Doomed Dolphin Speaks to New York's Vibrant Wildlife

By the time New Yorkers spied a dolphin swimming through the superfund sludge of the Gowanus Canal last Friday, it was too late. The marine mammal didn't even survive long enough for a rescue plan to come together. First sighted on Friday afternoon, the dolphin perished at 6:00 p.m.
The reason the marine mammal died, and why the dolphin swam up the polluted waterway in the first place, is as yet unknown. But the sad story of the wayward creature highlights the strange nature of New York City, the global epitome of urbanity. Hidden within Gotham are native carnivores, marine mammals, and even species that have scarcely been seen before.

Marine mammals are arguably the most high-profile of New York City's wild residents and visitors. The Gowanus Canal dolphin was only the latest to venture within city limits. Just a month ago, a 60-foot-long finback whale(Balaenoptera physalus) became stranded in the Rockaway Inlet of Queens. The emaciated animal died the day after it was discovered.

There seems to be no singular reason explaining why marine mammals such as the Gowanus dolphin and Queens' finback whale wander up the city's rivers or strand on beaches. Each case is unique. But not all the city's marine mammal visitors suffer terrible fates.

In 2006, a hefty manatee (Trichechus spp.) took a long jaunt from its Florida home up the East Coast, including a detour down New York's Hudson River. The sirenian survived the trip, continuing on to Cape Cod before reportedly turning back south to a destination unknown. Hopefully the manatee didn't encounter any great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) on the return journey, a marine predator we know patrols the waters off New York.

Of course, New York City's whales, seals, and occasional manatee can only skirt the city along its shores and canals. You likely won't see a seal caterpillaring its way along Broadway.

Yet the city's interior also hosts a strange accumulation of wildlife, including native animals that are carving out spaces for themselves in the concrete corridors and exotic species that we have introduced to city life.

Coyotes (Canis latrans) may be the cleverest of New York City's hidden wildlife. Thanks to camera traps, and the occasional police chase through Lower Manhattan, researchers are keeping track of the wily canids and studying how they are so successfully taking up residence in many of the nation's cities. "Most small, urban parks will likely hold a pair and their offspring at most—coyotes are very territorial," said Cornell University ecologist Paul Curtis.

The secretive carnivorans bring a welcome element to urban neighborhoods—an appetite for rodents—and are experts at cracking open new niches alongside people.

Black bears (Ursus americanus) may be next. The bears have proliferated in northern New Jersey in recent years, and in 2010, a black bear came within three miles of the George Washington Bridge, a major thoroughfare between New Jersey and Manhattan. The bear obviously would have eschewed rush hour traffic and the tolls, but the local population is so bountiful that it's not unreasonable to think some enterprising bear might eventually wander into the big city.

Strangely, you may actually be more likely to run into a crocodylian predator in New York City than a black bear. New Yorkers have a nagging habit of importing—and losing—alligator-like caimans and other reptiles within the city.

In 2010, an 18-inch long caiman took refuge under a parked Datsun in Astoria, Queens. No one knows how the reptile wound up on the street, but given the trend of owners buying cute crocodylians and later dumping them, someone may have abandoned the poor little caiman.

This would hardly be the first time. In 2006, another little caiman was found in the leaf litter behind Brooklyn's Spring Creek Towers, while "Damon the Caiman" swam around a Central Park lake in the summer of 2001. These caimans are only some of the most famous—according to a New York Timesreport, the Brooklyn-based Animal Care and Control deals with about ten caimans each year.

Many other unusual and exotic animals have romped through New York. Under some of their most notable animal celebrities, the city's Parks and Recreation department lists guinea pigs, boa snakes, and even a tiger that escaped from a circus in 2004 and ran down Jackie Robinson Parkway before his owners were able to get him back.

The Big Apple even contains species that have never been documented before. No, not the ballyhooed "Montauk Monster"—actually a rotted raccoon—but a distinct species of leopard frog. Described early this year, the cryptic amphibian was given away by its unique mating call.

superfund -（美国政府的）有毒废物堆场污染清除基金
sludge - 泥浆，沉淀物
rescue - 救援；救助
perish - 死，枯萎
wayward - 意料不到的，任性的
epitome - 典型，缩影
urbanity - 优雅
Gotham - 纽约市的别称
carnivore - 肉食者
high-profile - 高调的
venture - 冒险
city limits - 城市范围
finback whale - 长须鲸
strand -触礁
emaciated - 憔悴的
singular - 突出的，奇特的，单数的
wander - 漫游，迷路
hefty - 重的
manatee - 海牛      sirenian - 海牛类
jaunt - 远足
detour - 绕道
destination - 目的地
patrol - 巡视，巡查
skirt - 围绕
concrete - 具体的，实际的
coyote - 北美草原狼
trap - 陷阱
chase - 追捕
wily - 狡猾的
canid - 犬科动物
secretive - 遮遮掩掩的，秘密的
carnivoran - 肉食动物
appetite - 食欲，求知欲
rodent - 啮齿目动物
niche - 适合的位置，壁龛
proliferate - 激增
thoroughfare - 道路，往来，通行
eschew - 有意避开
bountiful - 慷慨的，丰富的
enterprising - 喜欢冒险的，由进取心的
crocodylian - 鳄目的
nagging - 挑剔的，唠叨的
alligator - 短吻鳄
caiman 凯门鳄
romp - 轻易成功，嬉笑玩闹
celebrity - 名声
circus - 马戏团
ballyhoo - 鼓吹
rotted - 破损的
raccoon - 浣熊
leopard - 豹
cryptic - 秘密的
amphibian - 爬行动物
given away - 泄露

Urban Heat May Warm Faraway Places

The massive amounts of heat produced by cities may be heating up rural areas 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away, atmospheric researchers have found in a new modeling study.

Scientists have long invoked the "urban island heat effect" to explain why cities are generally hotter than suburban and rural areas. More people, as well as more cars, houses, and paved surfaces, turn energy into heat, which is radiated into the atmosphere.

But new modeling research from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, suggests that cities in the Northern Hemisphere can also increase the heat of faraway rural places up to 1.8ºF (1°C)—a substantial aggregate increase.

The reason comes down to global air flow.

Heat produced by cars and people travels about 2,500 feet (4,023 kilometers) into the atmosphere, where it disturbs part of the jet stream that continually circulates a belt of cool air around the top of the planet. When hot air intercepts the jet stream, it pushes the belt upward, allowing warmer air from the Equator to come farther north, warming parts of northern Europe and North America that normally would have been cooler.

Over the Northern Hemisphere, 86 major metropolitan areas cover only 1.27 percent of the Earth's surface. But those areas consume 6.7 terawatts of energy annually—representing 42 percent of annual global consumption.

Those cities' influence on global climate is therefore magnified, according to the study, published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Until now, climate researchers have mostly pointed to greenhouse gasses as the sole cause of climate change. But the planet has been warming in some areas faster than models have predicted.

The impacts of urban heat produced by energy consumption may account for some of that extra warming, said Guang Zhang, a meteorologist at Scripps who conducted the study: "Essentially, we are now able to account for a missing part of the warming."

Zhang found that the areas most significantly impacted by this urban heat effect were Siberia and northern Canada, which can see temperatures rise 1.4º to 1.8°F (0.8° to 1°C) due to urban heat in faraway cities like New York or San Francisco.

Further south, areas like Minnesota and Michigan might see a 0.5°F (0.3°C) increase. The modeling was conducted with data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a leading source of global climate data.

While it's true that the Earth's aggregate climate affects every spot on the planet, the impacts of city heat were most pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere, where nearly 90 percent of the global population lives. And the most dramatic cool usually comes in the fall, the researchers said, for reasons that can't yet be fully explained.

radiate - 发出/放出（光热等）
substantial - 实质的
aggregate - 集合的，统计的
disturb - 干扰
intercept - 遮挡
consume  - 消费    consumption  （n.）
magnify - 放大，夸张
sole - 唯一的，单独的
account for - 说明
conduct - 带领，实施

Hollies Get Prickly for a Reason

With shiny evergreen leaves and bright red berries, holly trees are a naturally festive decoration seen throughout the Christmas season.

They're famously sharp. But not all holly leaves are prickly, even on the same tree. And scientists now think they know how the plants are able to make sharper leaves, seemingly at will. 

A new study published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society suggests leaf variations on a single tree are the combined result of animals browsing on them and the trees' swift molecular response to that sort of environmental pressure.

Carlos Herrera of the National Research Council of Spain led the study in southeastern Spain. He and his team investigated the European holly tree, Ilex aquifolium. Hollies, like other plants, can make different types of leaves at the same time. This is called heterophylly. Out of the 40 holly trees they studied, 39 trees displayed different kinds of leaves, both prickly and smooth.

Some trees looked like they had been browsed upon by wild goats and deer. On those trees, the lower 8 feet (2.5 meters) had more prickly leaves, while higher up the leaves tended to be smooth. Scientists wanted to figure out how the holly trees could make the change in leaf shape so quickly.

All of the leaves on a tree are genetic twins and share exactly the same DNA sequence. By looking in the DNA for traces of a chemical process called methylation, which modifies DNA but doesn't alter the organism's genetic sequence, the team could determine whether leaf variation was a response to environmental or genetic changes. They found a relationship between recent browsing by animals, the growth of prickly leaves, and methylation.

"In holly, what we found is that the DNA of prickly leaves was significantly less methylated than prickless leaves, and from this we inferred that methylation changes are ultimately responsible for leaf shape changes," Herrera said. "The novelty of our study is that we show that these well-known changes in leaf type are associated with differences in DNA methylation patterns, that is, epigenetic changes that do not depend on variation in the sequence of DNA."

"Heterophylly is an obvious feature of a well-known species, and this has been ascribed to browsing. However, until now, no one has been able to come up with a mechanism for how this occurs," said Mike Fay, chief editor of the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society and head of genetics at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. "With this new study, we are now one major step forward towards understanding how."

Epigenetic changes take place independently of variation in the genetic DNA sequence. 

"This has clear and important implications for plant conservation," Herrera said. In natural populations that have their genetic variation depleted by habitat loss, the ability to respond quickly, without waiting for slower DNA changes, could help organisms survive accelerated environmental change. The plants' adaptability, he says, is an "optimistic note" amidst so many conservation concerns.

festive - 祝贺的，节日气氛的
prickly - 多刺的，棘手的
seemingly - 表面上看
at will - 任意，随意
browse - 吃草/树叶，浏览
swift - 迅速的；迅速地
council - 评议会，会议
investigate - 调查
heterophylly - 异形叶性
methylation - 甲基化作用
novelty - 新奇，新奇的事物
epigenetic - 后生的（指DNA变化）
ascribe - 归因于
come up with - 发现（答案）
mechanism - 机理
conservation - 保存，管理
deplete - （资源等）枯竭
optimistic - 乐观的
amidst - 在。。。中
concern - 重要的事情，关系

Hubble Discovers Oldest Known Galaxy

The Hubble space telescope has discovered seven primitive galaxies formed in the earliest days of the cosmos, including one believed to be the oldest ever detected.

The discovery, announced Wednesday, is part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field campaign to determine how and when galaxies first assembled following the Big Bang.

"This 'cosmic dawn' was not a single, dramatic event," said astrophysicist Richard Ellis with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Rather, galaxies appear to have been formed over hundreds of millions of years.

Ellis led a team that used Hubble to look at one small section of the sky for a hundred hours. The grainy images of faint galaxies include one researchers determined to be from a period 380 million years after the onset of the universe—the closest in time to the Big Bang ever observed.

The cosmos is about 13.7 billion years old, so the newly discovered galaxy was present when the universe was 4 percent of its current age. The other six galaxies were sending out light from between 380 million and 600 million years after the Big Bang. 

Baby Pictures

The images are "like the first ultrasounds of [an] infant," said Abraham Loeb, a specialist in the early cosmos at Harvard University. "These are the building blocks of the galaxies we now have."

These early galaxies were a thousand times denser than galaxies are now and were much closer together as well, Ellis said. But they were also less luminous than later galaxies.

The team used a set of four filters to analyze the near infrared wavelengths captured by Hubble Wide Field Camera 3, and estimated the galaxies' distances from Earth by studying their colors. At a NASA teleconference, team members said they had pushed Hubble's detection capabilities about as far as they could go and would most likely not be able to identify galaxies from further back in time until the James Webb Space Telescope launches toward the end of the decade.

"Although we may have reached back as far as Hubble will see, Hubble has set the stage for Webb," said team member Anton Koekemoer of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Our work indicates there is a rich field of even earlier galaxies that Webb will be able to study."

primitive - 原始的，初期的
detect - 发现，检测出
assemble - 组成，聚集
astrophysicist - 天体物理学者
grainy - 多粒的，粒状的
faint - （声色光等）弱的，暗淡的
onset - 开始，发病，攻击
specialist - 专家
luminous - 发光的，明亮的
filter - 过滤器，滤色镜
infrared - 红外线的
capability - 能力
launch - 发射，发动

Maya Rise and Fall (14)

FOR A TIME, fleeing nobles could find refuge in Cancuén, a quiet port at the headwaters of the Pasión River. Even as downriver cities sank into chaos during the eighth century, Cancuén prospered by trading luxury items and providing sumptuous lodgings for elite visitors. The architect of this golden age was King Taj Chan Ahk, who came to power in 757 at the age of 15. Cancuén had a long history as a strategic trading post, but Taj Chan Ahk transformed the city into a stunning ceremonial center. Its heart was a 270,000-square-foot (25,000 square meters), three-story royal palace with vaulted ceilings and 11 courtyards, made of solid limestone and elegantly placed on a riverside promontory. It was a perfect stage for a Maya god-king, and Taj Chan Ahk was master of the role, even as it was dying out elsewhere.

There is no evidence that Taj Chan Ahk ever fought a war or even won a battle. Instead he managed to dominate the upper Pasión Valley for nearly 40 years by coaxing advantage through patronage and alliances. An altar monument at Cancuén dated 790 shows him in action, engaged in a ceremonial ball game with an unknown noble, perhaps to celebrate a treaty or a state visit.

Taj Chan Ahk died in 795 and was succeeded by his son Kan Maax, who sought to trump his father by expanding the palace. But pomp and ritual—the old trappings of kingship—could no longer hold the Maya universe together. Within five years the spreading chaos had reached the gates of the city. In one terrible day its glory winked out, another light extinguished in the world of the Classic Maya.

(END)


refuge - 避难，保护
sumptuous - 高价的，豪华的
lodging - 住宿
architect - 创造者，设计者，建筑师
strategic - 战略上的
trading post - （与原住民的）交易所
stunning - 出色的
promontory - 岬
coax - 轻轻弄好，哄骗
patronage - 后援，保护
altar - 祭台
engage in - 参与，从事
treaty - 条约
state visit - 正式访问
trump - 胜过，打出王牌
pomp - 华丽，虚荣
trapping - 诱骗

Maya Rise and Fall (13)

In 679 he attacked his native city. "Mountains of skulls were piled up, and blood flowed," the stairway records. Balaj Chan Kawiil triumphed, and his brother died in the battle. The victory brought Calakmul to apogee and transformed Dos Pilas into the overlord of the Petexbatún, the southwestern part of the Petén.

Tikal survived, rebuilt, and less than 20 years later attacked and defeated Calakmul. Stucco sculpture at Tikal's central acropolis depicts a Calakmul noble awaiting sacrifice. It was a defeat from which Calakmul never fully recovered, but Tikal itself was never the same after the wars finally concluded. "Even though Tikal wins in the end," says the University of Pennsylvania's Robert Sharer, "it's never in shape to control everything."

What happened next is not entirely clear. Calakmul's power was broken, yet its allies, including Dos Pilas, continued to battle Tikal in Calakmul's name. Dos Pilas consolidated its hegemony in the Petexbatún through alliances and war. Its rulers commissioned new monuments and built a second capital.

But in 761 Dos Pilas's luck ran out. Former allies and vassals conquered the city and sent its ruler into exile. Dos Pilas would never be resettled, and with its obliteration the Maya world crossed a divide. Instead of reestablishing order, wars would create greater disorder; instead of one ruler emerging triumphant from a decisive battle, each conflict simply created more pretenders. Victories, instead of inspiring new monuments and temples, were transient and, increasingly, unremarked. Defeats spurred desperate citizens to rip apart their ceremonial buildings, using the stones and fill to build redoubts in hopes of staving off future invaders. Cities no longer rebuilt and rebounded. They simply ceased to exist.Smaller states tried to assert themselves in the spreading chaos, but none could. Instead, the warring states sought temporary advantage in a land of dwindling resources. The commoners probably hid, fled, or died.



skull - 头盖骨
pile - 堆积
apogee - 最高点
acropolis - 卫城
sacrifice - 牺牲
conclude - 结束
consolidate - 巩固，统合
hegemony - 主导权，霸权
conquer - 征服
obliteration - 消去
triumphant - 成功的，得意的
pretender - 窥视王位的人
inspire - 激励
transient - 短暂过客
rip - 撕裂
redoubt - 要塞
stave off - 避免，阻止
invader - 入侵者
assert - 维护，主张
chaos - 大混乱
warring - 敌对的，交战的
dwindle - 不断减少
flee （fled，fled） - 逃走

Maya Rise and Fall (12)

Simon Martin, with Nikolai Grube of the University of Bonn, compares the Tikal-Calakmul rivalry to the superpower struggle of the 20th century, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to outdo each other in fields ranging from weaponry to space travel. With neither side ever able to gain the upper hand, the Cold War arguably brought stability, and so did the standoff in the Maya world. "There was a certain degree of destruction" because of the rivalry, says Guatemalan archaeologist Héctor Escobedo. "But there was also equilibrium."

IT DID NOT LAST. Martin suggests the balance may have been intrinsically unstable, like the competition among the city-states of ancient Greece, or the nervous grappling between North and South in the United States prior to the Civil War. Or perhaps an overstressed environment finally caught up with the proud Maya powers, bringing a new edge of desperation to their rivalry. Either way, the unraveling began at the small garrison state of Dos Pilas, near the Pasión River downstream of Cancuén.

In 630 Tikal, trying to reassert a presence along Pasión River trade routes increasingly dominated by Calakmul, expanded an existing outpost near two large springs—pilas, in Spanish. The site had little else to recommend it. Dos Pilas grew no crops and sold nothing. Scholars call it a "predator state" that depended on tribute from the surrounding countryside. War, for Dos Pilas, was not only a ritual to glorify kings and appease gods. War was what Dos Pilas did to survive.

The kingdom's history of violence and duplicity began when Tikal installed one of its princes, Balaj Chan Kawiil, as Dos Pilas's ruler in 635. The garrison slapped together a fancy-looking capital for the young prince, using carved facades to mask loose and unstable construction fill. But in 658 Calakmul overran Dos Pilas and drove Balaj Chan Kawiil into exile.

We know the next chapter thanks to a thunderstorm that toppled a tree at Dos Pilas six years ago, exposing a carved stairway hidden beneath its roots. Inscriptions on the stairway reveal that Balaj Chan Kawiil returned two years after his exile—but as a Calakmul surrogate. Dos Pilas's turncoat king helped Calakmul cement its control over the Pasión Valley during the next two decades. Then Calakmul delivered fateful news. Its rulers ordered Balaj Chan Kawiil to fight his brother in Tikal itself.


standoff - 僵局，避开
destruction - 破坏，灭绝
equilibrium - 均衡
intrinsically - 本质上地
grapple - 搏斗
unravel - 揭开，拆散
garrison - 要塞，屯驻地
reassert - 重申
outpost - 前哨，边境殖民地
appease - 抚慰
duplicity - 欺诈，双重性
facade - 外观
exile - 流亡；流放
topple - 打倒；倒下
surrogate - 代理人
turncoat - 叛徒
fateful -决定命运的

Maya Rise and Fall (11)

When bad times came, there was little the kuhul ajaw could do to help their people. Monoculture farming—growing one staple food crop that could be accumulated and stored for hard times or for trade—could not be sustained in the rain forest. Instead, each city-state produced small quantities of many different food items, such as maize, beans, squash, and cacao. There was enough, at least at first, to feed the kingdom, but little left over.

Meanwhile, Maya society was growing dangerously top heavy. Over time, elite polygamy and intermarriage among royal families swelled the ruling class. The lords demanded jade, shells, feathers from the exotic quetzal bird, fancy ceramics, and other expensive ceremonial accoutrements to affirm their status in the Maya cosmos. A king who could not meet the requirements of his relatives risked alienating them.

The traditional rivalry among states only made matters worse. The kuhul ajaw strove to outdo their neighbors, building bigger temples and more elegant palaces and staging more elaborate public pageants. All of this required more labor, which required larger populations and, perhaps, more wars to exact tribute in forced labor from fallen enemies. Overtaxed, the Maya political system began to falter.


The greatest rivalry of all helped propel the Classic Maya to their peak—and then tore their world apart. Beginning in the fifth century, the city-state of Tikal, probably bolstered by an alliance with the great Mexican highland state of Teotihuacan, expanded its influence, enlisting allies and vassal states in a swath southward through the Pasión River Valley to Copán in what is now Honduras. A century later a challenger arose: The northern city-state of Calakmul, in what is now the Mexican lowlands of Campeche, forged an alliance of city-states throughout the Petén, north to the Yucatán and east to what is now Belize. The two great alliances faced off in a rivalry that lasted more than 130 years.

This period marked the golden age of Classic Maya civilization. The kuhul ajaw were in full flower in these two great alliances, competing in art and monuments as well as in frequent but limited wars. Calakmul defeated Tikal in a major battle in 562 but destroyed neither the city nor its population. Eventually Tikal rebounded and defeated Calakmul, subsequently building many of its most spectacular monuments.


monoculture - 单一栽培，单一文化
staple - 主要产物；主要的
polygamy - 一夫多妻
swell - 膨胀，增加
ruling - 支配
accoutrement - 饰品
affirm - 肯定，证实
alienate - 使疏远
strive - 努力
outdo - 胜过
pageant - 盛会
exact - 要求，迫使
tribute - 年贡
falter - 颤抖，摇晃
propel - 推进
bolster - 支持
enlist - 征兵
swath - 细长列，收割的痕迹
forge - 锻造，建立
face off - 对决
defeat - 打败
spectacular - 壮丽的

Maya Rise and Fall (10)

For more than a millennium, the Maya had entrusted their religious and temporal well-being to their god-kings. These leaders displayed their might and majesty in lavish rituals and pageants, in opulent art and architecture, and in written records of their triumphs, inscribed on stone, murals, and ceramics.

The system prospered—indeed, its excesses created the artistic achievements and learning that defined the Maya as one of the ancient world's great cultures—as long as the land could satisfy people's basic needs. This was easy at first when cities were small and resources relatively plentiful, but over time, growing populations, an expanding nobility, and rivalry between the city-states strained the limits of the environment.

Today the Petén, geographically the largest province in Guatemala, has a population of 367,000, living in isolated towns scattered through a forested wilderness. In the eighth century, by some estimates, ten million people lived in the Maya lowlands. The landscape was an almost unbroken fabric of intensely cultivated farms, gardens, and villages, linked by a web of trails and paved causeways connecting monumental city-states.

Maya farmers were well schooled in sophisticated techniques designed to get maximum production from delicate tropical soils. But beginning in the ninth century, studies of lake-bed sediments show, a series of prolonged droughts struck the Maya world, hitting especially hard in cities like Tikal, which depended on rain both for drinking water and to reinvigorate the swampland bajos where farmers grew their crops. River ports like Cancuén might have escaped water shortages, but across much of the Maya region the lake-bed sediments also show ancient layers of eroded soil, testimony to deforestation and overuse of the land.


millennium - 千年
entrust - 委任
temporal - 现世的，时间的
might - 权利
majesty - 威严
lavish - 奢华的，丰富的
pageant - 盛会
opulent - 华丽的
prosper - 繁荣
scatter - 散布于
cultivated - 农耕的
pave - 铺（路）
delicate - 虚弱的，易碎的     The child was in delicate health.
reinvigorate - 使复兴
erode - 侵蚀，腐蚀
testimony - 证明，证言
deforestation - 森林采伐

Maya Rise and Fall (9)

CANCUÉN WAS ONE OF the last major dominoes to fall in the Pasión River Valley, part of the ancient Maya heartland in present-day Guatemala. Many other cities had already met similarly decisive ends, and throughout the southern lowlands of Mesoamerica, what came to be known as the collapse of the Classic Maya was well under way. The civilization that had dominated the region for 500 years was sliding into a prolonged, irrevocable decline.

While warfare obliterated some vibrant city-states, others simply faded. The kuhul ajaw, or holy lords, who had celebrated their every deed in murals, sculpture, and architecture, no longer commissioned new works. Public displays of hieroglyphic writing became scarce, and dates in the Long Count calendar system all but disappeared from monuments. Population fell drastically. Nobles abandoned palaces and squatters moved in, lit cook fires in the old throne rooms, and built lean-tos next to crumbling walls. And then even the squatters left, and the jungle reclaimed what remained.

Elsewhere in the Petén lowlands of Guatemala and in southern Mexico, the collapse took longer. Even as Cancuén fell, rulers of the great city-state of Tikal in the northern Petén were building ceremonial structures. But 30 years later Tikal's population began to drop precipitously as well. Its last dated monument was inscribed in 869. By 1000, the Classic Maya had ceased to exist.

The question has fascinated scholars and the public since 19th-century explorers began discovering "lost cities" in the Petén: How could one of the ancient world's great civilizations simply dissolve?

Early speculation centered on sudden catastrophe, perhaps volcanism or an earthquake or a deadly hurricane. Or perhaps it was a mysterious disease, untraceable today—something like the Black Death in medieval Europe or the smallpox that wiped out Native American populations at the dawn of the colonial age. Modern researchers have discarded these one-event theories, however, because the collapse extended over at least 200 years. "There isn't any single factor that everybody agrees on," says Southern Illinois University's Prudence M. Rice.

Scholars have looked instead at combinations of afflictions in different parts of the Maya world, including overpopulation, environmental damage, famine, and drought. "You come away feeling that anything that can go wrong did," says Rice.

They have also focused on the one thing that appears to have happened everywhere during the prolonged decline: As resources grew scarce, the kuhul ajaw lost their divine luster, and, with it, the confidence of their subjects, both noble and commoner. Instability and desperation in turn fueled more destructive wars. What had been ritualized contests fought for glory or captives turned into spasms of savagery like the one that obliterated Cancuén. Says Simon Martin of the University of Pennsylvania Museum: "The system broke down and ran out of control."


decisive - 决定性的，重大的
collapse - 垮台，倒塌
under way - 进行中的，已开始的
fall / slide into a decline - 走向衰落
irrevocable - 不可改变的
obliterate - 消去
vibrant - 充满生气的，振动的
commission - 订制（艺术品），委任
hieroglyphic - 象形文字的
drastically - 彻底地
squatter - 非法占地者
lean-tos - 披屋
crumble - 粉碎，瓦解
reclaim - 掩埋，收回
precipitously  - 出乎意料地，陡峭地
fascinate - 困扰
dissolve - 分解，解散
speculation - 推测
catastrophe - 大灾难
smallpox - 天花
affliction - 灾难，不幸
famine - 饥荒
divine - 神圣的
luster - 光辉
commoner - 平民
desperation - 自暴自弃
fuel - 刺激，供给燃料
destructive - 破坏性的
spasm - 发作
savagery - 残忍，野蛮

Maya Rise and Fall (8)

Fatal Rivalries

One day in the year 800, the peaceful Maya city of Cancuen reaped the whirlwind. King Kan Maax must have known that trouble was coming, for he had tried to build makeshift breastworks at the approaches to his 200-room palace. He didn't finish in time.

The attackers quickly overran the outskirts of the city and streamed into Cancuen's ritual heart. The speed of the attack is obvious even today. Unfinished construction projects lay in tumbled heaps. Half-carved stone monuments littered the pathways. Pots and bowls were strewn about the palace kitchen.

The invaders took 31 hostages. The jewels and ornaments found with their remains marked them as nobles, perhaps members of Kan Maax's extended family or royal guests from stricken cities elsewhere. The captives included women and children; two of the women were pregnant.

All were led to the ceremonial courtyard of the palace and systematically executed. The killers wielded spears and axes, impaling or decapitating their victims. They laid the corpses in the palace's cistern. Roughly 30 feet (nine meters) long and 10 feet (three meters) deep, it was lined with red stucco and fed by an underground spring. The bodies, accompanied by ceremonial garments and precious ornaments, fit easily. Kan Maax and his queen were not spared. They were buried a hundred yards (90 meters) away in two feet (0.6 meters) of construction fill intended for remodeling the palace. The king still wore his elaborate ceremonial headdress and a mother-of-pearl necklace identifying him as Holy Lord of Cancuen.

No one knows who the killers were or what they sought. Booty apparently did not interest them. Some 3,600 pieces of jade, including several jade boulders, were left untouched; household goods in the palace and ceramics in Cancuén's giant kitchen were undisturbed. But to archaeologists who have dug up the evidence over the past several years, the invaders' message is clear. By depositing the bodies in the cistern, "they poisoned the well," says Vanderbilt University archaeologist Arthur Demarest. They also chipped the faces from all the carved likenesses on Cancuén's stone monuments and pushed them over, facedown. "The site," says Demarest, "was ritually killed."



fatal - 致命的，命运的
reap - 收获
whirlwind - 旋风
makeshift - 临时的，凑合的
breastwork - 临时性低矮防护墙
overrun - 泛滥
tumble - 倒塌
litter - 散乱      The yard was littered with bottles and cans.     No litter.
strew - 散落于
invader - 侵略者
hostage - 人质
ornament - 装饰品
captive - 俘虏
execute - 处死
wield - 挥舞
impale - 刺
decapitate - 斩首
victim - 被害者，牺牲者
corpse - 尸体
cistern - 水槽
garment - 衣服
elaborate - 精巧的
booty - 战利品
boulder - 卵石，巨砾

Maya Rise and Fall (7)

Some Mayanists believe that Tikal was acting as a vassal state for Teotihuacan, expanding its dominion throughout the Maya lowlands, with Fire Is Born acting as a kind of military governor. Others see him less as a conqueror and more as a catalyst who spurred Tikal to expand its own power and influence.

His fate is a mystery. There is no known record of his death, and no evidence that he ever ruled a Maya kingdom. But his prestige lived on. The Waka stela recording his arrival there wasn't erected until a generation later, indicating that even a long-ago visit from the great Fire Is Born was a matter of civic pride.


The Maya were never the same after him. Later rulers transformed Tikal into what Nikolai Grube, and Simon Martin of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, have described as a Maya superpower. And in both religion and art, the Classic Maya began to embrace foreign motifs and themes, adding sophistication and cosmopolitan exuberance to an already flourishing culture.

Soon another political development fed this cultural flowering. In the sixth century, the kan (meaning "snake") lords of Calakmul, a city just north of the Pet�n, began their own expansion. In time Calakmul came to challenge Tikal, and the rivalry split the Maya world. Like the 20th century Cold War, this contest spurred heights of achievement even as it sowed tension and strife. But unlike our own, the Maya Cold War ended in catastrophe.


vassal - 诸侯，下属
dominion - 领土，主权
catalyst - 催化剂
spur - 激励
prestige - 名声，威望
civic - 城市的，市民的
motif - 主题
sophistication - 素养
cosmopolitan - 世界性的
exuberance - 繁茂，丰富
rivalry - 竞争
split - 分裂
sow - 播种
strife - 争斗
catastrophe - 灾难

Maya Rise and Fall (6)

The date is noted on Tikal's now famous Stela 31, which yielded early clues to Fire Is Born's importance when David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin deciphered it in 2000. The second passage on the stela records what happened after the city fell: Tikal's king, Great Jaguar Paw, died that very day, probably at the hands of the vanquishers.

Fire Is Born appears to have dropped whatever pretense he had assumed as a goodwill ambassador. His forces destroyed most of Tikal's existing monuments—stelae put in place by 14 earlier rulers of Tikal. A new era had begun, and later monuments celebrated the victors. Stela 31, erected long after the conquest, describes Fire Is Born as Ochkin Kaloomte, or Lord of the West, probably referring to his origins in Teotihuacan. Some Maya experts have also suggested another meaning: that Fire Is Born represented a faction that had fled to the west—to Teotihuacan—after a coup d'état by Great Jaguar Paw's father years earlier and had now returned to power.

It apparently took Fire Is Born some time to pacify Tikal and its environs. But a year after his arrival, Tikal's monuments record that he presided over the ascension of a new, foreign king. Inscriptions identify him as the son of Spear-thrower Owl, Fire Is Born's patron in Teotihuacan. According to Stela 31, the new king was less than 20 years old, so Fire Is Born probably became Tikal's regent. He was certainly the city's de facto overlord.

In the years that followed the conquest, Tikal itself went on the offensive, expanding its reach across the Maya region. Fire Is Born appears to have masterminded the campaign, or at least inspired it. References to him have been identified in cities as distant as Palenque, more than 150 miles (240 kilometers) to the northwest. But the most poignant testimony to his empire-building comes from Uaxactún, just 12 miles (19 kilometers) from Tikal. There a mural shows a Maya nobleman giving homage to a warrior in Teotihuacan regalia—perhaps one of Fire Is Born's troops. A stela depicting a similar warrior guards a tomb where archaeologists found the remains of two women, one pregnant, a child, and an infant. Freidel and others have concluded that these were the remains of Uaxactún's royal family, slain by Tikal's forces. The king, presumably, was taken to Tikal and sacrificed there.

Decades after the arrival of Fire Is Born and long after he must have died, the aggressive rulers of Tikal continued to invoke Fire Is Born and his patron state, Teotihuacan. In 426, Tikal took over Copán, 170 miles (274 kilometers) to the south in present-day Honduras, and crowned its own king, Kinich Yax Kuk Mo, who became the founder of a new dynasty. A posthumous portrait shows him wearing a costume typical of central Mexico—a reference to Teotihuacan—and like Fire Is Born, he bore the title Lord of the West.



vanquisher - 征服者
pretense - 借口，假装
assume - 假定
conquest - 征服，夺取
faction - 党派
flee （pl.fled） - 逃走 
coup - 政变，成功之举
pacify - 抚慰，实现和平
environ - 周围
preside - 主宰，负责
ascension - 上升，升职
regent - 摄政
facto - 事实上
overlord - 最高领主，霸主
offensive - 攻击的，无礼的
mastermind - 谋划
homage - 效忠
regalia - 勋章，王位的象征
guard - 保护，守卫
slay - 杀害    （slay, slew, slain ）
presumably - 可能
sacrifice - 牺牲
crown - 加冕
posthumous - 死后的
bear - 承担，生育     （bear, bore, borne）

Maya Rise and Fall (5)

Fire Is Born's soldiers were probably shock troops, designed principally to display his bona fides and demonstrate good faith. He needed reinforcements, and he had come to Waka to get them. In return, he could offer the goodwill of his patron, a mysterious ruler known from inscriptions as Spear-thrower Owl, probably a highland king, perhaps even the lord of Teotihuacan.

Waka's ruler, Sun-faced Jaguar, apparently welcomed Fire Is Born. Based on hints in texts from Waka and other sources, Freidel, project co-director Héctor Escobedo, and epigrapher Stanley Guenter suggest that the two rulers cemented their alliance by building a fire shrine to house the sacred flame of Teotihuacan.

Along with moral support, Fire Is Born probably secured troops. His expeditionary force likely carried the spear-throwers and javelins typical of Teotihuacan and wore backshields covered with glittery pyrite, perhaps meant to dazzle the enemy when the soldiers spun around to hurl their weapons. Now warriors from the Petén, equipped with stone axes and short stabbing spears, swelled their ranks. As armor, many wore cotton vests stuffed with rock salt. Eleven hundred years later, the Spanish conquistadores shed their own metal armor in the sweltering rain forest in favor of these Maya "flak jackets."

The military expedition most likely set out for Tikal in war canoes, heading east, up the San Pedro River. Reaching the headwaters, the soldiers disembarked and marched either along the river or on the canyon rim overlooking it.

Garrisons probably dotted the route. News of the advancing column must have reached Tikal, and somewhere along the stretch of riverbank and roadway, perhaps at a break in the cliffs about 16 miles (26 kilometers) from the city, Tikal's army tried to stop Fire Is Born's advance. Inscribed slabs, called stelae, later erected at Tikal suggest that the defenders were routed. Fire Is Born's forces continued their march on the city. By January 16, 378—barely a week after his arrival in Waka—the conqueror was in Tikal.


bona fides - 诚意
demonstrate - 宣传
reinforcement - 增援
goodwill - 善意，信用
patron - 主人，后援者
inscription - 铭文
moral - 道德上的
expeditionary - 远征的
javelin - 标枪
glittery - 闪烁的
pyrite - 黄铁矿
dazzle - 使眩目
spun - 旋转
hurl - 猛投
stabbing - 尖利的
swell - 扩大
armor - 装甲部队，甲胄
vest - 防护衣，马甲
conquistador - 征服者    conqueror - 征服者
shed - 脱去
swelter - 热得难受
in favor of - 以。。。取代，赞成
set out - 出发
disembark - 登陆
canyon - 峡谷
rim - 边缘
garrison - 守卫队，要塞
dot - 散布
stretch - 延伸
slab - 厚板
stele （pl. stelae) - 纪念石柱，石碑
erect - 树立
rout - 使溃败