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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 Pen-dragon. 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.

Sometime before 561
A.D.,
a ruler known only as “Sky Witness” took the throne of Kaan. A major figure despite his obscurity, Sky Witness set out to destroy Mutal. The motive for his hatred is uncertain, though it may have been rooted in the invasion from Teotihuacan. The new rulers of Mutal had aggressively thrown their weight around and by Sky Witness’s time controlled as much as eight thousand square miles. (Mutal city itself had an estimated population of sixty thousand, plus many more in its hinterland.) Particularly important, the Teotihuacan-backed dynasty took over several outposts on the Usumacinta River system, Yucatán’s most important trade route. Shipments of luxury goods from faraway regions usually had to travel up or down the Usumacinta; Mutal’s ability to tax and supervise the trade must have been terribly vexing, even if it had little practical import. Sky Witness may have thought that Mutal was becoming a dangerous neighbor and decided to take preemptive action. Or he may have wanted to control the Usumacinta and its tributaries himself. A dynastic dispute may have been involved. Grube told me that he thought the kings of Kaan, never allied with Teotihuacan, may have wanted to stamp out pernicious foreign influences—xenophobia is a powerful motive in every culture. No matter what the motive, Sky Witness’s plan to dismantle Mutal was brilliant—in the short run, anyway. In the long run, it helped set in motion the Maya collapse.

Kaan and Mutal had a lot at stake. The Yucatán Peninsula is like a gigantic limestone wharf projecting into the Caribbean. Roughly speaking, the northwest-southeast line on which it joins the mainland runs through the middle of the Maya heartland. Despite receiving three to five feet of precipitation in an average year, this area is prone to drought. Almost all the rain falls during the May-to-December rainy season and rapidly sinks hundreds of feet into the porous limestone, from where it cannot easily be extracted. Little is available during the five hot, dry months between January and April. The region does have permanently water-filled swamps, sinkholes, and lakes, but often these are too salty to drink or use for irrigation. So toxic is the groundwater, a U.S.-Mexican research team remarked in 2002, that the Maya realm was “geochemically hostile” to urban colonization. Its occupation “more resembled settlement on the moon or Antarctica than most other terrestrial habitats.”

Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their
milpas
and gardens. “Permanent, year-round populations could be established only in the presence of an anticipatory engineering of water supplies.” The Maya heartland, in other words, was a network of artificially habitable terrestrial islands.

As Maya numbers grew, so did the islands beneath them. North of Kaan, half a dozen small cities improved agricultural conditions by lifting up entire fields and carving out rain-retaining terraces on dry hillsides. Kaan itself dug out a series of reservoirs, established neighborhoods around each one, and linked the ensemble with roads and waterways. Central Mutal was ringed by a chain of seven reservoirs, with another central reservoir reserved for royalty. And so on.

Revamping the landscape both allowed Maya cities to expand and made them more vulnerable. Despite constant maintenance, erosion silted up reservoirs, hurricanes destroyed terraces, and weeds and sediment choked irrigation networks. Over time the Maya found themselves simultaneously maintaining existing systems and pushing out to cover past mistakes. If war damage made it impossible for a city’s inhabitants to keep up, they would be in trouble; island dwellers who wreck their homes have no place to move. One can speculate that the losers’ fear of having their backs to the wall generated the extraordinary tenacity of the Kaan-Mutal conflict.

Sky Witness’s strategy was to ring Mutal with a chain of client states and allies and then strangle it, boa constrictor–style. In this way Kaan would both acquire a dominant position in the Maya realm and destroy its enemy. The first step was to suborn Mutal’s most important vassal, the king of Oxwitza’ (now known as Caracol). With 115,000 people, Oxwitza’ was twice as populous as Mutal and controlled almost as much territory. Yet it had become Mutal’s vassal soon after Teotihuacan installed the new dynasty. No concrete evidence exists that the first event caused the second, but the coincidence in timing is hard to dismiss. Sky Witness seems to have divined or inspired resentment in Oxwitza’. The king of Oxwitza’ took the throne “by the action of” Mutal in 553
A.D.
Within three years Sky Witness had persuaded the new ruler of Oxwitza’ to betray his masters.

Maya polities were not large enough to maintain standing armies; instead both Kaan and Oxwitza’ mustered short-term militiamen to fight wars. Wearing cotton armor and wooden helmets, brandishing lances, hatchets, and maces, and carrying great painted litters with effigies of their gods, the two militias marched on Mutal. Kaan is some sixty miles north of Mutal; Oxwitza’ is fifty miles south of it. The two cities planned to crush Mutal between them. They carefully chose the day of the attack. Maya priests tracked the movements of Venus, which they regarded as a powerful portent. Its day of emergence in the morning sky was considered an occasion on which warfare and violence was likely to be rewarded—an optimal day to attack a city. On April 29, 562, in what archaeologists call a
Star Wars
assault, the two celestially guided armies overran Mutal, sacked its precincts, and probably killed its king (the relevant glyphs are too worn to read).