The Maya's ingenious secret to survival

The Maya's ingenious secret to survival Michael Godek/Getty Images Tikal was the economic and ceremonial hub of the Maya civilisation. Sediment cores taken from Tikal's reservoirs show that the Maya created the oldest known water filtration system in the western hemisphere. "I'm Native American and I've always been bothered that archaeologists and anthropologists have traditionally assumed that the Indigenous people of the Americas did not develop the technological muscle that was found elsewhere in the ancient world in places like Greece, Egypt, India or China," said Kenneth Tankersley, an archaeological geologist at the University of Cincinnati and lead author of the study documenting the Maya's use of zeolite. Stuart Birch/Getty Images The Maya relied on seasonal rainfall for their water supply, which they collected in reservoirs Modern visitors to Tikal will need to make an extra effort to locate the reservoirs, which live on today mostly as depressions in the soil, but some of the dams and earthen berms used to impound the vast quantities of water that once slaked the city's thirst are still evident to the informed observer. Hvalar/Getty Images Home to as many as 240,000 people at its 8th Century peak, the site was abandoned around 900 AD "Without a time machine we don' know what happened exactly," said Tankersley, "but it doesn' take a lot of deduction to imagine someone from Tikal thinking: 'If sweet, clean water is coming out of this crystalline volcanic tuff, maybe we could break some off and use it to make our water clean as well.'"