72 Scientific American, October 2020
Zach Zorich is a Colorado-based freelance writer.
His last feature article for Scientific American examined
the reasons for the decline of the Greenland Vikings.
S
ome 550 years ago the last of
the great city-states of the Maya
civilization that had flourished
in the Americas for centuries
met their demise. As drought
and warfare tore apart the so -
cial and political fabric and the
Spanish conquistadors began claiming Maya land
for plantations and subjugating Maya people to work
on them, many residents of storied stone cities such
as Yaxchilan and Palenque fled to the countryside in
search of a better life. Ultimately they founded a host
of new Maya cultures. Some people, known as the
Lacandon Maya, established themselves in the forests
around Lake Mensabak in the southern Mexican state
of Chiapas. Their descendants still live in this region
today. They are the Hach Winik, “the true people” in
Yucatec Mayan.
For decades anthropologists thought these modern-day Lacandon were
a time capsule of sorts, a Maya group that had survived the collapse and
subsequent Spanish conquest intact, unchanged for hundreds of years.
Starting in the 1980s, however, as researchers learned more about
the Lacandon, it became clear that this was not the case. Although it incor-
porated elements of classic Maya culture, the Lacandon way of life
was distinctive.
For the past 17 years archaeologists Joel Palka of Arizona State Univer-
sity and Fabiola Sanchez Balderas, president of Xanvil, a Mexican organi-
zation that studies and supports Maya culture, have been collaborating
with the modern Lacandon Maya to learn what they can about the birth
of their culture and to understand how their ancestors adapted to a world
that was being radically reshaped by forces outside their control. The
team’s excavations at various sites around Lake Mensabak are the first to
explore the Lacandon past. The research is yielding a detailed picture of
the lives of Maya people who survived colonialism to carry on the tradi-
tions of their ancestors while developing customs, beliefs and survival
strategies of their own.
© 2020 Scientific American
