with special glyphs indicating that a war took place at a 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