The Maya: Glory and Ruin
Saga of a civilization in three parts: The rise, the monumental splendor, and the collapse.
The doomed splendor of the Maya unfolded against the backdrop of the rain forests of southern Mexico and Central America. Here, Classic Maya civilization reached improbable heights. To chart a culture whose Preclassic roots reach back 3,000 years, we begin with new evidence suggesting that the arrival of a warlord from central Mexico ushered in an age of magnificence and masterpieces such as the death mask of Palenque's King Pakal. But empires rise only to fall. We conclude with the cascade of catastrophe—natural and man-made—that precipitated the Classic Maya collapse, leaving nature to reclaim the grandeur.
THE RISE
The Kingmaker
The stranger arrived as the dry season began to harden the jungle paths, allowing armies to pass. Flanked by his warriors, he marched into the Maya city of Waka, past temples and markets and across broad plazas. Its citizens must have gaped, impressed not just by the show of force but also by the men's extravagant feathered headdresses, javelins, and mirrored shields—the regalia of a distant imperial city.
Ancient inscriptions give the date as January 8, 378, and the stranger's name as Fire Is Born. He arrived in Waka, in present-day Guatemala, as an envoy from a great power in the highlands of Mexico. In the coming decades, his name would appear on monuments all across the territory of the Maya, the jungle civilization of Mesoamerica. And in his wake, the Maya reached an apogee that lasted five centuries.
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In Janine Benyus’s world, architects, car manufacturers, furniture makers and engineers don’t look to computers to solve design challenges - they look outside their windows.
Some 225,000 people died in the Sumatran tsunami in 2004. The difficulty is detecting tsunamis early enough to warn people, because tsunami waves dozens of feet high when they reach the shore may only be a few dozen centimeters high as they travel through the deep ocean. In order to reliably detect them and warn people before they reach land, sensitive pressure sensors must be located underneath passing waves in waters as deep as 6000 meters. The sensor data must then be transmitted up to a buoy at the water’s surface, where it is relayed to a satellite for distribution to the early warning center. Transmitting data through miles of water has proven difficult, however: sound waves, while unique in being able to travel long distances through water, reverberate and can destructively interfere with one another as they travel, compromising the accuracy of information.
