in the course of the next six hundred years. By the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early sixteenth century, the great temples and palaces of such Maya sites as Tikal, Palenque, and Calakmul had receded into the forest, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth century.
The Maya cities never unified into an empire, though some cities were subservient to others, and they often appear to have cooperated, particularly in warfare. The main connection between the region’s city-states, fifty of which we can recognize by their own glyphs, is that their people spoke around thirty-one different but closely related Mayan languages. The Mayas developed a writing system, and there are at least fifteen thousand remaining inscriptions describing many aspects of elite life, culture, and religion. They also had a sophisticated calendar for recording dates known as the Long Count. It was very much like our own calendar in that it counted the unfolding of years from a fixed date and was used by all Maya cities. The Long Count began in 3114 BC, though we do not know what significance the Mayas attached to this date, which long precedes the emergence of anything resembling Maya society.
The Mayas were skilled builders who independently invented cement. Their buildings and their inscriptions provide vital information on the trajectories of the Maya cities, as they often recorded events dated according to the Long Count. Looking across all the Maya cities, archaeologists can thus count how many buildings were finished in particular years. Around AD 500 there are few dated monuments. For example, the Long Count date corresponding to AD 514 recorded just ten. There was then a steady increase, reaching twenty by AD 672 and forty by the middle of the eighth century. After this the number of dated monuments collapses. By the ninth century, it is down to ten per year, and by the tenth century, to zero. These dated inscriptions give us a clear picture of the expansion of Maya cities and their subsequent contraction from the late eighth century.
This analysis of dates can be complemented by examining the lists of kings the Mayas recorded. At the Maya city of Copán, now in western Honduras, there is a famous monument known as Altar Q. Altar Q records the names of all the kings, starting from the founder of the dynasty K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, or “King Green-Sun First Quetzal Macaw,” named after not just the sun but also two of the exotic birds of the Central American forest whose feathers were greatly valued by the Mayas. K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ came to power in Copán in AD 426, which we know from the Long Count date on Altar Q. He founded a dynasty that would reign for four hundred years. Some of K’inich Yax’s successors had equally graphic names. The thirteenth ruler’s glyph translates as “18 Rabbit,” who was followed by “Smoke Monkey” and then “Smoke Shell,” who died in AD 763. The last name on the altar is King Yax Pasaj Chan Yoaat, or “First Dawned Sky Lightening God,” who was the sixteenth ruler of this line and assumed the throne at the death of Smoke Shell. After him we know of only one more king, Ukit Took (“Patron of Flint”), from a fragment of an altar. After Yax Pasaj, the buildings and inscriptions stopped, and it seems that the dynasty was shortly overthrown. Ukit Took was probably not even the real claimant to the throne but a pretender.
There is a final way of looking at this evidence at Copán, one developed by the archaeologists AnnCorinne Freter, Nancy Gonlin, and David Webster. These researchers mapped the rise and fall of Copán by examining the spread of the settlement in the Copán Valley over a period of 850 years, from AD 400 to AD 1250, using a technique called obsidian hydration, which calculates the water content of obsidian on the date it was mined. Once mined, the water content falls at a known rate, allowing archaeologists to calculate the date a piece of obsidian was mined. Freter, Gonlin, and Webster were then able to map where pieces of dated obsidian were found in the Copán Valley and trace how the city expanded and then contracted. Since it is possible to make a reasonable guess about the number of houses and buildings in a particular area, the total population of the city can be estimated. In the period AD 400–449, the population was negligible, estimated at about six hundred people. It rose