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

15: Maya Drought and Niche Inheritance

333 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322801.c015 15 Maya Drought and Niche Inheritance David Webster Temple ruins are not the only mark of the Maya’s occupation distinguishing the landscape of southern Yucatan today. The forest that now covers that vast territory is apparently their product. —Edward Higbee, “Agriculture in the Maya Homeland,” 461) Two brief anecdotes to begin. First, I’ve lately been afflicted by filmmakers wanting advice about the Classic Maya collapse, probably because the (supposedly ) doomsday year 2012 looms on their radar. Most recently I was called by a London filmmaker who was doing a program about drought and the collapse. He asked me: “Which big Maya site should I focus on to best tell this story?” Revealingly, given the prominence of drought explanations in the current literature (both professional and popular), I could think of no site where collapse and drought are clearly linked by direct, hard evidence. What I could think of were sites such as Uxmal or Chichen Itza where one could tell the opposite story—impressive centers that thrived in dry regions right in the middle of the ostensible big drought interval. My filmmaker was not charmed by my alternative suggestion, and I heard no more from him. His enterprise was firmly rooted in a long tradition of sensationalizing the Classic Maya, exploiting what archaeologists call “The Maya Mystique” (see Webster 2006). Doom and collapse are sexy; survival is dull. My second anecdote concerns a September 10, 2008, PBS radio broadcast in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Ike in the Caribbean. Paul Farmer, a noted international relief expert, bemoaned the widespread 334 WEBSTER destruction on Haiti and called it a human-made disaster. We normally think of hurricanes as natural disasters,but Farmer’s point was a good one.Although humans didn’t create Ike, the character and magnitude of its damage were enormously exacerbated in Haiti by human alterations of the landscape—particularly deforestation.1 The impact on the adjacent Dominican Republic and other islands was much less severe because their landscapes had been less (or differently) anthropogenically disturbed. The film anecdote is pertinent to my reaction to some of the first major drought publications back in the mid-1990s: if the biggest drought of the Holocene occurred between AD 800 and 1000 (Hodell, Brenner, Curtis, et. al 1995), why were there thriving regional polities in the northern, driest parts of the Maya Lowlands at this very time, not too far from the Yucatecan Lakes where the drought data were obtained? At the Palenque Mesa Redonda in November 2008, I made sure to buttonhole the relevant experts and ask this question: When did Uxmal and Chichen Itza, both as centers and political systems, reach their peaks? The answers were at about AD 900 and 950 respectively,right in the middle of the drought interval (see also Masson,Hare, and Peraza López 2006; 191). I was also perplexed by our own population reconstructions for Copan,Honduras,which show continued high population figures between AD 850 and 950, and a comparatively slow decline thereafter (Webster, Freter, and Gonlin 2000; Webster, Freter, and Storey 2004; Wingard 1996). Although one could insist that the general patterns of dynastic collapse and demographic downturn at Copan coincide with the postulated drought interval, even right in the middle of it there were still plenty of people on the Copan landscape—certainly enough to sustain a complex regional polity.2 Such persistence is increasingly evident in the Peten heartland as well. Stephen Houston and his colleagues have documented vigorous Postclassic activity at El Zotz, just west of Tikal, lasting until AD 1200–50. Polish archaeologists have recently determined that the impressive center of Nakum, in northeastern Guatemala, thrived in the ninth and tenth centuries (Zralka and Koszkul 2010).3 Also puzzling was that on the heels of these data from northern Yucatan, there followed publications by some of the same authors that did not mention major Late/Terminal Classic drought elsewhere in the Maya Lowlands, or at least did not single it out as very obtrusive or important. A 1996 study (Islebe et al. 1996) of Holocene vegetation history from the Classic Maya heartland much farther south is a case in point. These examples point to what I’ve always seen as a major objection to the drought as “primary cause” explanation—it just doesn’t jibe well with the MAYA DROUGHT AND NICHE INHERITANCE 335 archaeological record (see...