On the Fall of Copan, Teotihuacan, and the Origins of the Fate of 8 Ahau

Summary

"A Forest of Kings" was groundbreaking for its integration of epigraphy, archaeology, and ethnohistory. In their book, Schele and Freidel discussed the Early Classic Teotihuacan-Maya cultural and political interaction as well as the fall of Copan, and the larger issue of the collapse of Classic Maya cities, and even the fall of Postclassic Mayapan. In this presentation I wish to expand on and integrate these disparate themes in an effort to answer the question of why the Colonial era Maya associated Katun 8 Ahau with destruction, collapse, and the abandonment of the great cities of their past. I will argue that a number of early major episodes of collapse in the Maya world, falling on 8 Ahau dates, led to this association and that the collapse of the last Maya kingdom, the Itza, in 1697, was an echo of the collapse of the first great Maya kingdom 1500 years earlier, both falling in Katun 8 Ahau.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Contextualizing Maya History and Archaeology Part I: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Forest of Kings   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage