Downloaded From www.AllSubs.org
Shared by http://DJJ.HOME.SAPO.PT/
1200 years ago a catastrophe struck.
One of the most extraordinary civilisations the world
has known, disappeared.
Millions of people died, some were savagely murdered.
Why it happened is a mystery.
This is the story of one man's search for the truth.
For years, Dick Gill has been on a personal quest to discover
why the magnificent Maya society collapsed.
Hidden deep in the tropical rain forest of Central America,
are the ruins of the lost city of Tikal.
lt's now deserted, but 1200 years ago,
Tikal stood at the heart of the Maya civilisation.
Tikal was one of the greatest cities in the world,
home to 100,000 Maya.
They were deeply spiritual,
worshipping dozens of gods of the sun and the moon,
the earth and wind, fire and rain.
Their priests were super human rulers.
They alone could communicate
with the celestial world of the gods.
The Maya lived in what is today Southern Mexico
and Central America.
From the jungles and plains rose cities and towns,
great centres of worship,
of art and learning.
The Mayas achievements were staggering.
They developed their own writing,
and mastered astronomy and mathematics.
But they were also capable of brutality,
sacrificing human victims to appease the gods.
ln the 9th Century AD, it was a thriving culture.
But then, at the very height of their glory,
something terrible happened.
ln less than a 100 years,
the Maya were all but obliterated.
Tikal and other cities were abandoned forever.
Archaeologists have always been mystified.
Why did a civilisation that had lasted
for almost 2,000 years,
disappear in such a short time?
Dick Gill's mission to solve this mystery started in 1968,
when a holiday in Mexico changed his life.
l felt this magnetic attraction,
and l'm not really sure why.
But l did feel it.
And l went home and told everyone
that l was going to work with the Maya,
and, of course, my friends and
family were quite amused by the idea.
Back in Texas, they laughed,
because Dick was the most unlikely person
to tackle this puzzle.
When l first turned my attention
to the collapse of Maya civilisation,
l was a banker.
And l was really an outsider with respect
to the archaeological community.
Archaeologists treated him with derision.
What could a banker tell them that they didn't already know?
Then fate stepped in.
The family bank collapsed.
So l gave up banking,
and l set out on a quest to resolve
the age old mystery of what happened to the Maya.
As he was now out of a job,
Dick went back to college and studied archaeology,
devoting his life to solving the riddle of the Maya.
First, he needed to establish the scale of the disaster.
How many people had actually disappeared?
Dick knew just the man to ask.
One of the first archaeologists
to encourage Dick was Fred Valdez.
Fred has turned his back on the glamorous
Maya temples and palaces,
and instead works with his team deep
in the mosquito ridden jungle.
They're looking for traces of the houses
where the ordinary Maya lived.
And Fred calculates,
from the number of stone foundations,
how many people once lived here.
He was amazed.
lt was most surprising.
Probably the biggest surprise of all for us on the project was
how large the population was out away from the major centres.
We're talking millions and
millions of ancient inhabitants, there's no doubt.
But suddenly, 1200 years ago, the house building stopped.
The Maya that were living here were very interested
in continuing to occupy this particular location,
and they built one house over the other.
That's what these floors represent.
This is where they were living.
And with this last floor,
that was the end of their constructions.
After that, this place is abandoned.
The mystery is what happened.
There's no sign of mass migration,
no increase in population anywhere else.
This led Fred to one horrible conclusion.
l would estimate that 80 to perhaps
as much as 90% of the population died off
at this particular time.
Most of the Maya probably died here
in the very place they were born.
lt's possible up to 1 1 million people perished.
What could explain how so many died so quickly?
Dick's quest was given an even greater poignancy
by a grim discovery.
ln 1980, American archaeologist, Tom Hester and his team,
were digging near an ancient Maya palace.
When we began to excavate there was the most dramatic thing
l've ever seen in my career in archaeology.
As we can see here on the top of the neck,
on the top of the back, is one single killing blow.
Oh, my god, what is this, you know.
Nobody had ever seen anything like this.
They'd found evidence of savage murder
at precisely the same time as the Maya collapsed.
The scar in the bone shows that the axe that was used,
the weapon that was used,
came up from the bottom of the body,
up towards the chin,
up towards the back of the ears
and the back of the head, right like this.
Finding the skulls,
and no bodies attached to them was quite a shock.
This is a six year old child,
and over at the corner of the eyes there are cut marks.
Part of the face,
if not all of the face was removed.
We found 30, 10 men, 10 women, 10 children.
What affected me was just
the sheer mass of the number of skulls.
The most horrible killing is to a baby, a six month old,
and on the baby the killer didn't stop with one blow,
it didn't sever the head.
And there's a second chop comes in from the back of the neck,
and delivered a much deeper,
much stronger blow to the back of the head than to the front.
Truly a horrible, horrible thing.
These killings did not bear
the hallmarks of ritual human sacrifice.
The unusual savagery suggested a society
in the midst of some cataclysmic shock.
l felt that whatever the explanation
for the Maya disappearance was,
it had to explain
the disappearance of millions of people,
and it had to be something that covered the whole Maya area,
and we're talking about hundreds of miles,
north and south and east and west.
l looked at a number of different explanations
that had been proposed,
explanations like warfare and disease,
and declining agricultural productivity
and plant disease and religious inflexibility.
And on and on.
l've collected over a 100 now.
Dick was unconvinced by any of the conventional theories,
which failed to account for the speed
and the scale of the Maya collapse.
There must be something else,
something the academic world had neglected.
lt was then that l turned my attention
to natural disasters,
to see whether there might be a natural disaster that explained
how this great civilisation came to an end so quickly.
Dick had one particular disaster in mind,
a force of nature that he knows all too well.
l'm a Texan, l know what drought can do.
l have lived with drought all of my life.
l was a child in the 1950s,
when Texas was devastated by a serious drought.
l remember my father taking me in
to the hill country near San Antonio.
l remember seeing the dead and dying animals.
The countryside burned to a crisp.
The sunny days that went on and on and on without end.
There was nothing that anyone could do.
The drought started when it started,
and it finally ended when it ended.
lt was a very dramatic experience,
and it is one that is burned in to my memory.
And it has left me with a very clear understanding
of the awful devastating destructive power of drought.
lt was going to be difficult for Dick
to persuade sceptical archaeologists
that the Maya had run out of water.
His theory had one very big and rather obvious problem.
Tikal is in the middle of a rain forest.
l can understand why many of my colleagues
have difficulty accepting the possibility
that drought would occur in many parts of the Maya lowlands.
After all, we're sitting here in Tikal,
we're surrounded by high forest,
we've seen parrots flying in and out among the treetops.
Toucans.
There are vines hanging out of the branches.
The rain storm's all around us today.
lt's kind of hard to convince someone that,
yes, right here in this spot they had a terrible drought,
and it wiped out a great civilisation.
lt's just hard to accept.
lt's counter-intuitive.
But a clue from the present day suggested
that Dick's idea might not be quite so outlandish.
Here, the descendants of the few Maya
who survived the catastrophe 1200 years ago
are praying for rain.
Secret ceremonies take place at the end of the dry season.
While the women prepare a feast for the gods,
the men perform rituals,
combining Maya and Christian ceremonies.
Pleading with the gods,
just as their ancestors did,
not to allow the rains to fail.
Dick went back to Tikal,
searching for evidence that the ancient Maya
were in fear of drought.
Far from any rivers or lakes,
the people of Tikal were
completely reliant on the summer rains,
which only last for four to five months of the year.
Dick was fascinated to find that the whole city
was designed to conserve water.
The plazas and streets sloped
to channel the rain in to dozens of reservoirs.
You know, the main problems the Mayas had here in Tikal
is solving the water problem, since we have no rivers,
no lake and no underground waters.
To cope with that problem...
Dick has enlisted the help of local guide,
Rufino Ortiz, who knows every inch of the city.
Well, okay, Dick, as you notice that's the reservoir here.
We're going to go down
on the side of the retaining wall here.
What is this that we're coming down off?
This is one of the largest reservoirs here in Tikal.
Rufino is taking Dick to hidden parts of Tikal,
one of the huge ancient reservoirs
now smothered by jungle.
Do you have any idea how deep it is Rufino?
Well, from the top to the bottom of the reservoir,
it's about a 125 feet depth.
How much water will this hold?
This has the capacity systemated
to about a 100 million gallons of water here.
Were these rain fed reservoirs?
This all had to fill up from rain water, right?
Exactly.
Everything is rain fed here,
because here in Tikal we don't have lakes
and rivers or underground water,
so they had to use the surface areas to channel the water
and store it in these little reservoirs here.
So if they didn't get rain,
they were in a real big trouble.
Terrible problem.
Exactly so.
So Tikal's only source of drinking water
during the dry months was the reservoirs.
lf the annual rains failed to fill them,
the Maya would be in serious trouble.
Dick still needed proof that
there had ever been a drought at all,
and that took him to Mexico City.
20.25. 19.87. 1 .15. 1 .5. 18...
Much to his delight,
the city authority's meticulous weather records
revealed just what he'd hoped to find.
14. 6.25. 89.62. 7.
lt turns out that in the last century
there was one severe drought.
lt was really a pretty bad drought.
ln fact, it happened in 1902, 1903 and 1904.
And given the fact that really severe drought is so rare,
we're really pretty lucky that it showed up
in this 100 year record that we have here.
A drought that lasted three years proved to Dick
that severe droughts not only could happen,
but had happened.
This was certainly a very extraordinary moment.
l hoped maybe if a pretty bad drought happened at least once,
maybe it happened twice,
and maybe that other time was when the Maya disappeared.
But one destructive drought in the last 100 years
was not enough to hang a whole theory on.
He had to search further back in time.
To delve more deeply in to Mexican history,
Dick had to visit a most unlikely place.
The city prison.
Now the National Archives,
it houses a unique collection of handwritten books,
some dating back to the 16th Century.
After months of searching,
Dick found a number of haunting accounts of devastating droughts
from the Yucatan province of Mexico,
the heartland of the ancient Maya.
These reports that are contained
in these books here are reports made
by the Spanish colonial authorities to their superiors
in Mexico City or in Madrid.
And this one, for example, that l found,
is a plea for help from the authorities in Yucatan.
The crops had been very bad in the year 1 795,
they were running out of grain,
and they were very much afraid
that the terrible death that they had seen so often in the past
was going to repeat itself again.
So they say, send help now.
Dick was now certain that he was on the right track.
He now had evidence of several severe droughts,
but that wasn't enough.
There were no records for as far back as the 9th Century.
Back at the ranch,
Dick's research now took off in a completely new direction.
He studied meteorology,
and read hundreds of scientific papers,
looking for anything that might shed light
on the collapse of the Maya.
l don't think climate events happen in isolation.
Weather is part of a global pattern.
So l began looking at ancient climate records
from all over the world,
trying to understand what was going on around the world
at the time that the Maya disappeared.
l looked at records from North America,
from South America, from Australia,
from Asia, from Europe.
And it was from Europe that he got his breakthrough.
A paper with the catchy little title
''Dendrachronology,
mass balance and glacier front fluctuations in Northern Sweden''.
The dates just leapt out at him.
1200 years ago, at precisely the time
when the Maya collapsed,
tree rings in Sweden revealed an exceptionally cold period.
But could freezing weather in Europe
be linked to drought in Central America?
The experts were extremely sceptical.
The first thing that l did was
to get in contact with distinguished
and respectable meteorologists,
to ask them, well,
what kind of a tie can there be here?
No-one had really looked at this before.
l seem to have been the first to have stumbled across this.
ln fact, l got one letter that said that most meteorologists
would probably find the idea a little far fetched.
lt was nothing more than a hunch.
People get hunches,
and they follow up on their hunches,
and this was my hunch that l followed up on,
was that there was a connection.
Dick threw himself back in to the record books,
looking for the connection.
The best place to start, he thought,
was one of the weather systems
that links Europe and Central America,
the North Atlantic high pressure system.
lt was a daunting task.
As you can see,
l got over a 1 ,000 pages of just numbers,
and l almost went blind trying to find
which was the highest pressure out of all of these numbers here,
and it was just thousands of pages
that l had to go through.
He scoured the records for the 20th Century.
lt took him over two years.
But what he found was a revelation.
Areas of high pressure are associated
with calm settled weather.
There are high pressure systems in the North Atlantic.
One in particular normally stays near Europe,
and that's where it was for most of the time.
But Dick discovered that just once during the 20th Century,
this system moved towards Central America.
Well, that was a time of severe drought in the Maya lowlands,
and it was a period where the coldest Arctic temperatures
were recorded for the 20th Century.
So Dick had found that weather systems
half a world apart could, indeed, be linked.
Was he at last on to something?
There was only one man who could tell,
climate modeller, Tony Broccoli.
With the computer,
l can change the world's climate.
l don't have to go to the polar regions
or sweat in the tropics or anything like that.
l can just sit in my office,
comfortable and dry, and perform my experiments.
So at the touch of a button on my keyboard,
l can say, make the sun stronger or brighter,
and see what happens to the rains in tropical Africa,
or drought in the mid-western United States.
ln his virtual world,
Tony has a unique overview of the earth's climate.
This map shows us the distribution of rain
throughout the whole world
for a particular time of year.
ln this case, this is January,
and one of the interesting features is this rainbelt
that extends throughout the tropical regions.
As we go through the seasons, January, February, March,
we can see that that tropical rainbelt slowly shifts northward.
We see the rains come to Central America
during June, July, August, September.
Tony looked at what might shift these tropical rains
away from Central America, creating drought.
Here he starts with the tropical rainbelt
bang on top of the equator.
But when he makes the far North colder,
the effect is dramatic.
The rain belt is forced South and
doesn't reach Central America.
The result is drought.
lt would only take a relatively small shift
in the average position of
that tropical rainbelt to make the difference
between abundant summer rains in Central America,
and drought conditions in Central America.
Dick was now more convinced than ever
that it was drought that had destroyed the Maya.
And support for this theory came from a most surprising place.
The frozen North.
Paul Mayewski, an expert in ancient climates,
was intrigued by Dick's idea
about exceptional weather conditions.
Not for him the warm comfort of an office.
He prefers the freezing landscape of Greenland,
where he analyses chemicals in the ice.
The beauty of the ice cores
is they've built up over the years,
each layer preserving precise evidence of past climates.
lf we walked outside right now,
we'd be able to tell that it was cloudy.
We would be able to tell that it was cool,
and that there wasn't a great deal of wind.
But we wouldn't know about the greenhouse gas content,
we wouldn't know if it was stormy out in the oceans.
We wouldn't be able to tell as richly
what we can tell from the ice core record
going back through time,
and that's a pretty odd thought when you think about it.
We've captured something that's almost better at telling us
about the past than we're able to tell
by going out sniffing the air outside.
Paul has constructed a uniquely accurate history
of global weather from his ice cores.
When he heard about Dick's drought theory,
he decided to check his cores for the 9th Century.
Would he be able to find evidence of
any dramatic climate change
in the Northern hemisphere.
The first thing that we looked at was our record of ammonium,
and ammonium is a chemical that gets up in to the atmosphere,
which tell us whether or not
there was a lot of vegetation in the Northern hemisphere.
lf there's a lot of vegetation one assumes
it was probably warm and wet.
Low amounts,that it was probably drought conditions,
that there weren't a lot of plants,
the soils had probably dried up.
And when he looked at the ice
that was 1200 years old, he was astonished.
We found that there was a tremendous drop in ammonium.
They, in fact,had probably not experienced
a drought like this going back two,
maybe 3,000 years.
So the ice cores confirmed Dick's hunch.
At exactly the time of the Maya collapse,
it was dry and cold across the Northern Hemisphere,
the very conditions that would
indicate drought in the Maya areas.
But archaeologists remained unconvinced.
lf there had been such a severe drought,
why was there no record of it in the Mayas own chronicles.
The Maya carvings tell of great battles,
of ruling dynasties, and all powerful gods.
But on drought, they are silent.
l decided to see whether the Maya
had written anything about drought.
We don't find anything on their monuments and buildings,
but l thought that if drought
were a regular part of Maya life,
that they must have written about it somewhere.
Then he had a stroke of luck.
He came across this rare manuscript written by the Maya,
one of the few that had not been destroyed by the Spaniards.
So l came to this Maya book to see
whether there was any discussion of drought,
and right here, on the last page, there it is.
There is a hieroglyphic symbol for drought.
They did write about drought.
lt was an on-going part of their life,
and there it is, right there.
lt was just what he'd hoped to find,
a voice from the past.
But despite all the evidence he was accumulating,
Dick's theory was still being questioned by archaeologists.
Drought as a solution to the Maya collapse
has been very difficult
for most of my colleagues in archaeology to accept.
The current theories about
the collapse of advanced civilisations
are that you have to have a very complex explanation,
and that an idea as simple as the idea of drought,
is too simple, and is probably proposed by a simpleton.
But the final proof Dick was so desperately
seeking was just around the corner.
Out of the blue came a discovery made by three geologists,
who had no particular interest in the history of the Maya.
A team from the University of Florida
happened to be researching climate history
at their favourite location, the Yucatan in Mexico.
Our basic research really is to try to understand how climate
how the climate of the Yucatan has changed
through the last several thousand years.
And, in particular,
we're interested in how rainfall
may have varied over that time period.
The focus of their attention is the bottom of the lake,
where the mud holds the secrets of past climates.
They take a core right down through the mud,
layers and layers of sediment,
which have built up over thousands of years.
We're taking it up from the bottom
using these screw together rods,
and at the bottom of this we'll have,
we hope, a tube full of sediment.
Sediments are a great trap of environmental information.
Sediments will collect things like pollen and snail shells,
bits of leaves and twigs.
As they brought one core out of the water, they were amazed.
Straight away they could see evidence of a severe drought.
And we have some very nice gypsum bands
towards the base of this core,
that indicate very dry periods extreme drought
in the area when the lake level fell,
very low at some time in the past.
Back in the lab there was another surprise.
This time it came from the tiny snail shells
found in the mud.
Locked in the shells are two sorts of oxygen
from the lake water,
a heavy one and a light one.
Plenty of rain and the light oxygen dominates.
More of the heavy oxygen means it was dry.
When they analysed the snails, they were astonished.
They found a surge of heavy oxygen.
lt was the worst drought in the last 7,000 years.
But they had no way of knowing exactly
when this apocalyptic drought had happened.
Then they had a stroke of luck.
Right in the middle of the driest part of the mud core,
they found what they needed.
A single seed.
They sent it to be dated.
When l actually looked at the result for the first time,
it really was a eureka experience.
l knew at that moment that this drought coincided
with the collapse of Maya civilisation
in the 9th Century AD.
When l heard the news,
there was a tremendous sense of relief.
Here was the evidence that finally supported my theory.
When l first proposed my theory,
there was no physical evidence from the Maya lowlands itself.
There was nothing in the dirt
or in the lake cores that l could point to that said,
look, this demonstrates that they had a terrible drought here.
But finally, here it was.
lt was a sense of relief mixed with excitement too.
As long as my theory was just a theory
l think that some of my colleagues
in archaeology were sceptical,
which l understand.
But when we finally had hard evidence
from the ground in the Maya lowlands,
l felt that maybe, at last,
people would start to take my theory seriously.
Dick had gathered clues from around the world,
from the frozen North to tropical Central America,
from rare Spanish documents to an ancient Maya book.
But it was the Mexican lake core
that gave him the clinching scientific evidence,
final proof that the glorious Maya civilisation
had been destroyed by the awful forces of nature.
lt's a chilling scenario.
As the drought tightened its grip,
the Maya people would have turned to their ruling priests,
with their super human powers and their direct access to the gods,
they should have saved the Maya.
But the priests proved to be powerless.
And it's this that may explain why 30 men,
women and children were so savagely massacred.
You've got 10 adult males,
10 adult females and 10 children.
lt just screams that it's an extended family.
Small inherited details in the teeth confirmed
Diane's suspicion; the men were related.
Not only that, the teeth showed that this was no ordinary family.
Some teeth had been carefully filed to make them pointed.
One even had an inlay of a precious stone.
Among the Maya, really this is a status symbol.
lt's something that the upper classes
did to show who they were.
The common folk, the rural populations,
didn't practice this.
The massacred family may well have come from the elite priests
whose powers had failed.
Sacrificed perhaps to appease the gods.
Even after the murders,
the frenzy and brutality continued.
This is the skull of a young adult female.
This skull has been burned.
You can see the charring,
the black, shiny black indicates
that the bone was burned at a low temperature
while the bone was fresh, while it was green.
That's what we call green,
when it's very close to the time of death.
Nothing could save the Maya from the horror that enveloped them.
The gods had betrayed them,
their reservoirs were empty.
There was no drinking water,
their crops had failed, there was nothing to eat.
The Maya civilisation was destroyed.
When drought afflicts an area, it's really all powerful,
and human beings are very helpless,
powerless in their ability to do anything about it.
You can't govern better in order to avoid drought,
you can't carry on religious ceremonies better.
You can't have better agricultural practices
in your fields to avoid drought.
When drought hits,
it's not the people themselves that are at fault,
and there's nothing that they can do.
They are the victims,
they are not the perpetrators of the problem.
Today, the Maya who survived this ancient apocalypse,
still perform some of their ancestral ceremonies.
But they never returned to their once glorious cities,
which were abandoned forever.
There's a certain satisfaction
that l have finally understood what happened to the Maya,
but as a human being,
it's awful to think about what happened to those people,
and how the civilisation finally came to an end.
Downloaded From www.AllSubs.org