News From the Front – A Japanese Rambo!?

Refreshingly, the debate surrounding the collapse of the Classic Maya has arisen elsewhere in cyberspace this week. There is a section of the New York Times website called ‘Scientist at Work – Notes From the Field’, a blog described as the modern version of a field journal – a place for reports on the daily progress of scientific expeditions. On 27^th February Takeshi Inomata, a professor of anthropology specialising in the ancient Maya, draws the reader’s attention to the on-going field science aiming to put the debate surrounding the Mayan population breakdown to rest once and for all.

Whilst primarily studying the anthropological aspects of the ancient Maya, the writer describes the arrival of a team of Japanese geologists and plant scientists who aim to uncover more about the area’s past climate (Figure 1). The group, including a lake-corer known as ‘the Japanese Rambo’, aim to collect sediment from 3 lakes in Guatemala, comprising of Lakes Petexbatun, Las Pozas and Quexil in the central Guatemalan lowlands. Results will stem from the analysis of geochemistry, isotopes, pollens, diatoms and other remains and appear to be successful already, with a series of four-metre-long cores extracted. However, the rich amounts of data on environmental change contained within each core will not be analysed until they are transported back to Japan.  

Figure 1: The group of Japanese scientists with a core sample taken from Lake Petexbatun (source)

 

Building on what we learnt from the paper by Hodell et al. (1995), it is claimed by the writer that though apparent that there were major droughts in the northern parts of the empire at the time of collapse, archaeological evidence suggests that centres prospered in this region during these supposed dry spells. Furthermore, it is stated that the southern regions witnessed a far greater abandonment, but evidence of droughts in this area still remains unclear.  

It is clear to see the need for a greater depth of study into the spatial extent of the defined droughts and the ability of different Mayan groups to resist such conditions. It is as a result of this need that groups of scientists, such as the Japanese, are working to discover new evidence of drought in the southern regions of the Mayan civilization and why anthropologists and archaeologists, like Takeshi Inomata, are working to find out how different sets of people were affected by climate changes.