As a seven-year-old, Francisco Estrada-Belli was afraid all of history would have been discovered by the time he was old enough to contribute. The year was 1970 and he and his parents had come from Rome to visit relatives in the Central American country of Guatemala. On the trip, they visited the ancient Maya ruins at Tikal. “I was completely mesmerised,” Estrada-Belli told me recently. “It was jungle everywhere, there were animals, and then these enormous, majestic temples. I asked questions but felt the answers were not good enough. I decided there and then that I wanted to be answering them.”
Fifty-five years later, Estrada-Belli is now one of the archaeologists helping to rewrite the history of the Maya peoples who built Tikal. Thanks to technological advances, we are entering a new age of discovery in the field of ancient history. Improved DNA analysis, advances in plant and climate science, soil and isotope chemistry, linguistics and other techniques such as a laser mapping technology called Lidar, are overturning long-held beliefs. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to Maya archaeology.
Last year, Estrada-Belli’s team, including his Tulane University colleague Marcello A Canuto, published a study with a central finding that would have seemed, just a few years ago, like an outrageously speculative overestimate. When Estrada-Belli first came to Tikal as a child, the best estimate for the classic-era (AD600-900) population of the surrounding Maya lowlands – encompassing present day southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala – would have been about 2 million people. Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million. That is more than five times the area’s current population. This would mean that more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire – all crammed into an area a third of the size.
