THE MAYA OF CENTRAL AMERICA 17
also a true city. One of their achievements, prob-
ably of Olmec origin, was a complicated system of
hieroglyphic writing. In the same period, the Maya
Classic civilization fl owered in the Petén region of
northern Guatemala.
The Maya of Central America
Among ancient American civilizations, the Maya
were preeminent in cultural achievement. Cer-
tainly, no other group ever demonstrated such
extraordinary abilities in architecture, sculpture,
painting, mathematics, and astronomy. Inhabit-
ing a region that consisted of portions of modern-
day southeastern Mexico, almost all of Guatemala,
the western part of Honduras, all of Belize, and the
western half of El Salvador, the Maya civilization
attained its highest development in the tropical for-
est lowland area whose core is the Petén region of
Guatemala, at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula.
This was the primary center of Maya Classic civili-
zation from about 250 to 900 CE.^2 The region was
rich in wild game and building materials (lime-
stone and fi ne hardwoods). In almost every other
respect, it offered immense obstacles to the estab-
lishment of a high culture. Clearing the dense for-
ests for planting and controlling weeds with only
the primitive implements available at the time were
arduous tasks. No metal existed, the water supply
was unreliable, and communication facilities were
poor. Yet it was here that the Maya built some of
their largest ceremonial centers.
The contrast between the forbidding environ-
ment and the Maya achievement led some authori-
ties to speculate that Maya culture was a transplant
from some other, more favorable area. This view
has been made obsolete by the discovery of long
Preclassic sequences at lowland sites. However,
abundant linguistic and archaeological evidence
(^2) Recent archaeological discoveries, however, are revolu-
tionizing the dates traditionally assigned to the Maya Clas-
sic period. The newly discovered city of Nakbé in the dense
tropical forest of northern Guatemala, which contains
extensive stone monuments and temples, is dated from 600
to 400 BCE, pushing the Classic era back into the time span
commonly assigned to the Formative or Preclassic period.
suggests that the lowland Maya were descendants
of groups who lived in or near the Olmec area be-
fore 1000 BCE and who brought with them the es-
sential elements of Mesoamerican civilization. In
time, they incorporated these elements into their
own unique achievements in the sciences, art, and
architecture.
Just as puzzling as the rise of the Maya low-
land culture in such an inhospitable setting is the
dramatic decline that led to a gradual cessation of
building activity and eventual abandonment of
the ceremonial centers after 800 CE. Specialists
have advanced many explanations for this decline,
including soil exhaustion as a result of slash-and-
burn farming, invasion of cornfi elds by grasslands
from the same cause, failure of the water supply,
peasant revolts against the ruling priesthood, and
the disruptive effects of the fall of Teotihuacán,
which had close commercial and political ties with
the Maya area. None of these explanations by it-
self, however, appears completely satisfactory.
Recently a more complex explanation of the
Classic Maya collapse has emerged. According to
this theory, the cessation of political and commer-
cial contacts with Teotihuacán after about 550
CE led to a breakdown of centralized authority—
perhaps previously exerted by Tikal, the largest and
most important ceremonial center of the southern
lowlands—and increased autonomy of local Maya
elites. These elites expressed their pride and power
by constructing ever more elaborate ceremonial
centers, which added to the burdens of commoners.
Growing population size and density strained food
resources and forced the adoption of more inten-
sive agricultural methods. These, in turn, increased
competition for land, which was refl ected in the
growth of warfare and militarism. Improved agri-
cultural production relieved population pressures
for a time and made possible the late Classic fl ow-
ering (600 to 800 CE), marked by a revival of cer-
emonial center construction, architecture, and the
arts. But renewed population pressures, food short-
ages, and warfare between regional centers, per-
haps aggravated by external attacks, led to a severe
cultural and social decline in the last century of the
Classic period. The build-up of pressure—so runs
the theory—“resulted in a swift and catastrophic