Maya Classic Period

The Maya Classic Period is the one era of ancient Mesoamerican religion that can be read in the words of its practitioners. Its kings put up carved monuments recording accessions, births, marriages, wars and rituals, dated to the day against the Long Count, and the decipherment of the script across the twentieth century turned those monuments from decoration into documents.

Michael Coe and Stephen Houston's survey traces the decipherment and what it produced. The picture is of a religion in which the king was a ritual specialist as much as a ruler, holding a title usually translated as holy lord, and in which his own body was an instrument. Bloodletting by the ruler and his consort, drawing blood from the tongue or elsewhere and burning it on paper, is depicted on monuments as the act that opened communication with ancestors and gods.

Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina's work on skeletal evidence has refined what can be said about sacrifice and about the treatment of bodies, replacing a good deal of earlier speculation with directly observed data. Behind the royal record stands a wider cosmology of the maize god, of the underworld called Xibalba, and of a calendar that tied every act to a position in cycles of days.

Across the ninth century the great southern lowland cities stopped putting up dated monuments, and within a few generations most were largely empty. That much is established, and it can be dated closely at individual sites because the monuments themselves carry dates. Why it happened is one of the standing open questions of Mesoamerican archaeology. Drought recovered from lake sediment and cave deposits, soil exhaustion, endemic warfare between rival dynasties, overextended elite obligations and the failure of the ideological claim that a king could guarantee rain have all been argued, and the current tendency is to treat them as interacting rather than to choose one. Two corrections are worth making because popular accounts get them wrong.

The Maya did not disappear: millions of Maya people live in the same region today and speak Mayan languages, and the northern cities of Yucatan flourished after the southern ones were abandoned. And the abandonment was not uniform, since some centres declined much earlier and others much later. Coe and Houston set out the evidence and the competing explanations without settling on one, and the atlas records the question as genuinely open rather than as an answer nobody has bothered to look up.