THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 N D5On May 21, 697, according to Mayan hiero-
glyphs, the city of Bahlam Jol “burned for
the second time.”
But, like much of Mayan writing and his-
tory, the record remained mysterious to
modern Maya researchers. Where was
Bahlam Jol? What exactly were the Mayans
describing with the hieroglyph that is trans-
lated as “burn”? There are many kinds of
burning.
A team of researchers who began their
work with a study of lake sediments in Gua-
temala has found that Bahlam Jol is the Ma-
yan name of ruins that archaeologists call
Witzna in northern Guatemala, and they
concluded that the fire was devastating.
They reported Monday in the journal Na-
ture Human Behaviour that the burning of
Bahlam Jol was an example of total war, in-
cluding ordinary city residents as targets,
and not the more rule-bound conflict that fo-
cused on taking important prisoners that
was thought to be the dominant form of
warfare at that time in their history.
“This fire was massive,” said David Wahl,
a geographer with the United States Geo-
logical Survey and one of the authors. Dr.
Wahl, who works to reconstruct the impact
of humans on the climate and environment
in ancient times, said that a thick layer of
charcoal in sediments of a lake near the city
indicated the intensity and scale of the con-
flagration. “It was unlike anything I’ve seen
in the 20 years I’ve been doing this.”
Dr. Wahl and his colleagues argue that
their findings represent a challenge to the
prevailing notion of the nature of Mayan
warfare before 800, when more extreme vi-
olence accompanied the collapse of what is
called Classic Maya civilization.
Other archaeologists praised the re-
search but said that the dominant view of
Mayan warfare is more complex and that
there are other examples of extreme vio-
lence at different periods in Mayan history.
Nonetheless, said David Freidel, a profes-
sor of archaeology at Washington Univer-
sity in St. Louis, the new research is “ele-
gant and persuasive” in the way it marries
written records to environmental and ar-
chaeological evidence. He said that the cen-
tral finding of the paper is solidly estab-
lished.
Dr. Freidel, who specializes in Mayan ar-
chaeology and was not involved in the new
study, said it clearly showed that ordinary
people had been targeted in the city. “The
burning of Witzna shows that total war ex-
isted,” he said.
But he noted that there had been other
cases of extreme violence, including de-
struction in Tikal, during a period from 100-
250.
Dr. Wahl, who has done work on the an-
cient Mayans for about 20 years, said the
new research was serendipitous. He had
identified a lake in Guatemala near the
Witzna site that looked like a good research
target.
It was. In lakes, he said, the rate of sedi-
ment accumulation varies greatly, so that
one centimeter (about four-tenths of an
inch) of a drilled lake bed core could repre-
sent the passage of anywhere from a decade
to several centuries. But in the lake near
Witzna, sediment had been deposited so
rapidly that a centimeter represented less
than a decade, perhaps close to one year.
That meant it was an extraordinarily de-
tailed record that could be tied closely to
dates and records.
In the cores he drilled, he found a layer of
charcoal three centimeters thick (about 1.2
inches), with chunks of charcoal almost a
half inch on a side. Another author on the
paper, Lysanna Anderson, a specialist in ev-
idence of ancient fires, studied the layer.
They concluded that it indicated a huge fire
and had been deposited very quickly — all
at once it seemed, although some might
have been from runoff a season after the
burning.
In addition, other chemical indications of
human activity dropped off rapidly right af-
ter the event, he said, indicating that the hu-
man population itself had suddenly de-
creased. The fire had happened, they
judged, between 690 and 700.
The next piece of evidence came from
Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologistat Tulane University and another author,
who was excavating Witzna. Along with
widespread destruction of buildings, he
found a stone column, or stele, that identi-
fied the city with the name the Mayans gave
it, Bahlam Jol.
Alexandre Tokovinine, the fourth author,
a specialist in Mayan writing at the Univer-
sity of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, searched
records of Mayan texts for the city name,
and found that in the nearby city of Naranjo,
a stone column specified when the city had
burned for the second time.
The word or hieroglyph for “burned” the
authors write is “puluuy,” which they now
think means the kind of conflagration that
happened at Bahlam Jol.
As far as he knows, Dr. Wahl said, using
environmental data to tie together evidence
from the written record and excavation is
unique in Mayan studies.
If it is the first, it probably won’t be the
last. Of the group’s multidisciplinary ap-
proach, Dr. Freidel said, “This is how we
should do it.”Rethinking Mayan Warfare From Ruins
Archaeologists document a
brutal attack waged with fire in
an ancient city in Guatemala.
By JAMES GORMANA. TOKOVININERight, 3-D models of two
stone columns from Mayan
ruins in present-day
Guatemala, with one bearing
a hieroglyph that says the
city of Bahlam Jol “burned
for the second time.” Above,
the arrow indicates burned
floor area in an excavation in
Bahlam Jol, the ruins that
archaeologists call Witzna.
Below, imagery using a laser
technology known as lidar
shows structures in Witzna.F. ESTRADA-BELLI‘This fire was massive. It
was unlike anything I’ve
seen in the 20 years I’ve
been doing this.’
DAVID WAHL
U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEYESTRADA-BELLI/PACUNAMthere. Not far from the Beira-Nhamagaia
crèche, a group of four adult dogs that had
split off from the original pack in the spring
— three males and one female — appeared
to be successfully rearing yet another litter
of eight pups.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” said Cole du
Plessis, coordinator of the wild dog range
expansion program at the Endangered
Wildlife Trust. “At the beginning of last year
there were no wild dogs in Gorongosa, and
now we’re closing in on 50.”
And why not? “When I flew over Goron-
gosa,” Mr. du Plessis said, “looking at the
prey numbers, the water, the topography —
I thought, if you could sketch what wild dog
heaven would look like, Gorongosa is it.”
The successful reintroduction into
Gorongosa of African wild dogs under-
scores the park’s position as one of the
bright spots on an otherwise grim land-
scape of shrinking forests and accelerating
loss of large, charismatic animals unlucky
enough to not be our pets or livestock.
During Mozambique’s civil war, which
ended in the mid-1990s, Gorongosa’s abun-
dant wildlife was almost completely de-
stroyed. Since then, the park has been
steadily recovering, aided by an unusual
partnership between the Mozambique gov-
ernment and the wealthy American philan-
thropist Gregory Carr, along with input
from local communities, international
teams of scientists, conservationists, hu-
man rights advocates — really, anybody Mr.
Carr can get on the phone.
Researchers see in Gorongosa the
chance to track the recovery of a complex
ecosystem from the ground up, and to see
what will heal on its own and what requires
intervention.
Getting the right mix of grazers and
meat-eaters has proved a particular chal-
lenge.
Herbivores were the first to bounce back
in post-conflict Gorongosa, and today the
park pulses with more than 100,000 of
them: blue wildebeest, buffalo, impala,
hippo, waterbuck, reedbuck, elephant,
eland, nyala, oribi, the hauntingly beautiful
sable, the disturbingly furry bushpig.
Experts thought that, with so much meat
on the hoof, carnivores of all stripes would
surely immigrate from surrounding areas
of their own accord, but predator rebound
has proved spotty — or not spotty enough.
The lions in the park have fared well, and
from the handful that remained after the
war, the number today is 146 and rising.
“We’ve got cubs everywhere,” Ms. Bouley
said. “It’s hard keeping up with them.”
Not so for the other major predators.
Spotted hyenas, which are common in
many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and once
were a Gorongosa staple, have yet to re-
turn, and the park team hopes to reintro-
duce a clan or two in the next few years. So,
too, the leopards: Camera traps have
picked up a lone leopard, probably a male,
skulking around at night, but for all the
park’s abundance of a leopard’s favorite
dish, baboon, that loner has remained a
party of one.
“We’re pushing to translocate some fe-
males from outlying areas into the core of
the park,” Ms. Bouley said. “That should
draw in other males and jump-start the
leopard population.”
In the meantime, the wild dogs are hav-
ing their day, hunting ferociously and co-
operatively every morning and afternoon
and sometimes in between.
Wild dogs, which are also known as
painted wolves, are not like other dogs. Ac-
cording to a recent genomic analysis, they
split off from the rest of the canid lineage
some 1.7 million ago. They twitter and
sneeze rather than bark or howl, and their
ears are like satellite dishes to track prey
and one another’s high-pitched calls. Their
legs are like the sticks of a shadow puppet,
and they have four toes rather than five, an
adaptation that helps them run at up to 45
miles per hour.
In Gorongosa, the dogs target bushbuck,
impala and waterbuck, surrounding the
prey, grabbing at legs, nose and hindquar-
ters, disemboweling it from below. What-
ever they do, they do as a team. A lion may
stray from its pride for hours or even days
at a time, but wild dogs are never out of
sight, smell and sound of their pack mates.
Dr. Creel, who has studied dog packs in
Zambia and Tanzania, said, “If you don’t see
an individual for an hour, you know the dog
has either died or dispersed” — gone off to
join a new pack.
Group life has its privileges, including be-
ing cared for when sick or injured. Last year
Nhamagaia, the beta female, broke a front
leg. “You could see it dangling,” Ms. Bouley
said. “We thought we were going to lose
her.” But though the dog straggled behind,
the pack would wait patiently for her and
make sure she could feed at a kill, and the
leg eventually healed.
The dogs are cooperative hunters and co-
operative breeders, a fairly rare reproduc-
tive strategy among mammals. In this sys-
tem, the alpha pair of the pack do most of
the breeding, while the other adults serve
as childless helpers at the nest. They regur-gitate meat from a kill to feed the lactating
alpha female, and they regurgitate more to
fuel her weaned but dependent pups.
The alpha dogs defend their status
through minor acts of aggression, nips and
charges, particularly during mating sea-
son, but the subordinates don’t seem to
mind. Dr. Creel and his colleagues found
that underdogs have lower levels of stress
hormones, compared with the dominant
pair.
Subordinate females generally don’t
bother to ovulate, and their balance of sex
hormones resembles that of women on
birth control pills. It’s a tough enough job to
keep the alpha female’s litter alive, espe-
cially in brutally competitive settings
where the dogs are surrounded by lions and
hyenas eager to steal their prey and kill
their young, and where the ranges of other
dog packs encroach on theirs.
Moreover, because subordinate pack
members often are related to the dominant
dogs, helping the pups keeps some fraction
of their genetic legacy alive.Nevertheless, subordinates may seek
higher status and personal parenthood in a
number of ways: by dispersing to a neigh-
boring pack if available, forming a new
pack, or getting pregnant at home and hop-
ing for the best.
Ms. Bouley suspects that Gorongosa’s
lavish conditions, of abundant prey and
light competition, explain the success of
Nhamagaia’s insubordinate act. The alpha
female not only didn’t shun the beta’s young
— with her own pups mostly weaned, Beira
pitched in as wet nurse to the new brood.
The older pups treat their juniors like toys,
one taking the head, the other the tail, in a
tug of war.
“The bonding between the new pups and
the whole pack, especially Beira, it’s not
what we were expecting at all,” Ms. Bouley
said.
Beira may be grateful for the extra dog-
power come September, when another pack
of 22 dogs will be relocated to Gorongosa
from the Kalahari, and turf battles are sure
to begin.A Wild Puppy Paradise in Mozambique
CONTINUED FROM PAGE D1
The dogs are cooperative
hunters and cooperative
breeders, a fairly rare
reproductive strategy
among mammals.PAULA BOULEY‘If you could sketch
what wild dog heaven
would look like,
Gorongosa is it.’BASICS