Copan Ruinas – Part One
Hello and welcome to part one of Venla's and my visit to Copan, Honduras.
Copan is the home of one of the most impressive ruins from the classic Maya period. This post covers what we learned on our visit to the ruins themselves through the guide we hired, the signs we read and things that we saw. (By the way, if any of you ever go to Copan, hire a guide. They are expensive but worth every penny.) Part two will cover the museum that is co-located with the excavated portion of the ancient city center and that houses protected stone carvings. We regret that we did not have time to visit the museum in the modern town of Copan Ruinas and that we could not get to the excavated residential district to the west of the acropolis.
The valley that surrounds Copan was first inhabited by humans in permanent settlement in the 7th or 8th century BC, give or take. However, it was not until the 5th century CE that the various settlements united into an identifiable political entity around the semi-mythical first king of Copan. Under his rule, Copan became a powerful city-state not unlike those that dominated ancient Greece at the time of Socrates. For thirteen generations, this dynasty ruled an ever expanding territory, reaching its zenith under the King 18 Rabbit.
18 Rabbit, who ruled for 43 years, represented the culmination of Classic Mayan politics. He was, for the people, a divine being. He splashed the public spaces of the grand Copan center with statues of himself in the many roles that he was to play for his people: he was depicted as both fertile youth and wise old age; as the sun but also as the rain and the maize. Statues show him as powerful ball-player but, interestingly, also as a woman, a mother. 18 Rabbit was everything to everybody.
It is not hard to imagine why the people believed him. For generations, the elites had been building a myth around the person of the king. They used their advanced understanding of astronomy to hold elaborate ceremonies in which the king appeared to use his powers to eclipse the sun and the moon. Then, as now, education was power. The elites changed their appearance: they applied pressure to the foreheads of their babies to change the way their faces grew; they tied a small bobbin in front of childrens' eyes to make them go cross-eyed ; they replaced their teeth with jade. Further, the elites, properly nourished and cared for, lived longer. While an average farmer lived for 35 years, the elites had lifespans that outstripped a modern American's. When 18 Rabbit took power, he was already an old man to most people, yet he ruled for two generations of subjects.
The layout of the city reflects this highly stratified society. It is divided into three parts: a large public arena in the North, an Acropolis in the center, and a slightly misnamed necropolis in the south. The whole was once covered with stucco, with vertical surfaces painted glossy white and vertical surfaces blood red with white and green highlights. The arena once accommodated over 27,000 spectators. It served a purpose roughly equivalent to a roman Colosseum: it housed a small pyramid (from which the kings practiced their public rituals), the propaganda statues (described above), sacrificial altars (where the heads of victorious ball players were severed) and a ball court. All of public life happened here, from sports to markets to religious ceremonies.
Just south of this public space, sequestered behind tall rows of pyramids, lay the Acropolis, the high city for the kings and nobles. It housed temples where the priests invented their myths and the kings, high on psychedelic mushrooms, communed with the Gods. It also housed the military training ground, where the youths of the elites learned how to fight and kill, as well as an observatory from which the intellectuals (who outnumbered the soldiers, judging from the size of their space) watched the skies to discern the patterns that the stars revealed. In the center stood a country club of sorts, a place from which the crème de la crème watched the work of the lowly crème while enjoying the best food and drink.
Just beyond this acropolis stands the necropolis. This portion of the city got its name from the first archeologists who discovered the group of buildings that housed hundreds of predominantly female skeletons. What was strange about this, though, was that it was later discovered that the Maya never practiced this western strategy for honoring their dead: they interred the dead in the homes that they had lived in. It turns out that the supposed necropolis was actually the royal palace complex and the archeologists had actually discovered the nearly complete remains of 400 years of family history. The women outnumbered the men quite simply because each king had 18 wives. It was a lush complex, nearly as vast as the entire Acropolis.
All of this began to change when 18 Rabbit was captured in battle on a punitive expedition against a rebellious vassal city and executed shortly after. For the first time, a King of Copan, supposedly a god, died at the hand of simple men. The myths began to unravel. 18 Rabbit's son had to make concessions. He built a counsel building on the cusp between the acropolis and the public arena where he asked representatives of the districts he administered what to do, instead of ordering them about. The symbolism of his reign changed, too. We have the statues that 18 Rabbit built to himself quite simply because his successors did not bother to replace his image with their own. Instead, they began writing history, justifying their rule not as a divine right, but based on the quality of the dynasty's historic performance. It is thus that we have one of the Maya's greatest achievements: the great Stairway of Copan. The 64 rows of stone steps that rise some 100 feet in the above the main arena to a now missing temple recount the 300 years of history that lead from the founding of Copan to 18 Rabbit's death.
However, while it is tempting to imagine that Greek-style democracy and arts may have developed in this exotic society had things progressed, the city was totally abandoned by the 10th century, just three generations after the death of 18 Rabbit. The reason for this sudden end was linked to one key problem: the resource-intensive Maya lifestyle. The Maya consumed massive amounts of wood. As mentioned above, their cities were covered in several inches of stucco. However, stucco needs a lot of lime, and the production of lime needs a lot of heat and therefore wood to burn. It is fairly easy to trace the increasing rarity of wood in the archeological record: in the early periods of Copan's life cycle, the sculptures were made almost entirely of stucco, a fairly easy process that demanded that the sculptor simply pile plaster on where needed. As time progressed, the sculptors began to carve bulk features in stone, to be covered with stucco for the details. By the end of Copan's life, sculptors carved almost everything in stone, applying just enough stucco to serve as a sealant and primer for the paint.
The transition to the labor intensive process of stone carving is clear evidence that the wood needed for stucco was getting too expensive to use as it had to be hauled from increasingly great distances. However, the deforestation had another impact. First off, in tropical regions such as this one, the trees play an important role in the rain cycle (this isn't hippie babble, the process is very well documented and understood). No trees meant no rain and no rain meant no corn. Secondly, the trees had long acted as wind breaks, sheltering Copan from the force of the Caribbean hurricanes and storms that pass through every few years. Without them, the wind and rain blew and washed away the thin layer of topsoil. While the Maya understood astronomy, the rain was the purview of religion and they did not understand why their supplications to the rain god did not bring the gentle, daily rains of old. Instead, the rain became a curse, always either too much or too little.
The archeological record shows a disturbing trend: malnutrition began to strike the people of Copan in the beginning of the 9th century. It was small and rare at first, limited to the poorest people on the poorest land. However, as time progressed, the famines became more frequent and climbed the social ladder as they became more urgent. Social unrest grew: the faces of most depictions of the kings were defaced during this period. Finally, the family of the last king show signs that they, too, suffered malnutrition and usually died of hunger. Just a few years later, nobody lived in the Copan valley: the Maya had so ruined it that it could not even support subsistence farmers any more.
Enjoy the pictures, courtesy of Venla!
