273:, a wealthy and powerful ruler of Cancuén who died around 800 AD, the same time as the royal family became extinct and approximately fifty years before the city was abandoned. It is observed that Maax had been buried in a shallow, unmarked grave "like a beggar", clear cut evidence that the killings were more than murder.
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Demarest's grave is gradually revealed to be a tiled pool, a type of tomb used for ritual killings, and the sheer number of victims becomes apparent—in all, the remains of 31 men, women and children are found—the archaeologists on site are given pause. The victims' demise had none of the hallmarks
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After traces of a fetus are found, the narrator announces this can only be the extermination of a family. A grisly account is given of the decline of the Maya civilisation. Within decades of a city-state collapsing displaced persons would sweep through the surrounding regions, preying upon merchants
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They are more surprised by the state in which the victims had been buried. The motive was not plundering, as they died wearing jade jewellery. Instead, individuals may have been hunted down and slaughtered because the attackers left their weapons with the corpses and viciously stabbed the children,
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in Cancuén, the riches that would have been imported by the aristocrats of the city, and some of the finds already made. A further five minutes is spent covering the archaeologists searching for graves, before cutting to a site on the border of the city believed to contain a 12 m grave.
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using largely unguarded trade routes, which led to the peasants turning traitor and causing widespread violence. There are several scenarios which could explain a revenge attack of this scale, but it seems most likely that the lower classes of Cancuén had revolted.
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Half-way through the programme a royal burial is found 80 yards away from the pool, in the jungle outside of the city limits. The skeleton is identified as the remains of
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Scholars had recently come to believe that Cancuén was not only a secular society, but that its rulers also avoided war—"bobbing and weaving" alliances.
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it is discovered that they were not captured slaves at all but nobility. The shape of the child victims' skulls, with the foreheads compressed into the
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The first twenty or so minutes of the documentary is vivid introductory footage showing the lay of the land, a re-enactment of a bartering
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many of whom were under the age of twelve (adulthood), in the back of the neck. One skeleton suggests that the blade entered under the
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magazine presents them as evidence of the beginning of the end of the Maya city-states.
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to form a slender rise, is found exclusively in Maya children of noble birth.
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Hartigan, Rachel (18 September 2000). "Pleasure Palace in the Vines".
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Geographic (American TV channel) original programming
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310:(2): pp. 97-109. Retrieved 2009-09-02.
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598:Documentary films about Mesoamerica
488:Journey to the Edge of the Universe
338:"A 'strange and fascinating' find"
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297:Gugliotta, Guy (August 2007). "
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367:Last Days of the Maya
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512:JFK: The Lost Bullet
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101:90 minutes
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