The Great Decipherment
The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya by David Stuart; Princeton University Press, 488 pp., $35
David Stuart, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin and the youngest-ever recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant (he was awarded the prestigious fellowship at age 18), has written a superb, sprawling account of Maya civilization from c. 1000 BCE to 1697 CE—nearly two centuries after the Spanish conquistadors arrived in what is today southern Mexico and Central America. His book offers a summation of recent discoveries, made possible in large part by our improved ability to read Mayan hieroglyphs. Indeed, we are witnesses to an exciting epoch that archaeologists call “the last of the Great Decipherments,” comparable to the one in which the Rosetta Stone was decoded. Stuart himself has been the leading epigrapher, unlocking vast storehouses of knowledge of ancient Maya history, religion, and culture.
The Maya are uniquely enigmatic. The better-known Aztecs, based in the Valley of Mexico, built a centralizing megalopolis, Tenochtitlán, on top of which Mexico City now stands. The Maya, by contrast, preferred smaller urban clusters, spread throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Central America. Rather than having a single unifying language, the different subgroups communicated in about two dozen tongues. (There are more than 28 Mayan languages in use today, from Guatemala and Belize to Honduras to the United States.) War was a constant presence, defining how the Maya approached their existence. And mysteriously, they repeatedly abandoned their settlements, disappearing from sight—and from history, too, as the thick jungle surrounding those settlements devoured their dwellings.
Stuart begins with a chronicle of his 2012 visit to the ruins called La Corona, in Petén, Guatemala. The site features a row of limestone staircases whose carved texts and scenes throw light on political events in the so-called classic period (c. 150–900 CE). He writes excitedly of his growing capacity, after years of study, to read these and other snippets of historical information in such a way as to build a chronology of the rise and fall of the Maya.
Yet Stuart views their history not as an arc but as a series “of numerous ups and downs, of many foundations and abandonments.” He tracks the building of Maya urban centers, their peak during a period of expansive power, and their sudden collapse and relinquishment. “Persistent impermanence,” he writes, characterized the Maya approach to life, which, at its core, they saw as ephemeral. This transitoriness expressed itself in their cyclical calendar, which established precise turning points defined by catastrophic pivots, occasions for renewal, and the intervals in between. In retrospect, the Maya’s desertion of cities likely owed to a combination of factors—among them, overpopulation, war and political polarization, drought and the changing weather patterns, the scarcity of water supplies, and unstable commercial structures. Of course, scores of other peoples—including in our time—have suffered similar bouts of inclemency. None gave up their habitations with such regularity.
The Four Heavens is full of detailed descriptions of dynasties, some featuring epoch-shaping mythical figures. An appendix, in the form of a timeline, lists the dates of specific people and events according to the Gregorian and Maya calendars. By Stuart’s account, the most significant events occurred in the classic period. Conscious of how dynasties tend to offer fractured (Stuart calls them “atomistic”) views of the past, he strives toward a continuum that is holistic.
The reader gets enviable closeups of hubs like Calakmul, Caracol, Coba, Copán, Dos Pilas, Dzibanche, Ek Balam, Naranjo, and Tikal. Stuart also writes of Chichén Itza, which, during the post-classic period, might have been the largest Maya urban center, whose diversity of architectural styles suggests that the Maya met regularly with civilizational contemporaries, like the Aztec and Toltec. Today, Chichén Itza is among the most-visited archaeological sites in Mexico. Stuart follows the adventures of leaders like Ajnumsaj, king of Naranjo, who, crowned in Petén at a young age, presided over an extended interval of political stability in the sixth and seventh centuries, and several queens, such as Lady Ch’akch’en of Coba, whose regime appears to have pursued an expansionist strategy.
Everywhere, Stuart offers insights into the connections between the ancient Maya and their present-day descendants, numbering about 11 million. Approximately 40 percent of the overall population of Guatemala, for instance, is of Maya descent, with the largest groups—the K’iche’, Q’eqchi’, and Kaqchikel—living primarily in the western highlands. And there is a Maya diaspora in the United States of roughly 500,000 people, concentrated in California and Texas. Stuart makes occasional reference to the codices of the Spanish conquistadors, but wisely, he otherwise largely ignores them because of their bias and because, by the time the invaders arrived in the Maya lowlands in the 16th century, the population had already moved on.
As adept as Stuart is at decrypting hieroglyphs, his narrative lacks drive. The Four Heavens is, in a word, dry—a deeply researched study of the Maya ruling elite, whose tombs and other related sites are the clues Stuart uses to record the passing of time. He devotes little space, moreover, to the economy the Maya developed and how it changed from one era to another. The Maya subsisted on farming (maize, beans, squash), bartered daily goods (salt, tools, food) in sophisticated networks, and fostered long-distance trade routes for luxury items (jade, obsidian, feathers, cacao). They congregated in markets, had specialized merchants for certain items, and built a system of tribute and redistribution. Rather than devising a universal currency, they used cacao and shells. The taxation system frequently came in the form of manual labor on such projects, and it is likely that the labor itself was the tax.
Only tangentially does Stuart mention those aspects of Maya civilization, despite his subtitle’s promise of “a new history.” He similarly ignores such essential cultural components as schooling, jurisprudence, and cuisine. And he doesn’t talk about race, slavery, sexuality, or even philosophy. Given how scant the available information is, I feel ungrateful in listing these omissions. Yet the findings he and his colleagues have amassed, nothing short of miraculous, only whet our appetite. The Maya, like early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China, defined all of us in myriad ways. They had an advanced form of mathematics (including the concept of zero), were supreme astronomers, and built—without metal tools or the wheel—majestic structures like stepped pyramids, palaces, and ball courts. Fortunately, thanks in large part to Stuart, our knowledge about things we never imagined we would know is reaching new heights.
Being able to read the newly available sources—“the oldest extant voices anywhere in the Americas,” as Stuart puts it—is nothing short of a gift.
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