"Reservoirs in the heart of an ancient Maya city were so polluted with mercury and algae that the water likely was undrinkable. Researchers found toxic levels of pollution in two central reservoirs in Tikal [see next video], an ancient Maya city that dates back to the third century B.C. in what is now northern Guatemala. New findings suggest droughts in the ninth century likely contributed to the depopulation and eventual abandonment of the city." Source: Science Daily.
"... A geochemical analysis found that two reservoirs nearest the city palace and temple contained toxic levels of mercury that UC researchers traced back to a pigment the Maya used to adorn buildings, clayware and other goods. During rainstorms, mercury in the pigment leached into the reservoirs where it settled in layers of sediment over the years."
Note: "...researchers said it is possible but unlikely the Maya used these reservoirs for drinking, cooking or irrigation." Apparently they had several other, unpolluted reservoirs available.
"The oldest and largest Maya monumental structure on record has just been discovered after scientists [using LIDAR] shot millions of lasers from a plane to map an area in southern Mexico." Source: Live Science.
"At the newfound site, called Aguada Fénix, researchers found an artificial plateau measuring about 0.9 miles (1.4 kilometers) long, 0.2 miles (399 meters) wide and between 33 and 50 feet (10 and 15 m) high. And it likely served as a communal gathering place for the Maya."
Note: Aguada Fenix was unearthed in 2017. Located on a cattle ranch in Tabasco, Mexico, the site looks like a natural landscape, according to one of the researchers. Its discovery pushes back the date when the Maya began building ceremonial centers by around six or seven centuries, at least.
I'm not sure who produced this hilariously lurid documentary or when it was made.
"For a long time, it was commonly held by Mayanist [sic] experts that the 'pacific' Maya of Central America and southern Mexico did not practice human sacrifice (1). However, as more images and glyphs have come to light and been translated, it appears that the Maya frequently practiced human sacrifice in religious and political contexts." Source: Thought Company.
"Sacrifices played a vital part in Maya ritualism. Animals such as iguanas, crocodiles, turtles, dogs, peccaries, jaguars, and turkeys were occasionally sacrificed, and ... these offerings involved either whole animals -- alive, freshly killed, or cooked -- or in some cases only their hearts. But the supreme sacrifice was human life itself, and all too frequently humans were consigned to be slaughtered in the course of elaborate rituals." -- Maya, the Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization, Charles Gallenkamp, Third Revised Edition, 1985, p. 109.
(1) "The prevalent theory on the ancient Maya at the beginning of the 20th century held on to the notion that they had a predominantly peaceful society, idealizing the indigenous culture much like a noble savage. This view [was based on] poorly documented analysis of iconography and the content of Maya script." Source: Wikipedia.
Comment: The myth of the Noble Savage living a peaceful life in harmony with nature and his neighbors has the distinction of being wrong in every case that I'm aware of. It may not be the worst idea ever conceived, but it's definitely one of the most inaccurate.
"A ruthless Maya warrior queen may have ordered the building of an elaborate road more than 1,000 years ago to invade a distant city and to counter the rising power of another, archaeologists say." Source: Live Science.
"They think the queen of the Maya city of Cobá, Lady K'awiil Ajaw, may have ordered the road's construction around A.D. 680 so her armies could travel along it to conquer and take control of the city of Yaxuná, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) to the west, in what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
"Lady K'awiil Ajaw was one of the most powerful and warlike rulers of ancient Cobá, and carved stone monuments show her standing over captives, says archaeologist Travis Stanton of the University of California, Riverside."
This is called a "white road" because of the way it was constructed. According to Science Daily, "the road was as much an engineering marvel as the monumental pyramids the Maya erected across southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras. Although built over undulating terrain, the road was flat, with the uneven ground filled in with huge limestone boulders, and the surface coated with bright, white plaster. Essentially the same formula the Romans used for concrete in the third century B.C., the plaster was made by burning limestone and adding lime and water to the mixture."
This is one of several Maya roads which have been discovered using LIDAR over the years.
Video from April, 2020.Description of road network begins at 10:43.
"Most of the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica such as the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec and Aztec cultures practiced some kind of taking of human trophies during warfare. Captives taken during war would often be taken to their captors' city-states where they would be ritually tortured and sacrificed. These practices are documented by a rich material of iconographic and archaeological evidence from across Mesoamerica." Source: Wikipedia.
Photo credit: "El Tajin Ballcourt Mural (Tom Aleto)" by Thomas Aleto from Riverside, PA - Tajin Sacrifice Scene. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. I think Aleto teaches anthropology at Bloomsburg University.
> Video from 2015. Ancient Apocalypse was a 2001 BBC documentary series.
Note: "Dick Gill [featured in the documentary] was a most unusual person to put forward a bold new theory explaining the collapse of Mayan civilisation. When he started his hunt for clues, he was actually a banker." Source: BBC (2011). Gill spend a considerable amount of time investigating his theory that a major drought led to the collapse and believed that he had found conclusive evidence that this is what had happened:
"The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought brought about the Classic Maya collapse. According to the particular version put forward by Gill in The Great Maya Droughts ... '[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)
The drought theory seems to be widely accepted now. LIDAR scans support the theory, according to Wikipedia, and Gill's evidence is apparently pretty solid -- I haven't found any sources questioning the evidence itself. Still, it's possible that drought may not be enough to explain what actually happened.
"David Webster, a critic of [Gill's] megadrought theory, says that much of the evidence provided by Gill comes from the northern Yucatán and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. He also states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster, although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)
Earthquakes may have played a big part in the collapse as well:
"A study published in Scientific Reports in 2016 showed that between 750 and 900 a cluster of four earthquakes affected the wet tropical mountains south of the Yucatán lowlands, which are not vulnerable to drought, and include such important cities as Quirigua and Copán. These earthquakes left detectable destruction in several Maya cities and led to the abandonment of Quirigua. The study hypothesizes that repeated destruction combined with declining trade with the Maya kingdoms of the Yucatán lowlands to propagate the collapse to the southern part of the Maya realm." (Wikipedia)
Note: Megadroughts aren't uncommon and they can last for a long time. For instance, there was a 200-year megadrought in the Sierra Nevada in the 9th - 12th centuries. Parts of the western United States could be heading into one of these destructive dry spells right now.
"Researchers have found a 'graveyard' of about 60 mammoths ahead of the construction of an airport just outside Mexico City, according to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico." Source: Live Science.
"In addition to the ice age findings, researchers at the airport-construction site uncovered remains from an entirely different time period — pre-Hispanic times, when 15 humans were buried there, the INAH reported.
"...Scientists found the pachyderm bones — including those from male, female and young mammoths — at three sites within the airport's vicinity ... When the mammoths were alive during the last ice age, this area was on the shore of Lake Xaltocan. It's possible that these heavy animals got stuck in the mud there, and that human hunters took advantage of that, targeting the beasts there ..."
Note: Two more mammoth pits (around 15,000 years old) were discovered near this site last year:
Video from Nov. 2019.
"The ancient beasts were Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi), a species that lived throughout North America during the Pleistocene epoch (which began 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,700 years ago). The researchers did not find any remains of the furrier woolly mammoth, which lived farther north."
"The peopling of the New World is still a controversial debate today. In fact, there is no consensus on whether the first settlers arrived in one or several migration waves. Nevertheless, most recent research based on genetic data supports the view that the New World was peopled across the Bering Strait about 18,000 years before the present (ybp). Some authors propose two routes for a rapid human expansion across the continent, one coastal and the other inland; although other alternative routes have been proposed. The hypothesis for the human colonization of America is largely based on the study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which, from the very first studies, has shown that extant Native American populations exhibit six mtDNA different haplogroups (hgs). These can be classified into the following autochthonous hgs: A2, B2, C1, D1, D4h3, and X2a [1]. The fact that these lineages are restricted to a specific geographical area allows us to reconstruct the micro-evolutionary history of Mesoamerica and bordering areas." Source: PLOS ONE (2015).
[1] Most of these haplogroups are thought to have originated in various parts of Asia, though two of them (C and X) apparently come from the Near East and parts of southern or eastern Europe (the Caspian Sea region, for instance). This implies that there was a general eastward movement of peoples from all across the Euro-Asian continent which eventually led to the crossing of the Bering land bridge into the New World. Eastern European and Near Eastern peoples were probably involved in these migrations. Why not? Lots of hunter-gatherers were drifting east back then.
It's also possible that small groups of Polynesians crossed over to South America by boat and I still think it's possible that some Europeans may have reached the extreme northeastern coast of the New World, perhaps by following the north Atlantic ice shelves. The evidence for the latter is sketchy, though; if it exists it's probably buried in the sea off the coast of Newfoundland. If true, these theories would explain the early presence of people in Florida and the southernmost part of South America, but this is still mostly speculation.
Tak'alik Ab'aj Archaeological Park, Guatemala. I don't think this video captures the full scale of the site, but it's the best non-Spanish clip I could find.
"A 2,000-year-old stele discovered in southwestern Guatemala revealed signs of the birth of writing in the Mayan culture that dominated southern Mexico and part of Central America, experts said." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"Stele 87 was found in September 2018 in the Tak’alik Ab’aj archaeological park in the municipality of El Asintal, 125 km southwest of the capital. 'It is an example of the genesis of Mayan writing', German epigrapher Nikolai Grube said in a presentation. 'The great importance of stele 87 is that it is an early example of the development of writing in Mesoamerica (…) Tak’alik Ab’aj was a place of experimentation with Mayan writing,' Grube said in a video conference from Mexico during an event at the National Palace in the Guatemalan capital."
Tak'alik Ab'aj Stela 3
Note: "Tak'alik Ab'aj is ... one of several Mesoamerican sites with both Olmec and Maya features. The site flourished in the Preclassic and Classic periods, from the 9th century BC through to at least the 10th century AD, and was an important centre of commerce, trading with Kaminaljuyu and Chocolá. Investigations have revealed that it is one of the largest sites with sculptured monuments on the Pacific coastal plain. Olmec-style sculptures include a possible colossal head, petroglyphs and others. The site has one of the greatest concentrations of Olmec-style sculpture outside of the Gulf of Mexico." (Wikipedia)
3D laser scan of Stela 4
"Takalik Abaj is representative of the first blossoming of Maya culture that had occurred by about 400 BC. The site includes a Maya royal tomb and examples of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions that are among the earliest from the Maya region."
Wikipedia lists 87 stelae which have been discovered at this site.
According to Wikipedia, "Maya writing used logograms complemented with a set of syllabicglyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing. Maya writing was called 'hieroglyphics' or hieroglyphs by early European explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries who did not understand it but found its general appearance reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, to which the Maya writing system is not at all related."
"Golden, in collaboration with Brown University bioarchaeologist Andrew Scherer and a team of researchers from Mexico, Canada and the United States, began excavating the site in June 2018.
"Among their findings is a trove of Maya monuments, one of which has an important inscription describing rituals, battles, a mythical water serpent and the dance of a rain god. They’ve also found remnants of pyramids, a royal palace and ball court."