Why the idea that the Maya civilization ‘collapsed’ is wrong
Laser scans and other evidence show the Maya persisted in rural areas long after big cities collapsed.
The Maya created great kingdoms that ruled over tens of thousands of people for centuries in Mesoamerica. But as elaborate capitals like Chichén Itzá and Mayapan and the elites that controlled them rose and fell, the surrounding population that lived in the rural areas around them didn’t change for centuries.
The textbook timeline of the Maya civilization goes like this: The culture reached its height, known as the Classic period, between A.D. 200 and 900. Over the next century, urban centers fell apart. By some accounts, the Maya vanished, and scientists have implicated climate, overpopulation, and political unrest in their mysterious demise. While the Maya bounced back during the Postclassic period from A.D. 900 until the arrival of Spanish colonizers around 1540, it supposedly never reached its previous strength. But a new population analysis of the upper Yucatan Peninsula adds to evidence that the Classic Maya never truly collapsed and disappeared.
“Definitely, the idea of the collapse of the Maya in the Postclassic era is very debated,” says Pedro Delgado Kú, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of the Yucatan and coauthor of the new study.
Mayapan vs. Chichén Itzá
In some cases, Postclassic cities rose from the ashes of their predecessors. Delgado Kú and his colleagues have studied the Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula for some time—particularly Mayapan, one of the last large-scale capital cities built in the area before Spanish colonization. This Postclassic city was founded initially by the 12th century as a coalition of local governments, including some of the family clans that overthrew the rulers of the large capital that preceded it in the area—Chichén Itzá.
After the fall of Chichén Itzá by A.D. 1050, drought hit the area hard. But once the rain came back by A.D. 1180, Mayapan had become an impressive city. Aside from large pyramids like the Temple of Kukulkan, the urban area was surrounded by a 5.5-mile long wall that could barely contain the urban population—some neighborhoods spilled outside the protective feature, says Marilyn Masson, a coauthor and archaeologist at State University of New York at Albany.
Tracking the Postclassic Maya population
To Masson, Delgado Kú, and their colleagues, Mayapan’s story contradicts the idea that the Maya disappeared, or even that the Postclassic Maya of the northern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico were somehow inferior to earlier Classic Maya cities in the southern lowlands like Tikal in Guatemala.
“You’ll hear that Maya civilization ended in 1000 A.D. It didn’t,” Masson says. “The Postclassic period is a success story of resilience and recovery in the north for late Maya statehood.”
To better understand what happened in the region, the team wanted to get a handle on the population of the region and how it may have changed through time. In a study published in the December Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, their team examined prior attempts to map the population of the region, focusing on the decades spanning the collapse of Chichén Itzá and the rise of Mayapan.
They also conducted their own surveys on 15 square miles around Mayapan using lidar (short for “light detection and ranging”), a remote sensing technology that can see through dense jungle and reveal the locations of ancient towns and cities. Next, they surveyed 30 percent of this area on the ground in search of ceramics they could use to date homes and villages—driving up ranch roads and hiking into the wilderness guided by the local knowledge of Delgado Kú and other Maya archaeologists on their team.
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had, following up lidar,” Masson says.
While the population of the urban centers of Chichén Itzá and Mayapan changed a lot over time, the rural population that provided the people and resources to fuel these capitals didn’t change much between these eras, the researchers found. In fact, today, much of the area between modern towns is forest, but back then, most people who lived in the countryside would have been able to see their neighbor’s homes from their yard—something Masson compared to parts of the British countryside today.
“It’s not dense, but it’s continuous,” Masson says of the ruined network of homes, towns, and villages they surveyed.
(Here’s how lidar is changing what we know about the ancient Maya.)
Rural areas preserved Maya knowledge
When city states fall, much of the institutional knowledge of these places would have been preserved as administrators moved to the surrounding rural areas, Masson suggests. “Everything that people say ended in the Maya collapse, you see reborn in the Postclassic Maya society,” she says.
When the time came to build a new capital, some of these people, or their descendants, would have helped rebuild an institutional structure.
“It’s a really exciting finding,” says Elizabeth Paris, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary who has worked on Mayapan. While she was not involved in this recent work, Masson was her Ph.D. supervisor.
Paris says this pattern of the population becoming more rural between the periods of Chichén Itzá and Mayapan had probably been going on for much longer, and was likely also repeated when once-powerful cities like Tikal and Calakmul fell in the Classic period. “In some ways they did change, but in other ways, the way that they kept doing things is remarkably stable across the centuries,” she says. As kingdoms fell, others filled in the vacuum. “It’s not a community-wide devastation.”
The study is a good example of what happens when archaeologists look at the larger context of cities rather than just the biggest monuments. “The siren call of pyramid is very strong—we love excavating pyramids,” Paris says. “But you learn so much more, even just about the pyramids, when you look at the region as a whole.”
What happened to Mayapan?
Mayapan’s coalition government didn’t last. Sometime between 1441 and 1461, a clan called the Xiu eventually revolted and killed many of the Cocom family that controlled the city. While people still lived in parts of the walled city, the power structure and control Mayapan wielded over the surrounding countryside was broken, just like its predecessor Chichén Itzá.
Other research has shown that when Mayapan’s political dynasty fell, people moved back into the countryside once more. The colonial period brought drastic changes to society in the Yucatan, but modern Maya descendants preserve some ancient culture and rituals in the region. The town of Telchaquillo that sits by the ruins of Mayapan is still full of Mayan speakers.
“We were able to prove that many cultural aspects haven’t changed even today—they remain the same,” Delgado says. “I’m proud to be Maya, and to work through the vestiges of what our ancestors did.”
