For more than a thousand years, from about 2000 BCE until the Spanish arrival, the Maya raised cities across a band of land that runs from southern Mexico through Guatemala, Belize, and into Honduras and El Salvador. They were never one empire. At the height of their power, during the Classic period between roughly 250 and 900 CE, the Maya world was a patchwork of dozens of rival kingdoms, and this collection travels through the greatest of them, from the pyramids of Tikal and Yaxha in the Guatemalan forest to the carved monuments of Copán in western Honduras, and north across the limestone plain of the Yucatán.
Each of those kingdoms answered to a k'uhul ajaw, a "holy lord" who stood between his people and the gods. His authority was not just political. In temple ceremonies a king could take on the identity of a god, appearing in art dressed in that deity’s costume, and after death he might be worshipped himself. Two capitals loomed over all the others, Tikal and Calakmul, and their rivalry pulled smaller cities into opposing alliances. Tikal was crushed in battle in 562 CE and raised no dated monuments for more than a century, until a king named Jasaw Chan K'awiil I broke Calakmul around 695 CE and was buried beneath the great pyramid of Temple I.
We know these rulers as real, datable people because the Maya wrote their names down. Their script was the most developed writing system in the ancient Americas, carved onto the tall stone slabs called stelae, painted on pottery, and folded into bark-paper books. Layered beneath it ran the Long Count, a running tally of days from a mythological starting point in 3113 BCE that let a scribe pin any event to an exact date. The photographs here linger on that inscribed stone, on the ruler portraits of Copán and Quiriguá, on a carved lintel from Yaxchilán, and on a reproduction of the Dresden Codex, one of only a handful of Maya books to survive the Spanish fires.
The northern cities built in a different idiom. Across the low hills of the Puuc region, at Uxmal, Kabah, and Labná, Late Classic architects faced their buildings in thin, precisely cut limestone veneer and reserved the upper walls for mosaic sculpture assembled from thousands of separately carved stones. The result is one of the most distinctive regional styles in Mesoamerica, and its signature motif is a face. Stacked, hook-nosed masks of Chaak, the rain god, climb the corners and cover whole facades, as they do on the great palace front at Kabah. In a country with no rivers, where every drop of water drains straight through the limestone into caves and sinkholes, the god of rain was worth building an entire wall out of.
Power drifted north as the south failed. Chichén Itzá rose through the Terminal Classic and into the Postclassic, at exactly the time the interior kingdoms were going quiet, and it did so partly by plugging into new trade routes that had shifted from overland paths across the peninsula’s interior to sea lanes running around its coast. The city’s stepped pyramid of El Castillo, its round tower known as the observatory, and its jaguar altar all belong to that ascendancy, as does the Sacred Cenote, the sinkhole into which offerings were thrown. Centuries later still, in the Postclassic, the Maya walled a small town called Tulum onto a cliff above the Caribbean, a port looking out at the sea route that had rearranged their world.
That is why the ninth century reads as a collapse only in the south. There the carving of royal monuments stopped, the last Long Count date was cut in 909, and the great cities emptied, in a slow tangle of warfare, overextension, the failing promise of divine kingship, and some of the worst droughts in the region’s history. The northern lowlands and the Puuc hills carried on, in places for centuries. The last independent Maya city, Nojpeten, did not fall to the Spanish until 1697. And the Maya never disappeared: roughly thirty Mayan languages are still spoken by more than five million people today, and in a few highland towns the old sacred calendar is still counted out day by day.