david webster. webster: i think power is the ability of leaders to coerce people into doing things they don't want to do. you get power like that generally in one of two ways -- by having some kind of force or threat of force behind your demands, like a military force. or you get power by having something -- land, water, some scarce resource that other people need, and you manipulate them that way. i don't think maya kings were powerful in either sense. keach: the kings ruled not so much through power but through their authority to settle disputes spearhead the common defense and control some land. they also gained enormous prestige by redistributing precious goods and by leading religious rituals. but the authority of the king suffered a critical blow in a.d. 738 when 18 rabbit was captured and beheaded by the ruler of a rival city. adjoining 18 rabbit's palace was a smaller structure, the only known building erected by his successor king smoke monkey. some archaeologists think it was a council hous

archaeologist david webster. this was part of what we called the mystique of the maya. they maya are different from other people. they are unique. they don't behave the way other people do. of course, most complex pre-industrial societies are plagued with warfare. and the question was in my mind years ago why should the maya ever have been different ? keach: archaeologists soon discovered the maya were not that different. evidence of war and captive taking began turning up in many cities. this drawing of a stela shows a king standing on the stripped and bound ruler of a neighboring kingdom. the decapitated remains of sacrificial victims are often found buried under royal buildings. some of the human skulls discovered at copan have been intentionally reworked into something else. physical anthropologist rebecca storey. it didn't take much looking at them to see, of course, that they have been deliberately modified. this one here, of course, has been cut. there are drill holes in these. we don't naturally have those kind of holes in our skull. there are evidences of cut m