Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (30 page)

Finally, today there are still Maya people living in their ancient homeland
and speaking Maya languages. Because much ancient Maya culture survived
the collapse, early European visitors to the homeland recorded information
about contemporary Maya society that played a vital role in our under
standing ancient Maya society. The first Maya contact with Europeans came
already in 1502, just 10 years after Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of
the New World, when Columbus on the last of his four voyages captured a
trading canoe that may have been Maya. In 1527 the Spanish began in earnest to conquer the Maya, but it was not until 1697 that they subdued
the last principality. Thus, the Spanish had opportunities to observe inde
pendent Maya societies for a period of nearly two centuries. Especially im
portant, both for bad and for good, was the bishop Diego de Landa, who
resided in the Yucatan Peninsula for most of the years from 1549 to 1578.
On the one hand, in one of history's worst acts of cultural vandalism, he
burned all Maya manuscripts that he could locate in his effort to eliminate "paganism," so that only four survive today. On the other hand, he wrote a
detailed account of Maya society, and he obtained from an informant a garbled explanation of Maya writing that eventually, nearly four centuries later,
turned out to offer clues to its decipherment.

A further reason for our devoting a chapter to the Maya is to provide an
antidote to our other chapters on past societies, which consist dispropor
tionately of small societies in somewhat fragile and geographically isolated
environments, and behind the cutting edge of contemporary technology
and culture. The Maya were none of those things. Instead, they were cultur
ally the most advanced society (or among the most advanced ones) in the
pre-Columbian New World, the only one with extensive preserved writing,
and located within one of the two heartlands of New World civilization (Mesoamerica). While their environment did present some problems asso
ciated with its karst terrain and unpredictably fluctuating rainfall, it does
not rank as notably fragile by world standards, and it was certainly less frag
ile than the environments of ancient Easter Island, the Anasazi area, Greenland, or modern Australia. Lest one be misled into thinking that crashes are a risk only for small peripheral societies in fragile areas, the Maya warn us that crashes can also befall the most advanced and creative societies.

From the perspective of our five-point framework for understanding so
cietal collapses, the Maya illustrate four of our points. They did damage
their environment, especially by deforestation and erosion. Climate changes
(droughts) did contribute to the Maya collapse, probably repeatedly. Hostilities among the Maya themselves did play a large role. Finally, political/

cultural factors, especially the competition among kings and nobles that led
to a chronic emphasis on war and erecting monuments rather than on solv
ing underlying problems, also contributed. The remaining item on our five-
point list, trade or cessation of trade with external friendly societies, does
not appear to have been essential in sustaining the Maya or in causing their
downfall. While obsidian (their preferred raw material for making into
stone tools), jade, gold, and shells were imported into the Maya area, the lat
ter three items were non-essential luxuries. Obsidian tools remained widely
distributed in the Maya area long after the political collapse, so obsidian was
evidently never in short supply.

To understand the Maya, let's begin by considering their environment,
which we think of as "jungle" or "tropical rainforest." That's not true, and the reason why not proves to be important. Properly speaking, tropical
rainforests grow in high-rainfall equatorial areas that remain wet or humid
all year round. But the Maya homeland lies more than a thousand miles
from the equator, at latitudes 17
° to 22° N, in a habitat termed a "seasonal
tropical forest." That is, while there does tend to be a rainy season from May
to October, there is also a dry season from January through April. If one focuses on the wet months, one calls the Maya homeland a "seasonal tropical
forest"; if one focuses on the dry months, one could instead describe it as a
"seasonal desert."

From north to south in the Yucatan Peninsula, rainfall increases from 18
to 100 inches per year, and the soils become thicker, so that the southern
peninsula was agriculturally more productive and supported denser popu
lations. But rainfall in the Maya homeland is unpredictably variable be
tween years,
^-
some recent years have had three or four times more rain than
other years. Also, the timing of rainfall within the year is somewhat unpre
dictable, so it can easily happen that farmers plant their crops in anticipation of rain and then the rains do not come when expected. As a result, modern farmers attempting to grow corn in the ancient Maya homelands
have faced frequent crop failures, especially in the north. The ancient Maya
were presumably more experienced and did better, but nevertheless they
too must have faced risks of crop failures from droughts and hurricanes.

Although southern Maya areas received more rainfall than northern areas, problems of water were paradoxically more severe in the wet south.
While that made things hard for ancient Maya living in the south, it has also
made things hard for modern archaeologists who have difficulty under-

standing why ancient droughts would have caused bigger problems in the
wet south than in the dry north. The likely explanation is that a lens of
freshwater underlies the Yucatan Peninsula, but surface elevation increases
from north to south, so that as one moves south the land surface lies in
creasingly higher above the water table. In the northern peninsula the eleva
tion is sufficiently low that the ancient Maya were able to reach the water
table at deep sinkholes called cenotes, or at deep caves; all tourists who have
visited the Maya city of Chichen Itza will remember the great cenotes there.
In low-elevation north coastal areas without sinkholes, the Maya may have
been able to get down to the water table by digging wells up to 75 feet deep. Water is readily available in many parts of Belize that have rivers, along the
Usumacinta River in the west, and around a few lakes in the Peten area of
the south. But much of the south lies too high above the water table for
cenotes or wells to reach down to it. Making matters worse, most of the Yu
catan Peninsula consists of karst, a porous sponge-like limestone terrain
where rain runs straight into the ground and where little or no surface wa
ter remains available.

How did those dense southern Maya populations deal with their result
ing water problem? It initially surprises us that many of their cities were not
built next to the few rivers but instead on promontories in rolling uplands. The explanation is that the Maya excavated depressions, modified natural
depressions, and then plugged up leaks in the karst by plastering the bot
toms of the depressions in order to create cisterns and reservoirs, which collected rain from large plastered catchment basins and stored it for use in the
dry season. For example, reservoirs at the Maya city of Tikal held enough
water to meet the drinking water needs of about 10,000 people for a period of 18 months. At the city of Coba the Maya built dikes around a lake in order to raise its level and make their water supply more reliable. But the in
habitants of Tikal and other cities dependent on reservoirs for drinking water would still have been in deep trouble if 18 months passed without rain in a prolonged drought. A shorter drought in which they exhausted their stored food supplies might already have gotten them in deep trou
ble through starvation, because growing crops required rain rather than
reservoirs.

Of particular importance for our purposes are the details of Maya agricul
ture, which was based on crops domesticated in Mexico
—especially corn, with beans being second in importance. For the elite as well as commoners,

corn constituted at least 70% of the Maya diet, as deduced from isotope
analyses of ancient Maya skeletons. Their sole domestic animals were the dog, turkey, Muscovy duck, and a stingless bee yielding honey, while their
most important wild meat source was deer that they hunted, plus fish at
some sites. However, the few animal bones at Maya archaeological sites sug
gest that the quantity of meat available to the Maya was low. Venison was
mainly a luxury food for the elite.

It was formerly believed that Maya farming was based on slash-and-
burn agriculture (so-called swidden agriculture) in which forest is cleared and burned, crops are grown in the resulting field for a year or a few years
until the soil is exhausted, and then the field is abandoned for a long fallow
period of 15 or 20 years until regrowth of wild vegetation restores fertility
to the soil. Because most of the landscape under a swidden agricultural sys
tem is fallow at any given time, it can support only modest population den
sities. Thus, it was a surprise for archaeologists to discover that ancient
Maya population densities, estimated from numbers of stone foundations
of farmhouses, were often far higher than what swidden agriculture could
support. The actual values are the subject of much dispute and evidently
varied among areas, but frequently cited estimates reach 250 to 750, possi
bly even 1,500, people per square mile. (For comparison, even today the two
most densely populated countries in Africa, Rwanda and Burundi, have population densities of only about 750 and 540 people per square mile, re
spectively.) Hence the ancient Maya must have had some means of increas
ing agricultural production beyond what was possible through swidden
alone.

Many Maya areas do show remains of agricultural structures designed to
increase production, such as terracing of hill slopes to retain soil and mois
ture, irrigation systems, and arrays of canals and drained or raised fields.
The latter systems, which are well attested elsewhere in the world and which
require a lot of labor to construct, but which reward the labor with in
creased food production, involve digging canals to drain a waterlogged area,
fertilizing and raising the level of the fields between the canals by dump
ing muck and water hyacinths dredged out of canals onto the fields, and
thereby keeping the fields themselves from being inundated. Besides har
vesting crops grown over the fields, farmers with raised fields also "grow" wild fish and turtles in the canals (actually, let them grow themselves) as an
additional food source. However, other Maya areas, such as the well-studied
cities of Copan and Tikal, show little archaeological evidence of terracing,
irrigation, or raised- or drained-field systems. Instead, their inhabitants

must have used archaeologically invisible means to increase food produc
tion, by mulching, floodwater farming, shortening the time that a field is
left fallow, and tilling the soil to restore soil fertility, or in the extreme omitting the fallow period entirely and growing crops every year, or in especially
moist areas growing two crops per year.

Socially stratified societies, including modern American and European society, consist of farmers who produce food, plus non-farmers such as bu
reaucrats and soldiers who do not produce food but merely consume the
food grown by the farmers and are in effect parasites on farmers. Hence in
any stratified society the farmers must grow enough surplus food to meet
not only their own needs but also those of the other consumers. The num
ber of non-producing consumers that can be supported depends on the so
ciety's agricultural productivity. In the United States today, with its highly
efficient agriculture, farmers make up only 2% of our population, and each
farmer can feed on the average 125 other people (American non-farmers
plus people in export markets overseas). Ancient Egyptian agriculture, although much less efficient than modern mechanized agriculture, was still
efficient enough for an Egyptian peasant to produce five times the food required for himself and his family. But a Maya peasant could produce only
twice the needs of himself and his family. At least 70% of Maya society con
sisted of peasants. That's because Maya agriculture suffered from several
limitations.

First, it yielded little protein. Corn, by far the dominant crop, has a lower
protein content than the Old World staples of wheat and barley. The few edible domestic animals already mentioned included no large ones and
yielded much less meat than did Old World cows, sheep, pigs, and goats.
The Maya depended on a narrower range of crops than did Andean farmers
(who in addition to corn also had potatoes, high-protein quinoa, and many
other plants, plus llamas for meat), and much narrower again than the vari
ety of crops in China and in western Eurasia.

Another limitation was that Maya corn agriculture was less intensive
and productive than the Aztecs'
chinampas
(a very productive type of
raised-field agriculture), the raised fields of the Tiwanaku civilization of the
Andes, Moche irrigation on the coast of Peru, or fields tilled by animal-
drawn plows over much of Eurasia.

Still a further limitation arose from the humid climate of the Maya area,
which made it difficult to store corn beyond a year, whereas the Anasazi liv
ing in the dry climate of the U.S. Southwest could store it for three years.

Finally, unlike Andean Indians with their llamas, and unlike Old World