The Maya war of words: scholarly theories collide around the disappearance of the ancient Maya. How do you spell collapse?

• Author: Werner, Louis

Preclassic abandonment. Mid-Classic hiatus. Classic collapse. Such are the terms used by archaeologists today to describe the turning points along the way to the disappearance of high Maya civilization, a multi-staged historical process that occurred most rapidly and decidedly in the ninth century A.D., at the end of the so-called Classic Period. These points in time are of special interest because they symbolize what alternatively might have happened to the Maya, rather than what really did.

For scholars, it turns out that what happened to the Maya is bound up in the words they employ to describe it. Thus their use of the word "hiatus," referring to the sixty-year span in the sixth century A.D., when the building of citadels, pyramids, and ball courts seems to have paused, and Maya civilization itself may have come close to an end, but did not.

And now, as if to throw out yet another term for Mayanists to chew on, arrives the apocalypse--or Apocalypto, as in the title of Mel Gibson's soon-to-be-released movie, filmed completely in Yucatecan Maya. Set in the Postclassic period, the plot is a heavily guarded secret--but as its publicity materials state, the story is a "mythic action-adventure ... set in turbulent end times ... in a world ruled by fear and oppression."

With his title alone, Gibson has stirred romance and religion back into the staid, increasingly technological field of Maya studies, yet in fact a serious scholar has beaten him to it. Dynamics of Apocalypse, by John W. G. Lowe, published twenty years ago, takes a dry mathematical, "systems analysis" approach to the blood and guts of Gibson's mythic end of times. Even so, apocalypse is not likely to catch on in mainstream Mayanist vocabulary.

Experts have been arguing over just what happened to the ancient Maya kingdoms ever since John Lloyd Stephens pushed back the liana vines from Copan in November 1839. He himself declined to do so--"nor shall I at this moment offer my conjecture in regard to the people who built it," he wrote in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, "or to the time when or the means by which it was depopulated and became a desolation and a rain; whether it fell by the sword or famine or pestilence." But he did throw down his gauntlet to archaeologists, challenging them with this insight, "one thing I believe, that its history is graven on its monuments.... Who shall read them?"

Arthur Demarest, author of Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization and professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University, warns of a "lunatic fringe" among amateur Mayanists who explain the civilization's disappearance in terms of extraterrestrial kidnappers, Christian rapture, and the like. But what the lunatic fringe and many respected Mayanists do share is belief in a unified theory for the fall. One thing, and one thing alone, might explain it all.

The first Mayanists believed the answer would be unlocked by an inscription. Looking at one glyph-filled stela from Copan, Stephens wrote, "we considered that in its medallion tablets, the people who reared it had published a record of themselves, through which we might one day hold a conference with a perished race and unveil the mystery that hung over the city." Later scholars thought the inscriptions were not a "record of [Mayans] themselves" but rather a mere list of dates. They were partly right, but their half mistake led them astray for years.

When the Maya calendar was finally deciphered Harvard University archaeologist Sylvanus coined the concept of civilizational "collapse" by plotting a graph of the number of ancient sites whose stone stelae recorded specific katuns (twenty-year periods), starting in A.D. 313. He noted an abrupt drop-off at the beginning of the ninth century, from nineteen sites recording the year A.D. 790 to not a single site recording the year 840, increasing only slightly until the year 909, after which no sites recorded any more dates. For Morley, A.D. 909 represented the end of Maya history. But the history of what?

Morley and his followers proposed a "peaceful Maya" theory, that the calendar was the simple marking of cosmic time, without any messy intrusions of human affairs. As long as there was a priest to turn over the calendar pages, so to speak, all was well in Maya land. This...