Impacts of Climate Change on the Collapse of Lowland Maya Civilization

Abstract

Paleoclimatologists have discovered abundant evidence that droughts coincided with collapse of the Lowland Classic Maya civilization, and some argue that climate change contributed to societal disintegration. Many archaeologists, however, maintain that drought cannot explain the timing or complex nature of societal changes at the end of the Classic Period, between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE. This review presents a compilation of climate proxy data indicating that droughts in the ninth to eleventh century were the most severe and frequent in Maya prehistory. Comparison with recent archaeological evidence, however, indicates an earlier beginning for complex economic and political processes that led to the disintegration of states in the southern region of the Maya lowlands that precedes major droughts. Nonetheless, drought clearly contributed to the unusual severity of the Classic Maya collapse, and helped to inhibit the type of recovery seen in earlier periods of Maya prehistory. In the drier northern Maya Lowlands, a later political collapse at ca. 1000 CE appears to be related to ongoing extreme drought. Future interdisciplinary research should use more refined climatological and archaeological data to examine the relationship between climate and social processes throughout the entirety of Maya prehistory. 613

Forests, atmospheric water and an uncertain future: the new biology of the global water cycle

“…We should also consider the climatic influence of people in paleo-extinctions where past analysis consider human activities and climate change as distinct (Cooper et al 2015;Stuart 2015). Similarly it may raise new factors regarding the causes and role of declining rainfall in the history of various civilizations, from the Maya of Central America, to the Axumites of Eastern Africa and the Polynesians of Easter Island (Douglas et al 2016;Rull et al 2016;French et al 2017).…”

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“…In Amazonia, this question remains unresolved. Elsewhere in the Americas, there is mounting evidence of population declines and climate-driven collapse of complex societies preceding the Columbian encounter -from the Pueblos of the US Southwest 5 , through the Classic Maya in Mesoamerica 6,7 , to the Tiwanaku state in the Andean highlands 8,9 . In other parts of the globe, the vulnerability or resilience of ancient societies to climate change have been shown to be mediated by distinct economic practices 10 .…”

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“…Recent discovery of precisely dated cave deposits in Belize offer 2,000 years of subannual rainfall records that, when combined with stone monument inscriptions, broadly track the rise and fall of Classic Maya civilization; however, climate alone is not considered the driver of Maya collapse [58][59][60]. The climate records show anomalously high rainfall coinciding with population growth and wide scale development of urban political centers throughout Central America 440-660 CE.…”

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