The Great Maya Droughts

Water, Life, and Death

Richardson B. Gill

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780826323811
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Physical Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative study argues that the collapse of Classic Maya civilization was driven by catastrophic drought. Between A.D. 800 and 1000, unrelenting drought killed millions of Maya people with famine and thirst and initiated a cascade of internal collapses that destroyed their civilization. Linking global, regional, and local climate change, the author explores how atmospheric processes, volcanism, ocean currents, and other natural forces combined to create the dry climate that pried apart the highly complex civilization in the tropical Maya Lowlands in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Drawing on knowledge of other prehistoric and historic droughts, The Great Maya Droughts is a useful study of the relationship of humans to their natural and physical environment. The author tries to understand why the Classic Maya failed to adjust their behavior and culture to the climatic conditions and why civilizations in general sometimes collapse in the face of radical environmental change.

1. CLIMATE AND CATASTROPHE

Millions of people died, and until now, no one knew why. The devastation is almost impossible for us today to understand. One by one and by the millions, the people died of starvation and thirst. They died in their beds, in the plazas, in the streets, and on the roads. Their corpses, for the most part, lay unburied and were eaten by the vultures and varmints who entered the houses to eat the bodies of people who didn’t die in the open.

There was nothing they could do. There was nowhere they could go. Their whole world, as they knew it, was in the throes of a burning, searing, brutal drought. Their fields and woods were paper dry and on fire. The smell of smoke was everywhere. There was nothing to eat. Their water reservoirs were depleted, and there was nothing to drink.

Some tried to move, but there was no place to go. If they found respite for a few years from death, it soon caught up to them in their new location.

Entire cities and states disappeared. Those small areas where meager populations survived, only barely survived. In the emptied, desolate cities, surviving squatters moved into palaces and temples and tried to eke out an existence in the emptiness, only to be driven out or killed by recurring drought.

Bad drought is mean, ugly, and cruel. It is not just a statistical meteorological anomaly or a sociological abstraction. Men, women, and children suffer in horrible ways. A thousand years ago, people suffered and died in isolation, by themselves, with no one to come to their aid.

Bad drought is relentless and inexorable. There is nothing anyone can do. Nothing works. It just goes on and on and gets worse and worse until everyone is dead, no life is left, and the cities are empty and still.

The mystery of the Maya Collapse has proven to be a strong magnet which has attracted many inquiring and creative minds over the last one hundred fifty years, as it has attracted you and me. In a previous work, I catalogued over eight-eight proposed theories, explanations, or hypotheses, and, as of 1999, my list exceeded one hundred. Almost all of the explanations I have gathered are thoughtful, sincere attempts to shine light on the darkness of the Maya Collapse.

Many of the expositions, however, suffer from a major flaw. They state a proposition and jump straight to a conclusion without explaining the intervening steps that lead from one to the other. They fail to explain the mechanics of how their theory leads to the disappearance of millions of people.

Archaeology is not an experimental science in which we can test our hypotheses in laboratory environments. We are left to make sense of an imperfect archaeological record which consists mainly of holes and gaps with sparse fragments of evidence in between. The best we can do is to marshall many weak lines of evidence which converge on a solution to our puzzle because none by itself can be considered proof positive.

You have already read what happened to the Maya. In the pages that follow I will mobilize a number of arguments which will lead us to the conclusion that the Maya died of famine and thirst, and I will show, step by step, how a civilization can disintegrate when it is assaulted by drought and how a drought can occur in the Maya Lowlands.

The story of famine and death is not pretty, but we will learn a lot along the way about how human beings relate to the physical world in which we live.

INTRODUCTION

Human beings, hunter gatherers, first moved to the Maya Lowlands around 8000 BC. Farmers arrived around 2000 BC. Agriculture flourished, surpluses grew, and, along with them, the complexity and richness of Maya culture. The size of the populations soared until between four million and fourteen million people were living in the Maya Lowlands around AD 800, according to varying estimates. Then it all ended. Most lowland Maya cities were deserted between AD 800 and 900. Those few that survived were seriously depopulated. In the end, at the time of Spanish contact, and even until recent decades, much of the area that during the Classic period was once the most fertile and productive and the most intensely settled lay overgrown by jungle and deserted.

The ultimate focus of Maya archaeology in the Lowlands must be to answer the question: Why? Millions of people disappeared, and until now, there has not been a convincing explanation of what happened. It has not been, however, for a lack of suggestions. In over one hundred theories, explanations, and hypotheses for the collapse of Classic Maya civilization I have gathered, the authors proposed a myriad of different possible explanations, most of which attribute the Collapse to causes internal to the civilization, and almost all attribute the Collapse to the effect of human actions. Thus, the Maya disappeared as a result of administrative deficiencies, or declining agricultural productivity due to poor agricultural practices, or war, or a precarious system of social organization which could not cope with the population levels achieved at the end, and so on. In short, the Collapse was their own fault (Gill 1994:169–207).

In this book, we will examine a totally different point of view: the Collapse occurred as a result of external natural circumstances that the Maya neither controlled nor caused. They were the victims, not the perpetrators. The timing of the Collapse was coincidental with whatever was occurring within Maya society at the time. The Classic Maya died as a result of a series of devastating droughts which occurred during the ninth and tenth centuries, depriving them not only of food, but even more critically, of water.

In 1988, when I first publicly proposed the idea that the Maya were the victims of a drought, at a Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Phoenix, there was no direct evidence that such a drought had occurred. Recently, as we will see, David Hodell, Jason Curtis, and Mark Brenner, researchers from the University of Florida, have provided unambiguous evidence of a severe 200-year drought between AD 800 and 1000, the most serious during the 7,000-year time span of the lake sediment core. Studies performed at other locations have corroborated the evidence for a Terminal Classic drought in the Maya Lowlands.

Yet the idea that external events, like a dramatic climate change, could drive the collapse of a civilization meets considerable resistance among many archaeologists. Most social scientists have a tendency to view the changes which occur in societies solely in terms of the society itself. But human societies live in a physical world, and human beings are totally unable to control many of its major characteristics. We are totally powerless in the face of the large-scale dislocations and devastation wrought by earthquakes, floods, avalanches, hurricanes, eruptions, and droughts. An impressive example of the overwhelming force of nature is the Snowball Earth hypothesis. If it is correct, about 750 to 500 million years ago, during the Neoproterozoic, the Earth alternated between being one huge snowball, frozen solid from pole to pole, with the oceans frozen as far as the equator, and having extreme greenhouse conditions far hotter than now, driven by volcanically produced carbon dioxide levels 350 times greater than those of today. Such wild extremes emphasize our own meager, feeble, nonexistent abilities to dissuade Mother Nature when her course is set. In more recent times, ice ages and interglacials have effected drastic, though less dramatic, alterations in the physical environment and, on a shorter time scale, so have short-term climatic changes like devastating droughts and little ice ages over which we have no control (Hoffman et al 1998:1342).

The debate over internal processes and external shocks, over longterm uniform processes and catastrophic upheavals, is not restricted to archaeology alone. In other historical disciplines where time plays a central role, like geology, evolutionary biology, history, and demography, researchers have similarly tried to sort out the role of internal processes and external events. Archaeological theory has not developed in a vacuum. It owes much of its theoretical foundation to the intellectual milieu in which archaeologists live. It will help us understand the debate in archaeology if we examine the milieu in which our theories have developed. The history of the debate in geology has anticipated and informed the formulation of many of the important principles of archaeology and other time dependent disciplines. It bears a closer look.

EARLY BIBLICAL CATASTROPHISM

In 1654, Archbishop James Ussher, an Irish scholar and the Archbishop of Armagh, calculated the age of the Earth from the chronology of events in the Bible. According to him, it was created on October 26th, 4004 BC. The date was subsequently printed in many Bibles. That didn’t leave much time for the major features of the continents to have been created, so early geologists resorted to catastrophes to explain the rise of mountains and the cutting of valleys (Albritton 1989:6; Hallam 1983:82).

The Reverend Thomas Burnet was a prominent Anglican clergyman who became the private chaplain of King William III. Between 1680 and 1690, he published the four books of Telluris Theoria Sacra or The Sacred Theory of the Earth, first in Latin, later in English. He started from the point of view that the Bible must be true and tried to design a physics of natural causes that would explain the presumed truth of the Biblical account of the Earth’s history. Burnet conceived of the original Earth as a perfect sphere. Then came Noah’s flood which he said left the cracked crust of the Earth “a broken and confused heap of bodies.” The biblical story of Noah and the flood is well known, of course, being a later version with slightly differing details of the Sumerian flood tale which dates from as early as 3400 BC—and may itself have earlier origins. In the Sumerian version, the flood lasted six days. In the centuries of retelling leading to the Hebrew version, as we know, the flood had grown to forty days. Burnet’s approach was typical of the geological methodology of the seventeenth century, which had to resort to catastrophic explanations in order to squeeze the Earth’s history into a few thousand years (Albritton 1989:1–2; Burnet quoted in Gould 1987:22, 26–28).

STRATIGRAPHY

The first insight into the principles of stratigraphy were published by Nicolaus Steno in 1669. He laid down a fundamental tenet of modern geology and archaeology: in a sequence of sedimentary strata as originally deposited, any stratum is younger than the one upon which it rests and is older than the one resting upon it. “Therefore at the time the lowest stratum was being formed, none of the upper strata existed.” Stratigraphy, of course, is very important in modern archaeological fieldwork. Further, he postulated that all strata, whether horizontal, vertical, or inclined today, were parallel to the horizon at the time of their deposition. For the first time, then, Steno proposed that many of the rocks of the continents were formed by natural, ongoing processes rather than by divine creation or catastrophes. His ideas were still constrained, however, by the biblical chronology which required these natural processes to march in quicktime (Steno quoted in Albritton 1989:11–12).

HUTTON’S DEEP TIME

It fell to a reluctant author, a Scottish theorist who is considered by some to be the father of modern geology, to take the next major step. James Hutton, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, was awarded an MD from the University of Leiden, but decided to become a farmer in the Southern Uplands of Scotland and to invest his profits in business enterprises. After fourteen years of farming and successful investing, he had achieved a degree of financial stability, and he chose to return to Edinburgh where he quickly moved into intellectual circles. Although his ideas had already crystallized in his mind at around age thirty-two, it was not until after the establishment of the Royal Society in Edinburgh that he finally felt compelled to publish his theory in 1788—at the age of sixty-two (Albritton 1989:27).

Hutton was the first to peer into the abyss of time. He saw that the processes which have resulted in the formation of the Earth’s features were slow acting and required enormous amounts of time to effect their results. Erosion of the land by running water, by which “our plains are formed from the ruins of the mountains,” required an immense span of time. “Time which measures every thing in our idea, and is often deficient to our schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing” (Hutton first quoted in Albritton 1989:26, 29 and then in Gould 1987:64).

UNIFORMITARIANISM

By 1830, geology was freed from the shackles of biblical time. Hutton’s understanding of time had widespread support, and the biblical chronology was no longer widely accepted. Between 1830 and 1833, Charles Lyell, a lawyer by training and trade, published his three volume Principles of Geology. It was undoubtedly the most influential geological treatise to appear in the nineteenth century. In it, he proposed his view of geological uniformity, which has come to be known by the unfortunate term, uniformitarianism (first applied to his ideas by a reviewer, William Whewell, in 1832). Geology, for the next hundred fifty years, was dominated by Lyell’s principles. Since his ideas have had such a major impact on the development not only of geology, but of other time dependent disciplines like evolutionary biology and are today discussed by archaeologists, it is worthwhile taking the time to look at them in more detail (Albritton 1989:45; Gould 1987:105).

Lyell’s original concept of uniformity rests on the following distinct meanings:

1. The uniformity of law: natural laws are constant in space and time.

2. The uniformity of process: if a past process can be rendered as the result of a process now acting, do not invent an extinct or unknown cause as its explanation.

3. The uniformity of rate, or gradualism: the pace of change is usually slow, steady, and gradual; phenomena of large scale, from mountain ranges to grand canyons, are built by the accumulation, step by countless step, of insensible changes added up through vast times to great effect.

4. The uniformity of state, or nonprogressionism: originally proposed but subsequently abandoned, it postulated that change is not only stately and evenly distributed throughout space and time, but that the history of our Earth follows no vector of progress in any inexorable direction. Our planet always looked and behaved just about as it does now. Change is continuous, but leads nowhere. In the end, though, Lyell had to abandon the uniformity of state when he embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution, which does encompass a progression of forms (Gould 1987:119–123; Huggett 1990:105–106).

Lyell caricatured and derided the proposals of the catastrophists, as they came to be called. In the telling and retelling since, their positions became even more distorted. Catastrophists were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Climate And Catastrophe
• 2. Energy And Environment
• 3. Self-Organization
• 4. Famine and the Individual
• 5. Famine and Social Dissolution
• 6. Meteorology
• 7. Thermohaline Circulation
• 8. Volcanoes and Climate
• 9. Geology, Hydrology, and Water
• 10. Palaeoclimatology
• 11. Drought and Famine
• 12. Abandonment and Collapse
• 13. Summary and Discussion
• 14. References
• 15. Index