Maya in the Thunderdome

Human sacrifice was indeed important to Maya society. The Classic period gives us numerous depictions of severed heads, and even of headless bodies flung down staircases. However, in most cases, such sacrifices were of single victims of noble rank whose identity was prominently recorded for posterity, not a mass of unknown farmers. We have evidence of larger mass graves. But in these rare examples, it appears that warfare between competing cities led to the capture and summary execution of enemies. In either case, the victims would not have been anonymous individuals.

It's true that sacrificial practices among the Maya did change somewhat during the final centuries before the Spanish arrival. Spanish accounts note that some Maya pyramids along the Yucatan coast were covered with blood -- presumably human, though the Spanish never witnessed any of the sacrifices themselves. It is also true that "skull-racks," as seen in the movie, were found at some sites in the Yucatan. However, these were practices adopted by Maya groups very late in their history.

But in the movie, our hero is spared from being sacrificed, thanks to a fortuitously timed solar eclipse. The king announces that the eclipse is a good omen -- the gods are sated and require no more human flesh. This raises the problem of what's not in the movie.

The prediction of the solar eclipse is the only allusion to one of the more celebrated and important facets of Maya civilization -- their advanced state of knowledge in mathematics, astronomy and geometry. Maya calendrical, astronomical and mathematical systems were so advanced that they could predict eclipses, track Venus as morning and evening star, and compute the annual solstices and equinoxes decades in advance. In fact, the Maya made regular use of the concept of "zero" centuries before Fibonacci introduced it to Europe. Although an emphasis on Maya intellectual achievement would have been appropriate, it would have been inconsistent with the movie's theme of a cruel and savage Maya civilization.

In an action scene that springs entirely from Gibson's imagination, our hero is able to escape the city. Pursued by his captors, he runs through a dead corn field and hides in a field of decapitated corpses. This "killing field" is perfectly consistent with the movie's blood lust, but ever more distant from the real Maya. He flees through the jungle, and with only two pursuers remaining, he bursts out of the forest onto a beach. There, where the land ends and the water begins, both he and his tormentors witness Spanish galleons and rowboats ferrying Spaniards and Christianity to the lands of the Maya. His pursuers, as if in a trance, walk weakly toward the arriving Spaniards. Their pursuit is now irrelevant, as their world is about to end.

Again, the historical facts tell a different and more compelling story. Several accounts exist of Spanish expeditions in the early 1500s, sailing from Cuba and making stops along the Yucatan coast for provisions. Invariably these encounters ended badly for the Spaniards. So fierce was the Maya defense of their lands that Cortis avoided much of this coast, choosing to land farther west along what is known today as the coast of Veracruz. The Maya, at the time of the conquest, were intractable and fiercely autonomous. Most villages resisted the Spaniards. In fact, the Spanish conquest of the Maya was a long protracted campaign that some claim goes on to this very day.

In "Apocalypto," the arrival of the Spanish signals "a new beginning." Remarkably, the event is portrayed as tranquil, as if the Spaniards are the adults who have finally come to rescue the "littleuns" stranded on the island of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." In reality, the arrival was anything but serene.

Within decades of the first contact with the Spaniards, the Maya would die in the hundreds of thousands as European diseases, colonial exploitation and cruelty took root. In 1552, in the name of Christian piety, Fray Diego de Landa ordered that hundreds of Maya codices, carrying sacred knowledge accumulated over centuries, be burned as works of the devil. If there were ever an apocalypse in the history of the Maya -- and herein lies the ultimate demoralizing irony of the movie -- it would be because of European contact. But in the movie, after two hours of excess, hyperbole and hysteria, the Spaniards represent the arrival of sanity to the Maya world. The tacit paternalism is devastating.

After many centuries of misguided and simplistic views of the Maya, recent scholarship has shown the complexity and historical depth of their civilization. In Maya society, as in all civilizations, violence, surfeit and disparity were balanced by accomplishment, restraint and illumination. Gibson's feverish vision of a childish Maya society sacrificing itself to extinction is more than inaccurate, it works against the progress of decades of diligent scholarship to restore to present-day Maya people a heritage of which they are proud, and from which we have much to learn. I can only hope that audiences seeing this movie will be motivated to learn about the Maya -- present and past -- rather than be sated by Gibson's sacrificial offering at the altar of entertainment.

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