MikePadgett.com

Caracol

— An adventure-filled journey to Belize's largest Mayan site with a local Mayan guide.”

John Chuc drives us out of San Ignacio on a cool, rainy morning in Cayo. We soon hit the stony, potholed tracks that constitute the majority of Belize’s minor roads. We pass through several villages, each of which have been paved with their regulation mile’s worth of asphalt.

John tells me later that he hopes that all those minor roads will stay unpaved. If the tarmac arrives, he says, so too will the bigger vehicles and their drivers and passengers and heavy loads. And with them the expectation that everything in Cayo will have to speed up. Such an expectation would be created in direct opposition to the Mayan tradition, the Mayan way of life. Progress, reckons John, is subjective and should not always be inevitable.

Kids play on the roads. Dogs sleep on the roads. Huge elephant grass grows on the fringes of the roads and threatens to steal them back for Nature. That is John Chuc’s sort of progress.

When we reach San Antonio, John makes a brief stop and I get out to stretch my legs. The quiet is deafening. A young Mayan smiles shyly as she floats by. Later the road starts to rise steadily while the temperature drops.

Into the forests

We cross the brown, busy Mahal River and enter the Chiquibul National Park. There are electricity pylons, incongruous among the trees of the forest. Somewhere nearby a controversial dam project still supplies no current to them after design faults were discovered.

On the far bank of the Mahal, the stony white tracks give way to bright red clay: today it makes for a wet and rather treacherous surface. The clay and the increasing altitude indicate that we have now entered the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve. The existence of this native pine forest was a late discovery in Belize, a territory whose thick forests and tiny population precluded any serious exploration until the early twentieth century. In recent years, up to 80% of the pine forest was severely damaged by a massive infestation of beetles. A restoration programme in progress since 2002 aims to replant 3.5m beetle-resistant seedlings across 36,500ha. The programme is reportedly very successful but the landscape visible from the dirt road looks rather bare all the same. I roll up the window a little: it’s cooler up here.

Eventually we reach the Douglas D’Silva Forestry Station at one end of an abandoned loggers’ settlement called Augustine. Augustine today looks more like a deserted prison camp than a village. John tells me that a few licensed loggers still live in Augustine. True enough: in amongst all the neatly-spaced but deteriorating shacks I spot a few bits of soggy washing on a line.

The British Army still comes up here occasionally for jungle training exercises but its presence this close to the Guatemalan border is unlikely ever to be conspicuous. Our destination today is closer still and memories of Guatemala’s military manoeuvres in the 1970s are still relatively fresh in Belize.

Today vehicles heading to Caracol are escorted to and from the site following recent reports of visitors being robbed at gunpoint, a story more common across the border in Petén. These attacks are believed to have been conducted by Guatemalans entering and operating in Belize illegally under the cover of thick forests around the border.

The week before my visit, a band of Guatemalan loggers enticed by valuable hardwoods had been identified and pursued by the Belizean army. The loggers – working only at night but with the noise of their saws audible to the night guard – fled camp immediately. In their haste they left behind their heavy equipment and this was duly confiscated.

Caracol: the city state

The entrance to Caracol is the end of the line and the last few kilometres to the site are paved with asphalt. Visitors find there a couple of nondescript buildings including a small information centre with a handy scale model of the complex.

Caracol – or Oxwitza, to give the city its proper Mayan name – was rediscovered by a Belizean logger in the late 1930s. The British officials who subsequently visited the site incorrectly concluded that Caracol was of relatively minor importance in comparison with other sites then being excavated around the Yucatán Peninsula. A later topographical review revealed their error: the findings suggested the extrapolation of a much bigger overall plan.

Such was the accuracy of this conclusion that only 10% of Caracol has so far been excavated and exposed despite decades of work by archaeologists. Buildings that form part of the Caracol plan have been discovered as far as 30km away from the principal dig.

In common with all major Mayan complexes, Caracol was home to a self-contained, socially stratified and highly sophisticated society. The city state was led by a small patriarchal élite, protected and advanced by a warrior class and supported by broad middle and servant classes, with the population probably exceeded 150,000 during Caracol’s zenith period in the 6th century AD.

Built on a site far away from rivers in the midst of thick jungle, Caracol was designed deliberately to be difficult to locate and built from about 650BC. The population survived entirely on rainfall and localised farming operations, utilising intelligent irrigation and storage systems.

The need for blood

High on the Vaca Plateau, the people of Caracol had no need of neighbours. However this did not mean that they isolated themselves from the rest of the Mayan world. When growth outstripped resources – as certainly happened at Caracol – the city state required the blood of the élite to maintain the life force of their creator deity. Though Caracol’s rulers could ritually supply some of their own blood, war with other city states became necessary to secure adequate sacrifices.

Mayan wars seem almost clinical in their scope and prescriptive formula: battles involved only warriors and nobles, usually took place at agreed locations well away from the urban complexes and apart from the taking of prisoners, vanquished city states were left otherwise intact. All the victors usually wanted was the blood of their adversaries’ élite.

Ball games

As the rain falls gently on our heads at Caracol, John begins to explain how the victors obtained their sanguinary tribute. We’re standing before Altar 21 in the centre of a ball court on which was played a sort of divine game bearing a few similarities to tennis and squash.

The two players were taken from the vanquished élite and they bounced a heavy, 7.5kg latex ball between them. This ball was probably hit only with the hips and could deflect from the walls but was not supposed to touch the ground.

The winner of this game might have been spared, but it is more likely that both players were beheaded and their blood dedicated to the creator deity.

Playing the game was surely very difficult but the élite class probably trained and practised for the eventuality of formal play throughout their active lives. John explains that, contrary to the appearance of brutality in these proceedings, the ball game was a sacred ritual for which all players were spiritually prepared and in which they were proud to participate.

Plazas and buildings

Later I climb the steps of several of the taller excavated buildings in each of the two plazas.

First among these was Structure A2 on the western side of the A-Group plaza. Probably built during the first couple of centuries AD, A2 was found to contain numerous tombs and stelae at its summit.

Meanwhile the Temple of the Wooden Lintel, on the eastern side of the A-Group plaza whose function was to support astronomy and timekeeping activities. The eponymous lintel is in fact original to the structure which was built around AD70, a full nine years before Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii over in Europe.

Then followed the highest of the complex: Caana (“Sky Place”), which dominates the B-Group plaza. Caana is still Belize’s tallest building and seems to have been fully rebuilt in the late 7th century AD to contain at least 70 rooms.

The end

The ball game and evidence of timekeeping activities are just two examples of how elaborate the cultural formalities of Mayan civilisation were.

Yet however sophisticated they had become, the Classic Mayans could not respond to the vicissitudes of Nature. Up to the middle of the 9th century AD, Caracol continues to record events and then there follows the ‘radio silence’ characteristic of the period across the Yucatán.

There are several theories behind the so-called Classic Collapse which was probably never so total as historians once believed. Among these is the persuasive idea that the period of sudden decline at Caracol coincided with a severe regional drought. The fact of Caracol’s distance from stable water sources seems particularly to support the possibility.

Whatever really happened, as John explained, the jungle probably reclaimed the great, millenial city within a couple of decades. Now as we leave Caracol behind for the entrance clearing, I look back briefly and find that the jungle had already claimed the site from my view.

Show as slideshow

Caracol and Chiquibul

Accessible only by rough roads, Caracol is the largest Mayan site in Belize: in its day, a city state home to over 150,000 people.

John Chuc is a guide from a local Mayan family well-known in Bullet Tree Falls, Cayo. He runs K’in Winik Jungle Tours based in San Ignacio.