Classic Maya Collapse: An Introduction

Before launching into the main event, the detailed focus of this blog, I believe it is important to set the scene and give a brief history and background to the Maya. This will be done with the help of Oglesby et al. (2009), who provide a comprehensive introduction to the Mayan civilization and whose paper will be reviewed in the future.

The Maya were a Mesoamerican civilization that spanned over 3,500 years and 1,000 km. At its peak, the empire extended from central Mexico to Costa Rica through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The maximum extent of the Mayan civilization, showing its context in the Americas (source)

 

The Maya were well known for their fully developed written language, as well as mathematical and astronomical systems, art and architecture. The Empire is split chronologically into three periods. The Pre-Classic period (c. 2000 BC to 250 AD) saw the establishment of Mayan cities peaking during the Classic Period (A.D. 600-850) and which remained inhabited until the Post-Classic period until the arrival of Spanish in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. At their pinnacle, the Maya had attained one of the highest population densities in history with up to 6700 people per square kilometre, a density only rivalled by modern day China and Java.  

As mentioned, the peak of the Mayan civilization was during the Late Classic Period  (A.D. 600-850) but this summit was almost immediately followed by a dramatic and devastating population collapse that saw an 80% decline in inhabitants within a century. It is said that the large Maya cities disintegrated in four phases of abandonment spaced about 50 years apart around A.D. 760, 810, 860 and 910. This decline should not be confused with the collapse of the Pre-classic Maya in the 2^nd century AD.

The subsidence of the Mayan empire is still a major conundrum in the history of mankind and numerous explanations for the collapse have been proposed. These have included climatic change, soil erosion and exhaustion, epidemic disease, earthquakes, warfare, malnutrition, overpopulation, peasant revolt, hurricanes and collapse of trade routes. Despite such a wide variety of possible causes, it has been stated that social turmoil alone could not account for such a spectacular collapse. It is now widely agreed that it is most likely that a combination of social, ecological and political changes caused the population decline. However recent research, using new data obtained through improving paleo-environmental techniques, has highlighted, in particular, the importance of climate change. Such new data includes ice-core evidence from Greenland, regional lake sediment cores, marine cores and stalagmite climate records, all utilising a wide range of climate proxies and dating methods. In fact, it is theorised that social chaos and political turmoil only occurred as a direct result of climate change in the region at the time. Nevertheless, there still remains much debate within the climate change theories and opposition to them. 

This blog will focus on the intricacies of the environmental arguments for the collapse of Mayan Empire and their critics. Particular attention will be paid to the modern techniques used to help unlock such past environments and how ancient climate changes, such as that proposed, might explain future ones.