Scrutinizing Theories of Maya Collapse with the CHAAHK Spatial Simulation Model

Summary

The Classic Maya collapse remains as both relevant and controversial a topic as ever. For over a century, dozens of researchers have proposed different causes that may have driven this complex process. The last few decades have witnessed the academic community’s opinion converge on the notion that many different social and environmental factors, operating at likewise diverse scales, somehow contributed to a temporally gradual and spatially heterogeneous disruption of the demographic, political, and cultural patterns known to have characterized the Classic Maya. This paper builds on this progress by attempting to quantify the relative influence of certain factors on the Maya region's long-term trajectory. It presents an abstract spatial simulation model of Maya demography, subsistence, and trade over a 3000 year period. It implements relatively generic manifestations of what processes were relevant to the growth, collapse, and regeneration of the Maya system. This abstraction permits quicker model execution times, which then facilitates using data mining and sensitivity analysis methodology to quantify how certain stressor categories contribute to the presence or absence of long term societal collapse. The relative importance of these stressors according to the simulation is then compared to the amount of research attention they tend to receive.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22725