THE FALL OF THE OLD EMPIRE. 443 
discovered they have always been found buried in a dense forest, their 
temples, pyramids, courts, and plazas overgrown with large trees. These 
trees have driven their roots deep into the masonry of the different buildings, 
literally prying the walls apart, causing the collapse of the roofs, the dis- 
memberment of the stairways, and the general destruction and reduction to 
mounds of both buildings and substructures. In the decay of the trees the 
monuments suffer. Ifa large tree in falling strikes a stela, as has frequently 
happened, it either breaks it into pieces, the usual case, or uproots it entire. 
The writer has examined several score of such cases, and in the great major- 
ity the monument is broken into at least two pieces by the blow, and is not 
infrequently badly shattered. 
If the overthrowal of the monuments had been caused by earthquakes, 
more would be simply uprooted and fewer broken than is actually the case, 
and even granting that some of the present destruction has been brought 
about by earthquakes, it appears unlikely that this agency alone would have 
been sufficient to have caused the Maya to completely abandon their cities, in 
the embellishment of which they had spent such prodigious efforts and where 
they had lived for four or five centuries, and would have forced them to 
seek new homes so far distant. Such an abandonment is contrary to human 
practices under similar conditions elsewhere in the world; indeed, no more 
distant from the southern Maya area than Guatemala itself, the capital of 
which has been thrice destroyed by earthquakes and thrice rebuilt, or El Sal- 
vador, the capital of which is said to have been destroyed sixteen times. Cities 
have been abandoned and possibly never rebuilt because of destruction by 
earthquakes, but whole countries never, and since the vegetation now 
covering the sites of the Maya cities is alone sufficient to account for their 
destruction, the writer believes the seismic hypothesis may be rejected. 
Joyce suggests that war waged against the Maya by tribes to the north- 
west brought about the extinction of the Old Empire civilization: 
“The Maya, to judge from the monuments, had enjoyed centuries of peace, 
and only in the northeast and north do we find reliefs which give any hint of war. 
But these may be significant and no doubt the decline of the old culture was due to 
pressure exercised by their northern neighbors, a pressure which had its origin in 
the steady southerly drift of tribes from regions considerably farther north, and 
which led to the occupation of the Mexican valley by the Nahua-speaking Toltec.””! 
This conclusion, as Joyce himself concedes, however, is counter to the 
bulk of the evidence from the Old Empire reliefs. At Copan and Quirigua, 
for example, the principal subject treated is a human figure, deity, ruler, or 
priest, magnificently garbed and holding in his hands emblems of civil or 
religious authority. At Palenque and Yaxchilan, religious ceremonies, 
sacrifices, self-torture, etc., are set forth; and at Tikal and many other cities, 
human or divine figures are again the subjects portrayed. 
At some of the northern cities the principal figures stand on the backs 
of crouching human-beings who have been identified as captives, and at 

1 Joyce, 1914, pp. 364, 365. 
