Tikal Uncovered The Maya Fortress Hidden in the Jungle Full Documentary

Who hasn't dreamed of these pre-Columbian temples? Of these faraway lands filled with legends? Who hasn't wanted to wander, guided by the sun, through the heart of Maya country? Tikal, Guatemala. This city, a genuine treasure of mankind for over 2,000 years, has been captivating visitors ever since it was rediscovered in the 19th century. The way they build these huge, tall, incredible structures. Imagine these buildings more than 1,000 years and they are still there. That's impressive. But it wasn't until very recently that experts made astounding discoveries, thanks to state-of-the-art technology. An aerial laser system is undertaking a scan of the jungle, revealing that Tikal was once a sprawling sovereign city comparable to ancient Rome. It's the size of what is now Guatemala City. And Guatemala City can hold at least between 3 to 4 million people. At 70 meters high, Temple 4, the second highest pyramid ever built after Giza, hosted gory sacrifices. At its base, a hidden tunnel unveils the secrets behind the extraordinary ingenuity of the Maya civilization. You can make jokes to the Egyptian archaeologists when you see them about their sad little pyramids. A gigantic citadel buried some 10 kilometers from the city center. Fractal-saddle wars, a voracious appetite for sacrifices, architectural genius, and a mastery of science and astronomy. All parts of the Odyssey of Tikal, the most bewitching Maya city and of its builders, from its expansion to its mysterious disappearance. 750 A.D. In the heart of the deepest jungle of the Patan region in northern Guatemala rose the city-state of Tikal, the largest Maya city ever built at the time. A sprawling city with multiple areas. Two huge pyramids overlook the center, among which that of the Jaguar Priest, the ultimate symbol of power. On this 12,000 square meter plaza, the royal palace towered over the entire valley. Across from it, one of the greatest necropolis in the Maya world was home to the king's tombs. Further west was Temple 4. Standing at 70 meters, it was the highest temple ever built in Mesoamerica. Moreover, an ingenious hydraulic system carried water across the entire city. All of this brilliance was at the service of the most powerful Maya kings, considered gods among men. This is where they flaunted their power in front of hundreds of thousands of people during massive ceremonies. It would have been an amazing spectacle and a great source of power. I mean, they had wars and so on. But if you're a ruler of one of their vassal states, that's, you know, a hundred, a hundred and fifty kilometers away, you would come to this and you would have the honor of being a participant. The theater is the thing. It is not reinforcing power. It is a great part of the power itself. The kings exerted their power over a plethora of Maya cities that were under their rule. And yet, in just a few decades, the mighty Tikal would mysteriously sink into oblivion. Swallowed by the tropical forest, it would take over a thousand years until the first Western expeditions of the 19th century rediscovered its splendors. But the majestic city didn't immediately give up all of its mysteries. Some of its secrets are about to be unraveled thanks to a revolutionary tool. LiDAR. It's a surveying method consisting of a super powerful laser aboard a plane. They can see through the tree canopy and reveal the slightest fluctuations in the terrain. Now LiDAR is our X-rays. We can see the landscape. We can see every single modification the Mayas did. Not just only the major architecture features. We also can see areas where they were farming. They were almost invisible for us. Over 2,000 square kilometers of forest have been scanned, allowing the discovery of 60,000 previously unseen human structures. LiDAR has far exceeded the expectations of the archaeologists. It reveals the city had a completely different size, one much greater than all previous projections. We used to have 16 square kilometers. Now we have 75 square kilometers. And with the peri-urban area, it's around 527 square kilometers. It's the size of what is now Guatemala City. And Guatemala City can hold at least between 3 to 4 million people. This discovery gives rise to several new questions. How could a city 38 times bigger than ancient Rome be built in such an environment? And above all, how did it all start? Around 800 B.C., a first community made its way to this steep location overrun with vegetation. Yet it was there, in the middle of the jungle, that these nomads chose to settle down. Where do they come from? That's a puzzle. All the Maya territory was in movement all the time. It's like soda water in a cup. You start to see a lot of bubbles. And that's what I think is happening here in the lowlands. You start to have a lot of communities that were moving around this landscape, hunting and start to farm. These first inhabitants were soon joined by others that swelled the ranks. What was a simple community turned into a village. Tikal was born. You're not supposed to have civilization in a tropical forest. It's very, very wet. The soils are very thin. Very thin in some places because everything is tied up in a canopy. There are few navigable rivers. And they're on the edge because the water goes through the limestone down there. In this green desert where water immediately infiltrates the ground, the survival of the young city seemed uncertain. The Maya people of Tikal were, however, about to make a rare and previous discovery that would forever change their destiny. They were springs. And you know, the water from springs is virginal water. It's pristine water. It's really very sacred or magical. Imagine having a spring. Water is coming from the earth. That will give you an extra significance to the landscape. A blessed land on which the inhabitants of Tikal would erect a first temple. The Lost World Pyramid. Located in the southeast of the current city, this pyramid was rebuilt on several occasions. When they built the first structures, they wanted to build another, larger. What they do, they cover this one and they start to make another one on the top. It's like you're looking at an onion when you cut it. And you see different layers. The earliest layer will be here in the bottom. And that's what they found over here in the 1980s. Then it's one of the oldest structures in Tikal. This 30-meter pyramid actually conceals five other older ones. The first was built in 600 B.C. It was only 3 meters high and 24 meters wide. Despite its modest size, it became the nerve center of the Tikal community. From the top, priests used to observe a spectacle orchestrated by the gods themselves. The Heavenly Vault and its myriad of stars. You have priests up there making notes, seeing things. For hundreds and hundreds of years, they're getting a real idea about these stars. The movements of the stars will tell you a lot about the future. They also tell you when maybe you need to do some rituals or sacrifice. Being able to predict the future was the key to the immense power reserved to the local elite. A power for which they acquired knowledge about the cycles of Venus, the Moon and the Sun. In Tikal, the king star would even condition the construction of the city center. These buildings are the ones that make the solar observatory. And it depends how the Sun moves in the sky. And we'll start over here and we'll continue moving and that's how they can mark. That way you need three buildings and the Sun will rise behind them. Sitting on top of the Lost World Pyramid, the priests observed the motion of the Sun. In October, it indicated the beginning of the dry season. In April, the start of the rainy season. That's how the perfect orientation of the temples symbolized the winter and summer solstices. The Maya used this system to figure out when to sow and when to harvest. Of all ancient civilizations, they would become the best astronomers. It wasn't astronomy, this was astrology. They weren't trying to refine science or something. And there really is this, it's not just Mesoamerica. All around the world, Stonehenge or whatever it is, this is something that people record. But the Maya got such a good control of it. That's one of the reasons they worship time. It was so regular and impressive. In the first centuries AD, Tikal was one of the most flourishing cities in all the Maya lowlands. But its fate was about to be shaken up by an unprecedented event. Fourth century AD. Central Mexico. Teotihuacan. The largest Mesoamerican city ever built. It was the capital of a mysterious civilization looking to stretch its empire and take possession of the riches of faraway Maya territory. Tikal was a city that was highly cultivated. It was a very sophisticated city and Tikal remained as a leading power in the Maya lowlands and was very attractive for Teotihuacanos. January 378. Men traveled across the arid lands of Mexico towards the Petén. They were Teotihuacano soldiers equipped with the best weapons of the time. The event is narrated on a headstone in Tikal. The text on Silla 31 tells us that in 378, at the same day when the foreigners arrived, the king of Tikal died. This is clearly not a peaceful arrival of just a few merchants. We are talking about soldiers here. And they established a new dynasty. Teotihuacan seemed to have subjugated Tikal. But not everyone agrees. I tend to think that it may be a bit exaggerated. I mean, you know, it's not like now. It's like Napoleon said, armies, you know, travel on their stomach. There's a lot of people who come along to help, support. You better show me, you know, commoners, pottery, the people that came with them. And we don't have anything like that yet. While no archaeological evidence confirms the invasion of Tikal by Teotihuacan, other elements have shown that the two cities maintained commercial ties well before 378. Then what role did the Teotihuacanos play in the Maya city? Thanks to LIDAR, and for the first time ever in Tikal, archaeologists are about to unravel its mystery. LIDAR is showing that before they thought there was a natural hill. Now you can see that it's very similar to La Ciudadela of Teotihuacan. And that's where we think that maybe it was a Teotihuacan barrio. Some 1,500 kilometers away, the Citadel is one of the three major temples in Teotihuacan. It's a gigantic structure comprising a surrounding wall, a vast courtyard, and a temple. Its shape is strangely similar to the image detected by LIDAR. A few hundred meters from the center of Tikal, in the midst of the tropical forest, initial excavations seem to confirm the archaeologist's hunch. This is the eastern structure facing west. And this is the area that we think is very similar to Teotihuacan. So we want to prove these people, they have the knowledge of Teotihuacan. They know the culture. They know how to build this structure. They know the meaning of that kind of architecture. And that's what we are trying to prove with this excavation. Pending the results of these excavations, other elements prove the influence of the remote central Mexican capital. Near the Lost World Pyramid is a temple that has Teotihuacan written all over it. This is how we call it in Mesoamerican architecture, talud tablero. It's a type of architecture that is very common in Mesoamerica. You're going to have a talud, there's this wall over here, and a tablero that you can see up here on the top. Now we only can see the stones, but before, like a thousand years ago, these structures were painted and covered with a plaster. Most of the buildings here were painted in red. And sometimes the tableros were used also to depict some type of art. Already widespread in Teotihuacan, the talud tablero technique became highly popular in Tikal. The people from the ancient Mayas, they knew about the symbolism of this type of architecture. And the elites from here tried to emulate those type of architectures. There was a fashion, but also make the tight connections between them and the elites of Teotihuacan. Now an ally of the most powerful city in all of Mesoamerica, Tikal became the nerve center of Peten, and extended its influence all the way to Copan. But the domination was short-lived. In fact, two centuries later, when the Teotihuacano Empire collapsed, a weakened Tikal was conquered by a rival city, Calakmul, located about 150 kilometers to the north, and led by the Khan dynasty. Destitute of his prestige, would Tikal ever rise from the ashes? August 6, 695. The faithful soldiers of Jasa Chan Kawil, new king of Tikal, savored their revenge. After 130 years of submission to Calakmul, they had just won a decisive battle. Humiliated, the survivors and the rival army could only await their sacrificial demise. To mark his victory, Jasa Chan Kawil ordered the construction of two gigantic temples. They defeated the great enemy, giant, powerful hegemony of Calakmul. And he wanted to make a statement. We're back. And so, these temples are very different. They do not have temples inside of them. They were not built. Most of the temples are like Russian dolls. They were built all at once, all of them, which is amazing. The Temple of the Mask would comprise four massive pedestals and stand 42 meters high. Across from it, the Temple of the Jaguar Priest embodied Jasa Chan Kawil's absolute power. It would reach 47 meters in height, becoming one of the symbols of the city. When you see this architecture and some of the other things the Maya did, you know, they say it must have been space people, the way they carved jade, it must be aliens or something. But they had all these clever techniques. One of the techniques in which the people of Tikal became true experts was the art of leveling. Before building a pyramid, the Maya would level the ground and cover it with a thick platform. One of the things that people don't realize about Tikal is that the massive amount of labor that goes into platforms. This whole area looks nice and flat. It's an enormous platform. What is really impressive is that the whole area of the site is a series of platforms. For the main plaza, the Maya built no fewer than 12,000 square meters of platform. It took about 16 square kilometers of it to level the center of the city. These platforms and pyramids, however, required astronomical quantities of material. They also represented a considerable technical challenge for a people that didn't master metalwork. Luckily, the subsoils of Tikal were packed with an easily accessible and endless resource, limestone. The Maya exploited the limestone different ways, not only for construction material, but also for tools. The core of the limestone, it's very hard. So they created axes, they created hammers, they created spears. They used these tools to extract the millions of tons of stone needed for their colossal construction sites. So they trace, they design the trace of the stone that they want to cut. But also they burn the limestone in order to create plaster to cover all the walls. That is showing us the knowledge and sophistication that the Maya achieved by controlling and using this material. The Maya had to carry the carved stone on their backs as they didn't have beasts of burden. Yet it took them less than two decades to complete what would become the new city center. An enormous endeavor carried out by thousands of workers. This is something you do for the Holy Lord. And it wasn't because they were forced to do it. They had captives, but they didn't have a lot of slaves. I don't think anybody was coerced. We find that hard to believe. But again, they were devoutly religious. Atop this new pyramid, and away from prying eyes, Jassa Chan Kawil was about to perform a sacred ritual. A self-sacrifice during which he pierced his own penis. The ensuing blood was thought to have prodigious virtues. Blood is the absolutely central element to all their thinking. That blood is what connects to the ancestors and also the deities. And then he'll see the vision sharpen or have some other hallucinations. That's what connects him to the future. As he predicted the future to his people, Jassa Chan Kawil became more than a prophet. He was the earthly envoy of the gods, the key to holding infinite power. This was the big, pious ritual of the Maya. This is when they would have thousands of people, tens of thousands of people coming in from everywhere. And then the king would come out, and this is what's really amazing, especially here with these steep temples. The Temple of the Jaguar Priest was conceived following a very specific design. Each of the nine terraces represented one of the nine levels of the underworld, the kingdom of the dead. At the center of the pyramid was the axis mundi, the imaginary thread connecting the underworld, the human world, and the world of the gods. In Maya hieroglyphic writing, the word for temple is wits, which is the same word as mountain. And many temples, therefore, embody ritual places or places where the creation had taken place. And kings could re-enact events of the mythological past on these temples. But in the meantime, it was south of the main plaza that Jassa Chan Kawil would reign over the world of the living, in a palace overlooking the entire valley. A series of constructions accommodated the court the clergy, the city planners, and a cohort of servants. Between 200 and 300 people lived around this inner courtyard, all in the service of the king. In that central room is a throne where the king would sit and the visiting people would come, sometimes nobles with a petition, sometimes another visiting ruler. And this was a private area for elites. Festivals in here, where the nobles and rulers would, they would often be, there'd be hallucinogenic enemas in one side and the king is dancing, you know, and there's others dancing with a snake. And some of the nobles would be looking up into the air and there's floating porcupines wearing beads and an enema pouch over in the side. So they were obviously taking hallucinogens. Initially three stories high and 215 meters long, the palace was a maze of long and narrow rooms. The rooms tend to be narrow because they did not have the true arch. They had the corbelled vault, they call it, which the stones, it's like a child with blocks building. There's a stone and then another one closer, another one closer, another one closer, and a capstone. So it has its unstable, has a tendency to collapse. That's because the Maya didn't know about the keystone. Well known in the Western world, that technique allows to transfer the weight of an arch to the retaining walls. But since the Maya used corbelled arches, nothing allowed the forces to be distributed. This sort of long, narrow, high, style that was really a result of, you know, technology, they embraced it. And so they built their temples that way with the roof combs and so on. Because there would be wooden things to sit on with beautiful pillows and curtains, and it would have been a beautiful little room. The year was now 734 A.D. It saw the death of Jhasa Chankawil after a reign of five decades that left a profound imprint on the city. His body was buried six meters under the pyramid of the jaguar priest. And it's a massive burial. It's a huge burial chamber, one of the largest burial chambers we know from the Maya lowlands. And after the burial chamber, the temple, temple one, the temple of the great jaguar was constructed over it. Jhasa Chankawil thus joined the pantheon of the kings of Tikal. Before that, about 20 of his predecessors had been buried just a few feet away in the North Acropolis. During a lavish ceremony, the deceased was groomed for his final journey. Luxurious offerings demonstrated his rank. They buried their dead under the floors. You wanted to be buried near your ancestors. If someone was important, they might turn that eventually into a shrine, and it would become bigger. And here, especially in Tikal, one structure would then grow into a temple. This is one of the great unique things of Tikal, that you have one place where they are all buried. It's a cemetery of kings. About a hundred temples were built on top of one another over the course of centuries. Some of them covered monumental sculptures of Shak, the rain deity. Tikal reasserted itself as the staple city of the Peten. Its future king would have to defend that status, which aroused the envy of the neighboring cities. On December 8, 734, the son of the late king acceded to the throne. His name? Yikin Chan Kawil. Yikin Chan Kawil must have been a great war leader. He had ambitions to enlarge the territory that was controlled by Tikal, and he directed his military attacks against former vessels of the Khan dynasty. So what he did is he completed the work which was begun by his father. Yikin Chan Kawil sent his soldiers to wipe out the last resisting bastions of Khan Faithful. He thus consolidated the borders of this empire. But flooring his enemies wasn't enough. It's just like Renaissance Chile in that the battling was not just war. It was who has the best rituals. Look at the temples. Who has the artists? Who has the art? To reinforce his power, Yikin Chan Kawil embarked on the construction of a temple more ambitious still than his father's before him. Temple 4. Now covered in jungle green, it peaks at 70 meters. It is the highest temple ever built in Mesoamerica. The inclination is really, really steep. And the amazing thing is these steps. They go down like 200 meters. And the king would genitally bloodlet. Imagine if you were, had just lost liters of blood and then you would process with 200 pounds of equipment down these stairs in a dignified way. And they had to train the princes probably from the time they were five or six in doing this. And I know of no case that is recorded anywhere of a king falling. Because you're dead if you fall. That is also impressive. I wouldn't want to be a Maya king, by the way. Temple 4 featured a dizzying slope of 82 degrees. How did the Mayan design this pyramid that remains intact some 1,300 years later? In order to understand, archaeologists dug up a tunnel to the heart of the pyramid. To our surprise, they discovered another structure inside. We are right now in front of those walls. We were thinking that that was an earlier version of the temple. But once we saw all the way on both sides and in different sides of the structure, we come to the conclusion talking with the Mayans this was not an earlier and 1.6 meters in height, were appended to one another all the way to the top like a giant beehive. This structure supported 119 cubic meters of backfill and prevented the pyramid from collapsing under its own weight. Architects at Tikal are recognized to have been one of the best in the There were somewhere around here earlier experiments that failed, and that's how they learned to do this. Because you know, in Egypt, the collapsed pyramid at Medoum, this is steeper and it didn't collapse. So you can make jokes to the Egyptian archaeologists when you see them on the ground. To that end, they built a platform 5 meters in thickness and with a surface area of 15,000 square meters. A layer of stucco completed the construction. We are standing right on a floor that is about 10 centimeters thick. Can you imagine the amount of wood burned, that amount of limestone on top of the bedrock? So it couldn't be more solid. It would take the Maya workers less than 10 years to build Temple 4, an absolute feat. That's very fast, you know, because the Egyptian pyramids, they would sometimes build it just when the next pharaoh was born, they would start building it, it took so long. Yeah, it's incredible how sure he was that he was going to make it. I mean, once you began, that is not something, okay, I'm going to leave it just like that in the middle or a third or one third or two thirds. Once you are on the enterprise, you need to finish it, and he made it. The construction of Temple 4 marked the apex of the city. Based on the latest estimates, this required enormous water and food resources. If you really want to have these huge cities, you have to make sure that there's water available for everybody, and you don't have to walk five kilometers to bring a jar of water. It was obvious that the city couldn't solely rely on its single source of water. The Maya, hence, had a brilliant idea. This park was open to the public. They hired an Italian company whose specialty was hydraulic systems because they wanted to make sure that when it rains, water won't interfere with the visit, and we were impressed to see that the set of canals these Italians put in the park are exactly on top of the hydraulic system and the crates filled with sand were used to filter the water and make it drinkable. When we find out, we were very excited because we have no other reference like that. We have no other mention of any other reservoir that has this upper tank filled in with another sediment different from the local material that it's very, very similar to. To control the flow, two huge dams were built. 80 meters wide and 10 meters high, they were carved out of the rock and ended with a wall. Blocked with wood or stone panels, the pipes, 30 centimeters in diameter, allowed to check water quality in each basin. When they do that, they will have the control to tell who can go to these reservoirs, how much water can you take and all that and they will make sure that water flows through in the canal. But that's an assumption. We think that's the way it works. The Maya were able to take advantage of a hostile forest in their organization and in the settlement pattern space they're using. It was this ability to adapt that allowed the Maya to farm enough to feed the tens of thousands of locals. Corn, beans and wheat highlighted the richness of the city, which continued to attract new migrants daily. With 80 to 120 inhabitants per square kilometer it was one of the densest cities in the world at the time. How long would Tikal sustain its exponential growth? By the middle of the 8th century, the city had vanquished all of its enemies. It dominated an enormous territory stretching from Calakmul to Naranjo. Yet it struggled to manage such an unprecedented drought. People started to proclaim themselves as independent kings. They say, I am the divine lord of Tikal. And all of a sudden we have five or ten divine lords of Tikal. For me this is the beginning of the end. Politically weakened, Tikal would have to deal with a new challenge, an unprecedented drought. Over the next century you have a period of drought or decline or something and you're dependent on them now and you can't maintain them. And so it actually makes it worse because now you have this wonderful system and you can't maintain it. And so then it spirals faster down. Faced with this climate issue, the elite chose to build even more so as to appease the anger of the gods and encourage rain to return. But this behavior came with a heavy price on the environment. Cities grew very big. They were really abusing the landscape, like cutting too many trees. If you see, for example, the post holes of the pre-classic, there are these big trees. And then in the classic they were a little bit narrower and narrower because they didn't let them grow as big as before. And then in this case there is malnutrition, there are growing ecological problems and they're sort of just intensifying what they did before. So, you know, again, it's a beautiful disaster going on. I mean, the temples are oppressive and this sculpture and that sculpture, but that really doesn't help the economic system. The city became an ogre that consumed everything in its path. They lost their faith in their leaders who multiplied the ceremonies hoping to stay in power. There's a big increment in massive sacrifices in more quantities than before. So that can allow us to make an interpretation that there's a time of crisis. The role of the elites is to keep the status quo. And then the elites are not able to hold the status quo. If my family, and if the pyramid collapsed, whatever. Faced with a shortage of water and the helplessness of the elite, the inhabitants started to leave the city. Cornered from all angles, Tikal withdrew into itself. Thanks to their use of lidar in the jungle, archaeologists have discovered the traces of the city in dire straits. This is the area where we found and that's where we're going to be interested to go and check. And you see here, the lidar stopped right here. And what is happening over here, that's where we're going to see when we extend our lidar map to try to understand if it surrounded the entire area or not. But we're going to do it with the new lidar map. A six meter tall outer wall seemed to have surrounded the city. But for what purpose? It's not just for protecting during a war. Also it's trying to make people to don't move. Like also you can stop some type of migration. We know the Mayans migrate a lot. When a city collapse or something, people will moving. And I think also it's controlling people and we still don't know who was able to go and cross and get to another city. Everybody could do it or everybody can go to contain the bleeding. But in vain. The gods remained deaf to their appeals. Rain didn't come. In less than a century, Tikal became a ghost town. Throughout the Peten, the cities fell one after the other. It's the network. A civilization is a network. And it had collapsed. And so the fact that this site or that site stumbled on, Tikal continued for a while and went away. But many of the places, I mean many sites, it was boom. It was pretty fast. However, it's a thermostat. The heat builds up, builds up, builds up. And then boom, the air conditioning goes off. And it's all sudden. But these things, throughout the late classic, they were building. And that's how Tikal collapsed. All time. A gigantic city with vast unexplored sections that LiDAR is finally revealing. Under the thick jungle, the city-state isn't done revealing its secrets. Who knows what revelations Tikal still holds about this astounding civilization of builders.