The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya, David Stuart, 2026, Princeton University Press
We know more about Classic Maya geopolitics circa 800CE than we do about much of early medieval Europe at about the same time, says David Stuart.
Yet there remains an invisibility about pre-Columbian history that can probably only be explained by persistent Eurocentrism in academia and the discipline of history itself.
As Stuart points out: “Put simply, the Americas have for too long been disregarded within the world’s collective sense of its own deeper history.”
This leading authority on the Maya has been in the vanguard of a scholastic revolution in recent decades that has cast unprecedented light on this fascinating ancient civilisation.
One reason for that have been new strides in understanding the script, a rich textual language based on glyphs that can be found carved into the stonework of temples throughout Central America.
Indeed, not only do the Maya have the oldest written history anywhere in the Americas, they have the oldest written history from any region outside Europe, Africa, or Asia. Their ancient texts reach back more than two thousand years to a period when Roman emperors and the Han Dynasty were at their height.
Stuart’s book is an attempt to correct the “skewed, stubborn, and incomplete picture” of the history of the ancient Maya in all its complexities.
Why does this matter? It does so not only because of the importance of challenging Eurocentric assumptions, but also because understanding the collapse of the ancient Mayan civilisation may hold important clues to our own fate as our competing societies strain the Earth’s resources to breaking point. Rivalry, war and ecological exhaustion are important aspects of this story.
In Stuart’s groundbreaking and highly accessible new history of this civilisation based on the most recent discoveries, the author brings us up to date with centres of power growing, connecting, transforming, warring, and ultimately under stress.
The Four Heavens brings alive the people, places, and events that until recently have been absent from broad narratives of the ancient world, with a grand sweep of the culture rather than a patchwork of individual Mayan kingdoms.
The book is also a deeply personal endeavour, based on Stuart’s 50 years of research working and living in the Maya world. There has rarely been a scholar so immersed in his field: like a character out of an Indiana Jones movie, Stuart was the son of two Mayanist scholars who grew up around ancient Maya sites.
At the age of ten he was reading scholarly works about the civilisation, and by thirteen began making contributions to the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphics, eventually becoming the youngest person ever to win a MacArthur Genius award, at eighteen, for this work.
As Eric H Cline, professor of ancient history and archaeology at The George Washington University, says in the “Foreword”, this is quite literally the book Stuart was raised to write.
The Four Heavens is important for another reason: there has not been a general history of the Maya for the public published in over two decades, with work mostly slanted towards archaeological overviews and less concerned with the framework of Mayan history itself.
As Stuart notes, such historical accounts tend to be atomistic considerations of individual dynasties and sites, one reason why the lay understanding of the Maya can be so frustrating.
What we pine for is an overview, an attempt to “reframe the Maya past as a very human story”, and that is what Stuart has set out to provide—the story of the so-called “Classic” period, between 150 and 900 CE, in not solely localised fragments but as one narrative in which the fates of kingdoms and dynasties are integrated.
He writes: “In the big scheme, it proves to be a complex interfamily drama, involving a dozen or so lineages who intermarried, fought, and strove to promote their special status in their world through the inscribed monuments we have today to study.”
Written in four parts, The Four Heavens begins with paskab, a Maya word that means “to open the earth” and the premise of what Stuart calls the Rupture—a significant break in the historical memory of the Maya after 900 CE, the collapse of the Classic period.
This is an era that casts Mayan history into the darkness that we are perhaps most familiar, with the fall of many Maya states resulting, by the time of the Spanish invasion, in an almost complete loss of awareness of the people and events of the Classic period.
This “rupture” of cultural memory, “a cut-off in history with little parallel in the world”, has clearly influenced Euro-American perspectives, and the work of Stuart’s immediate predecessors and the scholar himself has been devoted to recovering it.
The second part of the book is the beginning of the detailed historical narrative, examining the dynasties of the Classic period and the social and political world they shaped and occupied.
Stuart examines what is known of Maya politics and elite culture, exposing a highly interwoven social and political network of alliances and fractured relations in which the themes of war and revenge fuel endless rivalries and clashes between dynasties.
The “Four Heavens” of the book’s title refer to the structure of Maya cosmology, four “sides” of the sky, as determined by the daily and annual movements of the sun, a scheme that included geopolitics.
In the third section of the book, Stuart examines from the seventh century kings in the east, west, north, and south of the Maya world who saw themselves as representatives of rainmaking deities, revealing a coherence to the wider civilisation.
He indicates that this suggests the ancient Maya saw their world in a sense as unified and idealised—despite its political balkanisation, instability and frequent conflict.
The final section of the book looks at the “collapse” of this civilisation in the ninth century that we all take for granted and its aftermath. While Maya histories make no direct mention of the end of the kingdoms, written sources reveal a world in deep crisis leading up to them, especially after 790CE.
Wars that had begun in the sixth century escalated to foster a generalised instability, forcing many peoples to leave their home sites, and as the conflict-ridden political world of the Classic era fell apart there was a widespread rejection of elite culture and power.
Stuart writes: “We have long described this complex process as a ‘collapse’, but this characterisation tells only the initial part of the story, for it was more broadly an adaptation of life in the face of great change, involving many scales of migration in search of better options.”
This offers a historical lesson we should consider carefully today: the tipping point was a period in which political strains were exacerbated by environmental change and population pressure, whereby entire peoples were forced to remake themselves anew.
If there is a lesson to be taken from this new history of the Maya it is that commonly accepted visions of their trajectory—a simplistic rise and fall—belong more to Western myths as they do to historical facts.
Stuart rejects these in favour of “numerous ups and downs, of many foundations and abandonments”, arguing for an aspect of Maya cultural history that he terms the “persistent impermanence” of place.
The Classic period was in fact a precarious one in which, while cities could be politically and economically stable and vital for long stretches of time, instability and demise were seen as almost always on the cards.
In our own arrogant disdain for the future of a world straining under population pressures, rivalries, wars and ecological collapse, the Maya therefore offer lessons we need to pay attention to.
Given the major strides that have been made in understanding the Maya in recent decades, the author concludes by drawing lessons about history itself.
Indeed, it seems clear that the Maya can provide us with a means to rebalance history away from its Eurocentric origins, ultimately premised on a sense of racial superiority, which continue to dominate the American narrative.
Stuart writes: “The imbalances of knowledge and its dissemination still exist after centuries of negating Indigenous identity and its history. It is all another legacy of the Rupture in history I have described and of the unresolved tensions stemming from conquest and colonial rule.
“But positive change is looming. I hold out hope that the names of Maya history, of kings, queens, artists, and warriors, will take their rightful place among the significant actors of the human story and breathe life into the ancient sites still around us.”
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