A Demographic Perspective on Maya Collapses

Summary

Since John Bongaarts introduced it in 1978, demographers have used the concept of proximate and ultimate causality to understand fertility, mortality, and other demographic events. Bongaarts distinguished between proximate causes of fertility, like contraceptive use or age at marriage, and ultimate causes like socioeconomic class or education, which affect fertility through those proximate causes. The proximate-ultimate framework could provide Mayanists with a more sophisticated, and ultimately more testable, means of exploring hypotheses of the decline of Classic and Preclassic Maya centers. Hazards analysis would provide clear, statistically sound, means of testing hypotheses about Maya site abandonment within the proximate/ultimate framework. Outcomes explored would be site abandonment, either on the household level or the polity level, perhaps in the presence of a possible proximate cause, for example drought. The Maya experienced a series of droughts across the Preclassic and the Classic, which they survived with varying success. Why did some Maya populations survive some droughts better than others? Drought could be expressed as either a proximate or an ultimate cause of abandonment depending on the specific hypothesis being tested. Explanatory variables could include population density, land use factors, the presence of drought, or military defeat, or an interaction between factors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage