Original subtitles

NARRATOR: In Mexico,

archaeological studies of Maya cities continue to reveal secrets

about the history and culture of the people who built them

and live there.

There are constant new discoveries being made in the Maya area.

And really, of the sites that we've found,

we've only excavated 5 per cent.

In the north of the Yucatan Peninsula,

the cities of Tulum, Mayapan and Coba

saw the end of the golden age of a civilisation

that was among the most advanced in the New World.

One of the things that the ancient Maya are best known for

is their work as astronomers.

From the year 900 of our era,

the Maya experienced a period

of flourishing cultural and commercial exchanges

with all of Mesoamerica.

Their edifices, from the more modest to the most imposing,

continued to evolve,

displaying the skills of Maya builders

and the political power of kings

who commissioned such monumental works.

The analysis of these structures allowed archaeologists to identify

the materials and techniques used.

From the layout of the corbelled vaults

to the system of imbrication and piling of the edifices,

the experts have pierced all the mysteries of Maya architecture.

Political lords had subjects who owed them corvee service

as a form of taxation,

so periodically Maya pyramids

would get another construction phase.

Today, technological innovations such as photogrammetry and LiDAR records

can reveal what is invisible

to understand how the Maya societies functioned, and to take

into consideration the full extent of their great capitals.

Maya civilisation is as fascinating as it is intriguing.

Ahead of its time in many scientific fields,

it was also filled with ancestral beliefs and occult rituals.

So they'll punch holes in their earlobe or through their nose.

And that royal blood

was categorically different than commoner blood.

What did Tulum, Mayapan and Coba

tell us about the last hours of the Maya era?

From the Caribbean coast to the heart of the Yucatan jungle,

let's take a look back over a thousand years ago

at the discovery of the last Maya cities.

Central America is the cradle of Maya civilisation,

and the Yucatan Peninsula, located in the south of Mexico,

can be viewed as the recipient of its last hours.

Bordered by the Gulf of Mexico to the north

and the Caribbean Sea to the east,

it spans over 300km long and 250km wide

for a surface area of around 70,000 square kilometres,

which is similar to the size of a country like Ireland.

At the tip of this peninsula,

three cities experienced the end of the Maya era.

Coba, which was a major cultural and religious site

until the Spanish conquistadors arrived.

Mayapan, the last great Mayan capital.

And Tulum, considered as the very last inhabited city

since it was only deserted in the 16th century.

With different scopes and functions,

these three cities shared the fact that they all experienced the fall

of a civilisation that was among the most renowned

and oldest of America.

Famed for their skills and knowledge in many different fields

such as astronomy, mathematics, agriculture and art in all its forms,

the ancient Maya remain a fascinating people

in every respect.

The field of Maya archaeology continues to capture the public

as well as academic interest,

primarily because it was

one of the most literate civilisations in the New World,

with their own writing system.

The Maya era lasted around 3,500 years,

divided into three great periods.

The first period, known as the Preclassic one,

which spreads from 2000 BC to 250 AD,

when the Maya population became sedentary

and founded their first great cities around 1000 BC.

The second period of time is the so-called Classic era,

the apex of the Maya civilisation.

It spans from 250 to 900 AD,

and saw the imposing cities like Tikal and Palenque

rise and disappear.

Lastly, the Postclassic period,

from 900 to 1500 AD.

This marks a shift for the Maya, who migrated towards Yucatan.

It was during this time that they founded Tulum and Mayapan,

which was their last great capital.

The Maya were a people of builders, craftsmen and merchants,

but above all, farmers.

Throughout their history, they chose to settle on land

where maize farming was favoured by fertile land and regular rainfall.

This is how, until the Classic period, the Maya settled

on a territory that spanned over the current countries

of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Belize and Mexico.

All of this land added up to about 310,000 square kilometres,

which is a surface area comparable to that of current Italy.

But at the end of the Classic period in the southern lowlands

at around the 900s AD,

the number of political centres collapse.

What actually happens is,

there's a period of probably drought-driven social disruption

in one particular portion of the Maya area,

because when people can't eat, they overthrow their rulerships,

they throw them out and they move out.

And what we see is a rise of settlements

toward the coastal zones

and in northern Yucatan between 900 and 1000 AD.

Fleeing from bad crops and shortages,

the Maya migrated massively towards Yucatan,

a region which they very soon viewed as a real El Dorado.

There are approximately 7,500 cenotes in Yucatan.

These inexhaustible, drinkable water sources are the main reason why

the Maya settled in Yucatan during the Postclassic period.

On this vast peninsula,

the ultimate traces of the Maya era remain today,

vestiges of the last inhabited cities like Coba, Mayapan and Tulum.

Situated on the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula,

130km to the south of Cancun,

Tulum is an unmissable archaeological site today

for tourists from all over the world.

Its closeness to the sea has made it famous both nowadays

and during the Postclassic Maya period.

Perched at 12m of altitude on its impressive white limestone cliff,

the heart of the city of Tulum is laid out on a rectangular space

of 380m from north to south and 170m from east to west.

Its total surface area is a little less than 65,000 square metres,

the equivalent to eight soccer fields.

Indeed, Tulum was only abandoned at the end of the 16th century.

Built during the Postclassic period around 1200 AD,

the city quickly rose as a strategic place,

open onto the world and displaying great cultural diversity.

Its architecture draws inspiration

from other pre-Columbian civilisations

contemporary of the Maya,

such as the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs,

the Toltecs and the Aztecs.

These people from central Mexico,

although almost 1,500km away,

regularly interacted with the Maya from Yucatan.

Among the architectural codes shared with the Toltecs, for instance,

we can see in Tulum many alcoves decorated with bas-relief,

or these so-called serpentine columns

that highlight the entrance to the main temple.

The influence on the architecture of Tulum is certainly part

of an interaction sphere.

This wide world of commerce and exchange of ideology,

of elite traders communicating with one another,

they were outward looking.

They had an international perspective.

This open-mindedness can also be seen in the adoption of shared gods,

the most obvious example of which is the feathered serpent god,

divinity of resurrection and reincarnation

originally worshipped by the people of central Mexico.

The Maya made it their creator god, going by the name of Kukulkan.

But the choice of adopting a so-called international religion

also concealed a more materialistic goal.

The port of Tulum was a hub for trade by the sea.

For the great cities located inland,

this was the gateway for goods such as ceramics, jade and obsidian,

a volcanic rock essential to produce stone tools.

In exchange, the Yucatan Maya exported their salt,

cocoa and honey.

Before reaching Tulum, all of these goods were painstakingly

transported by men on their backs along paved stone tracks

typical of Maya architecture called 'sacbeob'.

All over Yucatan, these paved roads formed a huge network that connected

the great Maya cities between one another.

Tulum was one of the final destinations of these terrestrial

trade ways that crossed the territory inland.

From this port,

the goods then travelled by sea towards the north or the south

to join the coastal cities of the Gulf of Mexico

or those of the Central American Plateau.

These maritime ways enabled cities

separated by enemy regions and tribes

to trade without having to go through

hostile territories.

And I think what is the biggest benefit to coastal trade

is that you can simply move much, much heavier burdens by water,

by canoe.

You could move much larger loads of goods much larger distances

for less labour investment, and faster.

As such, Tulum was an essential strategic ally

for the great Maya cities in Yucatan.

In that respect, the city was very quickly considered

as a true fortress of tradesmen.

Tulum is one of the few fortified Maya cities.

To protect the main buildings of the city,

all gathered inside a 65,000-square-metre quadrilateral,

a gigantic stone wall was built around it.

Its walls were 3m thick and about 6m tall.

They only spanned across three sides of the quadrilateral,

the fourth wall of the fortress being the limestone cliff,

that towered at 12m high, creating a natural wall on the sea side.

All along the fortification there was a rampart wall

and what seemed to be watchtowers.

The wall at Tulum restricts access to the central precinct

where the elites lived, and this was probably its primary goal.

But there certainly would have been probably guards

and controlled entry ports.

If there are markets that are taking place inside the central precinct,

one way that you can tax goods that are being distributed

through that market system

is to be able to control the movement of those goods

through the various gates and that was a checkpoint.

So these walls are complicated.

They have a lot of potential functions.

To go through this wall,

rare openings were created in the fortification.

These were decorated with particular vaults known as corbelled ones,

more commonly known as false arches.

If people are talking about sort of a false vault versus a true vault,

the distinction is the corbelled arch

versus the rounded Roman-style arch.

Classic vaults were generally built in semicircles

with stones carved into a truncated pyramid shape.

This layout allowed the weight of the construction to be redirected

towards the adjacent walls.

The vault thus ensured great stability

to the edifice it supported.

Maya vaults, corbelled arches,

did not have this semicircle shape.

They were built with blocks of stone

stacked on top of each other,

and slightly shifted so that the top foundation

was systematically overhanging over the lower base.

The assembly was simpler,

as they didn't use wooden supports

to withhold the edifice.

At the top,

one last flat stone rested on both piles that grew closer together,

thus creating the final cover.

The forces were directed vertically here

and weren't redirected towards the side walls.

To avoid any instability,

the corbelled vault could only cover much narrower openings

than those opened by semicircle vaults.

So what you have is a very narrow room, and if you need more internal

space, you make another arch next to that, another arch next to that,

another arch next to that.

And you can build a series of rooms that way.

These narrow and dark inside spaces were not an issue for the Maya.

In fact, they were in perfect harmony with their religion,

for their temples are the houses of gods.

These were sacred places,

and they weren't intended for public view.

They were meant for the restricted and privileged few,

for lords undergoing initiation ceremonies,

or conjuring of ancestors

or other kinds of communicative rituals with deities.

Maya temples display relatively modest and narrow interior designs.

This applies to the main building in Tulum, El Castillo.

The temple positioned at the top

contains only two confined vaulted rooms,

two little dormers at the back of the building,

and three openings on the facade separated by two columns.

From the outside, El Castillo remains monumental,

culminating at 24m above the Caribbean Sea.

El Castillo also served as a landmark for Maya navigators

who wanted to gain access to the harbour of Tulum.

As such, it had to be built as high up as possible on the cliff.

Over the centuries, its architecture evolved as the city grew prosperous

and unavoidable,

for, at the beginning, El Castillo

was just a small religious building of very modest proportions.

Originally, El Castillo in Tulum was already 25m wide,

but it didn't go much higher than eight metres.

To raise it, the builders added contention walls in the centre

and an inclined abutment plane at the rear.

These additions filled in the central part of the old temple

with stone and earth to ensure solid foundations for the extra height.

On this base, the new construction rose up to around 12m high,

adorned with a stairway of about 20 or so steps

leading to the sacred part, the temple at the summit.

The edifice, decorated with bright colours and numerous sculptures,

adopted monumental architecture.

Facing the temple,

a square-shaped platform of about 10 metres was also built,

probably to host dances and religious rituals.

Due to this sometimes hostile coastal climate,

edifices were often positioned with their backs to the sea,

with only a few openings on the eastern facade.

Another characteristic of the east coast style

is its particular aesthetics.

Many walls were intentionally inclined towards the outside,

giving the building a trapezoid shape

whose flat roofs were decorated

with alcoves, sculptures, and mouldings.

The east coast also really embraced the mural tradition.

So it's another frustrating thing about the east coast centres

is that the murals have not survived well in the tropical environment,

but they would have been resplendently painted and decorated.

If Tulum displays a rather sober style, it is probably

because the city was not really a centre of power,

but a fishing port and a city of merchants above all.

Its style contrasts sharply with the one found inland.

In the central part of the peninsula,

the great political capitals used architecture to display their power.

In Mayapan, for example,

a monument characterises in itself the ambition of the city.

This is the pyramid of Kukulkan.

With its square base of around 30m on each side,

it towers up to 15m high,

which is the equivalent of a five-floor building.

In 1150 AD, the Maya founded a new capital around this majestic edifice,

whose political system contrasted radically with the previous periods.

And the goal of the Mayapan elites are to form essentially

a confederacy, where they are bringing the elites from sites

all over the Yucatan Peninsula.

You can think of it as a council of rulers

who were themselves kings in their own city states.

We also have a mat symbol woven into the bench

that runs the length of the council house.

The mat symbol is a symbol of Maya royalty, of Maya rulership.

This collegial government

made the cult of the feathered serpent god persist.

The great pyramid is a temple devoted to Kukulkan.

Kukulkan was associated with prosperity and jewels

and wealth, so merchants loved him,

and he was conceived of as a founder

of many Maya political centres throughout Mesoamerica.

And so he's a hero.

The Temple of Kukulkan is not a revolution of Maya architecture

or of its dimensions,

but it bears testimony to the skills of Maya builders.

Here they used building processes proper to their civilisation,

which allowed them to erect pyramids up to several dozen metres

in record timing.

Political lords had subjects who owed them corvee service,

or obligatory service, as a form of taxation.

The workforce, often led by priests, was colossal.

The workmen extracted and carved the limestone,

highly abundant in Yucatan,

with simple tools made in obsidian or flint,

two very sharp rocks.

These blocks of limestone, some of which weighed around 50 kilos,

were transported to the work sites in the simplest possible way.

In the Maya area, there were no large beasts of burden.

They didn't have cattle or horses or anything like that.

So everything was being carried by people,

kind of with their hands behind their back

and carry things straight up,

straight up the steps of the temple.

So it's all hard manual labour.

The manual labour was exhausting, but not very complicated,

for the technique to raise such pyramids was surprisingly simple.

The structure of a pyramid, like the one in Mayapan,

is made up of backfill of rough stones and mortar.

To do so, spaces were divided by walls to create multiple cells.

Each group of workmen filled their cells as they pleased

with mud, sand, gravel or lime.

It was then entirely covered with a siding of well-carved stones

followed by a mortar coating.

This base served as a platform for the upper levels

that were built in the same way.

Once the edifice was finished,

it was covered in whitewash

to give it a smooth aspect and make it waterproof.

Finally, the pyramid was covered with a new coating with red pigments

added to it, giving the building the colour of the rising sun.

For the Maya,

building such a pyramid was also a way to get closer to the gods

with whom they wanted to get in contact.

In fact, this obsession with the relationship

between the heavens and the earth was a very strong influence

on the layouts of edifices.

One of the things that the ancient Maya are best known for

is their work as astronomers.

They clearly spent literally generations, hundreds of years

observing the night sky

and understanding that certain objects in the night sky

occurred on regular cycles.

They predicted eclipse cycles.

They were very concerned with movement of planetary bodies.

And how this translates into architectural alignments

is an interesting question that archaeoastronomers have identified.

At Mayapan, one major way you see this is that the temple of Kukulkan

is oriented in such a way that at the winter and summer solstice,

you get a shadow cast by the corner of the pyramid

that runs down the balustrade of the main staircase

and forms what looks like a serpent

moving down the stairs over time.

This phenomenon clearly marked a privileged moment of connection

with the gods.

Maya priests studied astronomy for religious reasons, orienting

temples in such a way as to make them offerings to the deities

supposed to protect them and bring them prosperity.

But studying the stars didn't only have this ritual goal.

The Maya managed to decipher the natural cycles of the Earth

thanks to a thorough study of the celestial vault.

They were then able to make up a disconcertingly precise calendar.

In effect, it is composed of two main calendars

that make up the calendar wheel.

The first one is the religious calendar called 'tzolkin'.

It is made up of a wheel with 20 names

of days associated with the wheel of 13 numbers.

It counts 260 days, divided into 13 periods of 20 days,

and was used for all religious activities.

The third wheel represents the second calendar,

a solar and civil calendar called 'haab'.

It includes 365 signs

representing the 365 days of the cycle of the sun,

and is divided into 18 months of 20 days each.

At the end of the year comes a period of five days.

This calendar was very useful for farming activities.

It is only every 52 years

that both calendars realign on the shared starting point.

The Maya called this period of 52 years the cycle of the Pleiades.

Perfect indeed, because the Maya had understood that a sidereal year,

which is the time the Earth takes to go around the sun,

is actually 365 days and 6 hours.

Although our Gregorian calendar

sorts this out with a leap year

every four years,

the Maya astronomers compensated

this slight gap at the end

of each cycle of the Pleiades.

With these 13 days of celebrations added every 52 years,

the correction of the Maya calendar

matches precisely the one we do

every four years nowadays.

And Maya priesthood during the Postclassic

was intensely interested in controlling the calendar.

Like, they would divine

when were good days to plant,

when were good days to hunt,

good days for making war,

good days to name children, and so on.

And the people occupying those positions

were influential in politics.

In the Postclassic period, Mayapan was the epicentre of the Maya world.

Consequently, the entire city was organised around its main temple,

viewed as the centre of the cosmos.

Around the pyramid of Kukulkan,

the heart of the city was home to all the religious

and administrative buildings of Mayapan.

To the west, the Temple of Venus,

to the east, the Caracol, devoted to the wind god,

and the complex dedicated to the god of rain, Chaac.

To the north, the Temple of Warriors,

the Temple of Painted Alcoves,

the Temple of Fishing, and the Northwest Temple.

In the middle of all these places of worship came the residences

of the ruling class.

Already densely packed, this main square only represented a tiny part

of what the city of Mayapan was at its peak.

Thanks to laser tele-detection technology,

archaeologists managed to reveal what was invisible.

In recent years,

they discovered to what extent the city spread out

far beyond its political and religious centre.

In 2013, we performed a LiDAR survey that allowed us to map

all the houses located under the forest around Mayapan

within a 40 square kilometre area.

So what we're doing is we're flying over the jungle canopy,

and we're sending down millions of pulses of laser light

into the jungle.

And most of those will hit leaves and trees.

But a bunch of those will manage to get between the leaves,

hit the real ground surface and bounce back.

And then we can digitally literally just hit a button

and delete all the vegetation,

and all you see is what's at that bare ground surface.

And to our surprise, we realised that this area was completely

covered in house mounds and outlying minor political centres.

We were able to look at a complete map

that show us all the architecture,

the stone walls,

you know, trails, cenotes,

all of that.

And it 100% changed

the way we were doing archaeology at Mayapan.

LiDAR technology allowed archaeologists to confirm

the existence of an 8km-long surrounding wall,

inside of which more than 4,000 structures were recorded

on a surface area of hardly more than 4 square kilometres.

It's dense and it's walled,

and there clearly was a concern for defence.

This was a contentious period and there were rivals and warfare

and raids were a part of the political landscape

in the Postclassic.

So you have both an external defence

and a way to keep an eye on the local population

who might, you know, want to rise up and cause you problems.

Again, city walls are more complicated, I think,

than a lot of people give them credit for.

Although it was fortified,

Mayapan took up a hierarchical organisation of space

specific to Maya civilisation.

In the centre of the city,

the religious edifices and housing of upper classes co-existed,

whereas the rest of the population

was organised around this nerve centre.

The first ring around it was where the merchants and craftsmen lived.

Then came the farmers who lived the furthest out of the city.

What the 2013 LiDAR study revealed

is that the city spread far beyond the surrounding wall.

The city itself spans 4.2 square kilometres within the wall,

and then it goes another half kilometre in all directions

outside the wall.

So stand on the top of the temple of Kukulcan,

as far as the eye can see,

and that will be Mayapan,

the residential zone of one of the most urban cities

ever to have existed in the Maya realm.

We had originally had a population estimate of 12,000

based on existing maps of Mayapan.

Now that we have the LiDAR, it looks like maybe 20,000 or 25,000.

So it's been absolutely critical in our understanding of the city.

Although Mayapan is considered to be

the last great political capital of the Yucatan Maya,

the essential cultural and religious centre of the Postclassic period

remains Coba.

The city is 200km to the east of Mayapan,

and about 50 or so kilometres northwest of Tulum.

Its ruins, today shrouded in thick tropical rainforest,

was revealed by archaeologists in the 1920s.

Coba is a wonderful city, in part because it was so long lived.

You see the first occupation there in probably about 100 AD,

and it had time to develop, you know, both size and scale.

It probably had 50,000 people in its height.

Around 650 AD,

Coba was the most important city of the Yucatan Peninsula,

a major political and religious capital.

But from the year 1000 AD on,

its influence declined severely

with the rise in power of its rival Chichen Itza.

These new complexes were erected around 1200 AD

and display all the architectural codes

typical of the east coast style -

small rectangular constructions, narrow vaulted rooms,

and very few openings bordered by columns

and decorated with ornamental friezes.

The presence of such ensembles

confirms the thesis of a renewal in Coba at the time.

On this huge site of 70 square kilometres,

which is twice the surface area of a city like Lyon in France,

these modest buildings brush shoulders

with the imposing pyramid temples of the previous period.

So you've got different architectural styles present, right?

So you see sort of Classic period tall, vertical temples

that then are topped by Postclassic Tulum style shrines

to reflect the changing times.

This little temple that towers over the canopy is at the summit

of the highest edifice in Yucatan, the pyramid of Nohoch Mul.

It stands on seven levels with rounded sides,

and measures 42m high.

The stairway leading to the top counts 113 steps, and its slope

is famous for being particularly steep and difficult to climb.

In Mayan language, 'Nohoch Mul' means 'Great Hill'.

In the scenery, this pyramid has the appearance of a craggy cliff

dominating the jungle,

and it's exactly what the Maya wanted when they built such a huge temple.

The ideology ties very closely to the cosmology,

the idea that there's an upper world and there's an underworld,

and that we're somewhere in the middle of it.

And there's various ways to reach the gods

who live in the upper world.

One of those is to ascend the mountain.

So, in the Yucatan, where it's relatively flat,

building your own mountain is one way to get a mountain.

And it was from the top of this sacred artificial mountain,

visible by all, that the Maya priests and kings ran the city.

Maya kings were divine messengers,

the only ones who could interact with the gods and obtain their favours.

During periods of drought and famine,

their political legitimacy could very quickly be questioned.

To preserve it, leaders had to use propaganda constantly.

This is what the many stelae found all over the city revealed.

Highly eroded today,

most of them are very difficult to interpret with the naked eye.

Archaeologists often use photogrammetry to create

a more legible version of these testimonies in three dimensions.

By assembling hundreds of photos taken in the field,

this technique amplifies all the reliefs of a sculpted scene

and reveals the invisible.

These prisoners of war could at any moment be sacrificed as offerings

to the Maya gods.

Nobody knows how often the temples were used as stages

to these macabre scenes.

Yet once again, the architecture of the place informs the experts

about their unfolding and the places where the ceremonies occurred.

These sacrifices of prisoners were not the only blood offerings

which the Maya people attended to.

Self-sacrifice rituals were also very frequent.

Perched on their pyramid,

the Maya kings or priests practised spectacular bleedings on themselves.

So they'll punch holes in their earlobe

or through their nose or into the fleshy parts of their penis,

things like that.

That would obviously have been very painful.

So it was a real commitment on the part of the elites as well.

And that royal blood

was categorically different than commoner blood.

These blood offerings were directly connected to the myth of rebirth,

and their goal was to ensure fertile crops for the people.

As proof,

this bas-relief represents a decapitated victim

from which a long plant is growing, loaded with fruit and flowers.

The victim bears all the attributes of a Maya pelota player.

This traditional ball game, widespread in Mesoamerica,

took place on courts built in stone,

some of which are still almost intact today.

In the one in Coba,

a stone skull marks the centre of the playing area.

The ball court, whose size varies according to cities,

is rectangular.

It is bordered by walls often inclined,

going up to 10 metres high approximately.

At the top of each of these walls,

a particularly inaccessible ring serves as a goal.

During this ritual game,

two teams of 2 to 7 players faced off

and exchanged a rubber ball that could weigh up to three kilos.

To do so, they were not allowed to use their hands and feet.

The contact area seemed to be the hip.

Many of the ball courts have large ball court rings,

so it seems like if the ball went through the ring,

you automatically won.

It was a one-off situation.

It wasn't like they were scoring points

by repeatedly getting the ball through the ring.

If it got up there, that was a good sign that the gods

were pleased with you and that was it, you were done.

Surely, ball players would have been heroes who sacrificed themselves.

So there was probably a gladiatorial aspect.

There needed to have been a winner,

and the price needed to be the ultimate price.

The people watched these battles from the top of the stands,

above the players.

In the representation of the universe as the Maya conceived it,

the ball-playing court constituted a passage

towards the world of the dead.

Its rounded shape and the presence of sculptures of skulls

and supernatural beings in the construction

leave no doubt for the experts.

It's definitely an access point to the underworld,

a cleft in the earth, so that you are going down to the realm

of the Lords of Death.

This underworld was not considered to be like the hell

that some other religions envision.

In this respect, the Maya people were not afraid of it.

They saw it as both the place where water comes from,

a source of life, but also the place where their deceased ancestors lived.

The Maya devoted a highly particular cult to caves and cenotes,

the natural geological formations found abundantly in the area.

When you see the formations, the stalactites, the stalagmites,

when you see the flowstones,

especially if you imagine them being lit

by torchlight and camp fires,

it's the kind of place when you think

"Where would the gods live?", and you've been down there,

that's a pretty good choice.

They're so impressive and they're so intimidating

that it makes absolute sense to me, as a researcher,

why the Maya considered them sacred and important.

Although the end of the Maya era

is often attributed to the Spanish conquest,

the historical truth is a little more complex.

On October 12th, 1492,

Christopher Columbus first set foot on the American continent,

but it wasn't until March 1517

that the Spanish reached the Yucatan Peninsula.

When they reached Maya land,

they found a civilisation that was already declining.

Power was no longer centralised in Mayapan,

which had already been deserted for several decades.

Mayapan collapsed around 1450 AD

as a result of political revolt

led by members of its internal council.

So the confederacy dissolved,

and at this point every lord went back to their home territory.

When the Spanish conquistadors invaded the areas inland,

the great Coba was also unoccupied.

Tulum, however, remained inhabited until 1544,

when the Spanish spread their conquest to the northeast

of the peninsula.

Thousands of Maya were killed

or forced to flee the cities they had founded.

Never again would they build cities like Tulum.

The heyday of the Yucatan Maya ends here,

in this small harbour city that managed to survive

over the years and eras to become the last city of the Maya era.

However, this great civilisation is still very much alive today.

It's an incredibly resilient culture.

They've been through severe droughts and things over the years

to the point where entire cities have fallen

and new ones have been formed,

and they always have found a way to reorganise,

to adapt and to survive.

For anthropologists and archaeologists alike,

the investigation work is only just beginning.

Of the sites that exist, we've probably found 5%.

Of the sites that we've found, we've only excavated 5%.

And as the technology advances,

there are constant new discoveries

being made in the Maya area.

And really, it's a fascinating place to work,

and we're going to be learning more about the ancient Maya

for many years to come.

Tulum. Mayapan. Coba.

These three cities were the home

to the last moments of the apex of this civilisation

that is as fascinating as it is mysterious.

The architectural and cultural testimony that they leave

is a synthesis of the beliefs, knowledge and skills

of the Maya people,

the achievement of around 4,000 years of existence and evolution

in the Central American forest.

If the Maya haven't totally disappeared today,

it's also thanks to the longevity of these vestiges of limestone

whose beauty is universal and eternal.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2024