Summary of Theories About the Collapse of the Maya

Okay, this is not my report, this is my research, I just thought that I might put a list of my references for the Maya up here (a) It may help other people (b) It will make it easier for me to see which ones I have ruled out and (c) It will be easier to write my report because I will only need two windows open instead of ten ^^


The first reference that I went to was wikipedia to get an overview of not just how and why the Mayans collapsed but who the Mayans actually were. From the main article on wikipedia (Maya Civilization) I found quite a bit on who they were but not a lot on why they collapsed. Here is a summary of what the paragraph on their collapse said:

• This decline was coupled with a cessation (a temporary or complete stopping) of monumental inscriptions and large-scale architectural construction (this indicates that the Mayan's realised that they were in trouble before their collapse)
• Non-ecological theories of Maya decline are divided into several subcategories, such as overpopulation, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, and the collapse of key trade routes.
• Ecological hypotheses include environmental disaster, epidemic disease, and climate change.
• here is evidence that the Mayan population exceeded carrying capacity of the environment including exhaustion of agricultural potential and overhunting of megafauna.
• Some scholars have recently theorized that an intense 200 year drought led to the collapse of Mayan civilization. The drought theory originated from research performed by physical scientists studying lake beds, ancient pollen, and other data, not from the archaeological community.

This information-although useful-was not very detailed. From there I found the article that this paragraph was taken from, this article is much, much more detailed.

Classic Maya Collapse

This article has almost every theory that you can possibly think of to do with the collapse of the Maya. The most important points in this article are:

• The collapse of classic Maya is still one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology.
• Some eighty-eight different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya Collapse have been identified
• Most of the southern Maya centers declined and were abandoned, while a few cities with access to water continued through this transitional period, and still other new ones were founded.
• Current theories of the Classic Maya Collapse have been categorized into three models:
  1) systemic ecological collapse — the Maya over-exploited the land and caused environmental problems for themselves;
  2) political/warfare — a cultural theory holding that the elite fought too much and provided poor leadership; and
  3) drought caused by climate change.

Foreign Invasion

• The archaeological evidence of the Toltec intrusion into Yucatán in Seibal, Peten suggests to some the theory of foreign invasion.

Excessive or Internecine (of or pertaining to conflict or struggle within a group) Warfare

• A great interregional war took place between the kingdoms of Mutal (Tikal) and Kaan (Calakmul) during the sixth and seventh centuries. The main combatants sought and obtained alliances in the entire Classic Maya region. Some Mayanists (e.g., Demarest) point to large-scale conflict as the cause of the collapse, but it does not explain the abondonment of other cities that were not involved in these wars.
• According to Paul Colinvaux in The Fates of Nations - A Biological Theory of History, humans will fight to preserve their share of existing resources, unless they can obtain more resources. Internecine warfare can be the mark of a declining civilization or power, but this process, when caused by expanding population, is fairly gradual.
• The Maya used a number of intensive agricultural techniques. But it has been noted that the Maya fought during their dry season, to avoid interfering with agricultural activities
• Warfare before the Classic Maya Collapse was generally between Maya city-states and between royal rivals. The Greek city-states by comparison fought each other for years, mastered the military function, and the Greeks did not as a result abandon their city-states wholesale. Warfare with foreign city-states or nations simply does not cause the type of collapse seen in the entire Classic Maya region. Even when war exterminates a population, the victors move in to take that space. The Thirty Years' War, the Eastern Front in the Second World War, the Napoleonic Wars - none of these resulted in permanent abandonment of the affected cities.

Peasant Revolt, Revolution, or Social Turmoil

• One theory attributes the collapse of the classic Maya to a hypothesized revolution among these lower classes. As life became more burdensome, work began to undermine the religious development and collective enterprise of ordinary people. The increased burden of work may have caused people to abandon their values and revolt against the elite of society. This might help explain the abrupt collapse of elite functions, as well as unfinished buildings and ceremonial centers.
• Peasant revolt might also explain the evidence of the burning of temples and smashing of thrones.
• When lower classes or different cultural groups successfully revolt, they assume the higher positions of society or bring the elite lower -- but they do not leave. Warfare, revolution, civil war, internecine warfare, a peasant’s revolt, and dynastic struggle are all historical phenomena that normally resolve themselves and re-establish equilibrium. Social turmoil self-corrects over time. The revolutionary or class struggle theory for the Classic Collapse has no historical precedent. Revolutions invigorate nations, make them stronger usually, and then tend to be reversed as the social and economic pendulum swings back.

Collapse of Trade Routes

• It has been hypothesized that the decline of the Maya is related to the collapse of their intricate trade systems, especially those connected to the central Mexican of Teotihuacán.
• Teotihuacán abruptly declined around c. 650 to 700, and the fall of this city is believed to have contributed to the sudden change in Maya economic and trade functions in the highlands, which may have resulted in a ripple effect of decline across the entire Maya world.
• Much of the Classic Maya trade was in obsidian, feathers, cacao, and other luxury items. Staple foods were produced where the people lived, and storage was not far advanced in the humid environment. The collapse of trade routes would most likely be a temporary phenomenon - or one that resulted from failure of the entire agricultural economy. Trade route discontinuation is most likely an effect, rather than a cause of, the Classic Maya collapse.

Environmental Theories

Catastrophic Event

• The term "catastrophism" has been used to describe the theory that a single natural disaster caused the Classic Maya Collapse. The lack of archaeological evidence makes it unlikely that a single natural disaster caused the Classic Maya collapse.
• The Mayan drought was not a catastrophic event because it did not occur as one event, but instead as the effect of climate change occurring over many decades.

Epidemic Disease

• Widespread disease could explain some rapid depopulation and might inhibit recovery over the long run.
• One theory states that disease can actually be helpful in some situations, by reducing population, disease lessens pressure in society, eliminates the need to farm marginal land or destroy the environment, and increases the ratio of resources to people. The Bubonic Plague, for example, markedly increased the value of labor and helped bring an end to serfdom.
• More probable is that disease, always a product of famine, resulted from a series of prolonged droughts. The consequences of drought and famine make inhabitants more susceptible to disease. Disease probably hastened the Classic Maya Collapse, but the driving force was probably the lack of water, which led to famine, which then led to disease.

Drought

• Mega-droughts hit the Yucatán Peninsula and Petén Basin areas with particular ferocity, for several reasons:
  1) Thin tropical soils, which decline in fertility and become unworkable when deprived of forest cover;
  2) Regular seasonal drought, drying up surface water;
  3) The absence of ground water;
  4) The rarity of lakes, especially in the Yucatán Peninsula;
  5) The absence of river systems, such as in the Petén Basin;
  6) Tropical vegetation which requires regular monsoon rain; and
  7) Heavy dependence upon water-based intensive agricultural techniques, particularly in the Classic period.
• The drought theory provides a comprehensive explanation, because non-environmental and cultural factors (excessive warfare, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, less trade, etc.) can all be explained by the effects of prolonged drought on Classic Maya civilization.
• Mesoamerican civilization provides a remarkable exception: civilization prospering in the tropical swampland. 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 exceptional accomplishments of the Maya are all the more remarkable because of their engineered response to the fundamental environmental difficulty of relying upon rainwater rather than permanent sources of water. “The Maya succeeded in creating a civilization in a seasonal desert by creating a system of water storage and management which was totally dependent on consistent rainfall."
• The drought theory does not blame the Maya; Dr. Gill does not believe the Maya did anything to cause their own Collapse. Further, the drought theory can be reconciled with evidence of warfare in the Petexbatun region of Guatemala: Late Classic warfare seemed to take place near water, lakes, and strategic access to the flow of water, as if water was the last and most critical resource in the region. A Google Earth view of the Petexbatun reveals a very low-lying area, strewn with lakes, and holding perhaps the last wet farmland of the southern lowlands in the terminal Classic Period.
• Critics of the drought theory wonder why the southern and central lowland cities were abandoned and the northern cities like Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Coba continued to thrive. Gill indicates the water table in the southern lowlands was too deep, that the Maya there had to rely exclusively upon rainwater; but that the northern Yucatán ground water was closer to the surface and obtainable through cenotes (a type of sinkhole containing groundwater) and other water access points. Sylvanus Griswold Morley, a noted American archaeologist and Mayanist of the early 20th century, noted that the location of cenotes was the prime factor governing the distribution of ancient Maya population in the northern Yucatán

Systemic Ecological Collapse Model

• More recent investigations have shown a complicated variety of intensive agricultural techniques utilized by the Maya, explaining the high population of the Classic Maya polities. Modern archaeologists now comprehend the sophisticated intensive and productive agricultural techniques of the ancient Maya, and several of the Maya agricultural methods have not yet been reproduced. Intensive agricultural methods were developed and utilized by all the Mesoamerican cultures to boost their food production and give them a competitive advantage over less skillful peoples. These intensive agricultural methods included canals, terracing, raised fields, ridged fields, chinampas (a method of ancient Mesoamerican agriculture which used small, rectangle-shaped areas of fertile arable land to grow crops on the shallow lake beds in the Valley of Mexico), 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 systems, hydraulic systems, swamp reclamation, swidden systems, and other agricultural techniques which have not yet been fully comprehended. Systemic ecological collapse is said to be evidenced by deforestation, siltation, and the decline of biological diversity.
• The 2006 film Apocalypto adopted the systemic ecological collapse model, portraying a brutal Mayan city still clinging to Classic era values during the end of the post-Classic era cutting down too many trees, corpses left to rot in the sun, crop failures, diseases, excessive limestone plaster use, etc.

This wikipedia article was useful because it gave an overview of the more well known theories. Wikipedia is also very useful to find refererences from because it usually has a list at the bottom with hyperlinks to be pages and publishing details for the books.

Something that I found that was interesting about this article was that it had the basic structure of Jared Diamond's Five Point Framework. The main differences was that put revolt and internal war in different categories from just general hostile enemies and they also had a seperate heading for disease as it doesn't really fit into Diamond's framework.

Climate Change Killed Off The Maya

This is an article posted on the National Geographic website by Stefan Lovgren that uses the drought theory to explain the collapse of the Mayan civilization. It also theorizes that three large droughts (each lasted less than a decade)that occured between 810 AD and 910 AD that matched periodic downturns in the Maya culture could have been caused by climate change. Some of the useful information in the article includes:

• According to experts say the Maya were particularly susceptible to long droughts because about 95 percent of their population centers depended solely on lakes, ponds, and rivers containing on average an 18-month supply of water for drinking and agriculture.
• The study of that lake also found man-made effects, such as deforestation and soil erosion.
• Scientists have found that the recurrence of the drought was remarkably cyclical, occurring every 208 years. That interval is almost identical to a known cycle in which the sun is at its most intense every 206 years.
• The drought theory is still controversial among some archeologists who believe a combination of overpopulation, an internecine (of or pertaining to conflict or struggle within a group) struggle for control among the nobles, a weak economic base, and a political system that didn't foster power-sharing led to the Maya's collapse. One hypothesis suggests the Maya people themselves were responsible for their downfall as a result of environmental degradation, including deforestation.
• Other human 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 hurt agricultural production and caused regional collapse.
• About 300 years after the Mayan collapse, the Chumash people on California's Channel Islands survived severe droughts by transforming themselves from hunter-gatherers into traders.
• Experts say the Maya collapse 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 beginning with crop failures, leading to malnutrition, increased disease and competition for resources, and ultimately causing warfare between nations and sociopolitical upheaval.

I found this article useful because it included references to other societies (both past and present) that have both collapsed and survived under the effects of droughts and other climate related problems.

Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization

This is another article on a website called sciencemag.org. The article is written by Gerald H. Haug, Detlef Günther, Larry C. Peterson, Daniel M. Sigman, Konrad A. Hughen, Beat Aeschlimann (all of these people work in numerous important-sounding places) The aritcle basically supports the theories presented in the article above. There is less information though, and it is harder to understand than the other article so it isn't the best reference. It is more-or-less a summary of the other article.

What Caused the Collapse of the Ancient Maya Civilization?

This article has less authority than the other two because it is posted on an unkown site by a person called Jeeni Criscenzo. This article introduces a new theory that relates mostly to the Mayans belief system and ecological stress or some sort of natural disaster (like a drought?) It also mentions the fact that most 'Mayanists' agree that the collapse was due to a combination of problems, not just one or two. Some of the most useful ideas in this article are:

• A ruler's divine status was at the core of the Maya's view of their universe. His power to influence the gods by bloodletting rituals made him a critical component to the order of things. (Therefore he would be turned to if something went wrong....such as a drought....)
• People never questioned the omnipotent power of their rulers and likewise each new generation of royalty was convinced of their own divine powers. At some point though, this unquestioned belief in their rulers started to wear thin. Perhaps there was a series of natural disasters - drought, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes (maybe an extreme El Nino?) or maybe ecological stress caused crops to fail. I think that whatever these problems were, they probably instigated an increase in warfare. Rulers felt their powers were failing and the gods required more and more royal blood - their own personal bloodletting was insufficient - so there was a frenzied campaign to secure other royalty to sacrifice to satisfy the gods.
• The royals were captured but they were not immediately sacrificed. They were kept for years to be bled at ritual ceremonies. Meanwhile there was no one running the show back at their homes. Their heirs could not take over leadership responsibilities because the ruler was still alive.
• The result was chaos. The belief system was shattered. And finally it got to the point that people just deserted the cities, and rewrote the rules - adapting their belief system as best they could (they did not have the education of the elite who had abandoned them, perhaps they couldn't even read or write.)
• The dominant cause was not warfare, it was a belief system that couldn't hold up under a drastic change in circumstances. There is something important here for us to observe and learn from. Our civilization is also undergoing dramatic change. Our belief systems are also being questioned. Fundamentalist in all religions are trying desperately to stop change. But change is inevitable.

This theory may seem a little far-fetched but when you add all of the problems that the Maya faced together it starts to make sense. They had a drought (and maybe put too much ecological strain on the environment with their expanding population) which caused their crops to fail, the people to starve and the spread of disease to increase rapidly with little clean water or good food for nutrition. This article was not the most helpful but it did introduce a new set of theories and factors to the equation.

News Release : Century-Long Drought Linked to Collapse of Mayan Civilization

This article (written by Shelley Dawicki) also suggests that drought and climate change were factors in the collapse of the Mayans. This article supports the ideas that were presented in the other two articles (see above) and shows the more technical side of the research. Some of the important points in the article are:

• Sediments from the Cariaco Basin in northern Venezuela clearly show a dry spell that the Caribbean region starting in the seventh century and lasting for more than 200 years.
• Titanium levels decrease with decreasing rainfall (thats how they know that there was a drought and for exactly how long it lasted for)
• The Maya flourished for about 1,000 years and had a peak population of more than one million. They built pyramids and elaborate cities with irrigation systems on the Yucatan, now part of Mexico. (Might these factors have contributed to ecological stress?) They depended on a seasonally consistent rainfall to support agriculture.
• Until recently, archaeologists and historians lacked information on short-term climate change, but now high-resolution records from ice cores, tree rings and some deep sea sediments provide evidence that climate shifts often coincided with sudden changes in human history.
• The sediment records show a dry period beginning about 1,200 years ago that was punctuated by periods of three to nine years each when there was little or no rainfall. Each event placed more stress on the civilization, leading to a collapse of a portion of the population each time. The remaining population could not survive the last severe drought at about 910 AD.
• Archeological data show that the Mayan communities in the southern and central lowlands collapsed first, while those in the northern highlands lasted for another century or so, possibly because they had access to more ground water resources. In the end, however, they couldn't survive the final dry period.

This article gives more specific dates for the droughts and collapse of the Mayan civilization but it does not have very much new information. One of the ideas that this article presented was that, as technology progresses we can find out more about the collapse of past civilizations (such as the titanium and ice cores) but as technology progresses our civilization's situation gets worse. I f we know so much more about the past civilizations, why don't we utilize that information to prevent our civilization's decline?

Maya Culture Collapse: Current Theory

Although this site does hurt your eyes when you read it and it doesn't appear to be very realiable (in one part it said that there were around 10 million people living in Maya before the collapse when I know from many other sites that that figure is more like 1 million), there is some useful information in it (though not much more than what has already been presented on the other sites) It presents a mixture of interlocking theories that, put together would go a long way to explaining the collapse of Mayan cilvilization. These theories are:

• Pollen samples collected from columns of soil that archeologists have excavated in lakes across the region provide evidence of widespread deforestation approximately 1,200 years ago, when weed pollen almost completely replaced tree pollen. The clearing of rainforest led to heightened erosion and evaporation; the evidence of the erosion appears in thick layers of sediment washed into lakes. This also disrupted the intensive agricultural system, that they have been using during 2000 years.
• Another piece of evidence, is the thickness of the floor stones in the Mayan ruins. They would have needed about 20 trees (to build a fire large and hot enough) to make a plaster floor stone that is about one square meter. In the earliest ruins, these stones were a foot or more thick, but they progressively got thinner. The most recently built ones were only a few inches thick.
• Studies of settlement remains, show that this deforestation coincided with a dramatic drop in the Mayan population. After two millennia of steady growth, the Mayan population reached an all-time high.
• “If we completely deforest an area and replace it with grassland, we find that it gets considerably warmer—as much as 5 to 6 degrees Celsius,” Oglesby said. Sunlight that normally evaporates water from the rainforest canopy would instead heat the ground. Although his model paints a more extreme picture than what actually happened (the region was heavily, but probably not completely deforested), Oglesby suspects that deforestation contributed to a drought. Lake sediment cores indicate that the Mayan deforestation appears to have coincided with natural climate variability that was already producing a drought.
• Maya farmers were well skilled in sophisticated techniques designed to get maximum production from delicate tropical soils. But beginning in the ninth century, studies of lake-bed sediments show, a series of prolonged droughts struck the Maya world, hitting especially hard in cities like Tikal, which depended on rain both for drinking water and to reinvigorate the swampland (bajos), where farmers grew their crops. River ports like Cancuén might have escaped water shortages, but across much of the Maya region the lake-bed sediments also show ancient layers of eroded soil, testimony to deforestation and overuse of the land.
• Maya warfare involved well-documented types of violence: wars among separate kingdoms; attempts of cities within a kingdom to secede by revolting against the capital; and civil wars resulting from frequent violent attempts by would-be kings to usurp the throne. Not considered worthy of description, but probably even more frequent, were fights between commoners over land, as overpopulation became excessive and land became scarce.
• The other phenomenon important to understanding all of these collapses is the repeated occurrence of droughts, as inferred by climatologists from evidence of lake evaporation preserved in lake sediments, and as summarized by Gill in "The Great Maya Droughts". The rise of the Classic Maya civilization may have been facilitated by a rainy period beginning around 250 B.C., until a temporary drought after A.D. 125 was associated with a pre-Classic collapse at some sites. That collapse was followed by the resumption of rainy conditions and the buildup of Classic Maya cities, briefly interrupted by another drought around 600 corresponding to a decline at Tikal and some other sites. Finally, around A.D. 750 there began the worst drought in the past 7,000 years, peaking around the year A.D. 800, and suspiciously associated with the Classic collapse. The area most affected by the Classic collapse was the southern lowlands, probably for the two reasons already mentioned: it was the area with the densest population, and it also had the most severe water problems because it lay too high above the water table for cenotes or wells to provide water. The Petén lowlands lost more than 90 percent of its population in the course of the Classic collapse.

This website theorises that the Mayan Collapse was mostly related to environmental stress that was put on the land by the Mayans deforestation and intensive agricultural methods. If these environmental problems were added to a drought (or three) then their effects would increase ten-fold. I now believe that warfare and revolt was only or small factor in the collapse of the Mayans (and it could even be said that it wasn't a cause of the collapse, it was an effect of the drought and environmental problems that caused the collapse)

Another thing that I have discovered is that before the Classic Mayan period, wars only really involved the elite (or ruling class) My theory is that when the droughts and the environmental stress began to effect the Mayans, the lower classes began to get involved in wars of their own. Maybe over food and water or maybe over land that was still farmable. They may also have revolted against their king's because they believed that the king's could talk to the god's and that he told them what to do. If the king appeared to be losing his power with the god's it was either the king that had to go or the god's.

I found that the most useful references that I came across were the sites that are well known and better cited (such as the National Geographic article and the NASA one) The more unkown the site got, the less truth was in the information.

More references that I found but didn't find the need to summarize (either I already knew the information in them or they were rather useless):

Climate Change and the Collapse of the Maya

Collapse: Why do Civilizations Fall?

And from there:

• · http://www.learner.org/interactives/collapse/mayans.html
• · http://www.learner.org/interactives/collapse/mayans_sub.html

Ancient Civilizations-Mayan

Mayaweb

W-o-w.....That was long!