The Resilience of the Maya in Northern Yucatan during the Terminal Classic

Summary

Resilience theory has typically been applied to living people by sociologists or psychologists or to components of the natural world by ecologists. Whatever its application, its scale is that of a community or system, with the focus is often on why particular components are able to persist when the system is inevitably disturbed, transformed, or reorganized, while others fare less well. Such systems move between stability and transformation in an adaptive cycle, with both environmental changes and human responses occurring. The transformations that took place in the Maya Lowlands before, during, and after the Terminal Classic can be analyzed in light of resilience theory, as society moved through phases of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization. Data from the Cochuah region, in the context of trends throughout the Maya Lowlands, are used to follow dynamic settlement pattern changes as society moved through collapse, release, and reorganization phases.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage