PROLONGED DROUGHT CAUSED THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANCIENT MAYA EXPERTS SAY

Chichen Itza

Raging wild fires, one hundred year floods, and thousand year droughts. No, I'm not talking about the Maya—not yet—but about current weather patterns that are becoming all too common. A view into the past may well help prepare us for our environmental future.

In the past month I've read three new articles on studies that link the collapse of the ancient Maya to drought—from Nature Communications, Phys-Org, and Nature World News. To be sure, this is not new news. Archeologists across the globe have long debated the reason behind the Maya collapse and have come up with numerous theories. Radical environment change rises to the top of the list, always accompanied by extenuating circumstances linked to lack of water and how societies cope in times of food scarcity because of this. 

The Maya's rise to greatness was compromised by the most severe drought of the past seven thousand years. It devastated the Yucatán Peninsula and grand Classic Era Maya cities collapsed in four phases of abandonment—spaced about 50 years apart—around 760, 810, 860, and 910 A.D.  

NOT LONERS

The ancient Maya were not alone in civilization collapse due to radical environmental changes, but because that collapse occurred within the past thousand years, we may relate to it more. Before the collapse of the ancient Maya, countless great civilizations fell: the Minoan Greeks, the Hittites, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylon, and ancient Rome for starters. The list goes on and on.

Minoan Greek Art

Early on, in 1946, the noted archeologist and Maya scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff commented on a climate disaster that could have imperiled the Maya. She put it like this, "Though it is conceivable that the disappearance of the population may have been a gradual process, the catastrophically sudden extinction of the arts can be explained only in the terms of some widespread and unforeseen disaster that afflicted most Maya cities soon after a.d. 800."

The last known inscription on a carved Maya stella was listed as 910 A.D. in the Peten. In prosperous times, stella recorded major events detailing triumphs of kings and defeats of enemies. From 900 A.D. on there was either nothing to report or no backing for it. The kings could not maintain prosperity and when rain didn't come and crop harvests were not large enough to feed the population, disillusionment set in.

Recent testing of skeletal remains at various Maya sites shows evidence of disease and malnutrition right across the board—in nobles and peasants. Slash and burn agriculture caused land exhaustion and deprived the ground of nutrients. As the population grew, the peasants increased intensive farming techniques in an attempt to feed the masses. Their production system became over-burdened. Not enough food to go around.

LACK OF RAIN

And influential Maya archeologist, scholar, and author Michael D. Coe, in The Maya, Eighth Edition, Places and People, his last in the series, The Maya, writes researchers discovered a major drought that corresponded to the lapse between the early and late classic periods—a time in which no new stella (large limestone slabs placed in front of pyramid temples) were erected and in which earlier stella had been defaced. Defacing stella can be compared to spray painting graffiti on buildings today, showing a lack of respect for authority, I wrote in Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy.

Maya Carving at Palenque

In accordance with the environmental dilemma, I read an article on Mayapan, a prominent Post-Classic Maya city in the northwest Yucatán Peninsula, by Marilyn Masson. Posted in "Nature Communications," Masson, Principal Investigator for the Proyecto Economic de Mayapan, wrote that prolonged drought likely fueled civil conflict and its eventual collapse. So great was the city that it was considered the ancient capital of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th century.

MAYAPAN

Mayapan (By En-Yucatán)

A latecomer to the pantheon of great Maya cities, Mayapan emerged as a regional capital on the Peninsula from the 13th to 15th centuries, after the demise of Chichen Itza. With a population of 20,000, it collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family that ruled Mayapan. Historical records date the collapse between 1441 and 1461. But there's new evidence, thanks to Masson, professor and chair at University of Albany's Department of Anthropology, who co-authored the study which was assisted by a team of researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from the area and time period, looking for signs of traumatic injury.

Masson and her team found shallow mass graves and evidence of brutal massacre at monuments and structures across the city. "Some were laid out with knives in their pelvis and rib cages, others were chopped up and burned," she said. "Not only did they smash and burn the bodies but they also smashed and burned the effigies of their gods. It's a form of double desecration, basically." 

ADVANCED RADIOCARBON DATING TECHNOLOGY

Professor Douglas Bennett, University of California/Santa Barbara anthropolgy department, lead study on Masson's team, had new information to add. He dated the skeletons using accelerator mass spectrometry, an advanced radiocarbon dating technology, and found they dated 50 to 100 years earlier than the city's supposed mid-15th century downfall. 

Archeologists at Work

Plenty of ethno-historical records exist to support the city's violent downfall around 1458, said Masson. But the new evidence, thanks to Bennett's advanced radiocarbon dating tech, puts the evidence of massacre 100 years earlier. Combined with climate data that the Peninsula experienced prolonged drought around that time, the team began to suspect environmental factors may have played a major role in the desertion of the site along with the violent chaos that preceded that desertion.

RAIN AND MAIZE CROPS

The Maya depended heavily on rain-fed maize but lacked any way to store grain longer than a year due to the humid jungle climate. The impacts of rainfall levels on food production are believed to be linked to human migration, population decline, warfare, and shifts in political power, the study states.

"It's not that droughts cause social conflict but they create the conditions whereby violence can occur," Masson said.

WARS ENSUE

Location of Mayapan (By ResearchGate)

The study suggests the Xiu, who launched the fatal attacks on the Cocom of Mayapan, used the droughts and ensuing famines to foment unrest and rebellion that led to the mass deaths and the migration from Mayapan as early as the 1300s.

Said Masson, "I think the lesson is that hardship can become politicized in the worst kind of way. It creates opportunities for ruthlessness and can cause people to turn on one another violently."

It's hard to not compare our present news cycles with these past events.

Following this period of drought and unrest however, Mayapan bounced back briefly thanks to healthy rainfall levels around 1400.  "It was able to bend pretty well and bounce back before the droughts returned in the 1420s, but it was too soon," Masson said. "They didn't have time to recover and the tensions were still there. The city's government just couldn't survive another bout like that. But it almost did."

According to Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, it's amazing how many cultures do collapse and one of history's disturbing facts is that collapse is caused by the destruction of the natural resources on which these cultures depend. The Anasazi, Easter Islanders, the kingdom of Angkor Wat in Cambodia...and the Maya. Declines of societies, he wrote, swiftly follow their peaks.

ON THE TAIL OF CHICHEN ITZA

Chichen Itza 

Mayapan rose to power in the footsteps of the decline of mighty Chichen Itza and after the great city-states of the south such as Tikal and Calakmul had gone into steep decline. During the late Postclassic Era (1250-1450 A.D.) Mayapan was the cultural and political center of the waning Maya civilization and had great influence upon smaller city states surrounding it. The sprawling complex spreads over four square kilometers and houses four thousand buildings. The ruins include temples, palaces and ceremonial centers, with architectural influence in the style of Chichen Itza. 

Tikal in Guatemala (ByLivescience.com)

Focusing on the present, as food insecurity, social unrest, and drought-driven migration in parts of the modern world continue to be of great concern, Masson said there are lessons to be learned in how other previous empires handled environmental hardships.

FAMINE OF ONE RABBIT

Pre-Spanish conquest, the Aztecs survived the infamous Famine of One Rabbit fueled by a catastrophic drought in 1454. The emperor emptied out the food storehouses from the capital to feed the people and when that ran out, he encouraged them to flee. Many sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf Coast where conditions were better but eventually bought their way out and returned to the capital, and the empire emerged stronger than ever. This strategy enacted by the Aztec imperial regime, said Masson, is likely what allowed for their recovery.

Her conclusion was that inspite of drought, civil conflict, institutional failure, and military conflict, a resilient network of small Maya states persisted that were encountered by Europeans in the early 16th century. (Just in time to be met, ironically, by the Spanish invasion).

HISTORY REPEATS?

In the face of present day climate change, these complexities and challenges faced by great Mexico and Central American civilizations are important as todays's world evaluates the potential success or failure of modern state institutions designed to maintain order and peace in the face of future climate change. Although Mayapan is a tale of only one city, correlations to present day world problems make the study of Mayapan extremely relevant now.

Climate change and its effects are real.

Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy

                                             by Jeanine Kitchel on Amazon

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.