In summer, heavy rains lash the Mississippi Valley. With the tree cover stripped from the uplands, rainfall would have sluiced faster and heavier into the creeks, increasing the chance of floods and mudslides. Because the now-combined Cahokia and Canteen Creeks carried much more water than had Canteen Creek alone, washouts would have spread more widely across the American Bottom than would have been the case if the rivers had been left alone. Beginning in about 1200 A.D., according to Woods, Cahokia’s maize fields repeatedly flooded, destroying the harvests.
The city’s problems were not unique. Cahokia’s rise coincided with the spread of maize throughout the eastern half of the United States. The Indians who adopted it were setting aside millennia of tradition in favor of a new technology. In the past, they had shaped the landscape mainly with fire; the ax came out only for garden plots of marshelder and little barley. As maize swept in, Indians burned and cleared thousands of acres of land, mainly in river valleys. As in Cahokia, floods and mudslides rewarded them. (How do archaeologists know this? They know it from sudden increases in river sedimentation—one 2011 study estimated the onset of maize agriculture increased surface runoff in the Delaware River valley by 50 percent—coupled with the near disappearance of pollen from bottomland trees in those sediments.) Between about 1100 and 1300 A.D., cataclysms afflicted Indian settlements from the Hudson Valley to Florida.
Apparently the majority learned from mistakes; after this time, archaeologists don’t see this kind of widespread erosion, though they do see lots and lots of maize. A traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles of maize typically encircled Haudenosaunee villages. This estimate was very roughly corroborated two decades later by the Marquis de Denonville, governor of New France, who destroyed the annual harvest of four adjacent Haudenosaunee villages to deter future attacks. Denonville reported that he had burned 1.2 million bushels of maize—42,000 tons. Today, as I mentioned in Chapter 6, Oaxacan farmers typically plant roughly 1.25–2.5 acres to harvest a ton of landrace maize. If that relation held true in upstate New York—a big, but not ridiculous assumption—arithmetic suggests that the four villages, closely packed together, were surrounded by between eight and sixteen square miles of maize fields.
Between these fields was the forest, which Indians were subjecting to parallel changes. Sometime in the first millennium A.D., the Indians who had burned undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (the general name for hickory nuts, beechnuts, acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts). Chestnut was especially popular—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as many as one out of every four trees in between southeastern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut—partly the result, it would seem, of Indian burning and planting.
Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the 1770s, the naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a hundred bushels of hickory nuts at a time. “They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid” to make a thick milk, “as sweet and rich as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially hominy and corncakes.” Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial—fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.
Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland and orchards. Enough forest was left to allow for hunting, but agriculture was an increasing presence. The result was a new “balance of nature.”
From today’s perspective, the success of the transition is striking. It was so sweeping and ubiquitous that early European visitors marveled at the number of nut and fruit trees and the big clearings with only a dim apprehension that the two might be due to the same human source. One reason that Bartram failed to understand the artificiality of what he saw was that the surgery was almost without scars; the new landscape functioned smoothly, with few of the overreaches that plagued English land management. Few of the overreaches, but not none: Cahokia was a glaring exception.
A friend and I first visited Cahokia in 2002. Woods, who lived nearby, kindly agreed to show us around. The site is now a state park with a small museum. From Monks Mound we walked halfway across the southern plaza and then stopped to look back. From the plaza, Woods pointed out, the priests at the summit could not be seen. “There was smoke and noise and sacred activity constantly going on up there, but the peasants didn’t know what they were doing.” Nonetheless, average Cahokians understood the intent: to assure the city’s continued support by celestial forces. “And that justification fell apart with the floods,” Woods said.
There is little indication that the Cahokia floods killed anyone, or even led to widespread hunger. Nonetheless, the string of woes provoked a crisis of legitimacy. Unable to muster the commanding vitality of their predecessors, the priestly leadership responded ineffectively, even counterproductively. Even as the flooding increased, it directed the construction of a massive, two-mile-long palisade around the central monuments, complete with bastions, shielded entryways, and (maybe) a catwalk up top. The wall was built in such a brain-frenzied hurry that it cut right through some commoners’ houses.
Cahokia being the biggest city around, it seems unlikely that the palisade was needed to deter enemy attack (in the event, none materialized). Instead it was probably created to separate elite from hoi polloi, with the goal of emphasizing the priestly rulers’ separate, superior, socially critical connection to the divine. At the same time the palisade was also intended to welcome the citizenry—anyone could freely pass through its dozen or so wide gates. Constructed at enormous cost, this porous architectural folly consumed twenty thousand trees.
More consequential, the elite revamped Monks Mound. By extending a low platform from one side, they created a stage for priests to perform ceremonies in full view of the public. According to Woods’s acoustic simulations, every word should have been audible below, lifting the veil of secrecy. It was the Cahokian equivalent of the Reformation, except that the Church imposed it on itself. At the same time, the nobles hedged their bets. Cahokia’s rulers tried to bolster their position by building even bigger houses and flaunting even more luxury goods like fancy pottery and jewelry made from exotic semiprecious stones.
It did no good. A catastrophic earthquake razed Cahokia in the beginning of the thirteenth century, knocking down the entire western side of Monks Mound. In 1811 and 1812 the largest earthquakes in U.S. history abruptly lifted or lowered much of the central Mississippi Valley by as much as twelve feet. The Cahokia earthquake, caused by the same fault, was of similar magnitude. It must have splintered many of the city’s wood-and-plaster buildings; fallen torches and scattered cooking fires would have ignited the debris, burning down most surviving structures. Water from the rivers, shaken by the quake, would have sloshed onto the land in a mini-tsunami.
Already reeling from the floods, Cahokia never recovered from the earthquake. Its rulers rebuilt Monks Mound, but the poorly engineered patch promptly sagged. Meanwhile the social unrest turned violent; many houses went up in flames. “There was a civil war,” Woods said. “Fighting in the streets. The whole polity turned in on itself and tore itself apart.”
For all their energy, Cahokia’s rulers made a terrible mistake: they did not attempt to fix the problem directly. True, the task would not have been easy. Trees cannot be replaced with a snap of the fingers. Nor could Cahokia Creek readily be reinstalled in its original location. “Once the water starts flowing in the new channel,” Woods said, “it i
s almost impossible to put it back in the old as the new channel rapidly downcuts and establishes itself.”
Given Cahokia’s engineering expertise, though, solutions were within reach: terracing hillsides, diking rivers, even moving Cahokia. Like all too many dictators, Cahokia’s rulers focused on maintaining their hold over the people, paying little attention to external reality. By 1350 A.D. the city was almost empty. Never again would such a large Indian community exist north of Mexico.
HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
In the early 1980s I visited Chetumal, a coastal city on the Mexico-Belize border. A magazine had asked me to cover the intellectual ferment caused by the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics. In researching the article, the photographer Peter Menzel and I became intrigued by the then little-known site of Calakmul, whose existence had been first reported five decades before. Although it was the biggest of all Maya ruins, it had never felt an archaeologist’s trowel. Its temples and villas, enveloped in thick tropical forest, were as close to a lost city as we would ever be likely to see. Before visiting Calakmul, though, Peter wanted to photograph it from the air. Chetumal had the nearest airport, which was why we went there.
(Illustration Credit 8.5)
As late as the 1980s, the Maya city of Kaan (now Calakmul) was encased in vegetation (top). Excavations have now revealed the pyramids beneath the trees (the right-hand mound in the top photo is the pyramid at bottom), exemplifying the recent explosion of knowledge about the Maya.
(Illustration Credit 8.6)
The town was unpromising in those days. We arrived late in the night, and the only restaurant we could find served a single platter: octopus with pureed beef liver. I am, as a rule, a member of the Clean Plate Club. Looking at the rubbery white octopus chunks bobbing in the tarry mass of liver, I rejected an entire meal for the first time since childhood. Soon afterward the electricity went out everywhere in town. For that reason we did not discover until we retired that our hotel beds were full of little hungry creatures. I was peevish the next morning when we met our pilot.
At first we flew over Highway 186, which arrows west from Chetumal across the Maya heartland. Every so often the pilot tapped my shoulder and pointed to an anonymous, tree-covered hummock. “Ruinas,” he said. Otherwise there was little to report. After a while we turned south, toward the border with Guatemala. The Yucatán Peninsula grows wetter as one heads south. The vegetation beneath the plane quickly became thicker, lusher, higher, more aggressive.
All at once we came upon Calakmul. The city proper, built on a low ridge, had once housed as many as fifty thousand people and sprawled across an area as big as twenty-five square miles. (The city-state’s total population may have been 575,000.) The downtown area alone had six thousand masonry structures: homes, temples, palaces, and granaries, even an eighteen-foot-high defensive wall. Scattered through the neighborhoods was a network of reservoirs, many apparently stocked with fish. Thousands of acres of farmland extended beyond. Little of this was known then—I am quoting from later reports—and none of it was visible from the plane. From our vantage the only visual testament to Calakmul’s past majesty was its two great central pyramids, each wrapped to the shoulders in vegetation.
Peter asked the pilot to fly low circles around the pyramids while he put together the perfect match of light, lens, angle, and shutter speed. He swapped lenses and cameras and window views in a dozen different combinations. At a certain point, he asked, peering through the shutter, “¿Cuánta gasolina tenemos?” How much gas do we have?
The pilot squinted at the fuel gauge: three-quarters full. A puzzled look spread over his face. I leaned over to watch as he tapped the gauge’s foggy plastic cover with his forefinger. The needle plunged almost to empty—it had been pinned.
Peter put down his cameras.
Eventually the blood returned to our heads, permitting cerebration. We had to decide whether to take the shortest path to the airport, straight across the forest, or turn to the north and then fly east along Highway 186, which we could try to land on if we ran out of gas. The trade-off was that the highway route was so much longer that choosing it would greatly increase our chances of a forced touchdown. Soon we realized the decision boiled down to one question: How scary was the prospect of landing in the forest?
I recall looking down at the trees. They had engulfed the great buildings and were slowly ripping apart the soft limestone with their roots. Circling above the city, I had thought, Nobody will ever find out anything about this place. The forest is too overpowering. Calakmul’s inhabitants had cut a little divot into its flanks for their city, but now the vegetation, massive and indifferent, was smothering every trace of their existence. From the plane the trees seemed to march to the horizon without interruption.
We flew over the highway. I tried not to stare at the fuel gauge. Still, I couldn’t help noticing as, one after another, warning lights blinked on. The plane had so little gas that the engine quit a moment after our wheels hit the tarmac. When we rolled silently to a stop, the pilot leapt out and kissed the ground. I sat back and regarded Chetumal with new affection.
In the mid-1990s the Mexican government paved a road to the site, which is now the center of the 1.7-million-acre Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. Aerial views of the ruins are now spectacular; archaeologists have cleared most of the central city. Along the way, contrary to my initial impression, they have managed to learn a great deal about Calakmul, the landscape it occupied, and the collapse that led to the forest’s return. To begin with, they deciphered Calakmul’s proper name: Kaan, the Kingdom of the Snake. Impressively, they learned it from the best possible source, the ancient Maya themselves.
Maya scribes wrote in codices made of folded fig-bark paper or deerskin. Unfortunately for posterity, the Spaniards destroyed all but four of these books. The rest of what remains are texts on monuments, murals, and pottery—about fifteen thousand samples of writing, according to one estimate. Piecing together events from these sources is like trying to understand the U.S. Civil War from the plaques on park statues: possible, but tricky. Combining literal interpretation with an understanding of context, epigraphers (decipherers of ancient writing) have spent the last thirty years hauling submerged chunks of Maya history to the surface. David Stuart, a Mayanist at Harvard, decocted the encounter between Chak Tok Ich’aak and the Teotihuacan expedition in 2000. And Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, respectively of University College London and the University of Bonn, first put the history of the great Mutal-Kaan war together in 1996.
Most of the stelae at Kaan were made from soft stone that has eroded too much to be readable. Martin and Grube thus had to rely on inscriptions at other sites that mention Kaan and its rulers. These are surprisingly numerous. Too numerous, in a way: archaeologists have turned up at least eleven versions of Kaan’s early dynastic history painted on big vases. Exasperatingly, none of the eleven tells exactly the same story. The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological—as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-factly included King Arthur and his father, Uther Pendragon. The dates are inconsistent, too. Kaan’s origins may reach back as far as 400 B.C. But the city-state does not unambiguously enter the historical record until about 500 A.D., when it had a king named Yuknoom Ch’een. The city was already dominating its neighbors; in 546, Yuknoom Ch’een’s apparent successor supervised the coronation of a five-year-old monarch in nearby Naranjo.
This supervision, recorded on a stela erected seventy years afterward, is the first known example in Yucatán of a Mesoamerican specialty: the chaperoned coronation. For much of the last century most Mayanists believed that at its height—200 to 900 A.D., roughly speaking—the Maya realm was divided into a hugger-mugger of more or less equivalent city-states. Critics pointed out that this theory failed to account for an inconvenient fact: Kaan, Mutal, and a few other cities were much bigger and more imposing than their neighbors, and therefore,
one would usually assume, more powerful. According to the skeptics, Maya society was divided into a small number of blocs, each controlled by a dominant city, each striving to achieve some semblance of empire.
Compelling evidence for this view did not emerge until the mid-1980s, when several epigraphers figured out that the Maya glyph ahaw, which means “sovereign” or “lord,” had a possessive form, y-ahaw, “his lord,” meaning a lord who “belongs” to another lord: that is, a vassal king. Another glyph, u-kahi, turned out to mean “by the action of.” They were only two words, but enough to make dozens of texts speak. In the stela, the five-year-old ahaw in Naranjo was crowned “by the action of” the ahaw of Kaan. Naranjo’s young king “belonged” to Kaan. (Naranjo is the name scientists gave to the city; its original name may have been Saal.)
“The political landscape of the Classic Maya resembles many in the Old World—Classical Greece or Renaissance Italy are worthy comparisons—where a sophisticated and widely shared culture flourished among perpetual division and conflict,” Martin and Grube wrote in Chronicles of the Maya Kings and Queens (2000), their remarkable summary of the epigraphic discoveries of the last three decades. It was a “world criss-crossed by numerous patron-client relationships and family ties, in which major centers vied with one another in enmities that could endure for centuries.” As Martin put it to me, Maya civilization indeed bore striking similarities to that of ancient Greece. The Greeks were divided into numerous fractious communities, some of which were able to dominate others by threats of force, unequal alliance, or commerce. And just as the conflicted relationship among Athens and Sparta was a leitmotif of Greek life, so Maya society resounded for centuries with the echoes of the struggle between Mutal and Kaan.