A brand new four-part documentary series called “Rise and Fall of the Mayas” has been picked up by Disney’s National Geographic, which tells the entire story of the great Mayan civilization, which inhabited areas that are now regions of Central America.
Pernel Media has created the series, where it will debut on France’s RMC Decouverte, before the series gets a second window release in France on Histoire TV, with ZDF Studios taking the distribution rights for German-speaking countries in Europe and TV5 Quebec taking the rights for French-speaking Canada. National Geographic acquired worldwide rights to the series, so we should expect the series to be released on the National Geographic channel and on Disney+. No release date details have yet been announced.
This new series had groundbreaking access to an expedition at Aguada Fenix, which is the oldest and largest Mayan site found to date. Archaeologists discovered the ruins, near the Mexico-Guatemala border, in 2020 through LIDAR technology. It is believed to be about 1,500 years older than other famous sites such as Tikal and Chichen Itza and suggests the first Mayan people could have lived 3,000 years ago. The civilization collapsed around 1500AD though around 8 million people of Mayan descent live in Central America.
The executive producers of the new series include Pernel’s Céline Payot Lehmann and Samuel Kissous, who said in a statement to Deadline:
“Telling the story of a great civilization from beginning to end is a rare privilege that we managed by securing exclusives on ground breaking archaeological findings. That is what convinced our partners to come on board,”
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