In this fascinating book, David Drew brings to life this extraordinary civilisation. He answers questions about why they constructed their cities in the hostile setting of the jungle, the exact age of their ruins, the strange human images depicted in elaborate costume at so many Maya sites, and he asks why at the time of the Spanish conquest, all knowledge of the Mayas had been lost. He looks at their history, art, architecture, political systems, religion, and, finding that the Maya are not in fact a lost or dead people - there are still five million descendants living in Mexico - considers the ways in which their society today illuminates that of their ancestors.
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Drew shows that there were really two Mayan empires: an "international one" verging on the Toltec and Mexica lands to the north, and an isolationist, conservative one to the south. Both constructed impressive, crowded cities marked by monumental architecture and elaborate royal tombs. Both fell victim to overpopulation and environmental failure, as drought and the depletion of the soil combined to produce famine. With them came the abandonment of the great cities. "It must be a gauge of the catastrophe and the severity of damage to the environment that in the years to come no attempt was made to revive a single one of them," Drew writes. The Mayan civilization emerged anew after the collapse, if at a much less ambitious scale--only to fall again as European-introduced diseases killed half a million Mayas between 1520 and 1547.
Drew's account of the Mayan empire's rise and fall is among the best general-interest books on this enigmatic era of New World history; scholars may prefer Martin and Grube's Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens. --Gregory McNamee
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