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National Geographic : 1989 Oct
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(Continuedfrom page 450) By A.D. 850 both Calakmul and El Mirador were dying. When the Spanish arrived, only 600 people were found in the area. The late, renowned Maya scholar Sir Eric Thompson, once invited to a seminar on the cause of the Maya demise, is said to have responded: "No need for seminar. Peasant uprising." With no evidence the Maya ever used the wheel, the labor required to build the massive temple cities would have been justification enough for revolt-especially if all the effort wasn't pleasing the gods. Recent studies by Richard Adams at Rio Azul to the east and by Willie at Calakmul show malnutrition in the waning years. Could it be that population pressures, then as now, damaged the environment? Did the people, frustrated, revolt against the leaders, or were they overrun by enemies from cen tral Mexico? Projects such as Calakmul bring us ever closer to the answer. The Maya prophet Chilam Balam predict ed that men with beards would come from the east. And so they did-starting in 1517. The "conquest" began in Guatemala with ruthless slaughter by Pedro de Alvarado. Francisco de Montejo received permission from King Charles to conquer Yucatan at his own expense. It proved to be very expensive and never completely successful. The first two attempts in 1527 and 1530 failed. The third and successful invasion began at Can Pech-now Campeche-the oldest surviving European settlement in the Yucatan. The official surrender took place at Ichcansiho now Merida-in 1542. But Maya guerrillas have held out for 450 years or so, and there are still towns that outsiders should leave before dark. Physically and emotionally remote from Mexico City, the Europeans of the YucatAn struggled for identity in the 19th century. In 1840 they declared themselves a sovereign nation. They even hired the Texas navy to protect them from Mexico. In 1848 a delega tion went to Washington to ask President Polk for statehood. ACISM was a basic fact of life. Caste distinctions determined rank in society and business. At the top: the Spanish. Stepping down: the criollos-whitebut born in the New World; mestizos-part white, part Indian; mula tos- white and black; pardos- black and Indian. At the bottom, like the Hindu untouchables: the Indians. Were it not for odds so enormous that raw courage alone would not suffice, the Maya might still be ruling the Yucatan Peninsula. In the Caste War, as brutal and unforgiving a conflict as the Americas have witnessed, the Maya rose up against the Europeans and the mixed castes from 1847 until 1855, with the massacre of entire towns by both sides. Rejection of the Catholic Church by the new Mexican republic triggered the war. The Maya, long converted and now very devout, were angry. Filling the spiritual vacuum, Jose Maria Barrera and a Maya ventriloquist named Manuel Nahuat created a "talking cross." Like a Maya ayatollah, the "cross" gathered thousands of followers known as Cruzob to its cult. The word itself, like the Maya form of Roman Catholicism, was a hybrid: cruz, Spanish for cross; ob, the Maya plural suffix. In time the Cruzob retreated to the Carib bean coast, capturing Bacalar in 1858. They requested and then refused a 4,000-peso ran som for the life of the citizens. James Blake, La Ruta Maya 463
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