The Mayan Collapse

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Preamble.The following case study provides an example of a culture that collapsed due to a variety of reasons relating to internal resource pressures and external environmental factors.

The Mayan collapse is germane to this chapter in that it develops specific examples of resource depletion that affected other great cultures.

Introduction

One of the most extraordinary and sophisticated pre-industrial societies to develop was that of the Maya. The civilization encompassed a region that includes modern-day eastern Mexico and parts of Belize, Guatemala and Honduras (Fig. 2.1). This Meso-American society developed over several thousand years, but its period of greatest activity was from 250CEto approximately 800CE, a time span known as theClassical Period.

Mayan society was heavily urbanized. However, this urban sector was underpinned and supported by rural activity on a large scale. Urban society was characterized by great cities such as Tikal, with a population of perhaps 100,000 by 800CE, or Copan at the southern end of the Mayan region, which had a population of at least 20,000 in the same time period. The

The main temple, under restoration, at Caracol in the Chiquibul Forest, Belize. This Mayan site is thought to have been occupied from 600BCto almostAD1100 and at its peak the city served a population of

115,000–150,000 people. Photo by Glyn Bissix.

A replica Stella at Caracol in the Chiquibul Forest, Belize. The original is reportedly in a private collection in Canada. Photo by Glyn Bissix.

Fig. 2.1. Map of the Mayan region, showing major Mayan cities and modern international borders.

culture of these cities, and others like them, was both sophisticated and complex. For the Maya, religion was a crucial component of daily life, and temples took the form of pyramids, some of which rivalled or even surpassed the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Unlike those structures, however, the Mayan pyramids were built without the aid of draught animals, metal tools or wheeled transportation. The Maya were not intellectually underdeveloped, however, they were in fact highly literate, and their mathematical skill was refined. They possessed an accurate calendar and the ability to predict both solar and lunar eclipses accurately.

Background

There is a great deal of geographical diversity in the region, from broad floodplains in the coastal region along the Gulf of Mexico to highlands in the region now marked by the Honduras–Guatemala border. Between the two, the landforms tend toward gently rolling hills and river valleys, with the hills increasing in height as one moves towards the south. Rainfall is seasonal, with the heaviest amounts occurring in a rainy season that lasts from May until December. Temperatures tend to fall within a narrow range depending on landform location:

on the coastal plains, temperatures range from 25 to 30°C, in the upland region in the centre of the Mayan region, temperatures vary from 15 to 25°C, while in the highland South the figure tends to be around 15°C.

Agriculture

The foundation upon which this great society was built was agriculture – and agriculture of only a few crop staples. Three main crops formed the basis of Mayan agriculture: maize, beans and squash. Of these, maize was by far the most important, accounting for perhaps 90% of each adult Mayan’s caloric intake. As a consequence of the varied geography and climate, the Maya were able to practice several different agricultural techniques throughout the Classical Period. At the simpler end of the spectrum was maize cultivation throughswidden agriculture (also known as ‘slash-and-burn’ agriculture). Here, sections of scrub, grassland or forest would be burned just prior to the onset of the rainy season in the late spring. The action of the rain coupled with human labour would work the vegetable ash into the soil, thus fertilizing it. Several crops of maize could be raised before nutrient depletion necessitated the abandon- ment of the plot and the repetition of the process elsewhere. In cases of low population density, swidden techniques are sustainable, as natural overgrowth of worked plots will occur over time, providing fresh fuel for a new round of burn-based fertilization in the future.

The recovery process is not quick, however (~20 years in tropical and subtropical environ- ments), and this means that too high a population density leads to unsustainability, because insufficient time is allowed for natural vegetative regeneration between burn and cultivation periods.

More sophisticated agriculturally was the Mayan technique ofmilpacultivation, which could occur in central regions where consistently heavy rainfall was the norm. This was an intensive technique that involved the cultivation of several different crops in rotation inter- spersed by short but intensively managed fallow periods to allow for soil regeneration (Simmons, 1996).

The most complex and environmentally significant of the Mayan agricultural techniques was the floodplain cultivation of maize on raised islands known aschinampas. The fields were artificial islands, constructed by dredging canals in the river’s floodplain and piling the nutrient-rich silt behind constructed barriers. Yearly dredgings ensured high productivity

thanks to the annual application of dredged silt to the fields, silt that was constantly replen- ished by river flow. The canals acted as an efficient transportation network throughout the patchworked agricultural zone, and served as an excellent habitat for fish and other marine fauna, the exploitation of which provided a valuable protein component to the Mayan diet (Simmons, 1996).

On uplands, widespread terracing was undertaken (one of the largest contiguous regions of terrace agriculture extended over perhaps 10,000 km²). It seems that Mayan farmers employed conscious soil conservation and management techniques in their terracing, transfer- ring soil that had been eroded off the hillsides in the course of agricultural activity from the lowest levels where it was deposited by rainfall back uphill to the higher terraces from whence it had come.

Society

The urban population that was supported by this agricultural activity was at least several millions in size, and perhaps much larger than that. Urban society was complex, rigidly hier- archical and highly cultured. Warfare seems to have been widely practised both for political aggrandisement and as a source of captives destined for sacrifice during the elaborate ceremo- nies around which Mayan religious life revolved. Scholars of the early 20th century believed that Mayan society was theocratic in nature, i.e. ruled by priestly castes; this was a natural assumption given the pre-eminence of religious structures in Mayan cities. More recent evidence has decisively shifted this view, however, demonstrating convincingly that more traditional political leaders governed Mayan society. The lords of each city and its surrounding hinterland acted independently from and in competition with the lords of other cities. It is known that there was a wide gulf between the urban elites and the base of rural and urban commoners upon which they depended.

It is also known that the Classical Period was marked by significant population growth after 600CE. Monumental construction in most cities increased rapidly, a process that would have required a major increase in labour investment. This labour would have had to have been drawn from each city’s rural hinterland. In addition, such major construction required large amounts of wood to aid in the construction process. This again would have placed considerable stress on supplies of wood, since it was also the sole source of fuel for the Mayans, elite and commoner alike.

The Historical Issue

The Mayan civilization discussed here was durable, spanning, as we have seen, several centuries at least. Yet classical Mayan civilization collapsed almost totally in the 800s – and it did so very rapidly indeed, perhaps in as short a time frame as that encompassed by a single generation. Many construction projects were abandoned in mid-phase, with tools being strewn around half-completed columns decorated with incomplete inscriptions. In one case, archaeologists discovered the unburied skeletons of children in the interior of one of the temples at Chichen Itza. Reverence for the dead was very important to the Maya, and a failure to bury corpses must, therefore, be seen as evidence of some rapid catastrophe.

The question is: What was the nature of that catastrophe? Scholars of the mid-20th century theorized that the rich Mayan civilization collapsed because of brutal and increas- ingly prolonged warfare between rival cities. Other theories now encompass environmental factors. Their proponents argue that unsustainable Mayan agricultural practices led to a

general deterioration of the environmental situation that in turn provoked a social collapse.

Other theories focus on larger, natural environmental factors such as climate change. It is likely that a combination of all three factors propelled the collapse of Mayan civilization.

Evidence of the Mayan Collapse

The evidence for the eventual Mayan collapse is subdivided into the three following categories: social/political; local environmental; and regional/climate-based environmental.

Social/political

1. Despite the competition between them, Mayan city-states traded heavily with one another for luxury goods for use by the elite within society. It appears that a durable, long- lasting and stable trade balance developed over centuries, within which each city-state controlled part of the trade in a particular commodity, as either producer, controller of trade route or consumer. In the century following 550CE, the great city of Teotihuacan, not itself Mayan but heavily influential in Mayan culture, trade and society, collapsed. Teotihuacan was located several hundred kilometres beyond the western edge of the Mayan zone, but its economic and military strength was so great that its collapse severely affected Mayan trade and cultural patterns.

2. It is known, from dates on the last ceremonial buildings and other constructions thrown up by the Maya during the Classical Period, that the decline of Mayan civilization began around 790CEin the west and over the next 30 years spread eastwards throughout the entire Mayan zone. In Copan, for example, at the south-eastern end of the Mayan zone, the last dated construction was abandoned, incomplete, in 822CE.

3. There is no evidence of massive external invasion, although there is a cultural intermixing between peoples of the Mexican uplands (around modern-day Mexico City) with those of the western Mayan zone in the 9th centuryCE– exactly around the time of the Mayan collapse.

4. There is evidence of violence in some of the cities. The effects of the violence indicate that it must have been sudden: there is no evidence of siege or defensive preparations in these cases.

Local environmental

1. Studies of skeletons recovered from cities as far apart as Copan in the south and Chichen Itza in the north have found evidence of malnutrition and of the existence of malnutrition- based illness, such as anaemia.

2. Similar studies of skeletons have discovered that there was a sharp increase in deaths among segments of the population that normally survive famines or other natural disasters.

Usually it is the elderly or the very young that succumb in such cases, but in the 800s it seems as though the deaths encompassed younger and mature adults as well.

3. Growing populations require larger quantities of fuel for cooking and other daily purposes. Most of the ceremonial buildings constructed in each city were whitewashed with lime plaster that requires large amounts of heat (or ‘pyrotechnology’) in its manufacture.

4. Studies of sediment cores drawn from lakes in the region have demonstrated a sharp decrease in the levels of tree pollen after the 600s. After approximately 1000CE, quantities of

Discussion Questions

1. Describe the linkages between cultural advancement and natural resource management in the early development of humans.

2. What do we mean by scarcity? What role does scarcity play in technology advancement in natural resource management?

3. This section describes four major phases of human development, what are they? What are the key advances in natural resource development that led to these transformational changes?

4. In mining minerals, human ingenuity often improves mine site pollution control and miner safety, so why is it that we see continual increases in pollution and worker injuries and deaths as a result of mining?

5. Natural resource development accelerated rapidly throughout the world during the 19th and 20th centuries. Why is that increases in the standard of living in the developing world where resource exploitation occurred have not kept pace with advances in the developed world?

pollen, especially of the black mahogany tree, a common species of established forests, return to average levels in the sedimentary cores.

5. In cities such as Copan, modern excavation has discovered that houses located on down slopes on the outskirts of the city and at the bottom of hillsides in the city’s hinterland are filled with large quantities of soil and dried mud sediments. The dwellings were clearly abandoned before the general abandonment of the region occurred.

6. It is known that silt loads in the region’s rivers increased dramatically.

Regional/climate-based environmental

1. By studying the prevalence of gypsum in lake cores drawn from Lake Chichancanab in the Yucatan Peninsula, scientists have determined that the period 800–1000CEwas unusually warm and dry in the region. Solid gypsum is a precipitate, i.e. when water that contains dissolved gypsum evaporates, the gypsum is left behind, in the same way that salt is left behind if a pan of salt water is boiled away. Precipitated gypsum is found in large quantities in the segment of the core relating to the 800–1000CEperiod.

2. There is good evidence that long-term droughts occur every 200 years or so; indeed, such a drought coupled with resource depletion is considered as a prime candidate for the collapse of Teotihuacan that occurred some time in the century after 550CE.

Conclusion

It is clear that environmental factors can severely stress even a well-established and flourishing civilization. In turn, social factors may exacerbate environmental problems. The lesson may be that, when the imbalance begins, it can accelerate quickly and render the society incapable of absorbing further environmental shocks, possibly not of the population’s own making.

Case Study Discussion Questions

6. Unlike other case studies presented in this text, the outcome of the case outlined in this chapter is already known. Based on the information presented in the case study, attempt to develop aplausible and specifictheory to account for the collapse of Mayan civilization in the 800s. Employ both the background presented in the main body of the chapter and the archaeological and environmental evidence presented in the case study in the development of your theory. Remember, your theory should incorporate, as far as possible, elements of warfare, human-induced environmental degradation and broader environmental factors which all played a role in the collapse of the Maya.

7. Attempt to develop an IREM-based solution to determine the points at which integrated and cooperative resource management, or other cooperative behaviour among the Maya, could have averted the collapse of their civilization. What does your IREM-based solution suggest to you in terms of the likelihood of social collapse in the face of resource depletion?

Is it a likely scenario, or an unlikely one?

8. Consider whether the conditions outlined in this case study are apparent in any of the other case studies presented in this text. Could policies adopted in the modern case studies have been applied to this historical example? Why or why not?

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