All language subtitles for BBC.Ancient.Apocalypse.3of4.The.Maya.Collapse.576p.PDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.en

1,200 years ago,
a catastrophe struck.

One of the most extraordinary civilizations
the world has known disappeared.

Millions of people died.

Some were savagely murdered.

Why it happened is a mystery.

This is the story
of one man's search for the truth.

For years, Dick Gill has been on a personal quest to
discover why the magnificent Maya society collapsed.

Hidden deep in the tropical
rainforest of Central America,

are the ruins
of the lost city of Tikal.

It's now deserted,

but, 1,200 years ago, Tikal stood at
the heart of the Maya civilisation.

Tikal was one of the greatest cities
in the world, home to 100,000 Maya.

They were deeply spiritual,
worshipping dozens of gods -

of the sun and the moon,
the earth and wind, fire and rain.

Their priests
were superhuman rulers.

They alone could communicate with
the celestial world of the gods.

The Maya lived in what is today
Southern Mexico and Central America.

From the jungles and plains
rose cities and towns,

great centres of worship,

of art and learning.

The Maya's achievements
were staggering.

They developed their own writing and
mastered astronomy and mathematics.

But they were also capable of brutality -
sacrificing human victims to appease the gods.

In the 9th century AD,

it was a thriving culture. But then,
at the very height of their glory,

something terrible happened.

In less than 100 years,

the Maya were all but obliterated.

Tikal and other cities
were abandoned for ever.

Archaeologists
have always been mystified -

why did a civilisation that had lasted for almost
2,000 years disappear in such a short time?

Dick Gill's mission to solve
this mystery started in 1968

when a holiday in Mexico
changed his life.

I felt this magnetic attraction.
I'm not really sure why,

but I did feel it.

I went home and told everyone that
I was going to work with the Maya.

Of course, my friends and family
were quite amused by the idea.

Back in Texas, they laughed, because Dick was
the most unlikely person to tackle this puzzle.

When I first turned my attention to
the collapse of Maya civilisation,

I was a banker.

I was really an outsider with respect
to the archaeological community.

Archaeologists treated him with derision. What could
a banker tell them that they didn't already know?

Then fate stepped in.
The family bank collapsed.

I gave up banking

and I set out on a quest to resolve the
age-old mystery of what happened to the Maya.

As he was now out of a job, Dick went
back to college and studied archaeology,

devoting his life
to solving the riddle of the Maya.

First, he needed to establish the scale of the
disaster. How many people had actually disappeared?

Dick knew just the man to ask.

One of the first archaeologists
to encourage Dick was Fred Valdez.

Fred has turned his back on the
glamorous Maya temples and palaces

and, instead, works with his team
deep in the mosquito-ridden jungle.

They're looking for traces of the
houses where the ordinary Maya lived.

Fred calculates from the number of stone
foundations, how many people once lived here.

He was amazed.

It was most surprising.

The biggest surprise for us on the project was how large
the population was, out away from the major centres.

We're talking millions and millions
of ancient inhabitants.

But, suddenly, 1,200 years ago,
the house building stopped.

The Maya that were living here

were very interested in continuing
to occupy this location.

They built one house over the other. That's what
these floors represent. With this last floor,

that was the end of construction.
Then this place is abandoned.

The mystery is, what happened?

There's no sign of mass migration,

no increase in population
anywhere else.

This led Fred
to one horrible conclusion.

I would estimate that 80% to, perhaps, as much
as 90% of the population died off at this time.

Most of the Maya probably died, here
in the very place they were born.

It's possible
up to 11 million people perished.

What could explain
how so many died, so quickly?

Dick's quest was given an even greater
poignancy by a grim discovery.

In 1980, archaeologist Torn Hester and his
team were digging near an ancient Maya palace.

When we began to excavate,

it was the most dramatic thing
I've ever seen.

On the top of the neck, the top of
the back, is a single, killing blow.

"Oh, my God! What is this?" Nobody
had ever seen anything like this.

They'd found evidence of savage murder at
precisely the same time as the Maya collapse.

The scar on the bone shows
that the axe that was used,

the weapon that was used,
came up from the bottom of the body

up towards the chin,
up towards the back of the ears

and the back of the head.
Right like this.

Finding the skulls and no bodies
attached to them was...quite a shock.

This is a six-year-old child

and, over the corner of the eyes,
there are cut marks.

Part of the face,
if not all of the face, was removed.

We found 30 -
ten men, ten women, ten children.

What affected me was. . .just the
sheer mass of the number of skulls.

The most horrible killing
is to a baby - a six-month old.

On the baby,

the killer didn't stop with
one blow. It didn't sever the head.

And there's a second chop

comes in from the back of the neck
that delivered

a much deeper, a much stronger blow to
the back of the head than to the front.

Truly, a horrible, horrible thing.

These killings did not bear the
hallmarks of ritual human sacrifice.

The unusual savagery suggested a society
in the midst of some cataclysmic shock.

I felt, whatever the explanation
for the Maya disappearance was,

it had to explain the disappearance of millions of
people and it had to cover the whole Maya area.

We're talking about hundreds of miles,
north and south, east and west.

I looked at some explanations
that had been proposed -

warfare, disease, declining
agricultural productivity,

plant disease, religious
inflexibility and on and on.

I've collected over a hundred now.

Dick was unconvinced by any of
the conventional theories,

which failed to account for the speed
and scale of the Maya collapse.

There must be something else,

something
the academic world had neglected.

It was then that I turned
my attention to natural disasters,

to see whether there might be
a natural disaster,

that explained how this great
civilisation came to an end so quickly.

Dick had one particular disaster
in mind,

a force of nature
that he knows all too well.

I'm a Texan.
I know what drought can do.

I have lived with drought
all of my life.

I was a child in the 1950s when Texas
was devastated by a serious drought.

I remember my father taking me into
the hill country near San Antonio.

I remember seeing the dead animals,
the countryside burned to a crisp,

the sunny days that went
on and on and on without end.

There was nothing
that anyone could do.

The drought started when it started
and it finally ended when it ended.

It was a very dramatic experience
and it is one...

that is burned into my memory.

And...

it has left me
with a very clear understanding...

of the awful, devastating,
destructive power of drought.

It would be difficult for Dick to persuade sceptical
archaeologists that the Maya had run out of water.

His theory had one very big
and rather obvious problem.

THUNDER CRASHES

Tikal is in the middle
of a rainforest.

I can understand why many of my colleagues
have difficulty accepting the possibility

that drought would occur
in many parts of the Maya lowlands.

After all, we're sitting here in
Tikal, surrounded by high forest.

We've seen parrots flying in and out among the tree
tops, toucans, vines hanging out of the branches,

there are rainstorms
all around us today.

It's hard to convince someone that,
yes, right here in this spot,

they had a terrible drought and
it wiped out a great civilisation.

It's just... hard to accept.

It's kind of intuitive.

But a clue from the present day suggested that
Dick's idea might not be quite so outlandish.

Here, the descendants of the few
Maya who survived the catastrophe

are praying for rain.

Secret ceremonies take place at the end of the dry
season. While the women prepare a feast for the gods,

the men perform rituals, combining
Maya and Christian ceremonies.

HE PRAYS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Pleading with the gods, just like their
ancestors did, not to allow the rains to fail.

Dick went back to Tikal, searching for evidence
that the ancient Maya were in fear of drought.

Far from any rivers or lakes, the people of Tikal
were completely reliant on the summer rains,

which last for
six months of the year.

Dick was fascinated to find that the whole
city was designed to conserve water.

Plazas and streets sloped to channel
the rain into dozens of reservoirs.

The main problem the Mayas had in
Tikal was solving the water problem

since we have no rivers,
no lake and no underground waters.

Dick has enlisted the help of local guide,
Rafeno Ortiz who knows every inch of the city.

As you notice, there is a reservoir here. We're
going to go down the side of a retaining wall.

What is this we're coming down?
One of the largest reservoirs...

Rafeno is taking Dick to hidden parts of Tikal - one
of the huge reservoirs now smothered by jungle.

Do you have
any idea how deep it is?

From the top to the bottom of the reservoir, there's
about 125ft of depth. How much water will it hold?

This has the capacity, it's estimated,
about 100 million gallons of water.

These are rain-fed reservoirs.
This had to fill up from rainwater.

Exactly. Everything is rain fed here

because, at Tikal, we don't have
lakes, rivers or underground water.

So they had to use the surface areas to channel
the water and store it in these low reservoirs.

So, if they didn't get rain,
they were in trouble. Exactly.

So, Tikal's only source of drinking water
during the dry months were the reservoirs.

If the annual rains failed to fill them,
the Maya would be in serious trouble.

Dick still needed proof that there
had ever been a drought at all,

and that took him to Mexico City.

Hola. Soy Dick Gill. Tengo una cita
para revisar datos meteorologicas...

20.25.19.87.

1.15.1.5.18.75.

To his delight, the city authority's meticulous weather
records revealed just what he'd hoped to find.

14. 6.25.

89.62.

'It turns out that,
in the last century,'

there was one severe drought.
It was really a pretty bad drought.

In fact,
it happened in 1902, 1903 and 1904.

Given the fact that really severe drought is
so rare, we're pretty lucky that it showed up,

in this 100-year record
that we have here.

A drought that lasted three years
proved to Dick

that severe droughts not only
could happen, but had happened.

This was, certainly,
a very extraordinary moment.

If a pretty bad drought happened at
least once, maybe it happened twice.

And maybe that other time was
when the Maya disappeared.

But one destructive drought in the last 100
years was not enough to hang a whole theory on.

He had to search
further back in time.

To delve more deeply into Mexican history,
Dick had to visit a most unlikely place -

the city prison.

Now the national archives, it houses a
unique collection of handwritten books,

some dating back
to the 16th century.

WHISPERING: "The land was
everywhere dry and barren."

"Those became the five years during
which there was nothing to eat."

"The deadly hunger continued."

"There was no water in the wells."

After months of searching, Dick
found a number of haunting accounts

of devastating droughts from the Yucatan province
of Mexico - the heartland of the ancient Maya.

"The entire forest was burned."

"That which came was a drought

"where the hooves of the animals
were burnt."

VOICES CONTINUE TO WHISPER

These reports that are contained in these books here,
are reports made by the Spanish colonial authorities

to their superiors in Mexico City
or in Madrid.

This one, for example,
that I've found, is a plea for help

from the authorities in Yucatan.

The crops had been very bad
in the year 1795.

They were running out of grain.

They were very much afraid that the terrible death
they had seen so much in the past would repeat itself.

So they say, "Send help now."

Dick was now certain
that he was on the right track.

He now had evidence of several severe
droughts. But that wasn't enough.

There were no records
for as far back as the 9th century.

Back at the ranch, Dick's research now
took off in a completely new direction.

He studied meteorology and
read hundreds of scientific papers,

looking for anything that might shed
light on the collapse of the Maya.

I don't think climate events
happen in isolation.

Weather is part of
a global pattern.

So I began looking at ancient climate
records from all over the world,

trying to understand what was going on around the
world at the time that the Maya disappeared.

I looked at records
from North America, South America,

from Australia, from Asia,
from Europe.

And it was from Europe
that he got his breakthrough.

A paper with the catchy title...

"Dendorochronology, mass balance and glacier
front fluctuations in Northern Sweden."

The dates just leapt out at him.

1,200 years ago, at precisely
the time when the Maya collapsed,

tree rings in Sweden revealed
an exceptionally cold period.

Could freezing weather in Europe be
linked to drought in Central America?

The experts
were extremely sceptical.

The first thing that I did was to get in contact
with distinguished and respectable meteorologists

to ask them what kind of a tie can there be
here? No-one had really looked at this before.

I seem to have been the first
to have stumbled across this.

In fact, I got one letter that said

that most meteorologists would
probably find the idea far-fetched.

It was nothing more than a hunch.

People get hunches and they
follow up on their hunches.

My hunch was
that there was a connection.

Dick threw himself back into the record
books, looking for the connection.

The best place to start, he thought, was one of the
weather systems that links Europe and Central America -

the North Atlantic
high-pressure system.

It was a daunting task.

As you can see, I've got
over 1,000 pages of just numbers.

I almost went blind trying to find which was the
highest pressure out of all of these numbers here.

It was just thousands of pages
that I had to go through.

He scoured the records
for the 20th century.

It took him over two years.

But what he found was a revelation.

Areas of high pressure are associated
with calm, settled weather.

There are high-pressure systems
in the North Atlantic.

One in particular normally stays near Europe,
and that's where it was for most of the time.

But Dick discovered that, just once during the 20th
century, this system moved towards Central America.

That was a time of severe drought
in the Maya lowlands,

AND it was a period where the coldest Arctic
temperatures were recorded for the 20th century.

Dick had found that weather systems
half a world apart could be linked.

Was he at last onto something?

There was only one man
who could tell -

climate modeller Tony Broccoli.

With the computer,
I can change the world's climate.

I don't have to go to the polar
regions or sweat in the Tropics.

I can just sit in my office, comfortable
and dry, and perform my experiments.

At the touch of a button
on my keyboard, I can, say...

make the sun stronger or brighter

and see what happens to the rains
in tropical Africa or the US.

In his virtual world, Tony has a unique
overview of the Earth's climate.

This map shows us the distribution of rain throughout
the whole world for a particular time of year.

This is January, and one of the interesting features
is this rain belt throughout the tropical regions.

As we go through the seasons -

January, February, March -

we see that that tropical rain belt
slowly shifts northward.

We see the rains
come to Central America

during June, July,
August, September.

Tony looked at what might
shift these tropical rains

away from Central America,
creating drought.

Here, he starts with a tropical
rain belt on top of the equator.

But when he makes the far north
colder, the effect is dramatic.

The rain belt is forced south
and doesn't reach Central America.

The result is drought.

It would only take a relatively small shift in
the average position of that tropical rain belt

to make the difference between abundant summer
rains in Central America and drought conditions.

Dick was now more convinced than ever that
it was drought that had destroyed the Maya.

Support for his theory
came from a most surprising place.

The frozen north.

Paul Mayewski,
an expert in ancient climates,

was intrigued by Dick's idea about
exceptional weather conditions.

Not for him the warm comfort of an office. He
prefers the freezing landscape of Greenland

where he analyses
chemicals in the ice.

The beauty of the ice cores is
they've built up over the years,

each layer preserving
precise evidence of past climates.

If we walked outside right now, we
could tell that it was cloudy, cool

and that there wasn't
a great deal of wind.

But we wouldn't know about the greenhouse
gas content, if the oceans were stormy.

We wouldn't be able to tell as richly what we can tell
from the ice-core record going back through time.

That's a pretty odd thought
when you think about it.

It's almost better at telling us about the
past than we're able to tell by going outside.

Paul has constructed a uniquely accurate
history of global weather from his ice cores.

When he heard about Dick's drought theory, he
decided to check his cores for the 9th century.

Would HE be able to find evidence of any dramatic
climate change in the northern hemisphere?

First thing that we looked at
was our record of ammonium.

Ammonium is a chemical that gets into the atmosphere
which tells us whether or not there was...

a lot of vegetation
in the northern hemisphere.

If there's a lot of vegetation, one
assumes it was probably warm and wet.

Low amounts - it was probably drought
conditions. The soil had dried up.

When he looked at the ice that was
1,200 years old, he was astonished.

We found that there was
a tremendous drop in ammonium.

They'd probably not experienced a drought like
this going back 2,000, maybe 3,000 years.

So the ice cores
confirmed Dick's hunch.

At the time of the Maya collapse, it was dry
and cold across the northern hemisphere -

conditions that would indicate
drought in the Maya areas.

But archaeologists
remained unconvinced.

If there HAD been such a severe drought, why was
there no record of it in the Maya's own chronicles?

The Maya carvings tell of great battles,
of ruling dynasties and all-powerful gods.

But on drought, they are silent.

I decided to see

whether the Maya
had written anything about drought.

We don't find anything
on their monuments and buildings,

but, IF drought were a regular part of Maya life,
they must have written about it somewhere.

Then he had a stroke of luck.

He came across this rare manuscript written by the
Maya, one of the few not destroyed by the Spaniards.

I came to this Maya book to see whether
there was any discussion of drought

and, right here on the last page,
there it is.

There's a hieroglyphic symbol
for drought.

They did write about drought, it was an ongoing
part of their life, and there it is right there.

It was just what he'd hoped
to find - a voice from the past.

But despite all the evidence he was accumulating,
Dick's theory was still questioned by archaeologists.

Drought as a solution
to the Maya collapse

has been very difficult for most of my
colleagues in archaeology to accept.

The current theories about the
collapse of advanced civilizations,

are that you have to have
a very complex explanation

and that an idea as simple as
the idea of drought is too simple,

and is probably proposed
by a simpleton!

But the final proof Dick was so desperately
seeking was just around the corner.

Out of the blue came a discovery
made by three geologists,

who had no particular interest
in the history of the Maya.

A University of Florida team

happened to be researching climate history at
their favourite location - the Yucatan in Mexico.

Our basic research
is to try to understand

how the climate of the Yucatan has changed
through the last several thousand years.

In particular,

we're interested in how rainfall may
have varied over that time period.

The focus of their attention is the bottom of the lake
where the mud holds the secrets of past climates.

They take a core down through the
mud, layers and layers of sediment

which have built up
over thousands of years.

We're taking it up from the bottom
using these screw-together rods.

At the bottom of this, we hope,
we'll have a tube full of sediment.

Sediments are a great trap
of environmental information.

Sediments will collect things like pollen and
snail shells and bits of leaves and twigs.

As they brought one core
out of the water, they were amazed.

Straightaway, they could see
evidence of a severe drought.

We have some very nice gypsum bands
toward the base of this core.

They indicate very dry periods,
extreme drought in the area,

when the lake level fell very low
at some time in the past.

Back in the lab,
there was another surprise.

This time, it came from the
tiny snail shells found in the mud.

In the shells are two sorts of oxygen from the
lake water - a heavy one and a light one.

Plenty of rain,
and the light oxygen dominates.

More of the heavy oxygen means it was dry. When
they analysed the snails, they were astonished.

They found a surge of heavy oxygen.

It was the worst drought
in the last 7,000 years.

Do it very gently.

But they had no way of knowing

exactly when this
apocalyptic drought had happened.

Then they had a stroke of luck.

Right in the middle of the driest part of
the mud core, they found what they needed.

A single seed.

They sent it to be dated.

When I looked at the result for the first
time, it really was a eureka experience!

I knew at that moment

that this drought coincided with the collapse
of Maya civilisation in the 9th century AD.

When I heard the news,

there was
a tremendous sense of relief.

Here was the evidence
that finally supported my theory.

When I first proposed my theory,

there was no physical evidence
from the Maya lowlands itself.

There was nothing in the dirt or in
the lake cores that I could point to

that said, "This demonstrates that
they had a terrible drought here."

But, finally, here it was!

It was a sense of relief
mixed with excitement, too.

As long as my theory
was just a theory,

I think that some of my colleagues in
archaeology were sceptical, which I understand.

But when we had hard evidence from
the ground in the Maya lowlands,

I felt that, maybe, at last, people would
start to take my theory seriously.

Dick had gathered clues from around the world.
From the frozen north to tropical Central America,

from rare Spanish documents,
to an ancient Maya book.

But it was the Mexican lake core that gave
him the clinching scientific evidence -

final proof that the glorious Maya civilisation
had been destroyed by the awful forces of nature.

It's a chilling scenario.

As the drought tightened its grip, the Maya
people would have turned to their ruling priests.

With their superhuman powers and their direct access
to the gods, they should have saved the Maya.

But the priests
proved to be powerless.

It's this that may explain
why 30 men, women and children

were so savagely massacred.

You've got ten adult males,
ten adult females and ten children.

It just screams that it's...
an extended family.

Small inherited details in the teeth
confirmed Diane's suspicion.

The men were related. Not only that, the teeth
showed that this was no ordinary family.

Some teeth had been carefully filed
to make them pointed.

One even had an inlay
of a precious stone.

Among the Maya,

this is a status symbol. It's something that
the upper classes did to show who they were.

The common folk, the rural
populations, didn't practise this.

The massacred family may well have come from
the elite priests whose powers had failed,

sacrificed, perhaps,
to appease the gods.

Even after the murders,
the frenzy and brutality continued.

This is the skull of a young adult
female. This skull has been burned.

You can see the charring.
The shiny black indicates that...

the bone was burned at a low temperature while
the bone was fresh, while it was green.

That's what we call green, when
it's very close to the time of death.

Nothing could save the Maya
from the horror that enveloped them.

The gods had betrayed them, their reservoirs were
empty. There was no drinking water, their crops failed.

There was nothing to eat.

The Maya civilisation
was destroyed.

When drought afflicts an area,
it's really all-powerful

and human beings are very helpless, powerless,
in their ability to do anything about it.

You can't govern better
in order to avoid drought.

You can't carry on
religious ceremonies better.

You can't have better agricultural
practices in your fields to avoid drought.

When drought hits, it's not the people themselves
that are at fault and there's nothing they can do.

They are the victims, they are not
the perpetrators of the problem.

Today, the Maya who survived
this ancient apocalypse

still perform
some of their ancestral ceremonies.

But they never returned
to their once-glorious cities,

which were abandoned forever.

There's a certain satisfaction

that I have finally understood what happened
to the Maya, but, as a human being,

it's awful to think about what happened to those
people and how this civilisation came to an end.

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