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 · last 12 months

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 Rise of the Ancient Maya · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

Let's go back.

Tell me about the Maya.

So I think the way to think of the Maya is there's this collection of similarities, but there's a lot of diversity and a lot of different interactions.

So for the ancient Maya, there are over three dozen Maya languages, and there's clearly a lot of variation as you go north, south, east, and west across the region.

When they're talking, there's some similarities.

So it's kind of like...

different accents but exaggerated to the point where sometimes you can't communicate but a lot of the common words are similar.

So they're able to communicate to some degree but there's some similar practices and it's sort of this central household compound, it's the idea of this sort of family ritual and activities, and then it's also building up some of these large stone architecture and pyramids and sort of the system like you see at Karakol with a couple variants for other regions.

So no, there's never one Maya emperor who's ruling all the way from the top of Yucatan, hitting the Gulf of Mexico, all the way down to the Pacific coast past Highland Guatemala.

Yeah, and I'd say for the Maya, you have this kind of regional state system where there are shifts between which city is within which polity, which type of organization.

It's a very slow process that happens over generations.

So for Karakol, we know that there are people starting to settle this landscape around 600 BC, and they're founding their households.

They're starting to put them in place.

You don't have monumental construction, though, until 360 BC.

When I say, you know, jungle or tropics, you probably think of a place that's hot, that's maybe a little less productive, or you think of lots of wildlife and very little human interactivity.

But what we've been finding archaeologically, not just in Mesoamerica with the Maya, but also in tropical parts of Africa or Southeast Asia, is there are these really sprawling, massive tropical cities and peoples who figured out how to unlock the potential of those tropical environments.

So for the Maya, in some places they're building agricultural terraces and they're building up this huge system of terraces where at Karakol, by the city's height, it's over 160 square kilometers.

In other parts, they're putting in raised fields instead of wetlands, or they're using other things that are more like chinampas from the Aztec.

And so you're seeing all of these different choices and decisions that is making the landscape significantly more productive.

Exactly.

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