As a seven-year-old, Francisco Estrada-Belli was afraid all of history would have been discovered by the time he was old enough to contribute. The year was 1970 and he and his parents had come from Rome to visit relatives in the Central American country of Guatemala. On the trip, they visited the ancient Maya ruins at Tikal. “I was completely mesmerised,” Estrada-Belli told me recently. “It was jungle everywhere, there were animals, and then these enormous, majestic temples. I asked questions but felt the answers were not good enough. I decided there and then that I wanted to be answering them.”
Fifty-five years later, Estrada-Belli is now one of the archaeologists helping to rewrite the history of the Maya peoples who built Tikal. Thanks to technological advances, we are entering a new age of discovery in the field of ancient history. Improved DNA analysis, advances in plant and climate science, soil and isotope chemistry, linguistics and other techniques such as a laser mapping technology called Lidar, are overturning long-held beliefs. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to Maya archaeology.
Last year, Estrada-Belli’s team, including his Tulane University colleague Marcello A Canuto, published a study with a central finding that would have seemed, just a few years ago, like an outrageously speculative overestimate. When Estrada-Belli first came to Tikal as a child, the best estimate for the classic-era (AD600-900) population of the surrounding Maya lowlands – encompassing present day southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala – would have been about 2 million people. Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million. That is more than five times the area’s current population. This would mean that more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire – all crammed into an area a third of the size.
A comparison between the classic Maya and ancient Rome is instructive in other ways. Some Maya cities were established hundreds of years before the founding of Rome, and they included significantly larger architecture that still stands. Both cultures developed sophisticated astronomy, mathematics, writing and agriculture, as well as elaborate trade arrangements across vast cosmopolitan lands. The ruins of Rome are today covered by a bustling world city where some of the most prominent elite families claim to trace their ancestry directly to ancient times. Many Maya ruins, in contrast, are now covered by more than 1,000 years’ worth of tropical forest while the descendants of the peoples who built those cities are some of the poorest people on Earth.
According to census records, the various Maya and much smaller Indigenous groups, such as Xinka and Garifuna, today account for more than 11 million people across Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras and the US. Most of them, 7.7 million, live in Guatemala, where they officially comprise 44% of the population. (Human rights organisations believe the number may be higher as it has long been stigmatised, even dangerous, to identify as Maya.)
History – both ancient and recent – is a key political issue for the Maya. In Guatemala, they have two central demands: first, that there be a full reckoning with the civil war and genocide that lasted from 1960 to 1996, and claimed about 200,000 lives, most of them Maya. Second, that they are recognised as the original inhabitants and legitimate owners of this land. As they see it, half a millennium of prejudice and discrimination against their community has led to a situation where, among other issues, two-thirds of the country’s arable land is controlled by only 2.5% of its farmers, few of them Maya, while 60% of Indigenous children are undernourished.
In 2023, the Maya peoples played a key role in the unlikely presidential election victory of a former diplomat named Bernardo Arévalo. The campaign to protect the vote against a corrupt judiciary was led by Indigenous groups and included 106 days of nationwide protests. Although Arévalo is not himself Maya, he is sympathetic to their cause. One of the people he appointed to his government is Liwy Grazioso, another prominent archaeologist with Italian roots, who now serves as minister of culture and sports. Grazioso is an expert in Maya history, and has published papers on the tombs of Rio Azul and the metropolis of Tikal, and overseen research on Kaminaljuyu, the ancient Maya city that rests under the capital. As a politician, she aims to build a country where the past and present can coexist, and where the country’s original inhabitants are a fully recognised part of the national story. “It’s not that the Maya are better, or that their ancient society was somehow superior to ours, but because as humans they are the same,” she said while offering me a glass of unsweetened hibiscus tea.
We were sitting in a grand, wood-panelled office, on the third floor of El Guacamolón, a mighty palace colloquially named after the colour of a mashed avocado dish, in the centre of Guatemala City. Since the palace’s completion in 1943, these bombastic halls have accommodated half a dozen military coups, as well as the planned annihilation of the lives, cultures, languages and history of the Maya. This oppression, of course, has a long history. Grazioso explained how Maya elites – intellectuals, royals, astronomers, priests, writers and historians – were systematically killed by the Spanish colonisers, and their texts burned as works of the devil.
Outsiders’ power over the story of the Maya is written into the people’s very name. After their arrival in the early 1500s, the Spanish named local populations “Maya” after the ruined city of Mayapán in present day Mexico. Yet the Maya never saw themselves as one people and were never governed under one empire. They spoke many languages – 30 of which are still around – and belong to an intricate mix of cultures and identities.
By the time the field of Maya archaeology began in the 19th century, most of the knowledge once held by local leaders was gone. Over time, some observers spread pseudoscientific stories claiming that Maya temples were more likely to have been built by aliens than by ancestors of local people. (Vikings, Mormon Nephites and other mysteriously vanished civilisations have also been dubiously credited with building the ancient sites.) Grazioso believes that these fantastical theories serve a political purpose. “If we deprive the actual Maya of their glorious past, we don’t need to give them power today,” she said. “Talking about collapse and aliens becomes a distraction from what is right in front of us.”
That is where the work of present-day archaeologists comes in. Until recently, the prevailing debate about the Maya centred around the question of why their civilisation collapsed. While scholars continue to study this question, an increasing number of archaeologists are now also asking: how did the Maya survive? The question addresses both their ancient – and modern – abilities to transform extremely challenging circumstances into enduring survival.
For a long time, the idea that complex human settlements could once have existed in the Maya lowlands was seen as impossible. The theory was based on research in the Amazon rainforest in the 1950s and known as “the law of environmental limitation”. It held that lowland rainforests, with their thin soils, were not suitable for large advanced societies, as they could only produce limited amounts of food. This kind of land could only support small, primitive tribes. For many years, the idea was considered the closest thing to a natural law in anthropology.
When the theory was formulated, no large settlements had yet been discovered in the Amazon, but the Maya lowlands held thousands of massive stone pyramids, countless temples, raised causeways, engraved stone monuments and intricate tombs where buried royals were clad in luscious jade jewellery. Rather than positing the existence of highly populated, sophisticated Maya lowland cultures, many researchers tried to square what they found on the ground with the perceived law of environmental limitations. According to the “segmentary state” model, Maya kings ruled symbolically over a few disconnected communities living in tiny settlements separated by forest.
The law of environmental limitation was largely overturned in the 1980s, as the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs allowed researchers to read the texts on large stone monuments, known as stelae, in city centres. The carvings had been believed to be astronomical or ceremonial but turned out to be historical. And the stories they told were not of primitive forest dwellers, but of kings and conquerors, queens and revolutions.
In recent years a new story has formed, partly thanks to Lidar technology. Short for “light detection and ranging”, it consists here of bulky laser machines attached to twin engine aircrafts that fly half a kilometre above forests and fields. The equipment produces contour scans of the ground, making it possible to identify straight, round, or squared features, such as ancient ruins, fields, roads, temples, dams and fortifications. Lidar isn’t new – it has mapped the moon and is today a key feature in many technologies, including self-driving cars – but it made the leap into archaeology in 2009 after researchers at the classic Maya city of Caracol in Belize saw biologists using it to measure forest growth. With some tweaking, they thought, it could also map the ground beneath rainforest canopies.
In 2016, when Francisco Estrada-Belli saw Lidar scans of Holmul in north-eastern Guatemala, he realised that “archaeology had changed for ever, there was no going back”. He explained to me how he had laboured for 16 years to map this major city, using measuring tape and the help of countless assistants. They waded through thick jungle to reconstruct what the city might have looked like throughout its 1,700 years of history. His teams had outlined about 1,000 structures. Now, he could compare this with Lidar findings. During just three days of scanning, it had mapped more than 7,000 structures: residential buildings, canals, terraces, field enclosures, causeways and defence walls. Lidar had produced a continuous scan of an area 10 times larger than his teams had managed on foot.
Subsequent large-scale mappings led to Estrada-Belli’s estimate that between 9.5 and 16 million people once lived in the Maya lowlands. He calls the lowlands in the 700s a “continuously interconnected rural-urban sprawl”. This was a cosmopolitan region with high degrees of trade and settlements interconnected by a close web of causeways and roads. The ancient Maya did not use pack animals, or carriage wheels. Everything that was built and traded had to be carried by human force alone. Shoes had to be repaired, and people had to sleep and eat – not by distances of a day’s ride by horse, as in Eurasia, but within walking distance. There was no wilderness in these lowlands, Estrada-Belli told me, but rather a low density scattering of people, businesses and agricultural fields, and managed wetlands and forests – everywhere. Interspersed with all this were larger buildings, presumably for members of the elite.
This urban sprawl landscape opens a new set of questions. The most important of these, according to Estrada-Belli, has to do with agriculture. “When looking at Central American forests today, we must reckon with the fact that ancient humans affected everything,” he said. “The tree species are there because the Maya chose them, the types of flowers are around because they made use of them, the wetlands served a human function. And so on. And all these methods were sustainable over thousands of years.” He described “the enormous investments the Maya put into canals, terraces and raised fields in water. They used extremely diverse, advanced and flexible farming methods, rotating and combining hundreds of species.”
Yet today humans use the land “for cattle farming and monocultural corn plantations that does nothing but destroy the land,” he said. “We have a lot to learn.”
Tikal is the most visited of Guatemala’s Maya sites, welcoming hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. The surrounding woodlands belong to the Maya Biosphere Reserve, part of the largest tropical forest in the Americas outside the Amazon. It is easy to be seduced by the sense of mysticism here. At dawn, visitors sit in darkness on top of a 70-metre-tall temple hearing howler monkeys bawl in concert with thousands of crickets. The rising sun gradually reveals a seemingly endless tropical canopy interspersed only by the summits of other ancient pyramids. Only a tiny part of Tikal has been cleared of vegetation and restored to something vaguely resembling its former glory. The rest remains covered by thick layers of soil and trees.
The most recently inscribed stela found at Tikal was dated in AD869. Researchers’ interpretation of what happened after that date has over the past few decades transformed from a “sudden and disastrous” collapse into a historical era referred to as the Terminal Classic. The term encompasses a 200-year period when city centres were abandoned and farmers gradually moved to lands to the north and south. As Tikal and dozens of other cities were abandoned, places such as Chichén Itzá, Uxmal and Mayapán further north on the Yucatan peninsula grew rapidly, as did settlements in the highlands to the south. It appears as if many people during classic Maya times chose to migrate, rather than simply waiting around as things fell apart around them.
“We don’t really talk of collapse any more, but about decline, transformation and reorganisation of society and continuation of the culture,” said Kenneth E Seligson, an associate professor of archaeology at California State University. “Several similar shifts have happened in other places, such as Rome,” said Seligson. But “we rarely talk of the great Roman collapse any more, because they came back in various forms, just like the Maya”.
Seligson is one of many researchers seeking to shift attention from the Maya collapse to focus on their long-term survival. When its last stela was engraved, the city of Tikal could look back at more than 1,500 years of development. At the height of Tikal’s power in the 700s, it housed between 40,000 and 80,000 inhabitants, or even more, depending on where the city limits are drawn. This made it one of the world’s largest urban areas of the period. Yet the city looked nothing like the metropolitan expanses we are used to today. There was no grid of streets and fields for agriculture reached far into the city centre.
Living here required inventiveness. Most of Seligson’s research has focused on limestone, the bedrock under the Maya lowlands, covered only by a thin layer of soil. Limestone provides poor nutrition for most forms of farming, and allows any rainfall to quickly disappear into cracks that lead deep underground. On top of these challenges, for half the year, there is little rain. Yet Tikal and many other cities thrived. Inhabitants cultivated chocolate, vanilla, avocados, tomatoes, yuca, sweet potatoes and hundreds of other crops. Limestone was used to preserve food and purify water. It was used to make soap and for medicinal purposes. Houses were built of lime cement strengthened with sand and grass. Lime was even burnt and mixed with maize to help the Maya absorb nutrients. “The Maya should really be known as a people of immense resilience. They worked with available resources to develop long-term highly flexible solutions,” said Seligson.
The eventual decline of Maya lowland cities is still a hotly debated matter. Estrada-Belli believes it could have been the result of shifting trade routes. Others – including geographer Jared Diamond in his influential but controversial book Collapse – attribute the supposed downfall to greed among the Maya elites leading to a human-made ecological disaster. Another much-discussed theory, based on analysis of sediments from lakes and caves, is climate change. Some argue that a centuries-long “megadrought” was the ultimate cause for the decline of the classic Maya. Seligson, who recently wrote a book about the Maya and climate change, is not so sure. “Climate was undoubtedly an important factor,” he said, but it was one among many.
True to her role as a government minister, Liwy Grazioso believes one key explanation was declining trust in leadership. In a recent scientific article about the rise and fall of Tikal, she and her co-authors list factors including economic competition, increased warfare, lack of arable land and failure of revenue streams, as well as depletion of soil quality and droughts. All these strains on society made it hard to maintain essential infrastructure such as reservoirs. When I met Grazioso in the National Palace, she compared the flamboyant government building where we met to the great pyramids of Tikal. “This is a public building and it’s very beautiful. But to keep it, you need to use government money. When a crisis or a war is coming, who’s going to care? If the palace crumbles, who will pay attention? You will try to provide food for your family.”
Sitting in the current seat of power, Grazioso turned the argument to the present. She said: “It is the same that happens now, if we are not careful. Governments need to earn the trust of their taxpayers.”
Sonia Gutiérrez is a lawyer of the Poqomam Maya people from the highlands south-west of the capital. As the only Indigenous woman among the 160 seats in the Guatemalan parliament, she is arguably the highest-ranking Maya in the country. “Our political system has never represented the reality of our nation,” she said to me in her office a few blocks south of the National Palace.
Gutiérrez is the current leader of the Winaq party, founded by Rigoberta Menchú who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her efforts to end Guatemala’s civil war and achieve post-conflict reconciliation. “Our telling of history needs to change, and our society needs to change,” said Gutiérrez. “Our vision goes back to the time before colonialism. We must be seen not as alien people, but as living in our country where our ancestors used to live.”
“I have three struggles,” she said. “I am a woman, I am Indigenous and I am on the democratic left. I am working against all of history for the vindication of our historic cause.” She spoke of the need for a “plurinational” state that recognised the rights of self-governance among diverse groups. (Something similar has been implemented, with complications and backlash, into the constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador.)
She talked about tzilaj k’aslemal, the good life – a Maya concept she wants to see incorporated into the nation’s constitution. This would involve an approach to health in which modern medicine is “complemented with ancestral knowledge”, an education system that teaches Indigenous languages, and a different approach to the natural world. “We question the foundational capitalistic model,” said Gutiérrez. “For us, natural resources are not only to be exploited, but part of our existence, where we must take care of our rivers, our mountains, our forests. It is a vision of a plural society built on culture.”
And how could that be built? “It will take a long time,” she admitted. Still, she said, there is an urgency to what she’s doing. “The president and his administration give us a window of possibility. But I’m afraid that the old power structures have penetrated the state so much that the government is having a very hard time. And there is a lot of risk.”
Risk?
“Yes, if we do not act on this chance, there will not be another opportunity. And the revenge could be as severe as it was last time. We are up against well organised resistance to the ideas I am talking about.” Her conclusion was matter of fact: “We could see another civil war.”
A few kilometres north of the government offices, remains from the civil war are still processed at the laboratories of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG). Several of its staff were educated at the same institutions as Liwy Grazioso, and the technical advances that have transformed ancient archaeology are here employed to uncover modern Maya history: FAFG digs up and identifies victims of massacres.
First, witness interviews and documents help pinpoint areas of interest. Sometimes drone-mounted Lidar is then deployed to detect unusually lush patches of forest, since decomposing bodies make trees grow especially fast. Finally, investigators use DNA, as well as chemical analyses of soil, clothing, teeth, hair and bones to identify the dead.
Forensic anthropologist Alma Vásquez showed me around the laboratory. Eight human skeletons were laid out on blue tables. Under each table was a cardboard box marked with a location, date of recovery and ID number. Three of the skeletons were tiny. These were children found with two adults in a cave outside the village of Estancia de la Virgen, a couple of hours’ drive north-west of Guatemala City. Vásquez believed that the bones belonged to a family that had tried to escape a notorious massacre that took place by the Pixcayá River in 1982. The cranium of the smallest skeleton rested on striped red and pink padding. Vasquez estimated that the child was between one and three years old, and fragments of clothing suggested she had been a girl. The front of her cranium had been blown away by a grenade. There was a bullet hole through the back of her head.
If Vasquez’s hypothesis was correct, the little girl and her family belonged to a large community that fled their villages in early 1982. In the months prior, the “Guerrilla Army of the Poor”, which dominated in largely Indigenous villages in the area, had “freed” a small territory. As the government’s counterinsurgency focused on civilians, whom they assumed supported the guerrillas, the escaping families had sought refuge in the wooded and hilly upper banks of the Pixcayá.
On the morning of 18 March, army units marched from three directions towards the gathering by the river. At 8am they opened fire at men, women and children with guns and grenade launchers. The slaughter lasted for hours. Eyewitnesses reported that troops raped women and drowned children in the river. By mid-morning the forest was burning and army helicopters were shooting fleeing survivors.
Estimates of the dead at the Pixcayá River range between 300 and 400. Makeshift mass graves were dug on the river shore. There were reports of dogs in nearby villages gnawing on human bones. The skeletons of the little girl and her family that are now in Alma Vásquez’s forensic lab were not found until 2008. Their DNA has still not been matched with any survivors.
The massacre was one of the largest that took place during the bloodiest phase of the war in the early 1980s. But the event was typical in its systematic targeting of civilians. The eventual Commission for Historical Clarification, one of several official truth initiatives, identified 626 massacres carried out by government forces. They were deemed responsible for more than 93% of human rights violations. The report also described 32 mass killings perpetrated by guerrilla groups.
The war claimed more than 200,000 lives, and 83% of identified victims were Maya. More than 40,000 people are still missing. This sometimes means that relatives cannot claim inheritance, and that spouses cannot remarry or assert parenthood in unrecognised relationships. It also means that families do not get closure. FAFG currently holds 12,611 skeleton samples. Some were retrieved from mass graves, while others were discovered in road constructions or as homeowners expanded basements. Almost 4,000 individuals have been identified, mostly through DNA testing.
The work of FAFG is regularly used in court. Most famously, it contributed to the guilty verdict against Guatemala’s former president Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. On 10 May 2013, he was sentenced to 80 years in prison for crimes against the Ixil Maya people. FAFG’s forensic proof, along with testimonies from survivors, and leaked military documents, were vital evidence. The case centred on 15 massacres, where 1,771 people were killed by security forces under Ríos Montt’s command. “The verdict was crucial for people’s sense of belonging in the country,” Claudia Paz y Paz, who was attorney general at the time of the sentencing, told me.
In the end, however, it was a small victory. The sentence was suspended 10 days later on a technicality and Ríos Montt was deemed too old for retrial. Even so, the ruling prompted a significant backlash. Military-linked networks and economic elites reasserted control of the justice system through judicial appointments, fabricated disciplinary cases and legislative changes.
Many lawyers involved in the post-civil war processes, as well as human rights activists and leading journalists, are today in legal detention or exile. And political murders have increased. Luis Pacheco and Héctor Chaclán, the leaders of the Indigenous movement that protected the democratic vote to install the current president, have so far spent 10 months in custody on seemingly spurious charges of terrorism and obstruction of justice.
“With a corrupt judiciary, the democratic government has very limited powers,” said Claudia Paz y Paz, who now lives in Costa Rica and would be at risk if she were to return home. During the spring of 2026, a range of consequential appointments will be made to Guatemala’s Supreme Election Tribunal, constitutional court, and attorney general. Impartial jurists in these positions, Paz y Paz concluded, will be crucial for the system to hold.
Near the site of the Pixcayá River massacre lies the town of San Juan Sacatepéquez. A few blocks from the market, Blanca Subuyui and her team work on more urgent matters than the deep origins of their people, or even the bloody history of the civil war. Subuyui’s organisation, Asociación Grupo Integral de Mujeres Sanjuaneras (Agims), offers shelter and assistance from nurses, midwives and lawyers to deal with the consequences of rape, domestic violence and child pregnancies. Agims also offers conflict mediation, professional education in weaving and handicrafts and a seedbank for agriculture. Some of the women who assist the network must hide their participation from their husbands.
“We believe we have something to bring for the future of this country,” Subuyui told me over a large serving of fruit. As the leader of Agims, she has helped develop a comprehensive plan for the future of Ixumulew, “the land of maize” as Guatemala is called in the Kaqchikel language. The title of the text, Ri qab’e rech jun Utzilaj K’aslemal, translates roughly as “Our path toward the good life”. The 236-page document has been developed during a seven-year process involving 164 Indigenous organisations.
Its very first demands are the “full recognition of Indigenous Nations as pre-existing the state of Guatemala”, that these nations should “reclaim self-determination and sovereignty over our territories” and start by conducting a census without the “intention of making us disappear”. The document also calls for reorganisation of the army away from the structures that committed the genocide and asks that large companies should “pay the taxes they owe the country”.
“We do not want to take power from anybody, but we are the majority of the population, and it is fair that we have a seat at the table,” said Subuyui.
“But how can this plan be realised?” I asked. “There is only one Indigenous woman in parliament, out of 160.”
Subuyui described the growth of their organisation. How Agims and other groups are making a difference in their communities, how people now know their rights and are starting to support themselves financially, how there is pride in history and trust in a shared future.
I told her about the fear that Sonia Gutiérrez had expressed to me about revenge. And how prominent human rights leaders, judges and journalists are imprisoned, exiled, even murdered. Subuyui answered calmly: “Well, we are going nowhere. The struggle will continue, and the changes are now so profound that they are unstoppable. We will keep working no matter what, because we must. Change might take generations, but it is coming.”
