An epic story
This week I published a long article about an ancient mystery: What, exactly, was the relationship between Teotihuacan and the Maya? If you’ve heard of any ancient Mesoamerican cultures, it’s probably these two. Teotihuacan was a huge metropolis of 100,000 people—many of them immigrants—near today’s Mexico City; the archaeological site is home to the famous Pyramid of the Sun (which you can climb) and Pyramid of the Moon (which you can’t). The Maya area encompassed big parts of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and was full of independent city-states whose people shared a religion, a culture, and a political structure that revolved around dynasties of divine kings. Like in ancient Greece, the Maya cities’ relationships to each other were constantly shifting, with enemies becoming allies becoming enemies over the decades and centuries. There are lots of ancient Maya cities you can vist today, but the most important one in this story is Tikal, in northern Guatemala.
I know people have a hard time keeping Mesoamerican cultures straight. Even I, after more than 90 minutes in the Anthropology Museum, have been known to lose track of who is who and when they lived. For ease of understanding, it helps to think of Teotihuacan and Tikal as different nations whose politics seem intriguingly intertwined, like medieval France and England. Distinct cultures with different languages, traditions, and artistic styles, but broadly similar ways of seeing and understanding the world. Sometimes their relationship was strong enough that nobles grew up in or married into the court of the other country; sometimes diplomacy broke down and they went to war for several decades. The period of most intense interaction, or at least the interaction that archaeologists can see, was during the 4th and 5th centuries. (That’s the 300s and the 400s, around the end of the Roman Empire. I love imagining an alternate history where it was the Teotihuacan and Roman Empires that met, rather than the Aztec and the Spanish.)
During this period, important Maya people lived in Teotihuacan, in a fancy building with beautiful murals in the style of their homeland—diplomats and their luxurious embassy, maybe. Trade brought goods from each region into the other. Each culture copied the other’s art. Each found things they admired (and desired) in the other culture, and for a while, it seems, they got along great.
Until the year 378, when Maya written history records the conquest of Tikal. The warriors who did the invading are shown wearing clothes and carrying weapons associated with Teotihuacan. For some archaeologists, this is unambiguous: Teotihuacan conquered Tikal, and perhaps other Maya cities too. For others, it’s less clear. One king is replaced by another at Tikal, yes, but life in the city seems to remain mostly the same, without any evidence of ancient violence, like mass graves or burned buildings. Isotopes stored in the bones of the new, supposedly Teotihuacano king of Tikal show he grew up in or near the Maya city, not in central Mexico. If Tikal was conquered by a foreign army, where are all the conquerors?
I interviewed 20 people for this story, and no joke, every single one of them had a different interpretation of the events of 378 and the Teotihuacan-Maya relationship more generally. The first draft was a beast to write, although for once I pretty much nailed the structure from the beginning, which made editing pretty smooth. (Only four drafts! Sac Balam had seven.) It was such a treat to write a story with actual characters in the past—individual people with names and jobs and relationships and (at least implied) motivations. Questions from my editor like, could Sihyaj K’ahk’, conquerer of Tikal, read Maya writing?, sent me spiralling into extremely fun daydreams about what his childhood might have been like. Did he learn Mayan from the diplomats at Teotihuacan? Was that close relationship why he was eventually chosen to lead the invading army? That’s probably what I would go with for the screenplay, but there are so many other possibilities too.
In the end, the Teotihuacan-Maya relationship is a mystery that might never be solved. It can be challenging to write a story without a clear resolution. You set up the question, but the answer doesn’t exist. No hypothesis has been ruled out. A million things are still possible. Science isn’t really known for ambiguity, but it is, in fact, full of it. I think it’s in those moments, before everything has been worked out, that science is at its most fun.