By Andrew L. Jaffee

The violent history of the Maya has been sanitized as nonviolent, proving that having a “Ph.D.” after your name doesn’t really prove anything. Case in point: Alicia Estrada, an assistant professor of Central American studies at California State University, Northridge, Thursday night accused Mel Gibson “of misrepresenting the Mayan culture in the movie” Apocalypto. Estrada, in a superior display of historic ignorance, argued “that representations in the movie that the Mayans engaged in sacrificial ceremonies and had bloodthirsty tendencies were both wrong and racist.”

Quite to the contrary, archeological evidence of Maya “sacrificial ceremonies” and “bloodthirsty tendencies” is ubiquitous. It all started with the discovery of murals at Bonampak in 1946:

In this scene, Muan, king of Bonampak, indulges in egomania, proving to his subjects what a great conqueror of neighboring Maya city-states he was. Muan’s prisoners have obviously been tortured — blood dripping from their bodies — before being carted off to be sacrificed (killed). Other murals at Bonampak show “warriors descend[ing] on farmers working in the field,” and “a gruesome illustration of the pen being mightier than the sword:”

…the official scribes of Maya kings, who were considered important to the kings’ power, were especially targeted by enemies in warfare. If captured, they were executed—after their fingers were broken and their fingernails ripped out, according to a researcher who has taken a much closer look at Maya murals. …

The mural depicts captured scribes—bound, semi-nude, and with their fingers broken and bleeding. Some have already been executed.

After the discovery of the murals at Bonampak, archeologists kept finding more and more evidence of Maya “sacrificial ceremonies” and “bloodthirsty tendencies.” A hastily-built defensive wall was discovered at Chunchucmil:

…the stones used to create the barricade were clearly robbed from nearby structures (rather than freshly quarried)…

Given this data, it has been hypothesized that the barricade was constructed rapidly at the end of Chunchucmil’s history, possibly to protect the remaining inhabitants from an invasion that arrived before the wall could be completed (Dahlin 2000), leading to the ultimate demise of the ancient city.

This wall, certainly not the only one of its type discovered (e.g., Dos Pilas), bares evidence of Maya culture going up in flames as their city-states destroyed each other, just as Gibson portrayed in Apocalypto. From Science Daily:

Translation of recently unearthed hieroglyphic stairs on an ancient Maya pyramid in Guatemala provides dramatic evidence that two great Maya city-states and their allies were locked in a brutal superpower struggle that may have set the stage for the later collapse of the classic Maya civilization.

The newly translated stone hieroglyphs - complete with references to piles of skulls and flowing blood - were partially exposed last summer during a hurricane at the site known as Dos Pilas, deep in the Guatemalan rain forest.

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During a dig at the Maya site of Yaxuná, Charles Suhler and David Freidel found:

…the remains of 11 murdered men, women, and children.

We wondered who these people were and why so many had been placed in a tomb chamber usually reserved for a single person. Then it dawned on us. We had stumbled onto the dark side of Maya history. Like the murder of the Romanovs after the Bolshevik Revolution, the sacrifice of the royal family in burial 24 had accompanied a violent change in rulership.

Do not forget the ball courts you can see at any major Mayan site, where:

…the ball game was ritually associated with the endemic warfare among city-states of the times. The success of military conquest was recreated in a public and ritual ball game, in which high-ranking war captives were defeated and sacrificed. Sometimes they were kept, tortured, and displayed for years before their sacrifice.

So adds CBS:

Human sacrifice among the Mayans has been well-documented in recent years and is accepted as fact by most anthropologists, knocking down a previous theory that the culture did not take part in such bloody rituals.

Heard enough? Apparently Alicia Estrada, “assistant professor of Central American studies,” hasn’t. She’s heard what she wants to hear. Her “thesis” is not based on science, rather pure emotion. But this is now par for the course in academia, where you can get your Ph.D. by telling your professors what they want to hear — and G#d forbid you stray from the party line.

I myself have traveled extensively in Mesoamerica, and was truly awed by the great achievements of the Aztecs, Maya, Olmec, Teotihuacánacos, Toltec, etc. But, even as a child being dragged from archeological site to site by my archeologist mom, I could not help being troubled by the scenes of ultra-violence encoded by Los Indios in their murals, stelae, and frescos. As these civilizations reached their zeniths, their rulers became terrorists, terrorizing their own peoples and neighbors, all in pursuit of greater and greater power. Any student of history knows this is a common human theme, not distinct to any one race. People are people, capable of the human foibles which a certain non-Mesoamerican, Shakespeare, so eloquently studied and elucidated.

To forget history is a mistake. To sanitize history is plain stupidity.

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Related: Political Correctness, Academia, Archeology

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