The Role Of Environment In The Collapse Of The Ancient Maya

Summary

Understanding the socioeconomic demise and depopulation of much of the Maya lowlands from the eighth to tenth centuries has been influenced historically by environmental evidence and human-environment frameworks emanating from beyond archaeology. Climate change was involved as early as 1917, but subsequently muted by the excesses of environmental determinism. The role of environment was subsequently reinstated in the latter parts of the 20th century, especially influenced by compelling evidence from paleoecology. More recently, this role has been amplified as attention turns to past analogues of human-environment "tipping points" to inform sustainability science. The weight of the evidence increasingly indicates that the Maya collapse coincided with prolonged aridity and profound landscape changes, the feedbacks of which affected temperature, precipitation, and soil nutrient conditions, seriously challenging human-environment relationships in the Maya lowlands. It is a simplification, however, to invoke environment alone or primarily as the source of the collapse. Research attention must begin to address the collapse-period human-environment conditions relative to those in other periods of Maya hiatuses, raising the question why previous stress points were successfully tackled by the Maya as well as the extended paucity of occupation of much of the Maya lowlands.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Fields to the Palaces of the Prehistoric Maya: Hono(u)ring the Contributions of the late Peter D. Harrison   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage