This one instance does not prove that the Maya engaged in total warfare throughout the 650-year classic period, Estrada-Belli said, but it does fit with increasing evidence of warlike behavior throughout that period: mass burials, fortified cities and large standing armies. We can't know if everyone was killed or they moved or if they simply migrated away, but what we can say is that human activity decreased very dramatically immediately after that event." "Then, we see this really big decrease in human activity afterwards, which suggests at least that there was a big hit to the population. "What we see here is, it looks like they torched the entire city and, indeed, the entire watershed," Wahl said. After seeing the charcoal layer, the archaeologists examined many of Witzna's ruined monuments still standing in the jungle and found evidence of burning in all of them. Laguna Ek'Naab, which is about 100 meters across, is located at the base of the plateau where Witzna once flourished and has collected thousands of years of sediment from the city and its surrounding agricultural fields. Wahl, a geologist who studies past climate and is first author of the study, worked with USGS colleague Lysanna Anderson and Estrada-Belli to extract 7 meters of sediment cores from the lake. This is unique in that we were able to identify this event in the sedimentary record and point to the written record, particularly these Mayan hieroglyphs, and make the inference that this is the same event." "In the New World, there is so little writing, and what's preserved is mostly on stone monuments. "This is really the first time the written record has been linked to an event in the paleo data sets in the New World," Wahl said. of a "burning" campaign recorded on a stone stela, or pillar, in a rival city, Naranjo. The date for the layer coincides exactly with the date - May 21, 697 A.D. The charcoal layer dates from between 690 and 700 A.D., right in the middle of the classic period of Mayan civilization, 250-950 A.D. The evidence, reported today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is an inch-thick layer of charcoal at the bottom of a lake, Laguna Ek'Naab, in Northern Guatemala: a sign of extensive burning of a nearby city, Witzna, and its surroundings that was unlike any other natural fire recorded in the lake's sediment. For the first time, we are seeing that this warfare had an impact on the general population." "It wasn't primarily the nobility challenging one another, taking and sacrificing captives to enhance the charisma of the captors. "The revolutionary part of this is that we see how similar Mayan warfare was from early on," said archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University, Wahl's colleague. "The findings overturn this idea that warfare really got intense only very late in the game." "These data really challenge one of the dominant theories of the collapse of the Maya," said David Wahl, a UC Berkeley adjunct assistant professor of geography and a researcher at the USGS in Menlo Park, California. The finding also indicates that this increase in warfare, possibly associated with climate change and resource scarcity, was not the cause of the disintegration of the lowland Maya civilization. Geological Survey calls all this into question, suggesting that the Maya engaged in scorched-earth military campaigns - a strategy that aims to destroy anything of use, including cropland - even at the height of their civilization, a time of prosperity and artistic sophistication. New evidence unearthed by a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Only later, archeologists thought, did increasing drought and climate change lead to total warfare - cities and dynasties were wiped off the map in so-called termination events - and the collapse of the lowland Maya civilization around 1,000 A.D. At the peak of Mayan culture some 1,500 years ago, warfare seemed ritualistic, designed to extort ransom for captive royalty or to subjugate rival dynasties, with limited impact on the surrounding population. The Maya of Central America are thought to have been a kinder, gentler civilization, especially compared to the Aztecs of Mexico.
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