More recently, the people of the Maya regions, including the Yucatán, developed an extensive and complex civilisation in an area with very limited access to fresh water. The peninsula is karst: an area of limestone with little or no surface water but an extensive network of underground waterways running through it like an enormous plumbing system. The gateway to these waterways, and the vital fresh water they contain, is through caves and sinkholes, or cenotes. These abound on the edge of the Chicxulub crater, and the entire network of caves and underground waterways is linked to the asteroid impact. I don’t understand the reason for this, but I read it in a book and also a man with a lanyard told me so I believe it. The other half of Natives is a geologist; maybe ask him. Just as they did around rivers and lakes elsewhere, settlements and ultimately great cities formed around these invaluable water sources. Visit a Maya ruin and you will very often find a cenote or cave entrance nearby. So, no asteroid, no Maya. More or less.
Much of the first floor of the school was unfinished. I suppose at some point when they were building it the money must have run out, as money often did in Spain at that time. Also they forgot to leave enough money to buy resources or pay staff decent wages. But the kids had pencil cases with the school logo on and there was a grand piano in the massive reception area that never got played so, you know, swings and roundabouts. The uncompleted part was sealed off from the rest of the building, but you could access it from the staircase that led up from the underground carpark. This door was supposed to be locked once everyone had arrived but sometimes the caretaker would forget, or perhaps he left it unlocked because he needed something from up there. It was an excellent source of cardboard boxes, for example. When this happened I would go up and sit in one of the white rooms, empty apart from a few scattered, broken chairs and boxes of building materials - brackets, nails, cable casing, ceiling tiles, aluminium mesh - some unopened, some begun and barely used, ripped open and abandoned as if someone had been told they contained treasure. Wires and cables arced down, exposed, and lengths of ducting like huge, fat silver worms burrowed in and out of walls. It was quiet, and cool, and dusty. It was a good place to sit. It was a good place to swear at the top of your voice.
The school was built in a vague figure of eight shape. It is my honest belief that it was so designed in order to disorientate the people that toiled within. Unless you broke the cycle of its mobius corridor, you could walk round and round it forever, never getting anywhere. It was like being in Ikea without the prospect of meatballs, weird scandinavian confectionery, or a sideboard called tvåt. In the holes of the eight there were two internal courtyards. The surrounding walls were glass and the courtyards were overlooked by the windows of the first floor, so that to be in one was to feel like the subject of some perverse experiment and feel your every movement observed. As part of their Maya history unit, the year 5 class I was teaching at the time chose one of these courtyards as the location for madball, their own invention based on the little-understood game of pok-ta-pok, the ballgame played by the ancient Maya. Madball was essentially a four-way version of dodgeball, where the goal was to eliminate the other teams by hitting them them with a ball anywhere below the neck - the last team with any members standing being declared the winner. Players could be tagged back in, and there was a specific and highly contentious number and size of balls allowed. Games invariably ended in tears, blood, or both, and madball was played only a few memorable times until the students decided it was too dangerous. Of the many hazards madballers had to look out for was a large rectangular structure which gave ventilation to the carpark below. Despite affording a small amount of shelter, it was the site of many a collision between skull and sheet metal - not to mention lively debates about how long a player should be allowed to hide behind it without spoiling the game for everyone else. To start from the corner of the courtyard closest to the ventilation unit was considered advantageous, so the position had to be rotated between the teams appropriately. Madball was brilliant.
Though similarly debated and bloody, unlike its ancient Mesoamerican predecessor, madball was a purely secular activity. Pok-ta-pok, on the other hand, was definitely a ritual as well as a sporting event, forming part of the belief system of the ancient Maya. It's a religion which is difficult to understand: the mythology is extensive and complex, the pantheon is enormous and the practices debated. Moreover, given that Maya religion naturally overlaps with that of other Mesoamerican cultures, a single deity, character, location, etc may have several different names depending on the groups of people using it. Broadly though, the mythology held that the world was divided into levels: the upper world was the domain of the gods, and was itself divided into thirteen smaller levels; the middle world was the domain of the humans; and the underworld the domain of the dead, consisting of nine levels. It was to these levels that the Hero Twins of Maya legend, Xbalanque and Hunahpu, travelled in order to face a series of tests set by the lords of Xibalba, ultimately defeating said death gods in a game of pok-ta-pok and thus wrenching humanity from their devious grasp. As the story demonstrates, the levels of the Earth were not separate but traversable and intermingled, though only gods and the souls of the dead could make the journey. The passage between them took the form of a giant ceiba or kapok, a tree with a ferociously thorned trunk, whose branches and roots reached up into the heavens and down into the underworld respectively. The middle world rested on the back of a giant reptile - in some versions a crocodile, in others a turtle - swimming through the cosmic ocean. I’m not sure how the creature felt about the whole thing but presumably it didn’t mind. Maybe it didn’t notice. Though living humans could not use the tree to get about, it was believed that cenotes and caves were entrances to Xibalba and were therefore sacred - the gateway to a mystical as well as literal underworld. Archaeologists have found bones, pottery, jade and other ornaments in many of them, presumably the result of offerings and rituals conducted in these places. As well as water, caves and cenotes thus provided a source of myth and mysticism, and were a crucial part of how the Maya explained the world and their place within it. Given the grizzly and chthonic nature of many of these rituals, it seems fitting that they were conducted in places created by an event that nearly wiped out life on Earth.
The ventilation unit on the madball court created a shaft of light which cut through the surrounding darkness below to illuminate a small area of the underground car park. Like the rooms on upper storey, the car park was mostly unfinished and empty, but there was no need to wait for a door to be left unlocked to access it, nor did you have to use a mystical tree or take part in any Seventh Seal-style shenanigans; you simply left the school building via the dining hall and walked down the slope that the cars took in the mornings. Before I migrated up to the white spaces above, I made a daily journey into the sacred cave of the carpark, stinking of sweat, coffee, and stale beer, and with no clear idea of the reason for doing so. Among the other building materials that lay scattered like broken pots and bones around the underworld, a stack of pallets lent against one of the concrete pillars. I would take a pallet, lay it in or next to the patch of light, and sit, feeling the cool and the dark around, listening to the indistinct sounds, watching the dust that floated in the shaft of sun from above. I engaged in this ritual for a while, in a vague attempt to carve out a space for my brain to unknot itself. It worked a bit.
Although they knew what they wanted from their rituals, the cave journeys of the central lowland Maya also led them further and further into the dark. They went there to make sense of things that, ultimately, they couldn’t understand, namely, why the rain didn’t come and the crops didn’t grow. Believing caves to be sacred places and entrances to Xibalba, priests and nobles would go there in order to perform bloodletting rituals, commune with spirits, and decipher the shapes and shadows of the rocks, themselves changing imperceptibly with the calcifying drip-drop of time trickling, down from the land above. Often, the rituals performed here were focused on appeasing the rain god, Chaac. Caves and cenotes were thought to be his particular domain, his breath rising as mist from their depths. Towards the end of the classic period (roughly 250 - 900 AD), and to a lesser extent into the post-classic (900 AD until the arrival of the Spanish in 1492), the central and northern Maya areas (broadly corresponding the Yucatán Peninsula) were hit by a series of devastating droughts, perhaps the most significant of which lasted from 820-870 AD. Along with the obvious consequences for crops and access to fresh water - in an area where the latter was already scarce - these dry periods had profoundly destabilising effects on the social and political order of the region. As the maize failed and the rains refused to arrive, the people lost faith in the ability of their rulers to appease Chaac and provide for their needs. That’s what claiming divine right to rule gets you. Looking for answers, the ruling and religious classes went ever-deeper into the dark. They lit ceremonial fires and captured the smoke in pots, dragged thorned vines through their tongues, pierced their genitals with stingray spines, and (possibly) engaged in human sacrifice, to no avail. Chaac remained unmoved. The rains didn’t come, and the crops failed. To compound the problems faced by the people of the lowlands, all this came at a time when the political order was already stretched by intensified armed conflict.
Whatever Neil Young might tell you, war was definitely known and engaged in by the Maya. Great city-states like Tikal and Calakmul would vie bloodily for dominance over lesser entities, as well as each other. Indeed, the lack of a unifying Moctezuma-like figure in the Maya regions who could be tricked and toppled, allowing for easier conquest of everyone else, was one of the factors that made it very hard for the Spanish to pacify the Maya; in fact they only did so with significant help from other indigenous peoples from Mexico. This jars with the perception of the Maya that I encountered at school and which, I think, persists in the popular imagination: that of a largely peaceful, stargazing people who lived in harmony with nature, though they did sacrifice the odd prisoner and pull out the odd heart. Visits to Maya sites and a modest amount of research suggests that, apart from the stargazing part, this perception is pretty inaccurate. It is true that the Maya really were phenomenal mathematicians and observers of the night sky, working out before any European did that the planets had elliptical orbits, and using their observations to create a calendar that reached back and forward in time with surprising accuracy. The dates present on the stelae and codices allow us to pinpoint events in Maya history and cross-reference them with dates in the European calendar. (Less helpfully, the Maya fondness for astrology and their talent for marking time long into the future has led to misunderstanding and inventions about what they predicted, notably the end of the world). As mathematicians, the ancient Maya developed a number system which, unlike roman numerals, actually makes sense and can be used to do maths. The vigesimal (base 20) system also provides a unifying principle behind the construction of many temples, and the calendar itself, both of which are based on groups and cycles of 20.
However, beyond that, the image of the Maya above begins to falter. As well as killing each other's citizens, there is increasing evidence that the city states damaged their environment on a pretty massive scale. Though their diet did not require large areas of forest to be cleared for wheat or pasture for grazing animals, it seems to Maya did nonetheless clear huge areas of rainforest in order to build, maintain and expand their cities. A combination of deforestation and intense heat would have made the soil unworkable and reduced its ability to hold water, leading to crop failure. In addition, current estimates of the population of the central Maya stretch comfortably into the millions, suggesting that the cities reached a size that the available resources could not support. Thus, along with war and drought, it seems that environmental degradation may well have played a part in the mass abandonment of the central cities from about the 8th century AD. Having exhausted their environment, the Maya found themselves unable to absorb the impact of climate change and unable to do anything about it. No amount of self mutilation or smoke signals could change it. In this way the central Maya were the architects of their own downfall. Well, they’re only human.
Currently, human activity may be posing a new problem for the environment of the Yucatán. For several years now, huge amounts of sargassum, the plant that gives the Sargasso Sea its name - have been washing up and rotting on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and even beyond, so that beaches as far south as the Belizean Cayes are ripe with the stench of death. The causes are not exactly clear, but it's thought that a combination of deforestation and higher rainfall (possibly the result of climate change) may be to blame. Trees hold water and nutrients in the soil, so without their roots, larger than normal amounts of nutrients wash into the the sea, encouraging massive amounts of seaweed growth that is then carried by ocean currents to the shores of the Gulf. The effects - apart from the smell, and the effort needed to clean it up - are not exactly clear, though it may have a negative impact on sea turtle breeding patterns. Instinctively, it feels like a warning of some kind, though I’m not sure from whom, or of what. Before I left England I became convinced that more and more trees were dying. Maybe it’s just me.
Unlike those of the central lowlands, the Maya cities of the northern Yucatán remained inhabited until the Spanish arrived, albeit under the cultural and military influence of other groups from further north in Mexico. These places and populations really were decimated by European diseases and military aggression. What happened to the millions of people living further south after they abandoned their cities remains a mystery. It’s assumed they migrated northward, but there is disagreement over this. In fact, disagreement and debate seems to characterise much of Maya history, at least at the level that a layman like me can access it. What we do know is massively outweighed by what we don’t. This becomes abundantly clear when you visit Maya sites. Depending on the guide you take (or overhear), the leaflet you have or the sign you read, you might receive completely different information about the same thing. Pok-ta-pok is a good example. We know that the ancient Maya, like other Mesoamerican peoples, played some kind of ball game. We know it occupied a very important place in their culture, as attested by the central location of ballcourts at the Maya sites and the importance of the game to the Hero Twins story. We pretty much know that it was played with a rubber ball, and it seems a sensible assumption that getting the ball through a stone ring was at least part of the aim of the game. Beyond that it’s all up for grabs. There is general agreement that you couldn't kick the ball, but none about what part of the body you could use. Some say elbows and knees; some say elbows, knees and hips; some say just hips; some say hips and arse; and so on. The layout of the courts also differs from place to place. Chichen Itza’s main court has high, vertical walls and rings; most - like Cobá - have lower, sloping walls and rings; Calakmul´s court has no rings; Tikal has a triple ballcourt. In the centre most have what is often assumed to be a sacrificial stone, sometimes with a skull on it, but precisely who was sacrificed at the end of the game is not at all clear. In the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya, there is a mural that shows the victorious captain holding the head of the defeated loser. Then again, the same museum also states that Ix Tab was the goddess of suicide, a claim which is disputed. It seems the first reference to such a deity comes from the writings of evangelical Spanish bishop and general arsehole Diego de Landa. Recent research by Beatriz Reyes-Foster at the University of Central Florida argues that the idea of Ix Tab as a suicide goddess may even have been fed by modern media in order to explain the unusually high suicide rate in Yucatán. Other versions of the pok-ta-pok rules state that, having excelled at the game, the winner is sacrificed as a sort of honour/reward for the gods, but given that most other sacrifices seem to involve prisoners of war or slaves this feels like a bit of a stretch. It is likely that the game changed over time, as the different styles of courts at different sites would suggest, but, again, we can't be sure.
We would know more about the ballgame, and the Maya in general, had it not been for Diego de Landa. In an act of violent ignorance roughly on a par with ISIS smashing up Palmyra, Bishop Landa ordered that the majority of Maya texts be burned in 1562 as part of the conversion to Catholicism. Landa and his Franciscan order accused the Maya of idolatry and barbarism - notably human sacrifice - and sought to bring them to the true faith. Curiously, along with burning their texts and torturing their people, Landa also set out to chronicle the civilisation he encountered for posterity. I suppose history is written by the victor. Indeed, it may be that many of our ideas about the Maya and their love of human sacrifice are based on a mixture of exaggeration, misunderstanding and downright invention by Catholic priests and other Europeans at the time. Elizabeth Graham of UCL - and presumably others - argues that what we have come to understand as human sacrifice is in fact a facet of Mesoamerican rules of engagement; namely that enemy soldiers were not killed on the battlefield, but captured and taken back to be killed later. Such deaths should therefore be considered casualties of war. The distinction is a little on the semantic side, but it’s an interesting thought. Similarly, the bones of apparently dismembered limbs recovered from caves, cenotes and so on may not be evidence of grizzly amputation rituals as has often been assumed. According to research by Estella Weiss-Krejci of the University of Vienna, this is in fact a result of the bones of nobles being transferred to sacred places after death and some going missing on the way. Certainty the pyramids, which are usually tombs, were often built with tunnels inside, possibly to represent the mountain caves that the Maya deemed to be sacred.
Perhaps tales of sacrifice and general bloodthirstiness came back to Europeans and persisted in our minds as a way of justifying the civilising mission of our superior church and culture. The insistence that the Maya - although otherwise a largely scholarly and civilised people - engaged in human sacrifice is certainly persistent, and colours every presentation of them in popular culture, from Horrible Histories to Broken Sword (both are excellent, by the way). The presentation of human sacrifice as anathema to a religion whose central image is that of an innocent man tortured and left to die for no good reason is, at the very least, a bit rich. Similarly, there is a whiff of hypocrisy in asserting that, while it was wrong to state that man was made by the gods out of corn dough, it was perfectly reasonable to believe that, when a man stood in a certain place, wore certain clothes, and said certain words, he could transform baked wheat dough into the flesh of god’s only son, who was, by the way, born of a human virgin. Not in the way that Gilgamesh or Hercules (or even the Mesoamerican figure of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan) were half-man half-god, but in a completely different way that definitely happened. This is to say nothing of the stinking hypocrisy of brutalising anyone - at home and abroad - who said otherwise, in the name of the God of Love. And the fact that the massive pantheon of pre-Columbian gods and complex religious practices morphed into medieval Roman Catholicism, with its array of saints, shrines and shiny things was just coincidence.
In destroying the manuscripts and instigating a campaign of conversion and assimilation, Landa cast much of Maya history into the dark. This is, perhaps a little perversely, part of its undeniable draw. It also means that Maya history is fertile territory for wackos and conspiracy theorists. Along with all the awesome scholarly efforts involved in, for example, deciphering the script or mapping the cities, there are any number of theories about the end of the world, or alien contact, or whatever, along with some pretty shoddy cultural output (see, for example, Apocalypto, 2012 or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). In my first year of university I met a man who said he was part of the Invisible Army, an organisation focused on preparing for the apocalypse, as predicted by the Maya. This was done mainly through meditation. He rejected my suggestion that stockpiling canned goods was maybe a better idea. In reality I think membership of the Invisible Army was more of an aesthetic position than anything else, but the 2012 phenomenon really was a thing. You probably don’t remember the world ending, because it didn’t, but there was a string of stories and theories circulating at the time that the apocalypse would take place on 21st December 2012. In the event, my brother turned 17 and I went to see The Nutcracker drunk and fell asleep. Ballet is nonsense. The date was based - accurately - on the end of a cycle in the Mayan long count calendar, but there is no accompanying prophecy about the end of the world; the count simply starts again. There was another theory doing the rounds that a ‘rogue’ planet called Nibiru would collide with the Earth. I don’t know what a rogue planet is, though I assume it’s sort of the cosmic equivalent of North Korea. At any rate the collision never happened because, as NASA pointed out, the planet didn’t exist.
What interests me about conspiracy theories is that those who adhere to them are, for all their claims to the contrary, all their posturing as renegades and outlaws, deeply conservative. Whether it’s an ancient prophecy, the Illuminati, reptilians, whoever benefits from the flat earth cover-up, climate scientists, the liberal elite or, the old favourite, the Jews, the mind of the conspiracy theorist longs for someone to be in charge; for there to be an authority, albeit malign, to which everyone and everything is accountable. Therefore the power to actually do anything ourselves, or to be held ultimately responsible for our actions, is taken out of our hands and given to someone else. There’s no point investing in space exploration because the moon landing never happened. Those dinosaur bones were planted there. There’s no point in voting because the giant space lizards control everything. I get my news from Facebook because the MSM is all lies. The EU says you can’t call it Christmas anymore. We don’t need to switch to renewables because climate change is a myth. We’re sick of experts. The world will end soon, but not because of anything I’ve done.
Conspiracy theorists, and other conservatives, are afraid of the unknown. They look at the world around them and, finding it overwhelming and terrifying, gather their fears and confusions together into something identifiable but indistinct - a ‘them’ or ‘they’ - and surrender control of their actions to it. In this way they cannot - or will not - learn from their mistakes. The things they really do not understand they destroy. They will keep burning books and breaking bodies until the saviour returns. They will keep sticking thorns into their cocks until the rains come. All they can do is go further into the dark. The job of a historian, like that of a scientist, is to make sense of the unknown, and to brings fears out into the light.
The difficulty is that most of us aren’t historians or scientists. We’re slow learners, and we have short memories. We are also optimists. Humanity isn’t a puppet, it’s a drunk. We're always sure we won’t wake up hungover, and have to shuffle into a car park to escape the pounding of consequence, the tinnitus of inevitability. Perhaps this is why we’re so fond of ideas about shadowy authorities or ancient powers that control us. We want there to be a knowable answer. When Europeans initially ‘discovered’ the Maya cities, we assumed that ancient Egyptians must have somehow crossed the sea and bestowed their culture on the Americans. Others thought that the Chinese did the same thing from the other way. More recently, others have claimed that Mesoamerican peoples must have had contact with aliens - presumably the same aliens who built/supervised the building of the pyramids in Egypt. Aliens are, apparently, very generous. When the film Interstellar was released in 2014, George Monbiot pointed out that it was easier for us to imagine leaving Earth in search of a new environment than fixing the one we already have. The truth is definitely out there, as long as nobody really tries to find where ‘there’ actually is. In the end I think it was Saturn.
Perhaps we are scared of what we'll find if we look. Less impressive but perhaps more enticing - and certainly more numerous - than the temples, palaces and plazas you see at ancient Maya sites are the structures that are unexcavated. Like the majority of the settlements, most of Maya history remains buried and mysterious, overgrown by jungle, protected jealousy by moss and vine, and the trees that spread their roots over and through the anonymous green mounds. When you look at them, at least as a layman, the most you can say is that they were put there by humans, but beyond that everything is uncertain. You also get a sense of what the Europeans would have seen and felt when they saw them for the first time: the bewilderment, the excitement, the growing and terrifying realisation that there was an entire civilisation that they simply didn’t know about, in a part of the world they didn’t know existed. What’s doubly confounding about these unexcavated buildings is that as soon as you uncover them, to try and understand what they are, they begin to disintegrate before your eyes. Even as it slowly tears them apart, the jungle that covers the ruins also protects them. Exposure to light, rain, wind, chemicals, erodes them. The huge faces on the Temple of the Masks at Lamanai are not the originals, but fibreglass replicas that cover the stone underneath. Very few people have the money and the time to excavate, preserve and restore the buildings properly, so they remain visible but unseen, identifiable but indistinct, gradually being ripped apart by roots and returned to the the stuff they’re made of, digested and processed back into the body of the earth. When I lived in Cairo, I heard that the basement of the Egyptian Museum was so full of artefacts that there was no more space for them and they were sinking back into the ground. There’s probably a lesson there, but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps when our descendants dig through the layer of chicken bones and plastic that is the geological marker of our age, they will conclude that, terrified still by death and decay, we invented a material that the Earth could not digest. Perhaps they will think that, believing it to be magical and wishing to absorb its powers of longevity, we pulverised and ingested it, and impregnated our food with it, so that we too might outlast the grinding teeth of time.
There have been five major extinction events in the Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, of which the Cretaceous-Paleogene caused by the Chicxulub asteroid is the most recent, and the most well-known. The Chicxulub event appeals to our imagination not just because of its destruction of iconic lifeforms, but also because of its relative simplicity: an asteroid hit the Earth. Like an ancient prophecy coming true, a collision with another planet, or the coming of the Antichrist (1999), there was nothing anybody could do about it. Such events are out of our hands and not our fault. We’re led into this line of reasoning by the word ‘event’, which implies a single, identifiable cause. The truth is probably a little more untidy. The Devonian extinction event may have lasted as long as 25 million years, encompassing a series of smaller extinctions. The ‘Great Dying’ of the Permian-Triassic extinction, which wiped out 95% all life in the ocean and 70% of life on the land, may have happened over 15 million years (although it may have been as little as 200,000). Whatever the figures - over which there is debate among people far more entitled to an opinion than I am - these things don’t happen just like that. It may well be that we are already living through the sixth mass extinction: the Holocene/Anthropocene event. The difference between this one and those that have come before it is that, ironically, the cause is much clearer, and there probably is something we can do about it, because it’s basically our fault.
The world didn’t end on 11th August 1999, and it didn’t end on 21st December 2012. Europeans did wipe out the ancient Maya, but they’d already done a fair bit of the work themselves. A great civilisation doesn’t just collapse, it’s undone by sickness and drought, by war and confusion. Its people don’t vanish, they become desperate and lost, and wander. They become suspicious, they glare at each other, they cast about for leadership, they retreat into old fiefdoms and defunct beliefs. They invoke gods and ancestors, nations and borders, to help them make sense of the darkness that they feel creeping from all around them like the slow spread of water, the encroaching tide clawing its way onto the land. Things don’t just end; they fall apart gradually, relentlessly, but not always inexplicably, until eventually all that’s left is some mounds overgrown by vines, a skull carved in stone, some fragments of writing, pots, bones, fossils, a change in the rock, a crater, a layer of plastic and bird corpses, and the stench of death.
***
After the soporific Caribbean coast and the clinging, sticking, insect-heavy heat of the Peninsula and its jungles, the dry heat and warm wind of Oaxaca, its scrubby mountains and yellow rock, feel almost refreshing. The colours feel more familiar. They have a washed out quality, as if they’ve been used several times, endured hardships, like the muscular land they sit on. The light is thinner, and at once there is a sense of space between things. It feels closer to home, though of course it’s further from it. Someone said recently that there are two kinds of European countries: small nations and those that have not yet realised they are small nations. It did take 24 hours to get here and I´m still in the same country; maybe there's something in it. Maybe I’m just pleased to not be on a bus. Nonetheless, I can feel a readiness and a lifting of my body when I see the mountains, as if an instinct is pulling me towards them, or preparing me for what they might hide. To the west and south is the Pacific Ocean, and I realise that this is the first time I have left the Atlantic world. My closest shore is not the body of water that sits in the middle of almost every map I’ve ever seen, centering and anchoring the way I understand the world, Africa and Europe at its heart, everything else flowing out from there. It’s the map that taught me the names and locations of the countries, their cities, their flags. It’s the map that taught me Britain was in the middle, that it got to decide the time for everywhere else. Once you’re in the Pacific, you fall off the map into the strange nothingness, before you reappear on the other side. Perhaps we centre maps on the Atlantic because any other way scares us. A map centred on the Pacific pushes my part of the world, already oversized on most projections, to a remote western outpost, some far flung, obscure archipelago at the edge of civilisation and full of savages. Parents might tell stories about it to frighten their children. Here be monsters. Perhaps viewing the world this way reminds us that we are on the edge of the water, not the other way round. The water covers everything. It suffers bits of land to stick up out of it here and there but could just as easily swallow us all. The plan, more of less, is to follow the Pacific coast south, until we run out of land or - more likely - money. I will have to reorient the map of the world I have in my head. Columbus never saw the Pacific. He simply didn’t believe it existed.
Addendum
To the extent that enough people will read this for me to be accused of theft of intellectual property, suffice to say that most of the stuff that looks like history was initially written, more eloquently, by someone else. The bits that look like conjecture and confusion, as well as the bits about the end of the world, I take full credit for. Below is a bibliography of sorts.
- A good deal of the historical background for this entry is drawn from The Maya (Ancient Peoples and Places), Ninth edition by Michael D Coe and Stephen Houston. It’s published by Thames and Hudson. You can get it here, among other places.
- The article by Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Rachael Kangas discussing the alleged suicide goddess Ix Tab which I reference is available here.
- I came across Elizabeth Graham’s argument that the Maya did not engage in human sacrifice on this episode of In Our Time. The idea is also discussed here, here, here, here, and probably lots of other places. The series also has excellent episodes about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and The Epic of Gilgamesh which, as you may have noticed, I’ve also listened to. In Our Time is good for long bus journeys.
- The specific idea that bones in caves are the result of their being moved after death is discussed in this article.
- The article released by NASA debunking the 2012 Phenomenon is here.
I think that’s it. Everything else is based either on general knowledge, casual research or visits to the following Maya sites: Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Cobá, Tulum and Calakmul in Mexico; Cahel Pech, Lamanai and the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) Cave in Belize; and Tikal in Guatemala, as well as the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya in Mérida, Yucatán.
