Coastalsurvey

Lacking any knowledge of Mayan history, the various expeditions and theories that have been imposed on this place, Palenque impresses the visitor with its presence. The refined grace of the buildings, the sophisticated interplay of natural contours and manmade terraces and the sheer difficulty of constructing this city on a hill, all speak volumes about aspiration and the human imagination. It’s little wonder that so many cosmologies have been invented to account for this unaccountable place.

As we reached the base of the white pyramid, the mist that had been clinging to the treetops thickened to a light rain. One by one, we climbed the steep limestone steps to find shelter in the chambers at the top. We shared water, cigarettes and avocado sandwiches while we waited for the rain to abate.

Palenque in the mist

The monument we were resting in was El Templo de Comte, named for Jean Francois Waldeck. Waldeck was a self-appointed nobleman, engraver, and author who lived atop the ziggurat for two years (1831-33) and wrote a book about Palenque that was mostly conjecture and lies.

Count Waldeck guessed that the civilization that built Palenque was older than ancient Egypt’s. He was only off by five millennia — Palenque and the other cities of the Maya Classic Period flourished from roughly 200 to 800 AD. Nevertheless, Waldeck’s lavishly illustrated book became a bestseller in Europe.

Sandy, who was making her third pilgrimage to Palenque, knew the names of the half-dozen temples that had been reclaimed from the jungle and she told us about each one. From the top of the Temple of the Count we could see over the earthen berm that bordered the glade to another, wider terrace that supported two huge temples. Sandy pointed to the more distant, a grand pyramid rising against a wall of verdant foliage. “That’s the Temple of the Inscriptions,” she said, “built by Lord Pikal to please the alien visitors.”

Bad ideas die hard. And the notion that Palenque was designed by extraterrestrials has enjoyed remarkable longevity. The idea was introduced by a Swiss hotelier named Erich von Daniken in his 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? Von Daniken proposed that space travelers built some of the wonders of the ancient world and altered the course of human evolution in the process. Pikal’s tomb in the Temple of the Inscriptions was one of Von Daniken’s proofs.

Although his ideas have little empirical basis and have been thoroughly debunked by archeologists, they retain an astounding currency in the popular imagination. At last count there were some 1,400 web pages devoted to Von Daniken’s theories. Theories are what people use to explain what they don’t understand. Faith is what remains when the theories have proven false.

For many years the cities and writing that the Maya left behind were incomprehensible. It wasn’t until the 1880s that a German librarian, Ernst Forstemann, working from a sixteenth century copy of a Classic Period text, was able to piece together portions of the Mayan calendar and some of their knowledge of astronomy. Because the astronomical tables were one of the few pieces of Mayan writing that epigraphers could understand, the idea that the Maya worshipped time became the operative theory.

A passageway in Palenque

As Michael Coe explains in his erudite and entertaining book, Breaking the Maya Code, the process of interpreting the Mayan script was a slow one. By the middle of the twentieth century archeologists had established that the cities were primarily centers of worship rather than trade, but the meaning of the fantastic pictographic writing carved on their walls remained opaque.

In 1952 a young researcher at the Leningrad Institute of Ethnology published a paper that laid out a method for reading the Mayan hieroglyphics as an outgrowth of spoken Maya. Yuri Valentinovich Knosorov was roundly criticized by American scholars who believed that the Mayan symbols were purely ideographic, however the Russian’s theory was sound and it opened the door for later translations.

One such breakthrough came with Tatiania Proskoriakoff’s 1960 paper, which determined that the mysterious stone monuments found at Piedras Negras were dynastic histories. Proskoriakoff, an architecturally trained archeologist who was working on the Carnegie Institute’s dig at that ancient Mayan city, noticed a pattern in the placement of stelae, or carved slabs of stone, before the temples. The dates inscribed on the stones and the repeating pattern of images supported Proskoriakoff’s contention that the stelae were, in fact, a type of royal genealogy.

Another great step toward understanding the Maya was taken at Palenque in 1973. That was the first year of the first Mesa Redonda conference, which brought together a diverse group of archeologists, linguists, artists and enthusiasts. By the time is was over, the conferees had sketched out the history of six kings comprising the entire Late Classic Period at Palenque.

This work continues today. One night at John’s I met a pair of American archeologists who were working at Palenque under the auspices of INHA and the University of Texas at Austin. Like many other late-night seminars at John’s, the topics of discussion were eclectic — I think we talked about bodysurfing in Hawaii and flying dreams — but archeology was not among them.

About a week after that I caught up with both of them at a restaurant in town. Christopher Powell, an energetic man in his early 40s with gray hair and light blue eyes, is field director for Projecto Grupo de las Cruces at Palenque. His laconic colleague Ed Barnhart is project director of mapping at the site. With his Mexican counterpart, Alphonso Morales, Powell is trying to learn more about the early history of Palenque from the time of its founding to Pikal’s reign. Barnhart and site director Arnaldo Cruz, are collecting data for a comprehensive map of Palenque. At present only 10 percent of the site is mapped.

An old edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica explained the Maya’s relationship with time this way: “time itself was believed to be divine.” I asked the archeologists if this was so. “These things had meaning for them, however, a lot of that meaning was lost,” Powell said. The ancient Maya went to war based on where Venus was at certain times, he explained, and time is still important for the modern Maya, who rely on celestial cues to plant and harvest their crops. “It may have been a way to hold sway over the populace or impress them, but we really can’t say with any certainty.”

My second question was even more basic. “Where did the Maya go?” I asked.

“Where did the Romans go?” Barnhart replied.

“They’re still here,” Powell said. “The evidence we have is that the ceremonial centers were abandoned. . . .What probably happened is that the people lost faith in their kings. I think they lost faith in the king as intercessor.” Powell posited a series of events leading to this loss of credence. First, the growing population around the holy cities partially cleared the forests, which reduced the rainfall. What rains did come, washed away the thin topsoil, making it impossible to sustain agriculture. At the same time the elite class was growing, placing more demands on the peasants and farmers. And, Powell noted, the style of warfare changed from a game in which kings hunted their peers to a type of total warfare that threatened civilian populations. All these factors, Powell said, led to a dissolution of society.

“When things started falling apart,” Powell explained, “all of it got blamed on the king. The evidence indicated that the people just picked up and left.”

No visit to Palenque is complete without meeting Moises Morales. Now in his seventies, Morales has spent his entire adult life exploring, studying and interpreting Palenque. He is the most sought- after guide to Palenque — the working sessions for the first Mesa Redonda conference took place in Morales champa — and his son, Alphonso, is now the principal investigator of the ongoing archeological work there.

One afternoon I had the good luck to meet Mr. Morales at John’s. I asked him the same question I had asked the archeologists: “Why was time important to the Maya?” “Because it was an instrument of manipulation,” Morales replied. “When you have knowledge of time you can understand basic astronomy. When you know that, you know the seasons, and when you know the seasons you know when to harvest. You are in command of the economy. You can be a very important person because you are in a position to predict things that will occur.”

Around the time Christ was wandering the Levant, some of the people who would become the Maya developed an understanding of the 365-day solar year. However, the majority of the Maya only knew the traditional 260-day year, which fit into an eternally fixed 52-year Calendar Round. By the time city-states like Piedras Negras, Tikal and Palenque arose from the jungles, there was already a ruling class that based its authority on an accurate knowledge of astronomy.

The Long Count, as it came to be known, was precise enough to figure a leap year and eclipses as well as the equinoxes and solstices that marked the change of seasons. That sort of double bookkeeping was “part of the manipulation” according to Morales. “If I want to keep you ignorant of my knowledge, what I will do is give you a calendar that doesn’t work. You will never know when the rain will come. You will never know when the harvest will be, but the ones in the noble class will be the ones who take full advantage of the facts and the people who know nothing.”

Late one afternoon Harry and I went to visit the dig at the Temple of the Cross. We found Chris Powell and Ed Barnhart on the western face of the pyramid, working in the shade of a temporary thatched roof. They were using a camera and a clipboard to collate the data from a small section of excavated steps that lay beneath a grid of string. Below them workmen were digging into the flank of the temple, trying to locate the source of a small spring that flowed into the Rio Otolum several hundred feet below.

The view from the Temple of the Cross was splendid. To the west we could see the Temple of the Inscriptions and the Palace. Looking north there was the perfectly flat field of the ball court and Waldeck’s pyramid. There was a bit of discussion among the workmen and Powell went to take a look. “You can see the masonry work here,” Powell called back up the slope. “The water course was channeled this way.”

Powell and Barnhart discussed this new find as they recorded the data under the grid. Barnhart explained that one of Waldeck’s engravings had shown a waterfall tumbling from the western flank of Templo de las Cruces. “So maybe,” Barnhart mused, “Waldeck was right about something.”

Not even Palenque’s true name is known. The word “palenque” is Spanish for “palisade.” No one really knows what the ancient Maya called the place, just as no one is certain why the people left this beautiful city. The Popol Vuh, a Maya text written centuries after the cities were abandoned contains a myth that says the people left because the divine cycle had been completed and the moment of dispersion had arrived.

Perhaps it was preordained, or maybe it was simply a loss of faith. Without belief in the principles, or myths, of a given organization, why would anyone agree to participate?

Before we left Palenque, I ran into Moises Morales once more at John’s. Moises was telling John about an interview he had given recently. A French television crew had flown Morales to the shores of a lake in the jungle, the supposed site of the Maya’s great underwater city. Apparently, the interview didn’t go so well for the French. “I wasn’t prepared to tell them what they wanted to hear,” Morales said.

I asked Morales once more why he thought the Maya left Palenque. “There is an old Indian saying,” Morales said, “Gods create things very beautiful to confuse the wise people.”

“Everything is a hypothesis.” Palenque will be whatever people need it to be in that age, Morales explained. “Palenque is not a place; it’s a state of mind. Depending on what you have is what you get. It is a necessity to believe.”