Dr Adrian Chase

speaker

354 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Adrian Chase’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · The Fall of the Ancient Maya · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

You can't get them anymore.

You've had someone else tell you that there's opportunities out north.

And so you pack up and leave.

Okay.

And as enough people pack up and leave, you start having the tax base you need to maintain all of the roads, all the plazas.

So the system ends up having this huge issue, probably like a lot of modern cities, where the population declines and they were planning to grow forever.

So during most of Karakol's history, it's on the major east-west trade routes.

And then in this terminal classic right before 900, it's now at the end of the trade route.

And you really want to be in the middle where all the goods are moving back and forth.

Yeah, so they go from being in the center of that east-west nexus to the end where you have to go all the way upriver to go from the coastal trade.

And the coastal trade takes off for the post-classic.

When the Spanish are coming across, they document Maya traders in canoes hauling all sorts of goods.

And these are canoes with 30 people all helping row or move it around, along with tons of cargo, which could be precious goods, textiles, cacao.

I think they even documented some metalworking on one of the canoes.

Oh, wow.

And at the same time, you do actually see some intense violence on the sites.

Near the end at Karakol, before 900, let's say 880s, 890s, you see violence on the top of Kana.

Kana, the main palace at Karakol, it's the place where the ruler's family lived, and there were people living there even while there were no monuments being erected, which suggests that there's some residual rulership still living up there.

But Haute-Couille is up there in his descendants, or his replacements.

The hieroglyphic record actually gets a little funny.

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