The Maya Collapse Ancient Apocalypse

1,200 years ago, a catastrophe struck.

One of the most extraordinary civilisations the world has known disappeared.

Millions of people died.

Some were savagely murdered.

Why it happened is a mystery.

This is the story of one man's search for the truth.

For years, Dick Gill has been on a personal quest to discover why the magnificent Maya society collapsed.

Hidden deep in the tropical rainforest of Central America,

are the ruins of the lost city of Tikal.

It's now deserted,

but, 1,200 years ago, Tikal stood at the heart of the Maya civilisation.

Tikal was one of the greatest cities in the world, home to 100,000 Maya.

They were deeply spiritual, worshipping dozens of gods -

of the sun and the moon, the earth and wind, fire and rain.

Their priests were superhuman rulers.

They alone could communicate with the celestial world of the gods.

The Maya lived in, what is today, Southern Mexico and Central America.

From the jungles and plains rose cities and towns,

great centres of worship,

of art and learning.

The Maya's achievements were staggering.

They developed their own writing and mastered astronomy and mathematics.

But they were also capable of brutality - sacrificing human victims to appease the gods.

In the 9th century AD,

it was a thriving culture. But then, at the very height of their glory,

something terrible happened.

In less than 100 years,

the Maya were all but obliterated.

Tikal and other cities were abandoned for ever.

Archaeologists have always been mystified -

why did a civilisation that had lasted for almost 2,000 years disappear in such a short time?

Dick Gill's mission to solve this mystery started in 1968

when a holiday in Mexico changed his life.

I felt this magnetic attraction. I'm not really sure why,

but I did feel it.

I went home and told everyone that I was going to work with the Maya.

Of course, my friends and family were quite amused by the idea.

Back in Texas, they laughed, because Dick was the most unlikely person to tackle this puzzle.

When I first turned my attention to the collapse of Maya civilisation,

I was a banker.

I was really an outsider with respect to the archaeological community.

Archaeologists treated him with derision. What could a banker tell them that they didn't already know?

Then fate stepped in. The family bank collapsed.

I gave up banking

and I set out on a quest to resolve the age-old mystery of what happened to the Maya.

As he was now out of a job, Dick went back to college and studied archaeology,

devoting his life to solving the riddle of the Maya.

First, he needed to establish the scale of the disaster. How many people had actually disappeared?

Dick knew just the man to ask.

One of the first archaeologists to encourage Dick was Fred Valdez.

Fred has turned his back on the glamorous Maya temples and palaces

and, instead, works with his team deep in the mosquito-ridden jungle.

They're looking for traces of the houses where the ordinary Maya lived.

Fred calculates from the number of stone foundations, how many people once lived here.

He was amazed.

It was most surprising.

The biggest surprise for us on the project was how large the population was, out away from the major centres.

We're talking millions and millions of ancient inhabitants.

But, suddenly, 1,200 years ago, the house building stopped.

The Maya that were living here

were very interested in continuing to occupy this location.

They built one house over the other. That's what these floors represent. With this last floor,

that was the end of construction. Then this place is abandoned.

The mystery is, what happened?

There's no sign of mass migration,

no increase in population anywhere else.

This led Fred to one horrible conclusion.

I would estimate that 80% to, perhaps, as much as 90% of the population died off at this time.

Most of the Maya probably died, here in the very place they were born.

It's possible up to 11 million people perished.

What could explain how so many died, so quickly?

Dick's quest was given an even greater poignancy by a grim discovery.

In 1980, archaeologist, Tom Hester and his team were digging near an ancient Maya palace.

When we began to excavate,

it was the most dramatic thing I've ever seen.

On the top of the neck, the top of the back, is a single, killing blow.

"Oh, my God! What is this?" Nobody had ever seen anything like this.

They'd found evidence of savage murder at precisely the same time as the Maya collapse.

The scar on the bone shows that the axe that was used,

the weapon that was used, came up from the bottom of the body

up towards the chin, up towards the back of the ears and the back of the head. Right like this.

Finding the skulls and no bodies attached to them was...quite a shock.

This is a six-year-old child

and, over the corner of the eyes, there are cut marks.

Part of the face, if not all of the face, was removed.

We found thirty - ten men, ten women, ten children.

What affected me was...just the sheer mass of the number of skulls.

The most horrible killing is to a baby - a six-month old.

On the baby,

the killer didn't stop with one blow. It didn't sever the head.

And there's a second chop

comes in from the back of the neck that delivered

a much deeper, a much stronger blow to the back of the head than to the front.

Truly, a horrible, horrible thing.

These killings did not bear the hallmarks of ritual human sacrifice.

The unusual savagery suggested a society in the midst of some cataclysmic shock.

I felt, whatever the explanation for the Maya disappearance was,

it had to explain the disappearance of millions of people and it had to cover the whole Maya area.

We're talking about hundreds of miles, north and south, east and west.

I looked at some explanations that had been proposed -

warfare, disease, declining agricultural productivity,

plant disease, religious inflexibility and on and on.

I've collected over a hundred now.

Dick was unconvinced by any of the conventional theories,

which failed to account for the speed and scale of the Maya collapse.

There must be something else,

something the academic world had neglected.

It was then that I turned my attention to natural disasters,

to see whether there might be a natural disaster,

that explained how this great civilisation came to an end so quickly.

Dick had one particular disaster in mind,

a force of nature that he knows all too well.

I'm a Texan. I know what drought can do.

I have lived with drought all of my life.

I was a child in the 1950s when Texas was devastated by a serious drought.

I remember my father taking me into the hill country near San Antonio.

I remember seeing the dead animals, the countryside burned to a crisp,

the sunny days that went on and on and on without end.

There was nothing that anyone could do.

The drought started when it started and it finally ended when it ended.

It was a very dramatic experience and it is one...

that is burned into my memory.

And...

it has left me with a very clear understanding...

of the awful, devastating, destructive power of drought.

It would be difficult for Dick to persuade sceptical archaeologists that the Maya had run out of water.

His theory had one very big and rather obvious problem.

THUNDER CRASHES

Tikal is in the middle of a rainforest.

I can understand why many of my colleagues have difficulty accepting the possibility

that drought would occur in many parts of the Maya lowlands.

After all, we're sitting here in Tikal, surrounded by high forest.

We've seen parrots flying in and out among the tree tops, toucans, vines hanging out of the branches,

there are rainstorms all around us today.

It's hard to convince someone that, yes, right here in this spot,

they had a terrible drought and it wiped out a great civilisation.

It's just...hard to accept.

It's kind of intuitive.

But a clue from the present day suggested that Dick's idea might not be quite so outlandish.

Here, the descendants of the few Maya who survived the catastrophe

are praying for rain.

Secret ceremonies take place at the end of the dry season. While the women prepare a feast for the gods,

the men perform rituals, combining Maya and Christian ceremonies.

HE PRAYS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Pleading with the gods, just like their ancestors did, not to allow the rains to fail.

Dick went back to Tikal, searching for evidence that the ancient Maya were in fear of drought.

Far from any rivers or lakes, the people of Tikal were completely reliant on the summer rains,

which last for six months of the year.

Dick was fascinated to find that the whole city was designed to conserve water.

Plazas and streets sloped to channel the rain into dozens of reservoirs.

The main problem the Mayas had in Tikal was solving the water problem

since we have no rivers, no lake and no underground waters.

Dick has enlisted the help of local guide, Rafeno Ortiz who knows every inch of the city.

As you notice, there is a reservoir here. We're gonna go down the side of a retaining wall.

-What is this we're coming down?

-One of the largest reservoirs...

Rafeno is taking Dick to hidden parts of Tikal - one of the huge reservoirs now smothered by jungle.

Do you have any idea how deep it is?

-From the top to the bottom of the reservoir, there's about 125ft of depth.

-How much water will it hold?

This has the capacity, it's estimated, about 100 million gallons of water.

These are rain-fed reservoirs. This had to fill up from rainwater.

Exactly. Everything is rain fed here

because, at Tikal, we don't have lakes, rivers or underground water.

So they had to use the surface areas to channel the water and store it in these low reservoirs.

-So, if they didn't get rain, they were in trouble.

-Exactly.

So, Tikal's only source of drinking water during the dry months were the reservoirs.

If the annual rains failed to fill them, the Maya would be in serious trouble.

Dick still needed proof that there had ever been a drought at all,

and that took him to Mexico City.

Hola. Soy Dick Gill. Tengo una cita para revisar datos meteorologicas...

20.25. ..19.87.

1. ..15. ..1.5. 18.75.

To his delight, the city authority's meticulous weather records revealed just what he'd hoped to find.

..14. ..6.25.

89.62.

'It turns out that, in the last century,'

there was one severe drought. It was really a pretty bad drought.

In fact, it happened in 1902, 1903 and 1904.

Given the fact that really severe drought is so rare, we're pretty lucky that it showed up,

in this 100-year record that we have here.

A drought that lasted three years proved to Dick

that severe droughts not only could happen, but had happened.

This was, certainly, a very extraordinary moment.

If a pretty bad drought happened at least once, maybe it happened twice.

And maybe that other time was when the Maya disappeared.

But one destructive drought in the last 100 years was not enough to hang a whole theory on.

He had to search further back in time.

To delve more deeply into Mexican history, Dick had to visit a most unlikely place -

the city prison.

Now the national archives, it houses a unique collection of handwritten books,

some dating back to the 16th century.

WHISPERING: "The land was everywhere dry and barren."

"Those became the five years during which there was nothing to eat."

"The deadly hunger continued."

"There was no water in the wells."

After months of searching, Dick found a number of haunting accounts

of devastating droughts from the Yucatan province of Mexico - the heartland of the ancient Maya.

"The entire forest was burned."

"That which came was a drought

"where the hooves of the animals were burnt."

VOICES CONTINUE TO WHISPER

These reports that are contained in these books here, are reports made by the Spanish colonial authorities

to their superiors in Mexico City or in Madrid.

This one, for example, that I've found, is a plea for help

from the authorities in Yucatan.

The crops had been very bad in the year 1795.

They were running out of grain.

They were very much afraid that the terrible death they had seen so much in the past would repeat itself.

So they say, "Send help now."

Dick was now certain that he was on the right track.

He now had evidence of several severe droughts. But that wasn't enough.

There were no records for as far back as the 9th century.

Back at the ranch, Dick's research now took off in a completely new direction.

He studied meteorology and read hundreds of scientific papers,

looking for anything that might shed light on the collapse of the Maya.

I don't think climate events happen in isolation.

Weather is part of a global pattern.

So I began looking at ancient climate records from all over the world,

trying to understand what was going on around the world at the time that the Maya disappeared.

I looked at records from North America, South America,

from Australia, from Asia, from Europe.

And it was from Europe that he got his breakthrough.

A paper with the catchy title...

"Dendorochronology, mass balance and glacier front fluctuations in Northern Sweden."

The dates just leapt out at him.

1,200 years ago, at precisely the time when the Maya collapsed,

tree rings in Sweden revealed an exceptionally cold period.

Could freezing weather in Europe be linked to drought in Central America?

The experts were extremely sceptical.

The first thing that I did was to get in contact with distinguished and respectable meteorologists

to ask them what kind of a tie can there be here? No-one had really looked at this before.

I seem to have been the first to have stumbled across this.

In fact, I got one letter that said

that most meteorologists would probably find the idea far-fetched.

It was nothing more than a hunch.

People get hunches and they follow up on their hunches.

My hunch was that there was a connection.

Dick threw himself back into the record books, looking for the connection.

The best place to start, he thought, was one of the weather systems that links Europe and Central America -

the North Atlantic high-pressure system.

It was a daunting task.

As you can see, I've got over 1,000 pages of just numbers.

I almost went blind trying to find which was the highest pressure out of all of these numbers here.

It was just thousands of pages that I had to go through.

He scoured the records for the 20th century.

It took him over two years.

But what he found was a revelation.

Areas of high pressure are associated with calm, settled weather.

There are high-pressure systems in the North Atlantic.

One in particular normally stays near Europe, and that's where it was for most of the time.

But Dick discovered that, just once during the 20th century, this system moved towards Central America.

That was a time of severe drought in the Maya lowlands,

AND it was a period where the coldest Arctic temperatures were recorded for the 20th century.

Dick had found that weather systems half a world apart could be linked.

Was he at last onto something?

There was only one man who could tell -

climate modeller Tony Broccoli.

With the computer, I can change the world's climate.

I don't have to go to the polar regions or sweat in the Tropics.

I can just sit in my office, comfortable and dry, and perform my experiments.

At the touch of a button on my keyboard, I can, say...

make the sun stronger or brighter

and see what happens to the rains in tropical Africa or the US.

In his virtual world, Tony has a unique overview of the Earth's climate.

This map shows us the distribution of rain throughout the whole world for a particular time of year.

This is January, and one of the interesting features is this rain belt throughout the tropical regions.

As we go through the seasons -

January, February, March -

we see that that tropical rain belt slowly shifts northward.

We see the rains come to Central America

during June, July, August, September.

Tony looked at what might shift these tropical rains

away from Central America, creating drought.

Here, he starts with a tropical rain belt on top of the equator.

But when he makes the far north colder, the effect is dramatic.

The rain belt is forced south and doesn't reach Central America.

The result is drought.

It would only take a relatively small shift in the average position of that tropical rain belt

to make the difference between abundant summer rains in Central America and drought conditions.

Dick was now more convinced than ever that it was drought that had destroyed the Maya.

Support for his theory came from a most surprising place.

The frozen north.

Paul Mayewski, an expert in ancient climates,

was intrigued by Dick's idea about exceptional weather conditions.

Not for him the warm comfort of an office. He prefers the freezing landscape of Greenland

where he analyses chemicals in the ice.

The beauty of the ice cores is they've built up over the years,

each layer preserving precise evidence of past climates.

If we walked outside right now, we could tell that it was cloudy, cool

and that there wasn't a great deal of wind.

But we wouldn't know about the greenhouse gas content, if the oceans were stormy.

We wouldn't be able to tell as richly what we can tell from the ice-core record going back through time.

That's a pretty odd thought when you think about it.

It's almost better at telling us about the past than we're able to tell by going outside.

Paul has constructed a uniquely accurate history of global weather from his ice cores.

When he heard about Dick's drought theory, he decided to check his cores for the 9th century.

Would HE be able to find evidence of any dramatic climate change in the northern hemisphere?

First thing that we looked at was our record of ammonium.

Ammonium is a chemical that gets into the atmosphere which tells us whether or not there was...

a lot of vegetation in the northern hemisphere.

If there's a lot of vegetation, one assumes it was probably warm and wet.

Low amounts - it was probably drought conditions. The soil had dried up.

When he looked at the ice that was 1,200 years old, he was astonished.

We found that there was a tremendous drop in ammonium.

They'd probably not experienced a drought like this going back two, maybe three, thousand years.

So the ice cores confirmed Dick's hunch.

At the time of the Maya collapse, it was dry and cold across the northern hemisphere -

conditions that would indicate drought in the Maya areas.

But archaeologists remained unconvinced.

If there HAD been such a severe drought, why was there no record of it in the Maya's own chronicles?

The Maya carvings tell of great battles, of ruling dynasties and all-powerful gods.

But on drought, they are silent.

I decided to see

whether the Maya had written anything about drought.

We don't find anything on their monuments and buildings,

but, IF drought were a regular part of Maya life, they must have written about it somewhere.

Then he had a stroke of luck.

He came across this rare manuscript written by the Maya, one of the few not destroyed by the Spaniards.

I came to this Maya book to see whether there was any discussion of drought

and, right here on the last page, there it is.

There's a hieroglyphic symbol for drought.

They did write about drought, it was an ongoing part of their life, and there it is right there.

It was just what he'd hoped to find - a voice from the past.

But despite all the evidence he was accumulating, Dick's theory was still questioned by archaeologists.

Drought as a solution to the Maya collapse

has been very difficult for most of my colleagues in archaeology to accept.

The current theories about the collapse of advanced civilisations,

are that you have to have a very complex explanation

and that an idea as simple as the idea of drought is too simple,

and is probably proposed by a simpleton!

But the final proof Dick was so desperately seeking was just around the corner.

Out of the blue came a discovery made by three geologists,

who had no particular interest in the history of the Maya.

A University of Florida team

happened to be researching climate history at their favourite location - the Yucatan in Mexico.

Our basic research is to try to understand

how the climate of the Yucatan has changed through the last several thousand years.

In particular,

we're interested in how rainfall may have varied over that time period.

The focus of their attention is the bottom of the lake where the mud holds the secrets of past climates.

They take a core down through the mud, layers and layers of sediment

which have built up over thousands of years.

We're taking it up from the bottom using these screw-together rods.

At the bottom of this, we hope, we'll have a tube full of sediment.

Sediments are a great trap of environmental information.

Sediments will collect things like pollen and snail shells and bits of leaves and twigs.

As they brought one core out of the water, they were amazed.

Straightaway, they could see evidence of a severe drought.

We have some very nice gypsum bands toward the base of this core.

They indicate very dry periods, extreme drought in the area,

when the lake level fell very low at some time in the past.

Back in the lab, there was another surprise.

This time, it came from the tiny snail shells found in the mud.

In the shells are two sorts of oxygen from the lake water - a heavy one and a light one.

Plenty of rain, and the light oxygen dominates.

More of the heavy oxygen means it was dry. When they analysed the snails, they were astonished.

They found a surge of heavy oxygen.

It was the worst drought in the last 7,000 years.

Do it very gently.

But they had no way of knowing

exactly when this apocalyptic drought had happened.

Then they had a stroke of luck.

Right in the middle of the driest part of the mud core, they found what they needed.

A single seed.

They sent it to be dated.

When I looked at the result for the first time, it really was a eureka experience!

I knew at that moment

that this drought coincided with the collapse of Maya civilisation in the 9th century AD.

When I heard the news,

there was a tremendous sense of relief.

Here was the evidence that finally supported my theory.

When I first proposed my theory,

there was no physical evidence from the Maya lowlands itself.

There was nothing in the dirt or in the lake cores that I could point to

that said, "This demonstrates that they had a terrible drought here."

But, finally, here it was!

It was a sense of relief mixed with excitement, too.

As long as my theory was just a theory,

I think that some of my colleagues in archaeology were sceptical, which I understand.

But when we had hard evidence from the ground in the Maya lowlands,

I felt that, maybe, at last, people would start to take my theory seriously.

Dick had gathered clues from around the world. From the frozen north to tropical Central America,

from rare Spanish documents, to an ancient Maya book.

But it was the Mexican lake core that gave him the clinching scientific evidence -

final proof that the glorious Maya civilisation had been destroyed by the awful forces of nature.

It's a chilling scenario.

As the drought tightened its grip, the Maya people would have turned to their ruling priests.

With their superhuman powers and their direct access to the gods, they should have saved the Maya.

But the priests proved to be powerless.

It's this that may explain why 30 men, women and children

were so savagely massacred.

You've got ten adult males, ten adult females and ten children.

It just screams that it's... an extended family.

Small inherited details in the teeth confirmed Diane's suspicion.

The men were related. Not only that, the teeth showed that this was no ordinary family.

Some teeth had been carefully filed to make them pointed.

One even had an inlay of a precious stone.

Among the Maya,

this is a status symbol. It's something that the upper classes did to show who they were.

The common folk, the rural populations, didn't practise this.

The massacred family may well have come from the elite priests whose powers had failed,

sacrificed, perhaps, to appease the gods.

Even after the murders, the frenzy and brutality continued.

This is the skull of a young adult female. This skull has been burned.

You can see the charring. The shiny black indicates that...

the bone was burned at a low temperature while the bone was fresh, while it was green.

That's what we call green, when it's very close to the time of death.

Nothing could save the Maya from the horror that enveloped them.

The gods had betrayed them, their reservoirs were empty. There was no drinking water, their crops failed.

There was nothing to eat.

The Maya civilisation was destroyed.

When drought afflicts an area, it's really all-powerful

and human beings are very helpless, powerless, in their ability to do anything about it.

You can't govern better in order to avoid drought.

You can't carry on religious ceremonies better.

You can't have better agricultural practices in your fields to avoid drought.

When drought hits, it's not the people themselves that are at fault and there's nothing they can do.

They are the victims, they are not the perpetrators of the problem.

Today, the Maya who survived this ancient apocalypse

still perform some of their ancestral ceremonies.

But they never returned to their once-glorious cities,

which were abandoned forever.

There's a certain satisfaction

that I have finally understood what happened to the Maya, but, as a human being,

it's awful to think about what happened to those people and how this civilisation came to an end.

In the final Ancient Apocalypse, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

In a storm of fire and brimstone, God destroyed whole cities to punish man's wickedness.

Can science now show that this terrible legend is based on a real apocalypse?

That's next Thursday at 9.00.

Subtitles by Mary Easton BBC Scotland - 2001

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