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

2: The Dynamics of Ancient Maya Developmental History

21 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322801.c002 2 The Dynamics of Ancient Maya Developmental History James Aimers and Gyles Iannone Recently, a growing number of environmental scientists and archaeologists have invoked droughts to explain what have long been considered to be the most famous episodes of demographic or political decline in ancient Maya history, including the Late Preclassic abandonments, a Middle Classic “hiatus,” a Terminal Classic “collapse,” and the Late Postclassic abandonment of Mayapan (various sources can be found in Table 3.1; see also Adams et al. 2004; Kerr 2001; Lucero 2002; Shaw 2003). Richardson Gill has been one of the most influential advocates of what is usually called the “drought hypothesis”(Gill 1994, 2000; Gill and Keating 2002; Gill et al. 2007). The following passage from The Great Maya Droughts summarizes his position: The first great florescence of Maya culture burst forth during the Preclassic when the first, true, Maya urbanism developed.Then catastrophe set in. Between AD 150 and 200, major cities from the Gulf Coast in the north to the Pacific coast in the south were staggered or emptied during a drought at the time of the Preclassic Abandonment. Populations recovered, most of the cities rebuilt and boomed in the ensuing three hundred years. During the Hiatus, lasting from about AD 536 to about 590, social turbulence erupted, with rebellion, war, and demographic collapse halting construction in large areas of the Lowlands. Río Azul, for example, was abandoned and population in the surrounding countryside dropped by 70 percent during a drought.The rains returned, and during the next two hundred years, the Lowlands boomed in a way never seen before or since. Then, devastation on a scale rarely suffered in world history destroyed Classic Maya civilization beginning around AD 810 as a brutal drought struck the Yucatán 22 AIMERS AND IANNONE Peninsula.The Southern Lowlands were largely wiped out, but small populations hung on in the north, the east, and central Petén, around stable sources of drinking water, and slowly began to rebuild a new Maya culture. By 1200, population levels in the north had recovered to the point that political integration and centralization could occur.The political hegemony of Mayapán lasted until 1451–1454, when disaster again befell the Maya and their major northern cities were abandoned during another drought. When the Spaniards arrived in AD 1528, they found petty, warring states with little political cohesion. (Gill 2000:313–14) Although this paragraph appears to provide a succinct and uncomplicated overview of ancient Maya history, it fails to capture the complexities inherent within this developmental trajectory, especially when it comes to socioecological dynamics. In order to provide a more nuanced understanding of how climate change may have impacted Maya communities in the past, the growing body of evidence for periodic, and severe, droughts must be considered alongside detailed data generated by archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, zooarchaeologists , and others (e.g., Dahlin 2002; Demarest 2001; Iannone 2007; Robichaux 2002; Yaeger and Hodell 2008). In addition, those who suggest that droughts were key causal factors in the decline of ancient Maya communities must also make a better effort to understand the actual impacts of specific drought episodes (e.g., Me-Bar and Valdez 2003; Wilhite and Glantz 1985; see Iannone, Yaeger, and Hodell, Chapter 3 in this volume), rather than assume that a “one drought fits all” model holds true in all cases The need for such conjunctive assessments provided the impetus for Gyles Iannone to organize the 2009 Society for American Archaeology symposium from which this volume is derived.The goal of this chapter is to briefly contextualize the various droughts in relation to the archaeologically defined periods of “collapse”that punctuated the long-term sequence of ancient Maya sociocultural development.This contextualization will set the stage for the more detailed assessments provided in the various case studies. Before discussing the various sociocultural and environmental factors that may have been active during these periods of decline, it is useful to consider just how rare these demographic and political reorganizations are and to critically examine the concept of collapse. poliTical dynamics and The “collapse” of complex socieTies Political cycling—the shifting between periods of increasing centralization and balkanization—is well documented in “chiefdoms” (Anderson 1994) and early state formations (e.g., Cowgill 1988; Eisenstadt 1963:7–8; Kennedy THE DYNAMICS OF ANCIENT MAYA DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY 23 1987; Marcus 1998; Morris and Scheidel 2009; Steward 1955...