Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations by Brian Fagan

Author:Brian Fagan [Fagan, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780786727681
Google: fFdAjEqG4tcC
Published: 2009-02-10T02:53:31.274000+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Classic Maya Collapse

Such was the scattering of the work, the human design. The people were ground down, overthrown. The mouths and faces of them were destroyed and crushed.

—Popol Vuh, Quiche Maya Book of Counsel

Lake bed deposits in Mexico’s Quintana Roo tell the same story as the Quelccaya ice cap in the Andes. A severe drought cycle settled over Peru and Central America in the mid- to late-sixth-century A.D. A combination of drought and El Niños nearly destroyed the Moche. Years of drought in the tropical southern lowlands of Guatemala and Mexico caused economic and social disruption at a time of rapid population growth. Like the Moche, the Maya survived, but the environmental writing was on the wall. Three centuries later their civilization lay in ruins.

The ancient Maya were among the most flamboyant and longest-lasting of all pre-Columbian civilizations. Once humble village farmers, the Maya transformed their low-lying tropical homeland into a landscape of great cities ruled by powerful lords. Between the last few centuries before Christ and A.D. 900, Classic Maya civilization flourished in the southern lowlands of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. The collapse came suddenly. The great ceremonial centers of the Petén and the southern lowlands were abandoned, and huge portions of the region were deserted, never to be reoccupied. In the city of Tikal alone, the population of more than fifty thousand declined to just one-third of that. The survivors clustered in the ruins of the great masonry structures and tried to retain a semblance of their earlier life. Within a few generations, even they were gone.

The “Classic Maya collapse” is one of the great controversies of archaeology, but there is little doubt that droughts, fueled in part by El Niño, played an important role in the disaster.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.