{"id":895361,"date":"2026-03-29T07:24:35","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T12:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/29\/the-maya-civilization-was-a-mystery-our-family-business-was-solving-it\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T07:24:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T12:24:35","slug":"the-maya-civilization-was-a-mystery-our-family-business-was-solving-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/29\/the-maya-civilization-was-a-mystery-our-family-business-was-solving-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The Maya civilization was a mystery. Our family business was solving it."},"content":{"rendered":"
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My earliest memory is of a faraway Maya pyramid. A lofty, stony thing in the Guatemalan jungle, with steps leading to a doorway\u2014impossibly enticing to my three-year-old self looking upward, determined to scramble up to the top. But my mom would have none of it.<\/p>\n

She and my father were both archaeologists and worked at National Geographic in the late 1960s and \u201870s, where they took me and my siblings on expeditions to Maya ruins, encountering places and peoples that no American kid at the time could ever imagine.<\/p>\n

The resulting tantrum I threw over not getting to climb the stone steps at Tikal\u2014now known as one of the most significant centers of early Maya civilization<\/a>\u2014is an early memory too. Did I care what that ancient pyramid was for, or who built it? Of course not. But these memories were among my first encounters with the world of the ancient Maya<\/a>, a world that shaped my childhood. I gradually was to become enchanted by the worlds of the ancient Maya and make such questions central to my research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Aerial<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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\"Ancient<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>
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Thick jungle surrounds Maya ruins of the Temple of the Grand Jaguar, the tomb of the powerful ruler named Jasaw Chank\u2019awil. When David Stuart first visited Tikal in the late 1960s, archaeologists didn’t yet know the story behind the pyramid\u2014and the three-year-old David only wanted to climb its impressive steps.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Joe Scherschel, Nat Geo Image Collection (Top)<\/span> (Left)<\/span> and Stephen Alvarez, Nat Geo Image Collection (Bottom)<\/span> (Right)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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In those early days no one could say much at all about Maya history. Even the name of the king who commissioned the pyramid at Tikal, and whose rich tomb was found buried within, remained a mystery to archaeologists. The reason for our ignorance was simple\u2014Maya hieroglyphs could not yet be read, leaving centuries of history from the Maya \u201cClassic period\u201d (roughly C.E. 200 to 900) invisible and inaccessible, locked away in the hundreds of stone inscriptions at Tikal and many other sites. This is what I think of as the \u201cGreat Rupture\u201d in historical knowledge. The real story of Maya civilization had long been lost due to societal collapse and, later on, the cultural destruction that came with the Spanish invasion.<\/p>\n

(Everything we thought we knew about the ancient Maya is being upended<\/i><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Today, thanks to new breakthroughs in reading the ancient texts, we can revisit that history and bridge the rupture. As it turns out, the great pyramid at Tikal was built by a powerful ruler named Jasaw Chank\u2019awil, to commemorate his great military victory of his enemy, the Kanul kingdom, in C.E. 695. His story and many others are recounted in my new book, The Four Heavens<\/i><\/a>, which aims to bring the history of the \u201cmysterious Maya\u201d into our own historical consciousness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Two<\/picture><\/div>
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George Stuart, a writer and editor for National Geographic<\/i> magazine, surveys salvaged Maya artifacts in a storage facility at Copan, Honduras, alongside his son David Stuart. After a childhood of accompanying his parents on expeditions, David became a reknown epigrapher, or person who reads Maya glyphs, in his own right.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Kenneth Garrett, Nat Geo Image Collection<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Learning to decipher the glyphs<\/h2>\n

Our two-week drive from North Carolina to Yucat\u00e1n, Mexico, ended on a dark night in 1974 in a remote place called Coba, where my father was to start his new research project, mapping, what they excitedly said, was a vast ancient city. We arrived at the Maya village in complete darkness, no electric light anywhere to be seen except for a flashlight in the distance. As we rattled our way down the dirt road, I vividly recall looking out the window of our truck, seeing a massive pyramid silhouetted against a night sky that was gray, so dense with stars. I was then nine years old, nervous at what lay ahead but anxious to see the pyramid in the daylight, and to climb it.<\/p>\n

My parents\u2019 workplace was a constant influence in my young years. My father, George Stuart<\/a>, was a writer and editor for National Geographic<\/i> magazine, and later head of the grant-making wing of the Society\u2014the Committee for Research and Exploration. My mother, Gene Stuart, was an artist and a writer at the magazine too. I was enamored by the adventure of archaeology, and soon by the constant discoveries being made. What else could I ever want to do but become a Maya archaeologist?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But a key element in understanding the ancient Maya was still missing back in the mid-1970s\u2014the ability to read the ancient texts, and to make sense of the mysterious hieroglyphs. As a kid, wandering the ruins of Coba, I recall seeing the strange forms of the writing on stone monuments, still standing in the forest. \u201cWhat do these say?,\u201d I asked my dad, pointing to the glyphs. \u201cWe still can\u2019t read them,\u201d he would tell me.<\/p>\n

(The hidden ruins of the great Maya Snake Kingdom were almost lost to time<\/i><\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"A<\/picture><\/div>
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A guard spotlights glyphs in Naj Tunich, a Maya pilgrimage site in Guatemala. David Stuart was only in the ninth grade when his father took him on an expedition to see the cave drawings firsthand, having already demonstrated an aptitude for studying hieroglyphs.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Stephen Alvarez, Nat Geo Image Collection<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Ancient<\/picture><\/div>
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In the fall of 1980, ninth grader David Stuart deciphered his first hieroglyph while visiting the cave paintings at Naj Tunich. He realized an eighth century scribe had used phonetic signs to spell the name of a month of the Maya calendar.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

W.E. Garrett, Nat Geo Image Collection<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Ancient<\/picture><\/div>
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Close-up of Lintel 48, a Mayan hieroglyphic calendar that records an unknown event that occurred in Yaxchilan, Mexico. After that first decipherment at Naj Tunich, David Stuart went on to become the youngest person to win a MacArthur Fellowship at the age of 18.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Otis Imboden, Nat Geo Image Collection<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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From then on I was hooked. The glyphs were so interesting to look at, with their images of animals, heads, and weird shapes. I read (or tried to read) what little illustrious scholars could say about them. Most Maya archaeologists were my dad\u2019s friends, and so, at parties or chance meetings, I would often ask them the same questions too. Over time the interactions and conversation grew deeper, and by the time I was in my teens, I was making my own small contributions to solving the puzzle. Fifty years ago, Maya studies was a remarkably open field, part academic, part experimental, eager to hear new voices and ideas. I timed my entry well.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1980 my father received word of a newly discovered cave in Guatemala, full of ancient drawings and elaborately painted hieroglyphs. Wilbur Garrett<\/a>, the editor of National Geographic<\/i> magazine, and my father immediately organized a trip to see the cave firsthand in an expedition that ended up being the subject of the August 1981 issue. I was brought along to study the glyphs\u2014both for my own enrichment and because I had by then shown an aptitude for it. (Being in ninth grade, however, I needed permission from Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School to be away from classes and get my homework in order.)<\/p>\n

The cave, we learned, was called Naj Tunich. We arrived after a long hike through the woods, near the Belize border, and were greeted with a cathedral-like opening in a hillside. To get to the paintings, we had to make our way hundreds of meters into the deep recesses of the cave, through large tunnels and small passageways. Ceramics of the ancient Maya were lying everywhere, attesting to its long use as a sacred site. Inside the cave we encountered beautifully inscribed texts on the smooth walls, painted by master calligraphers. Mentions of dates, names, places were everywhere. There and then I made my first decipherment, realizing a scribe in the eighth century used phonetic signs to spell the name of a month of the Maya calendar. Later, I and others would realize the paintings of Naj Tunich were done by royal pilgrims visiting a sacred site, an entrance into the underworld.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Filling in the gaps<\/h2>\n

One expedition I joined in 1985 at age 19 was especially memorable\u2014filled with discovery and even a true Indiana Jones<\/i> moment mixing archaeology, ancient history, and a bit of high adventure. This was a trip down the Usumacinta River, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, still very wild in those years and under threat from hydroelectric dams and the civil war in Guatemala as National Geographic<\/i> would document in the October 1985 issue. The expedition team rafted for days through the forested terrain and rocky canyons, spending a few days at the beautiful ruins of Yaxchilan, Mexico, with its gorgeous sculptures and temples looking down upon the river below.<\/p>\n

Recent excavations had revealed a new stone inscription (one of many) that I was anxious to see. No one had been able to read it after its discovery, but I looked upon it in amazement, as it was a written list of the first kings of the city\u2019s ancient dynasty\u2014four names of rulers who probably lived in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. One name read Yopat Bahlam, and another was Yaxun Bahlam. Maya history was laid out before me, and I was the first person to ever read these names in perhaps a dozen centuries.<\/p>\n

(What really caused the collapse of the Maya civilization?<\/i><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Silhouette<\/picture><\/div>
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A silhouette of National Geographic<\/i>‘s staff archaeologist George E. Stuart in front of rapidly deteriorating murals in Yaxchilan, an ancient Maya city on the banks of the Usumacinta River in Mexico. At age 19, David Stuart joined his father on the expedition that would be documented in the October 1985 issue.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Otis Imboden, Nat Geo Image Collection<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Two days later, our expedition camped on a quiet sandbar along the river, in Guatemalan territory, still far from any settlements. We were soon greeted by a band of Guatemalan rebels with automatic rifles drawn, their faces covered in bandanas. We seemed a suspicious bunch, no doubt, but we eventually convinced them we were focused only on the ancient ruins. They excitedly told us of sites they knew in the forest, which no one had yet explored. We didn\u2019t dare go after them, however, and risk becoming targets in the active military conflict.<\/p>\n

Throughout the \u201880s, a new wave of scholars was making rapid headway in Maya decipherment, and by the end of the 1990s the hieroglyphs were almost completely readable, thanks to the work of a dozen or so persistent scholars, myself among them. Looking back, something amazing had happened\u2014the older history of the ancient Maya had emerged from complete obscurity. Many dynasties and kingdoms, each with its own story to tell. This was a completely new <\/i>history, filling in a gap that we didn\u2019t even know existed. Most of what we knew about Mesoamerica came from when the Spanish arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica in the early 16th century. Or it came from the Indigenous chronicles that the Maya and others kept here and there. None of those histories went back more than a few centuries, however, to the time before the era of the so-called \u201cMaya Collapse,\u201d the still mysterious crisis when most courts and cities were abandoned, before about C.E. 900.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The new history we are now able to read presents a world of kings, queens and royal courts, and of lost stories that came before the Collapse and the historical rupture I have described. Today, because the ancient Maya wrote down so much about themselves, we can at last bridge the gap, and recover something once almost completely lost to human history. My new book is my attempt to weave many of those narratives together, and to tell the intellectual story of how we got here.<\/p>\n

My early memories of Tikal and Coba, with their immense pyramids, are from a time when none of that was knowable. Decades later, we all can appreciate ancient Maya monuments much like those we\u2019ve long known Egypt or Greece, with true historical setting. What is most important, I think, is that we now have access to the deepest history of the Americas, and that the modern Maya can claim it as their own ancestral legacy. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Archaeologist<\/picture><\/div>
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Archaeologist David Stuart interprets hieroglyphs on a pyramid at the Maya site of Copan, Honduras. Cracking the code of Maya glyphs transformed our understanding of the ancient civilization. “Today, because the ancient Maya wrote down so much about themselves,” Stuart writes, “we can at last bridge the gap, and recover something once almost completely lost to human history.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Kenneth Garrett, Nat Geo Image Collection<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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National Geographic Explorer David Stuart is the David and Linda Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing and director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the author of the new book The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya<\/b><\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My earliest memory is of a faraway Maya pyramid. A lofty, stony thing in the Guatemalan jungle, with steps leading to a doorway\u2014impossibly enticing to my three-year-old self looking upward, determined to scramble up to the top. But my mom would have none of it. She and my father were both archaeologists and worked at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":895362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37330,1676],"tags":[12827,11513],"class_list":{"0":"post-895361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-civilization","8":"category-mystery","9":"tag-civilization","10":"tag-mystery"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=895361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/895362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=895361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=895361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=895361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}