(soft tribal music) - [David] Palenque is one of Mexico's most charismatic archeological sites.

It is world famous.

Nearly 2,000 years before Palenque was built, ancient Mayas were busy building their first monuments.

- [Daniela] The connection between Aguada Fenix and Palenque shows us really well, the arc of the development of a civilization in the past.

(soft tribal music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnes Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guildford Fund.

(upbeat music) (mysterious tribal music) (birds chirping) - Mexico has more archeological treasures than any other country in North America.

In my opinion, the crown jewel is Palenque in the state of Chiapas.

It's a Maya site and this magnificent complex reached its height around 700 AD.

We don't really understand how the Mayas were able to do all the things that they were, but friends of mine, archeologists, are working on a project that is now more than 1,000 years before Palenque came to its height.

We are finding out more and more through the use of technology that did not exist until recently.

It's another place and another time and another discovery.

Palenque is located in the state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala.

It is internationally renowned for its exquisite monuments, excavated treasures, extensive writing, and its magnificent forest and clean water.

(Keiko speaking in foreign language) Palenque is the third most visited archeological site in Mexico, exceeded only by Chichen Itza and Teotihuacan.

It receives about 900,000 visitors per year.

(Keiko speaking in foreign language) - This is one of the most visited tourist sites in all of Mexico.

It's very, very popular.

It's only about 9:30 in the morning and already the crowds are streaming in.

There are plenty of vendors to offer sometimes very good replicas of what the site is all about.

(bird caller whistling) I think it is important to view pre-Hispanic structures, not just as buildings in themselves, but how they fit into their surroundings.

That is, the natural and altered landscapes where they were constructed.

To a great extent, seeing them this way allows us to appreciate how native peoples attempted to live in harmony with nature.

The natives shaped and managed their landscapes using their traditional knowledge.

But there were also shaped by those landscapes.

We can appreciate this today if we understand the logic they used in building their sites.

We hope the visual remains we are revealing will allow future generations to learn from these ancient builders of long ago.

- The buildings were painted in red.

- [David] Two researchers, friends of mine from the University of Arizona, have been studying Maya civilization for a couple of decades.

Japanese-born Takeshi Inomata and Swiss-born Daniela Triadan.

- Palenque is important because it's a part of a whole group of what we call Late Classic Maya Cities that were political units.

They are starting what we in the early classic, maybe around 300, 400 AD and then in the late classic they really flourished.

So Palenque is basically the western most of this group of southern lowland cities, so we have Palenque, and then if you go up river on the Usumacinta, we have Yaxchilan, we have Bonampak, we have Piedras Negras, and we go into the Pasion area where we have Ceibal, Aguateca.

And then a little bit up northern into the Peten we get Tikal, we get Calakmul, we go into Belize.

So we have this whole string of cities that become really important in the late classic.

We know a lot about them because they all have some texts.

And so we know a lot about their interactions.

We know all of this because, very practically for us, the Maya left in writing place names, names of their political units.

So we can read these glifs, so we know where the place of Palenque is, we know where Tikal is.

We have what we call emblem glifs.

So when we look at these emblem glifs, we can make the connections.

So Palenque is actually one of these cities that are really important and that are very typical for the late classic Maya system.

They're relatively independent, they're not one territory, they're not an empire, they're not a state that's unified.

So they're kind of equal players.

Sometimes smaller players take over.

We have a lot of warfare, but we also have a lot of friendly associations among these cities, and they all know of each other, of course.

And especially the ruling families all know of each other.

Wives get swapped from these Royal families.

It's like Europe with monarchs, Queen Elizabeth, right?

There were Germans, Queen Victoria, everybody knew everybody, and you basically had to marry within these Royal families.

It's pretty much the same thing.

And we know that from the texts.

- So this was really the core of Palenque.

It's the residence of the Royal family, and they're also at the core of administrative function of the and Palenque politics.

So this part was the main plaza.

This is the main access to the palace.

And then in the center is the main throne room of the king.

That's the throne room of the Palenque king.

Actually inscriptions talk about it and it's called sak-nuk-na, which means something like a white skin house.

- [Daniela] The Maya White House.

- This is really the heart of Palenque politics.

Great King Pakal built it and then subsequent kings had the accessions ceremonies here.

(mysterious music) - We are basically on the stairs of this temple of the inscriptions.

This step is really important because one of the biggest kings that ever lived in Palenque is actually buried in the center at the bottom of this temple.

- [David] In the history of archeology in the world, this ranks among the greatest discoveries ever.

- Yes, of course.

This is the famous tomb of Pakal, his sarcophagus, and then this sarcophagus depicts that Pakal associated with the world tree.

For Maya king, these kind of rituals are very important.

They recorded the ritual, but also they recorded a scene of the preparation.

And he's wearing this mask of massive monster.

This is the lower jaw and then this is the upper jaw, so his face is coming out of this jaw of the monster.

And then this depicts the King K'an Joy Chitam, who was the son of great King Pakal.

Actually in the center the King K'an Joy Chitam and then on the left side you have Pakal, who was his father.

He's handing his royal crown to him.

But interesting thing is he was already dead by this time, but in Maya concept, those ancestor never dies and that Pakal is still giving the authority of the king to his son.

On the right side is his mother, who was also dead.

She's also presenting royal regalia to her son.

- Palenque reaches height about 700 AD and slowly faded into obscurity.

Archeologists have recently discovered that Mayas were building important sites more than 1,000 years earlier.

We are now finding out that these sites were very sophisticated, and we have archeologists who can point them out to us.

Leaving Palenque, we traveled to the east to meet up with the archeologists and their team.

But along the way, there is one stop we have to make.

(vehicles roaring) 50 years ago, this was howler monkey country.

It was an unbroken canopy for 10, 20, 30 miles tropical jungle.

As it has been cleared, the monkeys have a harder and harder time finding a place to live.

They are canopy animals.

The government has constructed a mesh crossing where the monkeys can climb up, get down to the other side, and not be hit by cars.

Apparently the carnage was great here.

What they really need is more forest.

(soft music) Palenque is located in a state of Chiapas.

A nearby state on the coast is a state of Tabasco.

Its capital city is Villahermosa and its leading newspaper recently published an article that says, a Maya site in Balancan, the district where we are now, has revised history.

(ominous music) - [Daniela] LIDAR has completely changed the way in how we do what we call survey.

- Basically it's a laser technique to measure the distance from the plane to the ground and then that penetrates through the canopy, and then by software you take out the image of canopy and then you see just image of the ground.

- [Daniela] 20 years ago we had to cut sight lines through the bush.

The mapping of Palenque was done like that.

They had to cut through the forest, they see the mounts, they map them with a Topographic Total Station.

Before Total Stations they used a Theodolites.

I've done maps like that, it takes forever.

So LIDAR is a completely different ballgame.

- So this is the LIDAR image of Aguada Fenix.

You are looking at here, the big platform, which is 1.4 kilometers long and then here you have many causeways and then a reserves.

On this side, you have another significant platform.

It's a really wide causeway, so almost five kilometer long.

This is the drone shot of the platform.

This is the northern edge and then here you have a ramp going down from the platform down to this long causeway.

And then you see the edge of the platform going down this way.

If you're walking on it, you don't realize that's human-made.

It looks just like a natural landscape.

So really people didn't notice the importance of this place.

So actually we have almost 15 of them in the same format, about the same direction, dating to the same period.

Those are the sites in this red square.

And then some time of the year, everybody from this entire area probably gathered at Aguada Fenix to make this huge construction.

(bright music) - Pretty much by chance, the edge of our LIDAR clipped the corner of this enormous platform.

So then we were like, well this is actually the site we need to look at.

And that's where we started to work last year.

So we have this structure that has been made of these megalithic stones.

Megalithic because they're gigantic, right?

So this is one stone and it doesn't even end there.

And as you can see, it has one, two, I think this is one stone, three, three tiers of stone, and actually just found the top of the fourth one, so it's going even lower.

So this is a ginormous wall.

So they didn't only just build one of these, they built four of them.

And we don't know what they're for.

We're still working on this.

But we've seen these fills and they date to, we think, about a 1000 to 800 BC.

Now, this fill is later than the structure because it's added on right to this wall.

And if this is true, if this is a 1000 to 800 fill, then the structure certainly has to date to at least that, which is really exciting.

- At least 3,000 years ago, Americans were sophisticated, they were building civilizations, they were learning how communities can work together to make their own projects, they were making their stamp on history.

And when I was young, that message never got out because Americans were always considered inferior to Europeans.

- This is one of the biggest structures in Mesoamerica.

But what's interesting is that this was built 3,000 years ago, before the rise of Maya kings or marked social hierarchy.

So this is the work of people who got together and then collaborated.

It's really about the communal work.

But once maize hit the certain level of productivity, people starting to do more intensive maize agriculture.

And so that's not just the changing economy or the subsistence, but the whole worldview changed, society changed, and then this construction pattern also changed.

- When we talk about 3,000 years ago, or 1000 BC, and what was happening in the Americas, and we look to the eastern Mediterranean, that pretty well corresponds with the Mycenaean age in Greece, which is when Greece began to flower and gave us its great contributions to civilization.

The Mayas are up to something very good here.

(soft tribal music) In these very early sites, water communication was essential for trade information and political control.

It is part of Mexico's greatest river system.

- So Aguada Fenix is right over there, very close to the river.

So this must have been very important point.

So if you follow this river, it goes through the central part of Catan.

If you go off to the northeast side, you go to the Campeche where other important sites were.

- [Daniela] Water is really the way in how people probably moved, the canoe was probably the most important way of transportation, especially for cargo and people.

- Also, the river was major source of food.

Aguada Fenix really developed at the time of subsistence change.

Before that, people were doing lots of fishing, relied much on aquatic resources, then they started to do more maize agriculture.

But still, the river are high in resources like the fish, a shell were very important for those people.

And actually today local people catch lots of big fish from this river.

So this star formation is really weird.

We don't know what that is, but one theory is that this is just the natural formation of limestone.

Another theory is that it was originally human-made, people put it, put stones, then it was covered by limestone.

It may have been for fishing purposes or for it may have worked as a bridge.

- [David] With the newly discovered ancient Maya sites, we can better understand the critical role of forests and water in the development of classic Maya culture.

(soft tribal music) (waterfall rushing) - [Daniela] This is my absolute favorite spot in Palenque.

It's called as El Bano de la Rena, so the Queen's Bath.

And as you can see, it has this beautiful set of pools, right?

And I can just imagine living in the Murcielagos complex, which is right next to it, we just came from there.

And doing your daily baths, probably several a day, isn't that lovely?

- It's fortunate that Palenque has this limestone strata because it gives us good trees, the water, when it passes through, dissolves the calcium in it, gives it that blue color, and it makes it taste good.

(water flowing) Part of the magic of Palenque is you can walk in this cool forest and even on the hottest day out in the flats, it's very cool and refreshing, very dense, very damp, very dank.

And then within 20 feet or so you move from the primitive wildness, the darkness and the moisture of the forest out into this man and woman-created space, which is completely different and a symbol of the difference between human activity and natural activity, but all tied into one place.

And one of the virtues of the park is that it provides protection for this forest from the clearing and deforestation and all the animals that live inside.

(bird squawking) Is this a subterranean passage?

- Yeah, almost.

It looks like a labyrinth.

It's actually a older building, which was a carve out to by later buildings.

- [David] I think the people who needed to walk through there were not as tall as we are.

- Yeah.

Many of my Maya are pretty small actually, so you have to be careful so that you don't bump your head.

- Yeah.

And a lot of this was covered too, well, look up here, this was covered, arched.

- [Takeshi] Yeah, there were stone roofs covering those buildings.

- Nobody in the Americas seemed to have made an important attempt to make an arch.

What the Mayas invented and is elegant is this corbel vault.

How do you cover a space?

Well, if your lintel is too big, if you don't have rocks that big, you make this A-shaped arch, and this defines elegance.

(soft tribal music) - So this reign of King Pakal was the heyday of Palenque.

But before his reign, Palenque was defeated by Colakmul, which is another city in the Maya area, and then they had a very hard time.

And then Pakal restored the glory of Palenque and then they built beautiful temples and the many art and the inscriptions.

Those sculptures are representation of war captives.

So probably those captives are brought to this courtyard.

Some of them are probably tortured and then they may have been sacrificed here.

Those glifs represent the name of this captive.

So the identity of the captive was very important.

- [Daniela] We're in an elite residential group.

So, big buildings, they're going onto patios, right?

And because it's so vertical, they actually have to build these terraces and steps.

- [David] But they had to level the place, too, in solid rock.

- They had to level it, they had to build retaining walls, and then they are facing, these four structures are facing this patio.

- [David] And then when they left, the trees came back.

- This is a steam hut, so there's a small entrance and then they probably put heated stones and then put water over it and then that generate lots of steam.

They used it for cleaning and for healing properties, but also had the religious meanings.

They used it for purification before important rituals and events.

- It's a nice alley right next to the structure on the side of one of the big buildings, and it's another elite group.

It has vaulted roofs, when you look here around the right.

- [David] So this is a little an upper to middle class neighborhood?

- [Daniela] Definitely.

So this is a group that's called the Murcielagos group.

- The bats.

- The bats.

And here we have an actual bench where people probably slept and we're walking in a canal, in a drainage canal.

And what's interesting is that once we get to the front of the building, they actually covered it.

And so it goes down here, the water runs down at the site of the complex, and it actually drains all the way down here around the structure.

(soft music) (water flowing) The connection between Aguada Fenix and Palenque shows us really well, to the arc of the development of a civilization in the past.

So we're starting to see the beginnings, which tells us that people were already able to do really almost unimaginable things in a community with almost no technological help.

And it gets us to more and more social stratification.

We get kings eventually, we get a writing system, we get written history, and it gets us to what we see as Maya high culture.

And it shows us really the whole arc of this development of a civilization, and I think we can use the developments that we're seeing in the Maya area to try to understand other cultural developments in a more general basis.

- If we talk about Aguada Fenix, I think there are two sides of the story.

Aguada Fenix developed 1000 BC and there was no clear social hierarchy.

In one sense, that tells us that the people could do remarkable work by getting together and then collaborating.

You've made really one of the biggest constructions in entire Mesoamerican history.

This kind of collaboration represents social pressure to own individuals that people felt that you have to work with other people.

That you have less freedom to do other things and then you have a stronger sense of obligations.

So those things are very important implications for the modern world.

It tells us about the possibility of human work and the creativity, but at the same time that tells us about the social pressure and limitation of the freedom of individuals.

(soft tribal music) - We are only beginning to understand how complex and deep the Maya civilization was and how their knowledge extended for thousands of years into this area.

Palenque is one example of the crowning glory that emerged from their achievements.

Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetman.

(bright guitar music) The Four Corners area draws millions of tourists each year.

I've been through the region often, But now I have a new way of visiting this, one of the world's most unusual landscapes.

It requires special clothing.

These harvester ants are doing a pretty good job of defoliating or at least pulling the flowers off a tree.

Oh, probably 100 yards from here they've cleaned their own road, they keep it clean, and they will take these flowers then to the underground chamber and they will chew them and work them into a paste that then they inoculate with fungi and have food for themselves.

They like clean highways.

(majestic music) (soft tribal music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnes Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Gilford Fund.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please be sure to visit us at InTheAmericas.com or InTheAmericas.org.

(bright music)