Total warfare among the Maya began earlier than once thought [View all]

The burnt ruins of a Maya city in what’s now Guatemala hold clues to its untimely demise at the turn of the 7th century.

BY KATHERINE J. WUTUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019



A reproduction of the murals of Bonampak, which depict vivid scenes of Maya life around the end of the 8th century.
Image Credit: El Comandante, Wikimedia Commons

In the year 697, flames consumed the ancient Maya city of Bahlam Jol. In the wake of a blaze set by neighboring Naranjo forces, residents vacated their homes as entire buildings crumbled to the ground.

It was an act of “total warfare,” archaeologists say. This grim scene, described in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, upends longstanding notions of peace during the Maya civilization’s Classic period, which spanned 250 to 900 CE.

For years, archaeologists have known that this era ended in chaos, hastened by drought and growing political turmoil. But the new findings suggest that large-scale military conflicts—and the destruction they brought—predate the demise of the Maya civilization’s golden age by at least a couple hundred years.

The story first unfolded when a team of researchers led by David Wahl, a paleoclimatologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, was investigating the ruins of a site archaeologists call Witzna (but known to the Maya as Bahlam Jol) in the northeastern part of what’s now Guatemala. Wahl and his colleagues had initially set out to study how drought had affected the ancient city’s agriculture, but were surprised to uncover a 1.2-inch-thick layer of charcoal blanketing the base of a nearby lake, dating to around the end of the 7th century.

More:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/bahlam-jol-maya-warfare/