By Anabel Ford

As an archaeologist of the Maya civilization, I joined last month’s opening in Santa Barbara of “Apocalypto,” directed by Mel Gibson, to see how much reliable information would be blended with the high drama. Not much, I found, though much is made of the dialog being in the Yucatecan Mayan tongue.

The plot was simplistic, but with macabre conjuring set against a backdrop that purports to be the Maya world. Here the viewer’s imagination is stifled by the European stereotype of life in the tropical forest, with parts either verdant or devastated, and a degenerate civilization of bored, regal women and abusive, powerful men.

The film, which has English subtitles, has been nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture, Foreign Language. This is curious, as native speakers have told me that they could barely comprehend the Mayan dialog. Francisco Rosado-May, the agro-ecologist rector of the new Maya Intercultural University in Quintana Roo, Mexico, applauded the attempt to create dialog in his native tongue. But generally “the language is very stilted, difficult to understand, ungrammatical, and with a thick foreign accent,” he told me.

Yucatec, the Mayan language used in the film, is arguably the closest language to the Maya hieroglyphs. The 16th-century Spanish colonial Friar de Landa, in his personal defense for perpetrating atrocities against the Maya, recorded some of what we now know is the Maya syllabary. While Landa’s destruction of untold numbers of Maya codices, or books, is a major impediment to interpreting the Maya script, his records ultimately connected linguists and epigraphers in the 1970s working to decipher the Maya code. Understanding the links of the Yucatecan Mayan languages to their tropical world played no part in this film.

Science’s better understanding of Maya folk ecology demonstrates the people’s vast knowledge of the forest environment as well as a deeply held appreciation for it. The term “Kanan K’ax,” for example, has been translated as “well cared for forest,” but modern Maya speakers elaborate on the meaning. “Kanan” also means a responsibility to, and the ability to learn from, the forest. This lends a depth to the term that is absent in translation, particularly when connected to the fact that the Maya cultivated their food crops without plow or draft animals.

Screenwriter Farhad Safina said the film intends to draw parallels to our own civilization with “widespread environmental degradation, excessive consumption, and political corruption.” This could be a real obstacle to understanding the Maya. Popular views have it that the destruction of the Maya forest today is a result of the same disregard for the environment as in the past, but ecologists and botanists who work with local Maya know that their forest is replete with economic value barely hinted at in the film.

Chocolate, vanilla, and allspice are from the Maya forest, as are avocado, mahogany, and chicle. In fact, 90 percent of the Maya’s dominant plants are useful to humanity, and traditional Maya farmers have the most diverse domestic systems in the world. The Maya forest is a wild garden left by the past cultivators and maintained by a few, tenacious forest gardeners.

Director Gibson said “Apocalypto” was entertainment first, but it was also education and inspiration. I may have missed something in the telling, but I did not see authenticity. Those interested in the ancient Maya will have to look elsewhere. The subtitles provided an illusion, but to the knowledgeable ear, it was actors speaking to the camera.