forest gives way to the town of Aké. Signs of its past are everywhere. The ruins of a Maya pyramid sit near first base of a community baseball field in the center of town. Nearby, in the core of the restored archaeological site, another pyramid is topped with an unusual array of ancient columns. The enormous stones used to build that pyramid indicate it may have been constructed as early as between 100 B.C.E. and 300 C.E., Rosado-Ramirez tells me. A full-blown city grew up around the sacred monument between the years 300 and 600 C.E. Aké reached its height sometime between 600 and 1100, with a population of 19,000. It was economically prosperous, connected to extensive trade and diplomatic networks, and the religious heart of its community. During his first years in Aké, working on excavations led by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (known by the Spanish acronym INAH), Rosado-Ramirez studied Aké during this time, known as the Classic period. Events ranging from market days to religious festivals happened in the city’s plaza, which was kept meticulously clean. The spirits of gods and ancestors were believed to inhabit the temples surrounding it, and the succession of divine monarchs who lived alongside them were responsible for keeping Aké—and the rest of the Maya world—in working order through rituals (including sacrifice and bloodletting) that placated the deities and diplomacy that managed Aké’s relationship with other city-states, near and far. Merchants vied with the nobility for wealth and power, established trade routes, and facilitated the transport of goods over long distances; people moved from place to place with relative ease. That would all change—at first slowly, and then quickly—as an apocalypse rippled up from the south.
At first, the people of Aké would have heard rumors of faraway warfare, in what is now the Petexbatun region of Guatemala, 300 miles south of Aké. In the mid- to late 700s, when Aké was at its apogee, nearby cities and towns suddenly turned themselves into walled fortresses, and years of excavations led by archaeologists from Vanderbilt University found evidence that some of the region’s most impressive buildings, even inside the fortifications, were attacked and destroyed. By whom, and why, remain mysterious. The region had plenty of water and doesn’t appear to have faced another environmental challenge at the time. Until the war began, the region’s population was stable, and there’s no evidence of foreign invasion or attempted conquest. Perhaps the low-level tension that typically simmered between Classic Maya city-states boiled over into outright and widespread warfare for reasons we might never know. But by 830, all the cities in the region had collapsed, and their leaders were killed or had fled.
Over the next century or so, the apocalypse slowly spread and consumed once powerful Maya cities such as Tikal, in northern Guatemala, and Calakmul, in the southern part of the Yucatán Peninsula. In the 1990s, a sediment core extracted from Lake Chichancanab provided the first paleoclimatic evidence of a severe drought at the end of the Classic period. In the years since, researchers have gathered many more paleoclimate records from lakes and caves, which show drought likely hit these southern Maya cities during the ninth century, which perhaps amplified the political instability, in a classic apocalypse pattern. Perhaps, with all the conquests, alliances and intermarriages, the elite class had grown too large and unwieldy for common farmers to support in a time when food supplies were dwindling, Rosado-Ramirez suggested to me. And maybe those intertwined political and environmental pressures led to a popular revolution in philosophy and religion that undermined the justifications for monarchy, evidence of which wasn’t preserved as well as portraits of god-kings carved in stone.
As the divine kings of the south fell, their cities did, too. Without the need to glorify all-powerful rulers, the construction of new buildings and monuments stopped. Because Maya artists often engraved their work with precise dates, archaeologists can see when a city’s last monument was erected, a final gasp of proven occupation before a site’s abandonment. In a handful of Classic Maya cities, most famously Cancuén in Guatemala, archaeologists have found mass graves that some think hold the remains of the former nobility who were massacred in the political transition. But in most places, it appears that the elite class simply left once their hold on power slipped.
A city without a divine king didn’t have much work for priests or artists, and so they followed. Merchants, especially those who traded in elite and exotic goods, would have made their way to better markets or returned to their homelands as they waited for the next opportunity. Commoners, mostly farmers with household fields, probably would have been able to hold out the longest, if they wanted to. But eventually most people left the old cities, and they fell into ruin.
Whatever news of these crises arrived in Aké—and it must have, especially once refugees started pouring out of the south—its residents may very well have felt protected by their geographic and cultural distance from the chaos. The northern part of the Yucatán Peninsula had always been the driest part of the Maya world, and so its residents would have been used to living with a certain amount of water stress. They would have known how to collect rainfall and conserve the water levels of their artificial reservoirs and natural cenotes, skills that perhaps served them well at the beginning of the dry period.
Gradually, however, the strife crept closer and closer. Sometime between 900 and 1000, Rosado-Ramirez found, Aké built a wall that enclosed the temples and palaces of the city center and ran right across the 20-mile-long limestone road that had long connected it to the city of Izamál, practically and symbolically cutting off Aké from the wider Maya world. Perhaps the wall was meant to protect against attacks from the ambitious Itzá people, who were consolidating power in their capital, Chichén Itzá, or maybe Aké’s leadership wanted to exert more control over immigration as more and more refugees wandered a land struggling to produce enough food to feed them.
Still, Aké remained a flourishing city through the tenth century. Even as political power shifted, the climate fluctuated and the wall went up, the apocalypse still hadn’t quite arrived. In a haunting echo of how many of us experience climate change today, it was always happening somewhere else, to someone else—until suddenly, it happened to them, too. An even more severe and prolonged drought hit between 1000 and 1100, overwhelming even the northern cities’ water infrastructure and management. By the end of that century, Aké and the rest of the cities in the northern Yucatán Peninsula had collapsed and was largely abandoned. Just as had happened in the southern cities a few centuries earlier, the elites left first, and most of their subjects dispersed in their wake.
As cities collapsed, old identities and territories dissolved. Architecture and art would never reach the same monumental heights, nor would they ever require the same amount of labor. Ancient trade routes disintegrated and re-formed as shadows of themselves. Scribes and sculptors, for the most part, stopped carving significant dates into stone, giving archeologists the eerie impression that Maya history had ended.
It hadn’t, of course. Most Maya people moved from cities to villages, many along the peninsula’s coast, after there were no more inland cities to try to make a life in. But thatched houses are far more ephemeral than stone pyramids, Rosado-Ramirez points out, and material evidence of many of these post-apocalyptic communities decayed long ago. Information about how and where most common Maya people remade their lives in a post-apocalyptic world has remained so hard to find that past generations of archaeologists didn’t bother looking for it—or perhaps they couldn’t even imagine there was anything there to find.
In Aké today, modern houses abut the remains of ancient ones, which now take the form of small mounds on the otherwise flat landscape. Many of the town’s men work in a crumbling factory building where for over a century they—and their fathers and grandfathers before them—have processed henequen, a local succulent, into some of the world’s strongest rope. Part of the factory’s roof caved in during a hurricane in 1988, and the damage was too extensive to repair, but about half of the building is still accessible. The equipment inside is so old that replacement parts are occasionally purchased from owners of historic henequen machines otherwise on display as museum pieces.
When I arrive with Rosado-Ramirez, his old friend and collaborator Vicente Cocon López is there to meet us at the baseball field with his son Gerardo Cocom Mukul. Cocon López is Rosado-Ramirez’s closest friend and collaborator in Aké. Rosado-Ramirez has known Cocom Mukul, now in his 20s, since he was in elementary school; he’d been working as the project’s unofficial photographer for many years. The four of us climb the enormous stairs to the top of the ancient pyramid arrayed with columns, now cleared of vegetation and restored to something like its former glory thanks to INAH’s restoration efforts. The ascent requires taking huge steps that leave me short of breath. The pyramid was clearly designed to be both accessible and imposing. Cocon López, who has an impressive eye for construction techniques both ancient and modern, makes sure I notice how all the enormous stones in the staircase are roughly the same size—an indication of the incredible amount of labor and skill its ancient builders brought to it.
For many years, archaeologists thought Aké had been completely abandoned after the Classic period collapse. But after years of getting to know the current inhabitants of Aké, that interpretation no longer sat right with Rosado-Ramirez. All of his training as an archaeologist had taught him to focus on monumental architecture like pyramids. But if he applied the same rule to present-day Aké, he realized he’d be forced to conclude that the town had been abandoned decades earlier, when the henequen factory stopped being maintained. And, of course, that wasn’t at all what had happened.
So Rosado-Ramirez started trying to see ancient Aké through the lens of modern Aké. Had everybody left after the apocalypse, or did it remain the home of a different kind of community? If anyone could help him find more evidence of post-apocalyptic construction, it was Cocon López, who knew the site better than anyone and was skilled at spotting subtle variations in building patterns and materials. Without the backing of a grant or a government-funded excavation, Rosado-Ramirez started trekking out to Aké on Saturdays to walk the site with Cocon López and see what they could find. “We didn’t even have money for water,” Rosado-Ramirez remembers.
Cocon López scouted the site during the week, often following old metal tracks laid down during the boom days to move henequen in horse-drawn carts, and drew maps to guide their joint exploration on the weekends. In jumbles of old stones that, to me, are barely legible as the remains of buildings, Cocon López could see the entire timeline of old Aké and how later people interacted with and repurposed what came before. He and Rosado-Ramirez found small structures built with a mix of the huge stones of Aké’s earliest urban phase and smaller stones that came later.
With his local team’s help, Rosado-Ramirez identified the remains of 96 small houses within the monumental core of old Aké and excavated 18 of them. These buildings, most often found clustered together in groups of six or so around a shared patio, were filled with ceramic styles popular during the Postclassic period of the 10th to 15th century, and they occupied locations—including the city’s once pristinely empty central plaza—where commoners would have never been allowed to live before the collapse. Perhaps they had moved inside Aké’s wall for protection during an unstable time, or maybe they simply found the old border convenient for defining and unifying their now much-smaller community. Rosado-Ramirez estimates that between 170 and 380 people continued living among the ruins of Aké during the Postclassic period. The upper end of that estimate is almost exactly how many people live in Aké today.
For over 400 years, this smaller, more egalitarian, more flexible and more resilient Postclassic lifestyle worked for the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula. Even after the drought ended and the environment stabilized, they never again agreed to the rule of a divine king. They had tried living in that kind of ultra-stratified complex society, and it had failed them, catastrophically. It made their cities vulnerable, their politics fragile and their religion powerless when apocalypse struck. Why would they take that kind of risk again?
Instead, the Maya of the northern Yucatán Peninsula built a different kind of capital, starting around 1100. Mayapán wasn’t the seat of a god-king but rather the meeting place for a confederacy composed of representatives from powerful families and polities across the peninsula. Isotopes in the bones of people buried there show that the city attracted people from far and wide, both commoners and elites. Perhaps that’s where the rulers of Aké ended up after they fled: as junior members of Mayapán’s council.
Like Aké at the end of its first phase of life, Mayapán built a city wall. Unlike Aké, its enclosed center was densely occupied with both monumental buildings and commoner neighborhoods. Mayapán was home to several imposing pyramids, but no single central plaza like the one in front of Aké’s column-topeed pyramid. No one person or group controlled Mayapán, and so they didn’t need a massive public space where their followers could gather to hear their proclamations. Politics happened in the compounds of the council’s most powerful constituencies, and religious practices were more personal, with altars and incense burners inside people’s homes.
Without the need to glorify individual rulers, scribes wrote books instead of carving history into stone monuments, and architects designed pyramids that were much easier to build. Unlike in ancient Aké, people in Postclassic Mayapán didn’t need to spend their time shaping and precisely arranging huge stone blocks into elegant, perfect staircases and palace walls to comply with royal tastes. Instead, they built pyramids from jumbles of smaller stones, which were then covered in stucco and painted with colorful murals. Most of those murals have long since faded away, exposing the stone foundations beneath. When Rosado-Ramirez took me to visit these ruins centuries later, Mayapán’s monumental architecture looked messier and less refined than its Classic period counterparts. But at the time, it would have been just as beautiful and imposing, albeit in a different way.
Then, around 1400, drought struck again, and Mayapán, too, collapsed. According to surviving Maya texts, it was largely abandoned by around 1441. Its confederacy and council government had likely been a reaction to the inequality and failure of divine kingship, but the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula were now learning that any kind of centralized power, even when it was shared, could succumb in the face of an environmental challenge that required the kind of flexibility and adaptation that only smaller communities were capable of.
The people of post-apocalyptic Aké likely felt the stress of this new drought, but they didn’t have to leave their homes or remake their lives. They were already living in the safest, most adaptable way they knew. But their past was anything but lost or forgotten. People rebuilt and reimagined their communities with the help of everything their ancestors left behind, while also, perhaps, vowing not to repeat their mistakes.
We don’t yet have the kind of perspective on our own time that archaeologists have on the Classic Maya collapse. They can see the whole story, while we are still in the midst of ours. But the way Maya people reinvented themselves and their societies gives me hope. They carried forward what served them and left behind what didn’t, especially the concept of divine kingship and its resulting inequality. What if we learned to see the Classic Maya collapse not as a terrifying story of a mysterious people who vanished in the face of environmental catastrophe, but as fertile ground for an exciting and necessary transformation that changed how its people saw themselves forever? Aké, Mayapán and hundreds of other Postclassic Maya communities are not cautionary tales. They are much-needed examples of adaptation and reinvention—not despite the apocalypse, but because of it.
