From Ron Canter, a great backgrounder on the Maya city of Yaxha, site of the current Survivor Maya show. As you'll see, the real story beats the reality series for drama. The Maya weren't just playing summer camp in the woods. They created a civilization.

At the end of Ron's article are book references and links to other information. (click MORE for the complete report)

YAXHA – THE BACKSTORY
OF THE ‘SURVIVOR-GUATEMALA’ LOCALE

Yaxha is a survivor - not the ancient city or the show, but the name itself. The place has been “Yax-ha” since before the days of Julius Caesar. It is pronounced yash-ha' and means “Green Lake”. If the lake water were not so green, it might mean “Blue Lake”. To the Maya, blue was just a shade of green, not an entirely different color. This is simple, but a lifetime thinking otherwise makes it hard for me to get it straight in my head.

When Cortez marched through northern Guatemala in 1525, looking for golden cities, there was still a living Maya city at Lake Yaxha – not the giant whose crumbled pyramids form a backdrop for the reality-TV show Survivor-Guatemala, but a more modest one. The ruins of that city still grace the islands of Topoxte and Cante with temples and tightly packed house foundations. All the Postclassic (AD 909 to 1697) towns that Cortez saw in the Peten region were fortified, either by location or walls. Most were tucked onto islands or peninsulas, and those not so fortunate were defended by wooden walls. It was not a peaceful period in Maya history.

At Tayasal, another island city 33 miles west of Topoxte, Cortez was steered southward by advice from its ruler, the Canek. He explained to the Spaniard "that by going on some three leagues I would reach a place where the lake gave way to dry land, and to reach the coast I could follow the road which led from directly opposite his town" instead of "a hard one over steep and rocky mountains". The Canek was urging Cortez to take the easy route east. To bring along his warhorses, Cortez chose the steep and rocky one south to Nito. Except for one, all his horses died on the march anyway. The exception was Morcillo, a sick horse left in the care of the Canek. Eventually Morcillo ended up stuffed, mounted, and worshipped.

The road to the coast, later named “The Chicle Trail”, led straight to Topoxte and then east to the Belize River, so Cortez just missed visiting Lake Yaxha. European missionaries passed through Yaxha following the same road west from the coast to Tayasal. They harangued the Itza Maya of Tayasal (the present-day city of Flores), threw idols in the lake, and eventually wore out their welcome. The Canek took their guides aside and told them “Don’t bring those xolopes back here”. “Xolope” doesn’t translate literally too well, but ‘bonehead” comes close. A few years later they were back and this time they ended up as martyrs or as offerings, depending on your point of view.

Human sacrifice is one of those topics that always surfaces sooner or later in connection with Central American civilizations. The Maya were not an exception, but they were not so bloodthirsty as the later Azteca. On Survivor-Guatemala, the evening “Tribal Council” is held in the North Acropolis, surrounded by pyramids that once witnessed more serious sacrifices than a tribal member banished. The Maya “ajaw”, the ruler, would pierce his ear or his “aat” (hint – women don’t have one), catch the blood on paper, and then burn the soaked pages in a bowl. If all went well, the ceremony would open a portal to other levels of the world and the ancient dead kings could advise the living. The place would briefly become the axis of the world, and the color of the axis - the center of things - was “Yax”. At least, that is the current interpretation of glyphic records and carved scenes from the Classic, 250 AD to 909 AD.

All the great Maya cities immortalized the lives of their rulers with monuments of their births, glorious deeds and deaths – like we do. Sometimes they exaggerated the glorious deeds a bit – like we do. Much of Yaxha’s history is fuzzy. It is not because vengeful enemies smashed the monuments, though that happened enough. Yaxha’s monuments were carved from soft limestone. Time and weather has made many of them unreadable. It doesn’t pay to go cheap for timeless memorials.

That said, some of the stela (commemorative standing stones) can still be read but a lot of Yaxha’s history comes from other cities. A neighbor to the east, Naranjo (real name Saal) besieged and then burned Yaxha in 710 AD. The lord of Naranjo dug up the bones of Yaxha’s previous king and scattered them on an island – probably Topoxte – for spite. We know this because he recorded it on tough limestone.

About 9 miles north is Nakum, namesake of the other Survivor tribe. It has a lot of standing architecture, which means it has unrestored buildings a person can poke their head into, unlike the usual ruin. A friend of mine once described a typical Maya site as “big piles of dirt in the woods”.

Not quite 20 miles northwest of Yaxha is Yax-Mutal, better known as Tikal. “Tikal” just means “at the waterhole” but its ancient name translates as “First Topknot”. There’s that “yax” again, but this time it refers to the center, to being “numero uno”.

The ruined cities are all flanked by bajos, ie. swamps. This doesn’t sound like a good thing, but it was. In May 1995, Patrick Culbert and 5 colleagues chopped a path straight from Yaxha to Nakum through the heart of Bajo La Justa. It took them ten miserable 12-hour days to slog a mere 8 miles. They found the soil was rich, and, on every little island, there were house mounds. In the center of the swamp was the largest ruin, Poza Maya, with 40 structures and 9 courtyards. Nearby they found a square reservoir 250 km on a side. Traces of canals and raised fields gridded the soggy land. The bajos were breadbaskets for the cities.
For another reason why all these cities clustered here, a look at a decent map of the Peten is enough. A series of lakes runs east to west from the Belize River to the Rio San Pedro Martir, which flows to the Usumacinta and on to the Gulf of Mexico. Maya traders could not only get a drink at the end of the day, but also paddle and carry their way all the way across the Yucatan peninsula. Four mile long Lake Yaxha was part of a chain of lakes - Sacnab, Yaxha, Lancaja and Champoxte – stretching for ten miles, with short carries between lakes.

So how did it all come apart? Some – maybe most - of the cities were badly overpopulated, and then a long drought struck. It reached rock bottom in 862 AD. Things get fuzzy because one city after another stopped recording their history. Some show signs of war. In what is now Quintana Roo, Mx., the city of Yo’okop built a fort around, not its temples, but its shrinking waterhole. Cities didn’t collapse overnight or even everywhere. At Yaxha, the city was abandoned but not everyone left the lakes. If they had, the names “Yaxha” and “Sacnab” would not have survived. The lakes shrank but, after the drought passed, smaller cities sprang up on the islands.

I wish I could end on a really upbeat note, but not everything is perfect in the region. The ancient cities are again becoming islands, but of a different sort. They are surrounded by the last fragments of a grand forest that only 20 years ago covered most of northern Guatemala and nearby Mexico. Overpopulation has again pushed people to cut down the forest for hardscrabble farms. They soon exhaust the soil, forcing another cycle of clear cutting. Even being within a park is no absolute guarantee that the forest won’t be logged or the ruins looted. In the northwest corner of Peten, much of Laguna del Tigre National Park has been taken over by narcos (drug smugglers). Ruins along the Usumacinta River periodically face the threat of a dam drowning them. Even the Yaxha-Nakum-Naranjo Natural Monument is not immune from these dangers. William Gibson hit it on the head when he called the past “that sea upon which the present tossed and rode”.

Ron Canter, 10-4-05

Resources

A Scattering of Readings:

Conquest of Yucatan, Franz Blom, 1936. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Breaking the Maya Code, Michael Coe, 1999, Thames & Hudson, NY.

Possible Role of Climate in the Collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization. Hodell, D.A., J. H. Curtis, and M. Brenner. 1995. Nature 375:391-394.

Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, Simon Martin & Nikolai Grube, 2000, Thames & Hudson, Ltd. London, UK.

Sacred Monkey River, A Canoe Trip With the Gods, Chris Shaw, 2000, W.W Norton & Co.

Classic Maya Place Names, David Stuart & Stephen Houston, 1994. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art & Archaeology, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Wash, DC.

Web Sites:

Maya Expeditions, Guatemala
http://www.mayaexpeditions.com/
Serious river tours of major Maya sites, including Yaxha – led by Tammy Ridenour

MEC (Maya exploration Center), Mexico
http://www.mayaexploration.org/
Excellent tours arranged by Ed Barnhart, of Palenque Mapping Project

Sierra del Lacandon National Park, Guatemala
http://www.sierralacandon.org/about-park.html

Yaxha-Nakum-Naranjo Natural Monument, Guatemala
http://www.parkswatch.org/parkprofile.php?l=eng&country=gua&park=yanm&page=sum