Prolonged Drought Likely Caused Ancient Maya Collapse
A word of warning
Hola Amigos! First the Maya, then check below for Maya Train Update.
Raging wild fires, hundred year floods and thousand year droughts. No, I'm not talking about the Maya—not yet—but about current weather patterns that are becoming all too common. A view into the past may well help prepare us for our environmental future.
In the last year I've read numerous articles on studies that link the collapse of the ancient Maya to drought—from Nature Communications, Phys-Org, Nature World News to more traditional media outlets.
To be sure, this is not new news. I too wrote about it in Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy. Numerous theories abound, and archeologists across the globe have long debated the reason behind the collapse. Radical environment change rises to the top, always accompanied by extenuating circumstances linked to lack of water and how societies cope in times of food scarcity.
The Maya's ongoing greatness was compromised by the most severe drought of the past seven thousand years. It devastated the Yucatán Peninsula, and grand Classic Era Maya cities collapsed in four phases of abandonment spaced about 50 years apart—760, 810, 860, and 910 CE.
Not alone
The ancient Maya were not alone in civilization collapse due to environmental changes, but because that collapse occurred within the past thousand years, we may relate to it more. Along with the Maya’s undoing, countless other great civilizations fell: the Minoan Greeks, the Hittites, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylon, and ancient Rome for starters. And though these collapses were consequential, in today’s world, a ‘civilization’ collapse would encompass the entire planet due to our connectivity in pretty much everything.
In 1946, the noted archeologist and Maya scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff commented on a climate disaster that could have imperiled the Maya. She put it like this, "Though it is conceivable that the disappearance of the population may have been a gradual process, the catastrophically sudden extinction of the arts can be explained only in the terms of some widespread and unforeseen disaster that afflicted most Maya cities soon after a.d. 800."
The last known inscription on a carved Maya stella was listed as 910 CE in the Petén. In prosperous times, stella recorded major events detailing triumphs of kings and defeats of enemies. From 900 CE on there was either nothing to report or no backing for it. If rulers could not maintain prosperity when rain didn't come and crop harvests were not large enough to feed the population, disillusionment set in.
Recent testing of skeletal remains at various Maya sites shows evidence of disease and malnutrition right across the board—in nobles and peasants. As the Maya population grew, the peasants increased intensive farming techniques in an attempt to feed the masses. But slash and burn agriculture caused land exhaustion and deprived the ground of nutrients. Their production system became over-burdened. Not enough food to go around.
Lack of rain
Influential Maya archeologist, scholar, and author Michael D. Coe, in The Maya, Ancient Places and People, 1 the last in his series, The Maya, writes researchers discovered a major drought that corresponded to the lapse between the early and late classic periods—a time in which no new stela (large limestone slabs in front of temples) were erected and in which earlier stela had been defaced. Defacing stela has been compared to spray painting graffiti on buildings today, showing a lack of respect for authority. 2
Apropos the environmental dilemma, I read an article on Mayapan, a prominent Post-Classic Maya city in the northwest Yucatán Peninsula (25 km south of Merida), by Marilyn Masson. Posted in "Nature Communications," Masson, Principal Investigator for the Proyecto Economic de Mayapan, wrote that prolonged drought likely fueled civil conflict and its eventual collapse. Mayapan stood apart—and alone—from other Maya cities and for a time was considered the ancient capital of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula.
Mayapan—society in decline
A latecomer to the pantheon of Maya cities, Mayapan emerged as a regional capital from the 13th to 15th centuries after the demise of Chichen Itza. With a population of 20,000, it was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family that ruled it. Historical records date the collapse between 1441 and 1461. Thanks to Masson, professor and chair at University of Albany's Department of Anthropology, there’s new evidence citing the effects of a society in decline. This was the Late Classic Period, when the civilization was waning.
Historical documents were studied for records of violence. Human remains from that area were examined for that time period, looking for signs of traumatic injury.
Massacre and mass graves
Masson and her team found shallow mass graves and evidence of brutal massacre at monuments and structures across the city. "Some were laid out with knives in their pelvis and rib cages, others were chopped up and burned," she wrote. "Not only did they smash and burn the bodies but they also smashed and burned the effigies of their gods . . . a form of double desecration."
Advanced radiocarbon dating
Professor Douglas Bennett, University of California/Santa Barbara Anthropology Department, lead study on Masson's team, came in with new information. He dated the skeletons using accelerator mass spectrometry, an advanced radiocarbon dating technology, and found they dated 50 to 100 years earlier than the city’s supposed mid-15th century downfall. 3
Plenty of ethno-historical records existed to support the city's violent downfall around 1458, said Masson. But the new evidence placed the evidence of massacre 100 years earlier. Combined with data that the Peninsula experienced prolonged drought at that time, the team began to suspect environmental factors played a major role in the desertion of the site along with the violent chaos that preceded the desertion.
Rain and maize
The Maya depended heavily on rain-fed maize but lacked methods to store grain longer than a year due to the humid jungle climate. The impacts of rainfall levels on food production are believed to be linked to human migration, population decline, warfare, and shifts in political power, the study states.
"It's not that droughts cause social conflict but they create the conditions whereby violence can occur," Masson said.
Wars ensue
The study suggests the Xiu, who launched the fatal attacks on the Cocom of Mayapan, used the droughts and ensuing famine to foment the unrest that led to the mass deaths and the migration from Mayapan as early as the 1300s.
Said Masson, "I think the lesson is that hardship can become politicized in the worst kind of way. It can cause people to turn on one another violently."
It's hard to not compare our present news cycles with these past events.
Following this period of drought and unrest however, Mayapan rallied briefly thanks to healthy rainfall levels around 1400. "It was able to bounce back before the droughts returned in the 1420s, but it was too soon," Masson said. "They didn't have enough time to fully recover. The government just couldn't survive another bout like that. But it almost did."
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 4 wrote it’s amazing the number of cultures that do collapse. One of history's disturbing facts is that collapse is caused by the destruction of the natural resources cultures are dependent on. The Anasazi, Easter Islanders, the kingdom of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. . . and the Maya. Declines of societies swiftly follow their peaks.
On the tail of Chichen Itza
Mayapan rose to power in the shadow of Chichen Itza’s decline and those of the great city-states of the south. Both Tikal and Calakmul had gone into steep decline during the late Postclassic Era (1250-1450 CE). Mayapan was the cultural and political center of the waning Maya civilization on the Yucatán Peninsula and had great influence upon smaller city states surrounding it. It may have been “last man standing.”
Fast forward to present day, as food insecurity, social unrest, water shortages, and drought-driven migration in many parts of the world continue to brew, there are lessons to be learned from how previous empires handled environmental hardships.
Famine one rabbit
Pre-Spanish conquest, in central Mexico, the Aztecs survived the infamous famine of One Rabbit created by a catastrophic drought in 1454. To feed his people, the emperor emptied out the capital’s food storehouses. When food ran out, he encouraged them to flee. Many sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf Coast where conditions were better, but eventually bought their way out and returned to the capital. In time, the empire emerged stronger than ever. This clever strategy enacted by the Aztec imperial regime, said Masson, is likely what allowed for their recovery.
Her conclusion: In spite of drought, civil and military conflict and institutional failure, in a similar manner a resilient network of small Maya states led by Mayapan persisted into the early 16th century. (Unfortunately for the Maya, they met with the Spanish invasion after overcoming this disastrous catastrophe).
History repeats?
With global warming upon us, the problems faced by Mexico and Central America’s great civilizations are important to consider—Wars, famine, massacres.
Today's world must evaluate if our institutions are up to the task of maintaining order in the face of extreme climate change and its outcome.
Although Mayapan is a tale of only one city, correlations to present day problems make the study extremely relevant.
Fires are raging. Floods are rampant. Hurricanes are horrific. Droughts continue.
Climate change and its effects are real. Science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, in her 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, 5 writes, “We humans have been killing whatever we could whenever we could since the beginning of our tenure here on Earth. . . The first cause was ignorance. Primitive humans just didn’t know they were destroying the source of their subsistence until they had to move on. Today we know the truth.”
In a July article on the 2024 global summer heat epidemic, the Washington Post wrote, “The scorching heat across five continents in recent days, scientists say, provided yet more proof that human-caused global warming has so raised the baseline of normal temperatures that once-unthinkable catastrophes have become commonplace. In the past seven days alone, billions felt heat with climate change-fueled intensity that broke more than 1,000 temperature records around the globe.”
And the LA Times wrote on August 8, California's average temperature for July was the hottest on record since 1895.
The 6th extinction
In the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Biodiversity, a plaque reads: "Right now we are in the midst of the 6th Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape.”
Because I like to end on a positive note, back to Kolbert. She does present a hopeful tone in her recognition that when people focus their attention, positive change is possible. Do remember however, that was written in 2014.
Michael D. Coe, Stephen Houston. The Maya, Eighth Edition, People and Places. 9th Edition. (Thames and Hudson, 2015)
Jeanine Kitchel. Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy. (Jeanine Kitchel, 2012).
Bennett, D.J., Masson, M., Lope, C.P. et al. Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya. (Nat Commun 13, 3911, 2022).
Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. (W.W. Norton and Company, 2005).
Elizabeth Kolbert. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. (Henry Holt and Co., 2014)
MAYA TRAIN UPDATE
Tren Maya, the controversial infrastructure project that has been the darling of President Andres Lopez Obrador (Amlo), was originally estimated to run $28 billion USD. It’s now clocking in around $30 billion.
With roughly half of the project currently in use, it has wreaked major damage on the environment. Promising to pull in tourists—especially for lines linked to pyramid sites—a July 29 Yucatán Times article wrote the Chichen Itza station receives only 30 passengers per day.
In an Associated Press article by Mark Stevenson, the train line, which runs in a loop around the Yucatán Peninsula, is used daily by about 1200 people. These figures were released by the government July 15. Even though 4000 tourists enter Chichen Itza each day, they arrive by other means of transit—buses or private vehicles.
Initially the federal government announced that artisans, tourist guides, and service providers would benefit from the construction of a Visitor Service Center which includes the train station, said the Yucatán Times.
Guides, according to the Yucatán Times, have described the project as ‘a failure.’ There’s also been no increase in visitors to the Mayan Museum that was inaugurated a few months ago by the Mexican president. The new Visitor Center, located on the side of the highway near the pueblo Piste, is still under construction.
Most passengers use the train for short distances, between Cancun and Merida or nearby Campeche. Tourist use was originally floated as a way to pick up the train’s massive costs, hoping to temptin visitors to depart from Cancun and explore the entire 950-mile route, visiting Maya archeological sites along the way.
But according to Stevenson, a roundtrip route from Cancun to the Maya site of Palenque drew only 100 passengers each way in its first six months of operation. This is a sharp contrast to the government’s promise that the train would carry between 22,000 and 37,000 people daily. Ridership is three to five percent of that, with the four most popular stations—Cancun, Merida, Palenque and Campeche, already in service.
The rail line down the Riviera Maya corridor linking Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Tulum isn’t finished yet and presently has 17 trains operating. But there is little evidence the Cancun - Tulum line will make the project profitable because it doesn’t run particularly close to the resort towns its meant to serve.
Originally scheduled to run in an elevated line over highway 307 where the hotels are located, technical difficulties required the government change the route. A 68-mile swath cut through the jungle moved tracks four miles inland. Rather than simply jumping on a train to get to work, resort workers will need to taxi to the train station, wait for one of the few trains, then take another taxi to work.
The project did manage to create jobs. In the state of Tabasco, twenty thousand direct or indirect jobs were created, lowering unemployment by 40 percent, Governor Manuel Merino stated. But those jobs will be gone once construction is finished.
Stevenson wrote it’s not clear if the government ever thought the railway would be profitable. López Obrador had already decided to build it before feasibility studies were carried out. According to a 2019 government study, the railway was going to cost $8.5 billion, and the estimated benefits would be about $10.5 billion.
But those “estimated benefits” always included a lot of intangibles, wrote Stevenson, like reduced traffic on highways or increased tourism revenues, all of which either didn’t happen or were unrelated to the train. Stay tuned for the next update!
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WHY THE MAYA—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.
Thank you for such detailed information. My heart sank to my stomach through most of the article knowing where we are headed.
Jeanine, another informative and fascinating post. It's also frightening! I wonder how much we learn from these catastrophic events and how much we look away. Thanks for all of your research and sharing.