The evidence, reported today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is an inch-thick layer of charcoal at the bottom of a lake, Laguna Ek'Naab, in Northern Guatemala: a sign of extensive burning of a nearby city, Witzna, and its surroundings that was unlike any other natural fire recorded in the lake's sediment. For the first time, we are seeing that this warfare had an impact on the general population.' 'It wasn't primarily the nobility challenging one another, taking and sacrificing captives to enhance the charisma of the captors. 'The revolutionary part of this is that we see how similar Mayan warfare was from early on,' said archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Tulane University, Wahl's colleague. 'The findings overturn this idea that warfare really got intense only very late in the game.' 'These data really challenge one of the dominant theories of the collapse of the Maya,' said David Wahl, a UC Berkeley adjunct assistant professor of geography and a researcher at the USGS in Menlo Park, California. The finding also indicates that this increase in warfare, possibly associated with climate change and resource scarcity, was not the cause of the disintegration of the lowland Maya civilization. Geological Survey calls all this into question, suggesting that the Maya engaged in scorched-earth military campaigns - a strategy that aims to destroy anything of use, including cropland - even at the height of their civilization, a time of prosperity and artistic sophistication. New evidence unearthed by a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Only later, archeologists thought, did increasing drought and climate change lead to total warfare - cities and dynasties were wiped off the map in so-called termination events - and the collapse of the lowland Maya civilization around 1,000 A.D.

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