Maya builders may have ruined El Mirador by burning forests for plaster
Centuries before Tikal peaked, El Mirador in Guatemala raised La Danta, a pyramid about 72 metres high and one of the most massive on Earth. The city thrived on fields fertilised with swamp mud. Then its hunger for lime plaster stripped the forest, eroding clay over the farmland until the system failed.
Archaeologists were surprised when excavations from 1978 to 1983, led by Bruce Dahlin and Ray Matheny, showed that much of El Mirador predated the famous Classic cities of the region. It flourished from around the sixth century BC to the first century AD, peaking from the third century BC. The civic core covers about 26 square kilometres with thousands of structures, and around 35 triadic complexes, each a platform crowned by three pyramids. La Danta's volume, about 2.8 million cubic metres, puts it among the largest pyramids anywhere. Alignments between temples suggest the city was planned from the start, possibly around the sun's movements.
Its roads are equally striking. Raised white causeways called sacbeob, a Maya word meaning white road, stand 2 to 6 metres above the forest floor and reach 20 to 50 metres across; one runs about 12 km to Nakbe and another 20 km to El Tintal. Some researchers describe the network as the world's first highway system, and project director Richard Hansen thinks the basin's many linked sites may have formed Mesoamerica's earliest well-defined state.
Farming worked through ingenuity. Tropical soils hold few nutrients, so the Maya hauled mud from seasonal swamps by the thousands of tonnes, spread it on terraces, sweetened it with lime and grew maize, squash, beans, cacao and cotton. The trouble was stucco. Making 1 tonne of lime cement took about 5 tonnes of limestone and 5 tonnes of wood, and plastering pyramids, floors and roads consumed the forest. Rain then washed loose soil into the swamps, burying the fertile muck under 2 to 3 metres of sterile clay. By about 150 AD the city was abandoned, shortly after a wall was built around part of it, hinting at a perceived threat.
A smaller community returned around 700 AD, producing fine black-on-cream codex-style pottery found only in this basin, before leaving by 900 AD. Those pots now drive looting: looters may be paid 200 to 500 dollars a vessel that collectors buy for over 100,000. In 2010 the Global Heritage Fund listed Mirador among 12 sites worldwide closest to irreparable loss.
Source: El Mirador
