Apocalypto Really Hurt?

Betraying The Maya Who does the violence in Apocalypto really hurt? BY DAVID FREIDEL ING KAN B’AHLAM OF PALENQUE in his audience’s intelligence if he thinks it could not KChiapas, Mexico, commissioned three beauti- grasp or be entertained by a subtle depiction of ful temples in the late seventh century A.D. Inside Maya culture, religion, and social organization. The each is a smaller one, just big enough to house a sad irony is that, in the wake of the most recent large relief framed by long inscriptions. Written in research, really good films about the Classic Maya, verse, the inscriptions recount the births of the king- and the period of the Spanish conquest, have been dom’s three patron gods and show that they were waiting a long time for a director of Gibson’s tal- the beloved of the king; nurtured as a mother suck- ents. les a baby; and given new homes, revived, and HE PLOT OF APOCALYPTO is straightfor- healed after a terrible desecration at the hands of ward allegory. Idyllic hunter-gatherers are enemies almost a century earlier. The story weaves T attacked, raped, and abducted by sadistic warriors the history of the kingdom and Kan B’ahlam into from the city. On the journey to the desperate, dying the fabric of the cosmos. metropolis, the raiders and captives encounter all In Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, a Maya ruler sits the usually posited causes of the Maya collapse: silently as his priests butcher captives in the fashion oppression, pestilence, drought. Once there, they of the Aztecs of highland Mexico. He has no words, also find arrogant and cruel leaders savagely sacri- no songs, no history, no name. He is a rich, power- ficing blue-painted captives. Our innocent hero ful, sadistic brute. In stark contrast, the people of the escapes the slaughter and delivers violent retribu- forest in Apocalypto, the defenders of nature, are tion on his tormentors in the forest that sheltered his funny, wise, handsome, beautiful, and profoundly life before—the allegorical journey in reverse. naïve. They are primitives, innocent of the corrup- Gibson’s take on the urban pre-Columbian tive influences of civilization and urban society. But Maya as bloody savages is the latest in a long line no such people existed in the Maya world. Gibson of modern projections of this past. For much of the has several engaging natives in his tableau macabre twentieth century, the American public heard from nightmare of civilization versus nature, but they scholarly professionals such as J. Eric Thompson bear only superficial resemblance to Maya peoples, about how the Classic Maya (A.D. 250–900) were ancient or modern, despite speaking the Yucatec peaceful theocrats overwhelmed by brutal Toltec language. invaders who established militaristic and materialis- Apocalypto is a violently grotesque and surreal tic states in the Terminal Classic and Early work, crafted with devotion to detail but with dis- Postclassic periods (A.D. 750–1100). Archaeol- dain for historical coherence or substance. It is a ogists, including Thompson, who wrote popular, horrific and gripping vision from the mind of its accessible books about Maya archaeology called the maker. Most film critics and moviegoers probably last years of the Postclassic, just preceding the will not see that the film is a big lie about the sav- Spanish conquest, the Decadent period (A.D. agery of the civilization created by the pre- 1350–1500) because of the inferior quality of the art Columbian Maya. As one who has devoted his life and architecture of the time. Thompson’s notion of to bridging the gap between the Maya and the Classic Maya as generally peaceful was belied Americans, I wish Gibson had chosen other victims by the amazing and colorful battle painted on a wall to sacrifice for his art. Allegory and artistic freedom discovered at Bonampak in Chiapas in the late are well and good, except when they slanderously 1940s, but his view was influential among both misrepresent an entire civilization. Gibson insults archaeologists and the public. Popular magazines “Betraying the Maya” by David Freidel. Reprinted with permission of ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, Vol. 60, #2, www.archaeology.org. Copyright © The Archaeological Institute of America, March/April 2007. 1 2 Betraying the Maya The colorful frescoes at Bonampak, among the finest examples of Maya painting, depict occasionally bloody court rituals and ceremonies. Here, the ruler Chan Mauwan presides over the torture of captives. featured articles on the contemporary Maya of painted plaster. At Tikal, tunneling excavations Yucatán and Guatemala and juxtaposed them with uncovered magnificent royal tombs stocked with the towering pyramids of Chichén Itzá or Tikal, and beautiful ceramics, jade adornments, and other arti- gorgeous jade, shell, and ceramic artifacts. facts. These discoveries supported a view of Classic Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, popular images of Maya society different from Thompson’s, one struc- the Maya in the United States and Mexico empha- tured into tiers of elites, professionals, and com- sized art and architecture, but also featured pictures moners ruled by powerful kings. Courtiers, crafts- of beautiful virgins being thrown into the Sacred men, warriors, and merchants—the usual Well of Chichén Itzá or draped over sacrificial altars professions of urban life—have been documented by muscular priests. The latter still grace, in living archaeologically and pictorially in the Classic Maya color, the advertising calendars pinned up in record. Gibson’s costume designers spared no garages throughout Yucatan. Meanwhile, scholars expense to convey contrasts in wealth and status in in the field continued working to determine, for his city, but his vision lacked grounding in scholar- example, whether the Classic Maya lived in cities or ship from either Thompson or the later work. The in villages scattered around ceremonial centers city, for example, is a bizarre computer-generated presided over by the priestly elite envisioned by pastiche of Maya styles from different places and Thompson. times. The movie asserts authenticity while demanding complete freedom to build a fantasy out Surveys at the Classic sites of Tikal in of bits and pieces of pre-Columbian Maya life. Guatemala and Dzibilchaltun in Yucatan during the 1950s and 1960s made a strong case for Maya Were Classic Maya cities the dens of iniquity cities. Excavations revealed remarkable buildings Gibson envisions? Extensive research has not adorned with complex decoration in stone and revealed the slums depicted on the outskirts of the Betraying the Maya 3 film’s city; most people lived in simple wood-and- great bulk of Maya literature was on bark paper and thatch homes resembling the rural ones the Maya is now lost, what we have in stone provides a won- have used since the Spanish conquest. Moreover, derful glimpse of the aesthetics, intellectual life, and some researchers, such as Mayanists Arlen and historical consciousness of Maya nobility. Diane Chase, who have worked at the Classic city In addition to its depiction of urban life, site of Caracol in Belize since the 1980s, have found Apocalypto is wrong from the opening shot of an substantive evidence for a prosperous urban middle idealized rainforest hamlet. The Maya lived in and class alongside royalty and commoners. revered their rainforest environment, but they had Were city dwellers the bloodthirsty predators thoroughly transformed it with 2,000 years of farm- Gibson portrays? Simply put, they were not, but the ing. In 1972 and ‘73, I conducted surveys on the public deserves a more accurate and sophisticated island of Cozumel, where the Spanish under Cortés view of the pre-Columbian Maya, and Gibson cer- made landfall in 1519. While the Spanish describe tainly had the resources, advisors, and talent to have woods on the island, virtually the entire landscape provided it. With the deciphering of Maya glyphic was defined by stone walls dividing habitation and texts and continued field research since the 1970s, farming plots. Evidently this strategy allocated land the Classic Maya have emerged as more recogniz- for slash-and-burn agriculture in small plots that ably worldly. For them, warfare was a staple of could recover during fallow periods. All along the statecraft—sadly a hallmark trait of virtually all civ- coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, the Spanish encoun- ilizations. Their religious practices and social tered people living in towns. To be sure, in the six- organization are also coming into focus. While the teenth century large regions of the interior southern The temples of the Classic Maya site at Palenque contain reliefs that depict Maya mythology, which ties Maya kings and history into the fabric of the cosmos. 4 Betraying the Maya lowlands had reverted to mature rainforest and were sparsely inhabited. But even there the Maya had towns. The rural villagers who lived in the Petén and other interior areas were farmers planting a wide variety of crops. Gibson’s hunter- gatherers are pure fantasy: Ordinary Maya were peasant maize farmers and craftspeo- ple from 1000 B.C. This fact is not incidental; Maya religion in the Preclassic and Classic periods exalted the maize god and tied royal power to him, POCALYPTO JUXTAPOSES AIDEAS about social and political failure from the ninth-century crisis in the southern lowlands—the Classic Maya “collapse”—with the posited “decadence” of the period of the Spanish arrival five centuries later. These periods may have some links, but they are as distinct as the periods of the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution. The “decadence” of the Late Postclassic period is an aesthetic attribution by mid-twentieth-century scholars who observed that the quality and scale of public architecture had diminished compared with buildings Typical Maya were peasant farmers who worshiped the maize raised several centuries earlier.

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