Why Nations Fail

particular date in the Long Count. The planet Venus was
the celestial patron of war, and the Mayas regarded some
phases of the planet’s orbit as particularly auspicious for
waging war. The glyph that indicated warfare, known as
“star wars” by archaeologists, shows a star showering the
earth with a liquid that could be water or blood. The
inscriptions also reveal patterns of alliance and
competition. There were long contests for power between
the larger states, such as Tikal, Calakmul, Copán, and
Palenque, and these subjugated smaller states into a
vassal status. Evidence for this comes from glyphs marking
royal accessions. During this period, they start indicating
that the smaller states were now being dominated by
another, outside ruler.
Map 10 (
this page
) shows the main Maya cities and the
various patterns of contact between them as reconstructed
by the archaeologists Nikolai Grube and Simon Martin.
These patterns indicate that though the large cities such as
Calakmul, Dos Pilas, Piedras Negras, and Yaxchilan had
extensive diplomatic contacts, some were often dominated
by others and they also fought each other.
The overwhelming fact about the Maya collapse is that it
coincides with the overthrow of the political model based
on the 
k’uhul ajaw
. We saw in Copán that after Yax Pasaj’s
death in 
AD
810 there were no more kings. At around this
time the royal palaces were abandoned. Twenty miles to
the north of Copán, in the city of Quiriguá, the last king,
Jade Sky, ascended to the throne between 
AD
795 and
800. The last dated monument is from 
AD
810 by the Long
Count, the same year that Yax Pasaj died. The city was
abandoned soon after. Throughout the Maya area the story
is the same; the political institutions that had provided the
context for the expansion of trade, agriculture, and
population vanished. Royal courts did not function,
monuments and temples were not carved, and palaces
were emptied. As political and social institutions unraveled,
reversing the process of state centralization, the economy
contracted and the population fell.
In some cases the major centers collapsed from
widespread violence. The Petexbatun region of Guatemala
—where the great temples were subsequently pulled down

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and the stone used to build extensive defensive walls—
provides one vivid example. As we’ll see in the next
chapter, it was very similar to what happened in the later
Roman Empire. Later, even in places such as Copán,
where there are fewer signs of violence at the time of the
collapse, many monuments were defaced or destroyed. In
some places the elite remained even after the initial
overthrow of the 
k’uhul ajaw
. In Copán there is evidence of
the elite continuing to erect new buildings for at least
another two hundred years before they also disappeared.
Elsewhere elites seem to have gone at the same time as
the divine lord.
Existing archaeological evidence does not allow us to
reach a definitive conclusion about why the 
k’uhul ajaw
and
elites surrounding him were overthrown and the institutions
that had created the Maya Classical Era collapsed. We

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know this took place in the context of intensified inter-city
warfare, and it seems likely that opposition and rebellion
within the cities, perhaps led by different factions of the
elite, overthrew the institution.
Though the extractive institutions that the Mayas created
produced sufficient wealth for the cities to flourish and the
elite to become wealthy and generate great art and
monumental buildings, the system was not stable. The
extractive institutions upon which this narrow elite ruled
created extensive inequality, and thus the potential for
infighting between those who could benefit from the wealth
extracted from the people. This conflict ultimately led to the
undoing of the Maya civilization.