The Classic Maya Collapse
Between about 750 and 950 the Maya cities of the southern lowlands stopped building, stopped recording dates, and lost most of their population. The record is unusually precise because the Maya dated their monuments. The number of dated inscriptions erected across the region peaks in the late eighth century and falls to almost nothing within a hundred and fifty years, city by city — Palenque last dated in 799, Copán in 822, Tikal in 869, and the last known long count date anywhere in 909. Cities were not destroyed so much as vacated: unfinished construction, thrones left in place, and populations that fell by perhaps ninety per cent in some valleys. There is no single explanation and the evidence now supports a combination. Lake sediment cores and cave formations from the region record a series of severe multi-decade droughts in exactly this window, in a landscape that had no rivers in much of the interior and depended on stored rainwater. Population had grown to densities requiring intensive maize agriculture on thin tropical soils, with deforestation for construction lime accelerating erosion. Warfare between kingdoms had intensified, and kings whose legitimacy rested on bringing rain and winning wars had a specific problem when neither happened. The collapse was regional rather than total. The northern Yucatán cities including Chichén Itzá flourished during it, and Maya people number several million today across five countries. What ended was a particular political order of divine kingship and its monuments. The word collapse is itself part of the argument. What ended was a political and monumental order in one region over two centuries, which is a different thing from the disappearance of a civilisation, and Maya writers were still producing books when the Spanish arrived to burn them.
- Year: 800 CE
- Category: Political
