Name: Resilience of the Maya Civilization (Full Episode) | Rise and Fall of the Maya | National Geographic
Uploaded: 2026-01-12T16:59:13.000Z
Duration: 44 min 18 s
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A seemingly lost civilization that abandoned their cities in the forests of Mexico and Central America.

But what is the truth behind this remarkable society?

They were able to survive, to adapt and even to evolve in their own way.

Now teams of investigators are setting out to uncover the dark secrets of the Maya.

A massive concentration of that body down there.

Using new technology to expose the fate of the last capital cities.

Here's the staircase leading up to the top.

Venturing deep into mystical underground caverns.

There are these war victims of these sacrificial victims.

They're asking what happened when foreign invaders landed on Maya shores.

Burned buildings that were never rebuilt.

How the Maya coped with climate catastrophe.

And how despite a perfect storm of threats, they endured.

When early archaeologists discovered lost cities deep in the forests of Mexico and Central America, the legend of the ancient Maya was born.

The deserted pyramids inspired ideas of a vanished civilization that had long since disappeared.

Archaeologists split Maya history into eras.

The Classic era lasted some 650 years and ended in the so called collapse around 900 AD.

This was some 600 years before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors on Maya shores.

But contrary to popular belief, the collapse wasn't the end of the Maya.

They have all these fractures in their culture.

Sometimes they left the cities behind, but they were always innovative and creating new ways of surviving.

The Maya suffered too much but they kept going.

And today the Mayan society still exists.

So how did Maya resilience allow them to prevail against the Classic era collapse and the devastation caused by Spanish conquerors?

During the Classic period, the Maya region spread from southern Mexico through Guatemala, Belize and beyond.

The collapse saw the abandonment of cities concentrated around the southern lowlands.

Now in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, archaeologists are investigating the ancient Maya city of Chichen Itza to look for clues about what happened next.

The Maya were still using this site and building here after the Classic era collapse.

It's home to an iconic pyramid, the Temple of Kukulcan.

And to the northwest, the largest Maya ball court ever found.

Dominic Risolo and Sam Meacham are part of a team investigating the site.

Using new technology, they're using drones and scanning equipment to map out the city.

Today, Sam is conducting the aerial surveys.

It just goes out and autonomously flies this route over the entire site of Chichen Itza.

And within a matter of hours we have a high resolution map.

It's all autonomous and so it's just going to take up and you'll see once it gets to 25 meters, it's going to start the mission.

Drones offer archaeologists a unique perspective over the site.

Now it's going to fly over to the start point and now it's going to start capturing photos here.

The drone takes thousands of photos that can be used to create a 3D model.

But the team is also doing high resolution scanning of the site's contours.

So this sends out lasers from this LIDAR sensor and it has an onboard system that registers all of those points collected by the laser to help us create a 3D map of the site as we walk.

The LIDAR System creates a 3D point cloud that accurately maps every physical object in the area.

And it'd be nice to capture the geometry of the ball court.

And again, we can integrate all of these data into our aerial survey of the site.

And then here is, here's the staircase leading up to the top side of the ball court.

Technology, like drones and lidar are revolutionizing archaeology.

We're collaborating with the National Institute of Anthropology and History to produce essentially a comprehensive and digital atlas of Chichen Itza.

So we want to capture all of Chichen Itza, every building, every carved stone monument, every stone essentially for the entire site.

The models that the team are producing show the full extent of the city and expose the truth about what happened after the Maya collapse.

There's this popular conception of the disappearance of the Maya after the collapse of Classic period Maya civilization in the southern lowlands.

But what you see here, here is a fluorescence of Maya culture, a rise of the architecture that we see here.

This was all after the so called collapse of Classic period Maya.

The scanning work helps expose how the Classic collapse of the Maya did not trigger a dark age.

In fact, the Maya continued advancing their engineering skills.

Octavio Juarez has carried out archaeological work here for the last eight years.

The Kukulcan Pyramid is a focus of research.

This building was rebuilt approximately around the year 900 AD.

The building is 31 meters high, 55 meters at the base.

The pyramid is a masterpiece of ancient engineering.

The pyramid is made up of nine staggered layers.

It has four stairways, each aligned towards a cardinal point.

At the top we have another step added together that gives us 365 steps, which refers to the calendar.

This building is proof of the Maya people's sophisticated understanding of the calendar and astronomy.

Twice a year, during the spring and autumn equinox, the sun traces out the shape of a moving snake in shadow, linking with the carved head of a feathered serpent the Maya God Kukulcan.

It marks a large part of the agricultural cycle for us.

At the spring equinox when this phenomenon occurs, traditionally, people began to work the land to carry out agricultural work.

And later, on the autumn equinox, the first crops began to be harvested.

While the Classic era collapse around 900 A.D.

didn't see the Maya abandoned Chichen Itza, the continued expansion of the city had a limit.

Octavio is looking for clues about what happened.

By 1300 adults, the city was practically abandoned.

The entire city was covered by vegetation, and

it remained covered under vegetation until 1840, when the first explorers came.

Restoration teams at the site are conserving and cleaning the city's ruins, finding new clues as they work.

It allows us to find some elements that are covered under microorganisms, such as the pigments that form part of the building's decoration.

Another important aspect is that it allows us to see in more detail some decorative elements, such as this mask of the God of rain.

The Maya God of rain is called Chaac, and carvings depicting this God are common across Chichen Itza.

on this side, it's characterized by having his open mouth in which part of his teeth can be seen.

There's a good reason the Maya made so many Chaac carvings at Chichen Itza.

In the Yucatan Peninsula, we don't have surface water, such as lakes or rivers.

100% of agriculture was based on the rainy season.

So there was a very important culture focused on this deity in relation to rain.

Could drought have caused the Maya to abandon this city?

100 km away, paleo climatologist Martin Medina is preparing to enter the Sabna cave system.

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Resilience of the Maya Civilization (Full Episode) | Rise and Fall of the Maya | National Geographic

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