I watched a couple of PBS shows at 9 p.m., a NOVA called “Ancient Maya Metropolis” and a Secrets of the Dead show re-telling the story of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan. “Ancient Maya Metropolis,” first aired January 26, 2022, was about the Mayan city of Caracol, located in what is now Belize (which used to be British Honduras and, since it was a British colony, its official language is English). The show posed the question of why, around 1000 A.D., the Mayans successively abandoned their major cities after building up huge civilizations even in the midst of tropical rainforests. The answer appears to be a series of civil wars that depopulated the southern Mayan region (which extended through what’s now Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua), and the ongoing political turmoil between the Mayan city-states that ended with the population of each one in turn fleeing to the Mayan regions to the north, in what is now Mexico (the country you think of first as home of the Maya). There were predictable interviews with modern-day Mayans about how they had a perfectly respectable civilization just fine, thank you, and didn’t need to be “discovered” by white people from Europe. The irony there is that when Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico he couldn't have conquered it, even with the advantage of firearms, without indigenous help – and he got it from the Maya, who were restively enduring the tyranny of the Aztecs, who had replaced them as Mexico’s indigenous rulers.
Thursday, March 23, 2023
NOVA: "Ancient Maya Metropolis" (WGBH, PBS, 2022)
I watched a couple of PBS shows at 9 p.m., a NOVA called “Ancient Maya Metropolis” and a Secrets of the Dead show re-telling the story of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan. “Ancient Maya Metropolis,” first aired January 26, 2022, was about the Mayan city of Caracol, located in what is now Belize (which used to be British Honduras and, since it was a British colony, its official language is English). The show posed the question of why, around 1000 A.D., the Mayans successively abandoned their major cities after building up huge civilizations even in the midst of tropical rainforests. The answer appears to be a series of civil wars that depopulated the southern Mayan region (which extended through what’s now Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua), and the ongoing political turmoil between the Mayan city-states that ended with the population of each one in turn fleeing to the Mayan regions to the north, in what is now Mexico (the country you think of first as home of the Maya). There were predictable interviews with modern-day Mayans about how they had a perfectly respectable civilization just fine, thank you, and didn’t need to be “discovered” by white people from Europe. The irony there is that when Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico he couldn't have conquered it, even with the advantage of firearms, without indigenous help – and he got it from the Maya, who were restively enduring the tyranny of the Aztecs, who had replaced them as Mexico’s indigenous rulers.
