The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context: Case Studies in Resilience and Vulnerability

8: Collapse without Drought

157 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322801.c008 8 Collapse without Drought Warfare, Settlement, Ecology, and Site Abandonment in the Middle Pasion Region Matt O’Mansky The current focus by some researchers on drought as the causal factor in the transformation of Maya civilization in the Late and Terminal Classic periods has its origins in a lake core extracted from Lake Chichancanab, Mexico (Hodell, Curtis, and Brenner 1995). This was not the first time that climate change in general, or drought in particular, was cited as a key factor in the developmental trajectory of the ancient Maya (e.g., Armillas 1964; Covich and Stuiver 1974; Dahlin, Foss, and Chambers 1980; Deevey et al. 1979; Huntington 1913, 1924; Moriarty 1967), but the Chichancanab core provided hard scientific evidence for drought, fueling a new round of debate. At the time that this core was analyzed, one of the largest projects ever initiated to specifically collect data and evaluate theories on the so-called Classic Maya collapse was still conducting field research and was just beginning to present preliminary results in conference proceedings and journals . This project, the 1989–96 Vanderbilt University Petexbatun Regional Archaeological Project, included scores of archaeologists and specialists and hundreds of locally hired workers who studied the first region abandoned in the Late Classic: the Petexbatun. Since the conclusion of that project, dozens of articles and book chapters have been published (e.g., Beach and Dunning 1997; Brady et al. 1997; Demarest 1996b, 1997; Dunning and Beach n.d.; Foias 2002; Inomata 1997; O’Mansky and Demarest 2007; O’Mansky and Dunning 2004), in addition to the first several volumes of a planned twenty-volume monograph series (Demarest 2006; Inomata 2006, 2009; Wright 2006). In the meantime, additional paleoecological data have been gathered from the Maya region and beyond, and 158 O’MANSKY these data support the notion that drought occurred in both the Late and Terminal Classic periods (e.g., Brenner et al. 2001; Haug et al. 2003; Hodell, Curtis, and Brenner 1995; Hodell et al. 2001; Leyden et al. 1996; Peterson and Haug 2005; Whitmore et al. 1996). As additional paleoecological data has been collected, the discussion concerning the role of climate in the developmental trajectory of Maya civilization has become more sophisticated and nuanced as researchers wrestle with the climatological data and its relationship to the archaeological record (e.g., Dahlin 2002; Iannone, Yaeger, and Hodell, Chapter 3 in this volume; Robichaux 2002; Yaeger and Hodell 2008). Although this shift in the discussion is proving productive, some scientists continue to argue for models of culture change that are solely climate driven, even if such arguments are contradicted by archaeological data, as is the case in the Petexbatun region. Unfortunately, such neat, uncomplicated explanations—“drought caused the collapse”—are often appealing to much of the media and the general public because they are readily digestible and pose cautionary lessons for the modern world. Perhaps the most outspoken proponent of drought as the cause of abandonment of much of the Southern Lowlands in the Late and Terminal Classic periods is Richardson Gill (Gill 1994, 2000; Gill et al. 2007). Gill’s tendency to focus exclusively on the paleoecological data allows him to develop models that are sometimes contradicted by archaeological data (see also Aimers and Iannone, Chapter 2 in this volume), as is the case in his analysis of the Petexbatun abandonment. Citing evidence for an eighthcentury drought from a core extracted off the coast of Venezuela (Haug et al. 2003), Gill and his colleagues write that this drought “explains . . . the apparent depopulation of the Petexbatun and western Peten—previously an apparent anomaly” (Gill et al. 2007:295). This is the only mention of the Petexbatun in the article.The authors use the possible chronological correlation between drought and regional abandonment to ignore nearly a decade of field and laboratory research. Not only do lake cores extracted from the Petexbatun region fail to show evidence of drought at the time of abandonment , the abandonment of the region can be—and has been—explained through cultural processes. Because discussion of climate change and its impact on cultural processes is currently at the forefront of Maya studies, it proves timely to synthesize the relevant data on climate change and regional abandonment in the Petexbatun in a single summary article. Therefore, in this chapter, the archaeological, osteological, zooarchaeological, and paleoecological data are COLLAPSE WITHOU T DROUGHT 159 synthesized in order to show...