Mayan Empire Geography

The finding could explain how these ancient metropolises survived—and even prospered—despite having poor soil.

Extending south from southern Mexico, through Guatemala, and into northern Belize, the Maya Empire prospered from about A.D. 250 to 900, when it crumbled. (See an interactive map of the Maya civilization.)

Recently scientists discovered a distinct beige clay mineral in ruined canals at Guatemala's Tikal archaeological site—once the largest city of the southern Maya lowlands. The mineral, a type of smectite, derives only from the breakdown of volcanic ash.

Using chemical fingerprinting techniques, the team showed that the smectite at Tikal didn't come from dust ferried from Africa by air currents—the common assumption—but rather from volcanoes within Guatemala and in what are now El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico.

(Get the full story of the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)

Once-in-a-Lifetime Eruptions?

Prior to the new discovery, it was known that highland Maya cities closer to volcanoes could be drastically affected by eruptions. For example, the Maya village of Chalchuapa in El Salvador was completely buried when the nearby Ilopango volcano erupted in the sixth century A.D.

But until now, it's been unclear what effect, if any, eruptions had on lowland Maya cities hundreds of miles away. Now it appears that air currents regularly carried volcanic ash many miles away from the region's volcanoes. That's not especially surprising, considering that winds often carry dust all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, Tankersley said.

Tankersley and his team think their ash samples were deposited in Tikal over a 2, 000-year period, from about 340 B.C. to A.D. 990. There's no way yet to determine just how many eruptions occurred, their frequency, or which volcanoes the ash came from, he said.

"If you were a Mayan, you would probably have experienced at least one of these events during your lifetime, and perhaps more, during certain periods, " said Tankersley, who presented the team's findings at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Sacramento, California, in late March.

Supersoil Saved Maya Cities?

The new findings are "spectacularly important, " Sheets said, because they could help explain a central mystery about lowland Maya cities.

"The literature consistently talks about the soils in these places as being very weak and fragile and nonproductive because they were derived from weathered limestone, which does not form a very good soil, " said Sheets, an expert on the effects of volcanoes on Maya culture.

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