Apocalypto: The Maya Society That Never Was

Dr. Kelli Carmean

Department of Anthropology

Eastern Kentucky University

Okay I’ll confess I dashed to see this movie as soon as it opened, and have seen it a few times since, which might lead you to think I’m a Mel Gibson fan or a little off in the head myself. The truth, however, lies more in the unparalleled opportunity to see in full color Panavision a society of which I have only ever dreamed. Despite its many flaws, I appreciate that opportunity, which has also sparked great debate among my students who have just completed my Mesoamerican archaeology course.

Let’s get the whole violence thing out of the way. Very few Maya archaeologists today hold that the Maya lived in peaceful bliss; indeed it is abundantly clear that low level endemic violence ruled the day. New kings in dynasties came to power through the capture and public sacrifice of enemy warriors, and celestial warfare events punctuated Maya calendric observations. Most now agree that long standing military rivalries among competing city states was common throughout the Classic lowlands.

However, Apocalypto depicts a scale of human sacrifice far beyond the evidence available for the Maya. One notable scene reveals a corpse pit of past sacrificial victims that stretches as far as the camera can pan. Viewers have the sense that sacrifice atop the temple was non-stop. Decapitated heads bounce impressively down the steps to be caught in a net below. It is clear the script writers have cherry-picked written Spanish accounts of Postclassic Aztec ceremonies as inspiration for these scenes. Although one might accuse me of coping out by shifting the ghastly violence issue to the Aztec, but at least such a shifting would be more accurate, and would enable us to engage in a different discussion, namely how a fast-rising political power succeeded in taking a long-standing cultural feature of Mesoamerica and turning it into a highly effective tool of state intimidation and empire expansion before which would-be resisters to the Aztec steamroller had little choice but capitulation. But we can’t have that discussion, because such a statement because the issue here is Maya sacrifice and violence, and despite various print references to the Maya empire in movie reviews, such an entity never existed for the Maya in the Classic nor at any other time.

The movie does at least provide some cultural explanation for the human sacrifice: the gods are angry—the crops are dying and disease is spreading (although we saw precious little of this and what we did see was confusing and difficult to interpret)—and must be appeased with blood. And that is precisely what makes the Maya corrupt as a society. What Gibson fails to consider is that most pre-industrial societies, Christianity included, have a similar supernatural world view as their cultural heritage. What more precious offering is there than human blood?

Gibson has some serious time and space issues that make Apocalypto jarring for an archaeologist to watch. Judging from the size and shape of the temples, Tikal is clearly the city to which the unfortunate captives are taken. Tikal was a major Classic Period site occupied from around 300 to 900 AD, and abandoned as part of the broader Classic Maya collapse, which was probably in large part due to ecological stresses caused by growing urban populations throughout the lowlands, although such stresses no doubt were exacerbated by endemic warfare. But then Jaguar Paw runs to the ocean just in time to see the Spanish arrive, complete with a priest bearing a towering staff come to save the Maya from themselves. But wait a second: The Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1519, in Veracruz. Even if we understand the arriving Spaniards to have been the particular group that conquered the Yucatan that still puts it well into the 1530s. Tikal was long abandoned by that time, as were all of the Classic political centers from which kings would have ruled and to which sacrificial victims would have been dragged. By the 1500s, Maya society was composed of very small political entities we might call complex chiefdoms, and it is unclear whether human sacrifice was still practiced, although certainly it was among the Aztec in Central Mexico at that time.

Another jarring aspect: The hero of Apocalypto, Jaguar Paw, confusingly is the name of a Classic Tikal king, although in the movie he is a simple farmer in a small jungle village, who, along with his good buddy Curl Snout, also the name of a Classic Tikal king, get captured by Tikal. I guess the script writers simply liked these names and felt free to use them completely out of context, although I kept wondering if Jaguar Paw was going to stage some kind of grand coup and capture the throne of Tikal.

Finally, (although I could go on and on), we first meet Jaguar Paw living in a small village tucked away in the jungle. Although presumably they were farming, we never see this, although we do witness an exciting tapir hunt, despite the fact that Classic Period Mesoamericans ate largely vegetarian diets. Jaguar Paw’s village is peaceful and idyllic, and our hero is shocked when a rag-tag group of survivors wanders though. It is unlikely that politically-independent villages existed in the Classic Period; rather, most villages would have been tied into one competing political sphere or another, and certainly the young able-bodied men in Jaguar Paw’s village would never have been overlooked for tribute payments to a king, chief or sub-chief, and such tribute would have included labor; construction labor for temples, agricultural labor in royal fields, as well as warrior services on the battlefield. All present would have understood perfectly well—and participated in—the intermittent warfare that defined the political realities of the Classic Period. There is no way Jaguar Paw would have been shocked to learn that there was violent military competition in his jungle paradise.

If you’re looking for a good action flick, Apocalypto is a good choice. Besides, who knows maybe one can outrun an angry jaguar despite having lost copious amounts of blood. It’s also a good choice for a period flick—if you’re willing to view it with a very critical eye. The gist of Apocalypto seems to be that the arrival of Christianity provided an important new beginning for the Maya. Be that as it may, perhaps Mel Gibson’s new beginnings might reasonably include a course on Ancient Mesoamerica.