Why Did The Greatest Maya City Suddenly Vanish?

Now legendary across the world, it was the last great Mayan city, Chichen Itza. Located in the southeastern state of Yucatan in Mexico, this sprawling cosmopolitan city attracted thousands of men and women in its heyday, as much as Paris at the time. It has opportunities, it's exciting, this was the place to be. The sublime pyramid of El Castillo radiated. When you would emerge from that building, you were looking out over this enormous plaza, 20,000, 30,000 people. Whoever was the person wielding that position would have been godlike themselves. A pyramid that hides a strange secret at its core, a temple that's forbidden to the The leader stood in this very spot, to receive energies from the celestial world and the underworld. To the Mayas, this spot is therefore the most sacred place in all of Chichen Itza. And a giant cave upon which it may have been built. If that is true, it's going to be the foundational trait of all this city. They must have done everything from that cenote and the archaeological elements there must contain valuable information to understand this city. This city-state was brutally ruled by a powerful military guild that never thought twice about spilling blood. Literally, you could stand here and count the number of human sacrifices. Probably in this case, there would have been hundreds, if not a thousand or more skulls here. From human sacrifices to ingenious architecture, experts are about to take you deep within this incredible city-state, which marked both the zenith and the downfall of one of history's greatest civilizations. By the 11th century A.D. in southeast Mexico, Chichen Itza had reached its apex. It is the most powerful Mayan city in all of Mesoamerica. Built in the heart of the jungle, the city spreads over three kilometers. It includes dozens of lavish monuments. Among them is El Castillo, a pyramid standing 30 meters high, dedicated to the powerful snake god Kukulkan. It represents the city's religious center. To the north lies the Great Ball Court, a 170-meter-long playing field where two teams compete as part of bloody rituals. Towering over the canopy is El Caracol, one of the first observatories ever built by mankind. Its unique architecture allows for incredibly precise measurements of the movements of the stars. And finally, the Temple of the Warriors, with its vast covered arcade and its 200 columns, headquarters the ruling masters of Chichen Itza. It is a cosmopolitan city of nearly 50,000 inhabitants, as much as Paris at the time. A truly unique city that hides a world of mysteries within its heart. It is built over a network of underground tunnels that span kilometers, and caves so deep that even oxygen is sparse. We are in the heart of Earth. We are in the underworld. We are on the dark side of the universe. And yeah, this represented fertility. The modern Maya from Chiapas said that the stalactites that sometimes are dropping are the breasts of the Earth. They said that the stalagmites that grow on the floor are the phallus. And when they get together and form a column, the Earth is copulating to make life happen. So here we are on the sanctum, sanctorum of Maya religion and ritual and beliefs. If Chichen Itza was built on top of caves, it's because they were essential to the Mayas. In their eyes, they represented the world of the dead, while also being the source of life. They were the stage for their bloody ceremonies and human sacrifices, when a priest would use an obsidian blade to carve out his victim's heart to satisfy the gods and assure the city would prosper. We have probably the earliest date in Chichen Itza from this cave. It's a piece of charcoal. We've taken one of the mud of one of the walls that the Maya built to seal the cave. So probably a lot of the development of Chichen Itza started on this very cave. It was hence from great depths that the world's largest Maya city and its incredible pyramid rose to prominence. The year was 500 AD. In the heart of the Yucatan jungle, on wild virgin territory, men built the first huts and christened their new village, Chichen Itza. No one knows where these first inhabitants came from, but they were part of the powerful Maya civilization whose cities flourished from the highlands of the Pacific coast to the shores of the Caribbean Sea. Meanwhile, to the west, the Mexican highlands were dominated by the most powerful city in Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan. Choosing to build a city here was no accident. This vegetal desert, the porous surface of which allows no lake or river to form, is actually home to an abundant source of fresh water, the Cenote Sagrado. This enormous natural reservoir is 60 meters wide and 40 meters deep, formed by limestone that eroded with rainwater, a water source seen by the Mayas as a gift from the gods. I do believe that the first builders of Chichen Itza came here because of the cenotes, and this one in particular, the most important sacred cenotes in the Maya area. I believe this is the mother of all cenotes. If we're talking about ritualism, if we're talking about cosmogony, this cenote was used to give offerings to the gods. Many of the offerings which have been found within the sacrificial cenote come from cities in the southern lowlands, so it is very likely that people went to Chichen Itza as pilgrims. Pilgrims that would strengthen the ranks of the Chichen Itza population. And that's not all. Because 700 kilometers away, a terrible drought struck the Maya plains. Tikal, Caracol, and Polenque, large cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants, experienced a mass exodus. Their all-powerful leaders couldn't soothe the anger of the gods. We are understanding in archaeology is that communities, cities, villages are not forever, so maybe these people had to leave and they resettle a new place to live. So we see a general rise in the Yucatan in general of cities and communities in the period 7 to 8, 8 to 900. Chichen was one of these places. With the big cities crumbling in the south and given its sacred cenote, the odds were in Chichen Itza's favor to become a significant city. As a new order started to take shape, it began to work its way to the top. Back in the 8th century AD, Chichen Itza only comprised a few basic structures made of adobe and wood. Competition was ferocious. Uxmal, 130 kilometers to the west, was leading the way. The city had undertaken an ambitious architectural plan. Temples, palaces, and pyramids were built to ensure its local supremacy. In the battle to be the best, Chichen Itza had no choice. It had to start building. The monumental architecture is something that human beings do. It reinforces religious ideology. It reinforces our identity as a people. Who are we? But also it shows a power to build these things, the energy to do it, the economic power to do it, and also the power of the state to create these kinds of structures. Buildings that, unlike the people's humble dwellings, were made to last because the people of Chichen Itza had a highly desirable resource, limestone. A large deposit was found right outside the city. It looks like they were carving this stone, which it was going to be probably a serpent head. Can you see the shape of the serpent here? You can see the mouth, the eye still visible somewhere, but it looks like when they were working it, it breaks. So they leave it. They leave the work unfinished. The hard work was not to extract it. The hard work was to carry it all the way to the site. You imagine how many people they needed and a special technique. Maybe they push this stone through rolls of wood, logs, so it could be manageable. But it's amazing to believe the big city of Chichen Itza is built with big pieces of stone like this one. Without the help of pack animals and using the sole strength of their arms, the Mayas crossed the jungle carrying the heavy stones for hundreds of meters. That's how the first pyramid was built, El Osario. At 12 meters high, it was built atop a 25 meter deep cave, which is connected to the temple by a staircase. It's a symbolic doorway to the underworld. Further south, Las Monjas, a 50 meter long complex, was the heart of the city. Its upper level was home to private apartments reserved for the elite with long narrow rooms. The Mayas were not familiar with keystones. The technique, which originated in the western world, allows to distribute weight along the length of a supporting wall to create large open vaults. But the Mayas couldn't use corbelled vaults to distribute the weight, so even the elitist homes were cramped. Such was the price of durability. This construction system is extremely durable. It's over 1,000 years old. We can still see part of the paint that decorated the walls. This is a sign that their system worked perfectly. If their civilization had continued to develop, perhaps the Mayas would have figured out the solution, much like the western world did. Below, buildings with impressive puke-style sculpted facades, characteristic of the region, may well have housed the city's most powerful members. Over the doorway, this feathery kind of solary ring that that's surrounding this individual, who's probably a high-ranking elite lord, if not one of the kings of Chichen. So here the lord sits above in his throne or in this feathery space that's symbolizing an entrance into the underworld or a sacred mountain. A ruler used Las Monjas as his palace. A pediment over one of the doors is inscribed with Maya hieroglyphics that provide precious clues to his identity. It's very common in Maya culture for the buildings or rooms to be inscribed with the name of their patron or the person who is tasked with an important ceremony. Here, everything seems to indicate this was someone very important back then, Kaku Pakal. Kaku Pakal, the first ruler of Chichen Itza, a man believed by the Mayas to be a living god, who also broke with the traditions set by many kings before him. It seems that power was shared by Kaku Pakal and Emil Kopol, his half-brother, and probably different members of a family. This may have been a reaction to the experience of the collapse of dynastic kingship in the southern Maya lowlands. People didn't want to make the same mistake and put power on several individuals rather than one. Like their ancestors for thousands of years before them, Kaku Pakal and his family drew their power from the stars. By day as by night, they studied the skies, closely following the movements of the moon and the sun. Determining their cycles was an attempt to interpret a divine message. The movements of the stars is very regular, and so their worship of time is coming from this. They had a Venus calendar. It was a very complex elliptical orbit that was better than ours. And you have priests up there, you know, making notes, seeing things. For hundreds and hundreds of years, they're getting a real idea about these stars, which are also, you know, deities. So you get to know more and more and more. Now, that's not science. This is prophecy. The movements of the stars will tell you a lot about the future. The Mayas believed their priests read messages from the gods in the stars. To establish their power, the Chichen Itza elite had a brilliant idea. They built a spectacular edifice dedicated to the heavenly vault, El Caracol, one of the first observatories ever built by mankind. Erected over a large platform, this 18 meter wide and 28 meter high tower overlooks the treetops. Inside are openings that look out in every direction. These openings allowed them to observe the sunlight, the moonlight, and specific planetary constellations on the horizon at night, at sunset, and at dawn. For example, from this doorway, the sun traces a line between this opening and the opposing opening on the other side. That's how you know it's the winter solstice on December 21st. Heavily damaged, only three of the original openings remain intact today. The first is aligned with the astronomical south. The second with the setting of the moon on March 21st. And the third faces the sunset on the autumn and spring equinoxes, as well as the northernmost position of the most sacred star in Maya culture, Venus. People have argued that the Maya had the original star wars because they used Venus in order to predict when to go to war and when not to. Venus was not the goddess of love, but a symbol of war. And so observation was more than just about the beauty of observing the sky. It was about controlling people, controlling politics, controlling the religious system, and so it's a powerful tool. On either side of the tower, two trenches trace its curve. Between two to eight meters deep, their purpose remains a mystery to archaeologists. Recently, an engineer examining these decided that they were probably bases for moving screens. He argues that the Maya would have used gears and wheels in order to move these big wooden screens. These two screens could have been activated when needed. Moving the screens would have allowed for a greater number of precise observations, compared to using only the naked eye. If that's the case, that would have provided another really powerful source of astronomical observatory ability. Now, again, that's speculative and is not being published or written up by archaeologists. However, those ditches or those areas do exist, and an explanation is needed. With its one-of-a-kind Maya observatory and all its lavish monuments, Chichen Itza quickly rose to power in less than a century. But there was one essential developmental component the control of precious commercial routes. The masters thus launched an offensive in the north, near the port city of Islas Cerritos. Chichen was investing not only here, but across a larger landscape in order to develop and control trade. It couldn't have done what it did without access to the coast. I think if there were eliminated competition, they would get control of all the trade routes. I mean, I think there were a predatory state and they would get booty and all of that. But if you look at what happened in the period, not very long period, afterwards, or maybe even during, they were extending a trade empire. Their conquests allowed Chichen Itza to control a territory of 100 kilometers and gave it direct access to the sea and a strategically valuable resource, salt. A lot of Mesoamerica itself didn't have access to salt. And in fact, Islas Cerritos is very close within a few miles of the beginning of some of the most important salt producing areas in Yucatan. So I think it's pretty clear to me that Chichen was controlling the production and distribution of salt as well. So it was an important resource, I believe, for the Chichen state. Chichen Itza became the greatest economic power in the region. From Islas Cerritos, canoes loaded with precious merchandise could reach all of Mesoamerica. It's a huge canoes and it's very efficient. Why would you go so far? It's by water, but what really makes it efficient is you don't have to go through other kingdoms. We're going to get in lots of trouble. You can swing out into the oceans. And what Chichen did was in order to acquire and move these luxury objects, Chichen established coastal ports from Belize to the Gulf of Mexico. From the coast, Chichen Itza's merchants went deep inland, all the way to the Mexican highlands. A journey that took them some 1500 kilometers away to Tula, the powerful Toltec capital. The ensuing encounter was about to completely transform Chichen Itza. By the end of the 9th century, Chichen Itza's influence had grown so much that thousands of people migrated to the powerful city from all four corners of Mesoamerica. It has opportunities. It's attractive to people. It's exciting politically, ideologically, from a consumer perspective in terms of goods and services, the city security. This was the place to be. And I think that in-migration was part of the process of the growth of the city. To welcome these new arrivals, Chichen Itza needed to expand again. The old city began to put up scaffolding. There's a time period where you start seeing the influx of international ideas. People start changing their houses. People start building additions to their buildings and reconfiguring things. Above all, the city center moved north, where vast swaths of forest were cleared to make place for new buildings. When that happened, they didn't bring the stela. They brought to the center another way to depict or send a message about authorities. There's a sort of a big change in the architecture, in the murals, in the religion, in that layout. And the question is, what caused that? Previously built in traditional Maya style, the city began to radically change its appearance. In the new city center, one building came to symbolize this new trend, the Temple of the Warriors. This 150-meter long complex is made up of several temples. Its vast underground chamber, supported by 200 columns, is unique in the Maya world. Crowning the top, two sculptures of the Feathered Serpent, a divinity that was previously unknown in Chichen Itza, frame a series of columns and bas-relief warriors. Archaeologists have long been intrigued by these architectural choices. The structure of the platform, the central stairway, the use of columns in front, this open space, the Venus figures, the Feathered Serpents, all of that is similar to what we see at Tula. Tula's Pyramid B, in the former Toltec capital, inspired the design of Chichen Itza's Temple of the Warriors. A side-by-side comparison of the blueprints of the two buildings reveals an almost identical structure. But what led to these changes? Why would the rising star of the Maya era adopt these previously foreign building codes? For a long time, people have thought that Chichen Itza was conquered by troops from Tula. I wouldn't say that it's not impossible, but whether this is evidence for a direct overtaking of Chichen Itza, or whether there was more like a common style, is something which is still under heavy debate. Whether a Toltec invasion took place or not, there's no doubt that the two cities are closely affiliated. Chichen Itza adopted the codes of its distant Mexican cousin, a change in style that coincided with the death of Kaku Pakal, and a comprehensive reorganization of power in the Maya city. There's clearly a shift in the political organization. This divine king is no longer celebrated. What we see is the celebration of warriors. So it's probably a place where the social groups, the different warrior societies, came, interacted, carried out their official business, and it probably was exciting for young men to have an opportunity to publicly display their military prowess and abilities. So in some ways, I think this was a place where people could increase their social status by participation. The Temple of the Warriors became the symbol of the new masters of Chichen Itza, a powerful guild of soldiers that planned to impose their will upon the city and beyond. Once admired, Chichen Itza was now feared. Military power was so much more important in Chichen than the Maya centers and more organized. These temples are temples of warrior guilds, like unions. And so those, they would gather there, and obviously, they would have a lot of power. And then what were all these Chichen people dressed up like warriors with warrior guilds? What were they doing, you know, playing chess? It's war. What they were doing was, in essence, building a military order in order to carry out the sociopolitical agenda of the state. And part of that agenda was warring against local communities, terrorizing local communities, bringing in tribute from other towns and communities around, expanding the power. The powerful Chichen Itza army bended the neighboring cities to its will. Ek Palam and Uxmal were vanquished. The few survivors were bluntly herded to the city. Thrown into confinement cells, they waited to be sacrificed. Not far away was another prominently located and highly visible building, the Zompanli, which was adorned with thousands of carved skulls. There are sticks going through the skulls so that they would have actually been, if you had seen them, they're depicting skulls one on top of the other. So this is actually a basal platform or a platform that would have supported a large wooden rack. And the wooden rack would have been filled with human skulls. The prisoners didn't have long to wait. One after another, they were offered to the gods. They were beheaded swiftly and without ceremony. On these buildings, there are individuals that are walking with trophy heads. So you can see warriors actually holding the heads, probably the would have been displayed on here. There are also depictions of eagles and jaguars holding human hearts, which suggests that part of the ritual involved with this would have entailed removing the heart from these victims. So this is a giant operation for human sacrifice. So whoever would have come here, both the citizens, visitors, whomever, would have been able to see, hear a of the power of the state. Literally, you could stand here and count the number of human sacrifices. Probably in this case, there would have been hundreds, if not a thousand or more skulls here. A macabre spectacle meant to remind all of the fate that awaited Chichen Itza's enemies, and which once again had Mexican origins. They don't have zampantles everywhere. They're quite rare in the Maya lowlands. A zampantle is a symbol of sophistication. It distinguishes Chichen from other Maya cities, because Chichen represents the pinnacle of this kind of international culture and internationalization that's going on here. But a reign of terror was not enough. In this cosmopolitan city, where cultures and languages mixed together, everyone has to be on board. To that end, what better than a new place of worship? Dominating the main square, a pyramid 30 meters high and 55 meters wide, became the new religious center of Chichen Itza. El Castillo, a building at the service of power. You can imagine this is a theater. This pyramid doesn't sit like back somewhere hidden. Everyone always thinks of the stairway, because when you would emerge from that building, you were looking out over this enormous plaza. 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people waiting for you to go in and to come out. Imagine dressed up as an ancient Maya of Chichen, rising up those stairs on those days. The heavens, the universe, is interacting with you and with this person. That's really powerful that whoever was the person wielding that position of authority on the landscape would have been close to the gods, if not god-like themselves. Here, thousands of faithful followers worshiped the new god of the city, Cuculcan, the feathered serpent. This being of Mexican origins was believed to be the messenger of the gods and the source of absolute power for he who knew how to listen. Of all Mesoamerican deities, Cuculcan is by far the most enigmatic. Some saw him as a supernatural being, while others believed he was a man of flesh and blood. Between myth and reality, the true nature of this serpent god seems to have been lost in the fog of history. Did Cuculcan exist? I would say, yeah, it's a mixture of the human being and divinity. The key thing is here is where does the human being influence ends and where does divine figure appear? One of the issues surrounding the relationship between Chichen and Tula was always this idea that the feathered serpent of the Toltecs was a living person who at some point left Tula and came south to Chichen and founded the city. Now, most of us don't believe that anymore. Why Cuculcan becoming such an unimportant deal? That really does have something to do with the connection with Mexico. He's a big deal over there. He may have been a deity which was regarded as a leader of the foreigners or somehow associated with the foreigners that came to Chichen Itza. By dedicating El Castillo to Cuculcan, Chichen Itza's elite formed a powerful bond between the Mayas and the communities of central Mexico and ushered in an era of social peace. El Castillo thus became the most sacred place in the city, connected to the most sacred star, the sun. This building didn't just sit on the landscape, it interacted with the landscape, particularly with the sun, for example. There are 91 stairs on each side. With the top, that's 365. So it's a space that is representing the year. The solar cycle is at the heart of El Castillo's mechanics. On the spring and fall equinoxes, the sun casts a shadow on the rail of the temple staircase that reveals a serpent made of light, a magical spectacle that marks the start and the end of the rainy season. During the course of the day, as the sun moves, the balustrade actually looks like a writhing serpent. And in the morning, it comes down from the heavens. And in the evening, it ascends back up into the heavens. So these balustrades are not simply architectural. Again, they're cosmological, right? Measuring time is at the heart of Maya cosmology. And in Chichen Itza, El Castillo is the key. In 1930, archaeologists made an incredible discovery. By digging this tunnel through the side of the temple, they discovered a second pyramid, this one 16 meters high and structurally identical to El Castillo. At its summit, in the belly of the Great Pyramid, was an exceptional temple, forbidden to the public. We learned that its construction was tied to the way their calendar worked. Every 52 years, the Mayas added a layer to the structure. We're here in the second one, and it's very likely that beneath us lies the first construction level of the structure. 52 years, a length of time that's far from arbitrary. Because the Mayas actually used two calendars. The Hab, which is comprised of 365 days, symbolizing the solar cycle. And the Tzolk'in, a ritual calendar of 260 days, divided into 13 months of 20 days each. Three wheels of time that synchronize exactly every 52 years. By building their pyramids like Russian dolls, the Mayas prevented pillaging of the pyramid preceding El Castillo, a temple that hides one of the greatest treasures of Mesoamerica, the red jaguar throne. The jaguar is the symbol of the underworld. The leader stood in this very spot to receive energies from above and below, from both the celestial world and the underworld. To the Mayas, this spot represents the most sacred place in all of Chichen Itza, a place where only the leader of the city was allowed to enter. The vertical axis of El Castillo is the imaginary axis that unites the kingdom of heaven and the darkness. It's a sacred place with a carefully chosen location. For El Castillo is located at the exact intersection of the four cenotes that surround the city. Sagrado in the north, Choloc in the south, Canchuyum in the east, and Hotun to the west. It's precisely here, beneath El Castillo, that archaeologists are on the brink of another incredible discovery. Using electrodes, they discovered a 20 meter high and 30 meter wide cavity, a mere five meters below the surface. El Castillo was seemingly built on top of an enormous cave. Even though there's a gap, even though there is a void, the Maya knew that the karst, the soil, could be thicker in some areas. It might be the case here. I believe, my assumption is, there must be at the very least five meters of bedrock. If you think about it, most of these buildings are built over gaps, over caverns, and they knew they could build this one here. Only new excavations will determine whether there really is a fifth cenote here, a discovery that could provide precious new clues about the origins of the city. If that is true, which I believe it is, it's going to be the foundational trait of all the city. They must have done everything from that cenote, and the offering, the elements, the archaeological elements there, must contain valuable information to understand the city. Obviously, if there's a cenote underneath the pyramid, that's super cool, because that means that this building is in fact sitting on the direct portal to the underworld. We haven't seen the cenote yet, and so the day that they show pictures of that cenote will be a worldwide event. The military elite of Chichen Itza had completed their power conquest. The city was in their hands, and the surrounding towns had been subjugated. But in order to keep the peace, a social outlet was needed. To that end, what better way than a ball game? The elites of Chichen Itza thus had an enormous playing field built. 168 meters long and 70 meters wide, its rings hung some nine meters off the ground. Spectator stands were built on both ends of the field, along with a temple for the upper class. It was the biggest ball playing field ever built in Mesoamerica. The idea of building a ball court like this is saying we're the most powerful city-state in Yucatan, and there's no one who could compete with us on the playing field or building a playing field like this. This is an important political statement. In this 2,000-year-old sport, two teams battle on the field to score points by sending the ball through the opposing team's ring without using their hands. Sports are a way for society to interact with each other without going to war. They can compete on the playing field, and I think that they were doing that here. If we're standing here, let's say 900, 950 AD, what you would see here is not just this plain stone. All of this stone would be covered in stucco. It would be brightly painted, red, green, blue, yellow, so that it would have looked fantastic. And you would have probably had audience members sitting atop this area here, important personages at the ends of the ball court, feasting and calling out to the ball players. This would have been a massive celebration. For an event like this would be like the Super Bowl. A game that players were hand-picked to play. But unlike American football, the game ended very differently. At the end of it, the losing players were sacrificed. If we were in medieval Europe, like jousting matches, these were the elites that jousted. The masses might watch, but the people on the playing field were the upper class. So they're not just sacrificing a poor peasant. They're sacrificing a lord. I'm sure there were people who did not agree, but I think what was expected of you was to agree. It's an honor to be sacrificed, and in fact it's essential for you to be sacrificed, because the idea of rebirth and death, of fertility and growth, all of these things are connected to the sacrifice. So the ball court and the ball game are kind of like a machine designed to make the world go. Although the city's inhabitants thoroughly enjoyed the show, the gods seemed indifferent to the bloodshed, because beneath the city the water reserves were dangerously dropping. After just three centuries of existence, the city began to run low on resources. The priests increased the number of ceremonies, invoking Tlaloc, the god of the rain, and made offerings in vain. It looks like all this happened in a time of drought. There was problems up there. There was no rain. So one hypothesis is we are desperate for water. And by the end of the 11th century, peasants could not harvest. So maybe peasants were able to survive, but they were unable to pay for the taxes, and the first ones affected by this were probably the elite. Deprived of their subsidies, the city's elites are said to have simply disappeared, and along with them the administration, the bureaucracy, and eventually the state. Yet not all archaeologists find this explanation to be convincing. This was a probably a difficult city to manage. There were lots of different people with lots of different values and norms here compared to a typical Maya center. Trying to keep them all engaged and connected to the system may have been one of the biggest challenges that they faced. One of the things you think about is look at the Soviet Union. There was no war, I mean there was no calamity, there's no aliens, there's no comet smashing, and it just fell apart. And so systems can fail without major kinds of events causing them. Was Chichen Itza the victim of a disastrous climate event, or did it crumble beneath its own weight? No one knows. One thing is certain, the powerful Maya city has never ceased to fascinate anyone who's been lucky enough to admire its temples. After Chichen Itza collapsed and was abandoned by the majority of its population, it continued to serve as a place for pilgrimage, and it was never forgotten by the local population. When the Spaniards came in the 16th century, one of the first settlements was constructed over the ruins of Chichen Itza. And thus, the story of the last great Maya city comes to an end. An extraordinary city that marked the zenith of a 4,000-year-old civilization. One that continues to leave archaeologists wondering, who knows what secrets the ancient Mayas buried in the city's depths?