The Collapse of Mayan Society
By Jess B
By Jess B
No, it isn't just your imagination, the formatting is stuffed.
“…..The city was desolate. No remnant of this race hangs round the ruins, with
traditions handed-down from father to son and from generation to generation. It
lay before us like a shattered in the midst of the ocean, her mast gone, her name
effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she
belonged, how long on her journey, or what caused her destruction ....”
~John Lloyd Stephens, 1842
The Mayans were an incredibly complex society and were one of the most advanced civilizations in Mesoamerica. They created new ways of suriving in a seasonal desert, invented a complicated variety of intensive agricultural techniques such as canals, terracing, raised fields, the use of human faeces as fertilizer, seasonal swamps or bajos, using muck from the bajos to create fertile fields, dikes, dams, irrigation, water reservoirs, several types of water storage sys
tems, hydraulic systems and swamp reclamation. Their beliefs system was as complex as any modern day religion's, with huge temples dedicated to their gods and ritual sacrifices.They even had their own written dialect and passed down their knowledge through the generations.
tems, hydraulic systems and swamp reclamation. Their beliefs system was as complex as any modern day religion's, with huge temples dedicated to their gods and ritual sacrifices.They even had their own written dialect and passed down their knowledge through the generations. And yet, the cause of the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization remains a mystery even today. There have been some eighty-eight different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the sudden collapse of one of the most complex civilizations in our history. At first I tried to find other models for societal collapse that I could use to structure this but as I delved further and further into the depths of the Google search list I found less and less. I have, therefore, decided to use Jared Diamond's five point framework with a few add-ons of my own.
Climate Change
The Maya are often conceived as having lived in a rainforest, but technically, they lived in a seasonal desert without access to stable sources of drinking water.
The Mayans were particularly prone to climate change. As they did not have permanent water sources 95 percent of their population depended on frequent rainfall for both agricultural use and human consumption. After examining sediments from lake beds and the sea floor scientists and archaeologists have found evidence of a dry period that began about 1,200 years ago that was punctuated by periods of three to nine years which had little or no rainfall. These dry periods were actually long droughts that correspond to periodic downturns in the Maya culture. These shifts may actually have been the result of climate change. Each event placed more strain on the society which led to a collapse of a portion of the civilization each time. The remaining population could not survive the last severe drought which occurred around 910 AD.
Other societies have succumbed to climate swings. In Mesopotamia, a canal-supported agricultural society collapsed after a severe 200 year drought about 3,400 years ago. With wetter conditions, civilizations thrived in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and West Asia. Ten years after their economic peak in 2,300 B.C, however, catastrophic droughts and cooling disrupted agricultural production and caused regional collapse.
About 300 years after the collapse of the Maya the Chumash people on California’s Channel Islands survived severe droughts by changing from hunter-gatherers to traders. This is an example of how the response of a society can determine whether they survive or collapse.
Environmental Damage
Evidence has been found that environmental damage did actually contribute to the collapse of the Classic Mayan civilization. One example of this environmental damage can be found in pollen samples that were collected from columns of soil that were excavated from lake beds across the region. At one point, 1,200 years ago (maybe this was linked to the beginning of the droughts?) weed pollen almost completely replaced tree pollen. This suggests that the Mayans excessive tree-lopping caused a severe case of deforestation which would have lead to heightened erosion and evaporation; the evidence of erosion is recorded in thick layers of sediment that was washed into lakes. Something else that supports the deforestation theory is the thickness of the floor stones in the Mayan ruins. For the Mayans to build a fire large enough and hot enough to make a one metre square floor stone they would have needed to chop down about twenty trees. In the earliest ruins, the stones were a foot or more thick, but they got progressively thinner. The latest ruins had stones that were only a few inches thick.
Studies of settlement remains also show that this deforestation coincided with a dramatic drop in the Mayan population. The sunlight that would usually evaporate water from the rainforest canopy would heat the ground instead. Lake sediment cores also indicate that the Mayan deforestation appears to have coincided with a series of droughts that were already occurring.
Loss of Allies
I do not believe that the loss of allies was a contributing factor to the collapse of the Maya. Although there were often disputes between cities and some internecine warfare the Mayans were never involved in any large scale wars. The disputes were usually between the royal or elite classes and rarely involved the larger lower classes.
The other reason that I do not believe that this was a contributing factor to the collapse is that it wasn’t just one or two cities that collapsed; most of the southern and central lowland cities were abandoned while the northern cities like Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Coba continued to thrive. Loss of allies does not explain the patterned abandonment.
Hostile Enemies
Some Mayanists (eg. Demarest) point to large-scale conflict as the cause of the collapse, but it still does not explain the abandonment of other cities that were not involved in these wars. The Greek city-states fought each other for years but they did not abandon their city-states as a result of these conflicts. Even when war exterminates a population the land is not abandoned. The victors usually go on to claim the land and take the space. A few examples of this are the Thirty Years’ War, the Eastern Front in the Second World War and the Napoleonic Wars-none of these resulted in the permanent abandonment of the cities that were defeated.
On the other end of the scale is internecine warfare. Internecine warfare can be a mark of a declining civilization or power. According to Paul Colinvaux’s The Fates of Nations-A Biological Theory, humans will fight to preserve their share of existing resources, unless they can obtain more resources. Apparently the Mayans did the exact opposite of what they were meant to do. They abandoned their cities and slowly died out. I believe that the Mayan collapse just does not fit into the model that has been set by the collapses of other cities due to warfare or hostile enemies.
Loss of Trading Partners
Although there is evidence that the Mayans lost their trading partners I do not believe that it was a crucial factor in the collapse of the Mayan civilization. Most of the Mayans trade involved the importation of luxury items such as obsidian, feathers, cacao, and other luxury items. Staple foods were produced where the people lived and they did not have the methods for storing any imported food in their humid environment. The collapse of the Mayans trade is most likely an effect, rather than a cause of the Classic Maya collapse.
Disease
This is one of the categories that I have added on to Jared Diamond’s five point framework. When the droughts hit the Mayans their crops failed and their water sources dried up. This would have increased the risk of epidemic disease in the civilization as disease comes hand in hand with famine and malnutrition. One theory that was remarkably different states that disease can actually be helpful in some situations. By reducing population, disease lessens the pressure on an over populated society, eliminated the need to farm marginal land or destroy the environment, and increases the ratio of supply to demand. For example, the Bubonic Plague actually increased the value of labour and helped to bring an end to serfdom.
In conclusion, disease probably hastened the collapse of the Classic Maya, but the driving force was probably the drought and environmental damage, which led to a lack of water, which led to famine, which led to disease and malnutrition.
Cultural Factors
The other category that I have decided to add to Jared Diamond’s five point framework is cultural factors. In the case of the Mayans, they had an incredibly complex religion with its own sets of beliefs, rituals and values. A ruler’s divine status was at the core of the Maya’s view of the universe. His power to influence the gods through bloodletting rituals made him a critical component in the order of things. When the droughts hit and the crops
started to fail the people would have turned to their rulers. When the gods did not respond to the ruler’s bloodletting and ritual sacrifices the people would have started to revolt. The ruling class would have been thrown into disarray and the result would have been chaos. The belief system shattered. And finally it might have reached the point where people just abandoned their cities and left to build their own lives.
Climate Change
The Maya are often conceived as having lived in a rainforest, but technically, they lived in a seasonal desert without access to stable sources of drinking water.
The Mayans were particularly prone to climate change. As they did not have permanent water sources 95 percent of their population depended on frequent rainfall for both agricultural use and human consumption. After examining sediments from lake beds and the sea floor scientists and archaeologists have found evidence of a dry period that began about 1,200 years ago that was punctuated by periods of three to nine years which had little or no rainfall. These dry periods were actually long droughts that correspond to periodic downturns in the Maya culture. These shifts may actually have been the result of climate change. Each event placed more strain on the society which led to a collapse of a portion of the civilization each time. The remaining population could not survive the last severe drought which occurred around 910 AD.
Other societies have succumbed to climate swings. In Mesopotamia, a canal-supported agricultural society collapsed after a severe 200 year drought about 3,400 years ago. With wetter conditions, civilizations thrived in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and West Asia. Ten years after their economic peak in 2,300 B.C, however, catastrophic droughts and cooling disrupted agricultural production and caused regional collapse.
About 300 years after the collapse of the Maya the Chumash people on California’s Channel Islands survived severe droughts by changing from hunter-gatherers to traders. This is an example of how the response of a society can determine whether they survive or collapse.
Environmental Damage
Evidence has been found that environmental damage did actually contribute to the collapse of the Classic Mayan civilization. One example of this environmental damage can be found in pollen samples that were collected from columns of soil that were excavated from lake beds across the region. At one point, 1,200 years ago (maybe this was linked to the beginning of the droughts?) weed pollen almost completely replaced tree pollen. This suggests that the Mayans excessive tree-lopping caused a severe case of deforestation which would have lead to heightened erosion and evaporation; the evidence of erosion is recorded in thick layers of sediment that was washed into lakes. Something else that supports the deforestation theory is the thickness of the floor stones in the Mayan ruins. For the Mayans to build a fire large enough and hot enough to make a one metre square floor stone they would have needed to chop down about twenty trees. In the earliest ruins, the stones were a foot or more thick, but they got progressively thinner. The latest ruins had stones that were only a few inches thick.
Studies of settlement remains also show that this deforestation coincided with a dramatic drop in the Mayan population. The sunlight that would usually evaporate water from the rainforest canopy would heat the ground instead. Lake sediment cores also indicate that the Mayan deforestation appears to have coincided with a series of droughts that were already occurring.
Loss of Allies
I do not believe that the loss of allies was a contributing factor to the collapse of the Maya. Although there were often disputes between cities and some internecine warfare the Mayans were never involved in any large scale wars. The disputes were usually between the royal or elite classes and rarely involved the larger lower classes.
The other reason that I do not believe that this was a contributing factor to the collapse is that it wasn’t just one or two cities that collapsed; most of the southern and central lowland cities were abandoned while the northern cities like Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Coba continued to thrive. Loss of allies does not explain the patterned abandonment.
Hostile Enemies
Some Mayanists (eg. Demarest) point to large-scale conflict as the cause of the collapse, but it still does not explain the abandonment of other cities that were not involved in these wars. The Greek city-states fought each other for years but they did not abandon their city-states as a result of these conflicts. Even when war exterminates a population the land is not abandoned. The victors usually go on to claim the land and take the space. A few examples of this are the Thirty Years’ War, the Eastern Front in the Second World War and the Napoleonic Wars-none of these resulted in the permanent abandonment of the cities that were defeated.
On the other end of the scale is internecine warfare. Internecine warfare can be a mark of a declining civilization or power. According to Paul Colinvaux’s The Fates of Nations-A Biological Theory, humans will fight to preserve their share of existing resources, unless they can obtain more resources. Apparently the Mayans did the exact opposite of what they were meant to do. They abandoned their cities and slowly died out. I believe that the Mayan collapse just does not fit into the model that has been set by the collapses of other cities due to warfare or hostile enemies.
Loss of Trading Partners
Although there is evidence that the Mayans lost their trading partners I do not believe that it was a crucial factor in the collapse of the Mayan civilization. Most of the Mayans trade involved the importation of luxury items such as obsidian, feathers, cacao, and other luxury items. Staple foods were produced where the people lived and they did not have the methods for storing any imported food in their humid environment. The collapse of the Mayans trade is most likely an effect, rather than a cause of the Classic Maya collapse.
Disease
This is one of the categories that I have added on to Jared Diamond’s five point framework. When the droughts hit the Mayans their crops failed and their water sources dried up. This would have increased the risk of epidemic disease in the civilization as disease comes hand in hand with famine and malnutrition. One theory that was remarkably different states that disease can actually be helpful in some situations. By reducing population, disease lessens the pressure on an over populated society, eliminated the need to farm marginal land or destroy the environment, and increases the ratio of supply to demand. For example, the Bubonic Plague actually increased the value of labour and helped to bring an end to serfdom.
In conclusion, disease probably hastened the collapse of the Classic Maya, but the driving force was probably the drought and environmental damage, which led to a lack of water, which led to famine, which led to disease and malnutrition.
Cultural Factors
The other category that I have decided to add to Jared Diamond’s five point framework is cultural factors. In the case of the Mayans, they had an incredibly complex religion with its own sets of beliefs, rituals and values. A ruler’s divine status was at the core of the Maya’s view of the universe. His power to influence the gods through bloodletting rituals made him a critical component in the order of things. When the droughts hit and the crops
started to fail the people would have turned to their rulers. When the gods did not respond to the ruler’s bloodletting and ritual sacrifices the people would have started to revolt. The ruling class would have been thrown into disarray and the result would have been chaos. The belief system shattered. And finally it might have reached the point where people just abandoned their cities and left to build their own lives.Although this theory may seem a bit farfetched it becomes more believable when you add all of the factors together. If there was a drought, disease, a revolt against the ruling class from the lower class and environmental destruction all at once the collapse seems to make a lot more sense.
Response to Collapse
There is little evidence of to show what the Mayans response to their collapse was and this is probably where they failed. Their cities were abandoned and their temples were left to rot, if there was any attempt to avert the collapse it did not work. It is the response of the civilization that determines whether they survive or collapse.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I believe that the collapse of Classic Maya was caused by one or two factors and, as it progressed, created a new range of problems that contributed to the total collapse of the civilization. The two factors that I believe caused the collapse were both environmental-Climate change and environmental damage. One factor was a direct result of the Mayans intensive agricultural methods and their failure to respond when their environment started to fall into decline. When their crop started to fail, supply began to outweigh demand due to their overpopulated cities, disease and malnutrition started to spread and their water sources dried up the people blamed their rulers for the god’s benevolence. When the ruling class failed to fix the problem the lower class may have revolted against them and caused a full scale collapse where their belief system and complex societies just imploded. This theory would also explain how there are still living descendants of the Classic Mayans.
Comparison to Modern Society
Experts say that the collapse of the Maya could serve as a valuable lesson today to societies in Africa and elsewhere that are vulnerable to droughts. When droughts strike, they can trigger a chain reaction that begins with crop failures and scarce water supplies, leading to malnutrition, increased disease and competition for resources, and ultimately causing warfare between nations and socio-political upheaval.
Australia is in the middle of one of the worst droughts in history. Our population is expanding rapidly; our demand is starting to outweigh our supply. Wheat crops are failing, fruit farmers are cutting down their trees and selling up, pig farmers can no longer cope with the cost of feed, demand and cheaper overseas imports. Because our dams are so low we are sucking more and more water out of the land and still we do not implement measures to preserve what little water we have left. Because of the lowering of the water tables the level of salinity in our soils is rising and the area that we are clearing for housing is widening. Due to the amount of deforestation that we have caused erosion is taking hold of our coastlines and land is becoming more and more like an expanse of red and brown dirt. To support our population the demand that we are putting on the environment and our natural resources is increasing every day. Does any of this sound familiar?
In the Eastern states the Murray-Darling basin (one of the biggest water sources for agriculture in the country) is drying out. Go up to Queensland and the Gold coast and we have torrential rain and flooding. If this isn’t an example of climate change and what we are doing to our world then I don’t know what is.
I believe that our civilization isn’t at as much of a risk of collapsing as the Mayans were as we have well established trade partners and allies and we are able to implement modern technology to try to solve our problems. Although, if our trade partners were to find themselves facing a similar situation to the one that we are and cannot supply us with the extra food and water our civilization needs, we would be compromised.
What can contemporary society learn from the collapse of this past society?
Every society in our past generally collapsed for different reasons. Yet every society that collapsed in the past is sending us the same message. To avert a collapse a society needs to respond. Not as splintered groups, but as a united front. The lessons of the past are there, plain and simple. It is our choice whether or not we listen to them.
Bibliography
Books:
Kirkpatrick, 2003, Understanding People in the Past, The Maya, Heinemann Library, United States
Laughton, 1998, The Maya, Life, Myth and Art, Duncan Baird, Great Britain
Chrisp, 1994, Look into the Past, The Maya, Wayland, England
Diamond, 2005, Collapse, the Penguin Group, London, England
Websites:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0313_030313_mayadrought.html
http://science.nasa.gov.au/headlines/y2004/15nov_maya.htm
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5613/1731
http://www.jaguar-sun.com/ideas.html
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=9779&tid=282&cid=921&ct=162
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization
http://earth.google.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:eYnb8OBymFMJ:www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%2520-Ecology,%2520Economy,%2520Society/The%2520Maya.pdf+Mayan+Collapse+her+mast+broken&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=au (for the quote in the beginning)
http://earth.google.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:eYnb8OBymFMJ:www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%2520-Ecology,%2520Economy,%2520Society/The%2520Maya.pdf+Mayan+Collapse+her+mast+broken&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=au (for the quote in the beginning)
http://www.authenticmaya.com/maya_culture_collapse.htm
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/44510?fulltext=true&print=yes
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/44510?fulltext=true&print=yes
http://www.learner.org/interactives/collapse/
http://www.learner.org/interactives/collapse/mayans.html
http://www.learner.org/interactives/collapse/mayans.html
http://www.learner.org/interactives/collapse/mayans_sub.html
http://www.projectshum.org/Ancient/mayan.html
http://home.planet.nl/~roeli049/enghome1.htm
http://belize-guide.info/past.and.present/history/
http://www.projectshum.org/Ancient/mayan.html
http://home.planet.nl/~roeli049/enghome1.htm
http://belize-guide.info/past.and.present/history/
Picture References:
http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Ancient-Mayan-Ruins-Chichen-Itza-Mexico-Posters_i1003636_.htm
http://www.insurancebroadcasting.com/062107-p5.jpg
http://www.insurancebroadcasting.com/062107-p5.jpg
2 comments:
(This is Lady Mage from ff.net) I really liked this!!! You have well researched this and it is well written to boot. I love history!!!!
And I'm glad you like the tammychallenge blog and linked it too! (smiles delightedly) Thank you so much!
Wow! You actually read my sose assignment! xD
Thanks so much, I just hope that my teacher likes it too ^^
Maybe some of my friends will look at the link. Oh how I love to get people obsessed with things!
-Jess-
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