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By Root 1909 0

complex society, but putting the whole society at risk of collapsing. Religious and political factors apparently played an essential role in sustaining the complex society, by coordinating the exchanges of materials, and by motivating people in outlying areas to supply food, timber, and pottery to the political and religious centers. The only factor in our five-factor list for whose operation there is not convincing evidence in the case of the Anasazi collapse is external enemies. While the Anasazi did indeed attack each other as their population grew and as the climate deteriorated, the civilizations of the U.S. Southwest were too distant from other populous societies to have been seriously threatened by any external enemies.

From that perspective, we can propose a simple answer to the long-standing either/or debate: was Chaco Canyon abandoned because of human impact on the environment, or because of drought? The answer is: it was abandoned for both reasons. Over the course of six centuries the human population of Chaco Canyon grew, its demands on the environment grew, its environmental resources declined, and people came to be living increasingly close to the margin of what the environment could support. That was the ultimate cause of abandonment. The proximate cause, the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back, was the drought that finally pushed Chacoans over the edge; a drought that a society living at a lower population density could have survived. When Chaco society did collapse, its inhabitants could no longer reconstruct their society in the way that the first farmers of the Chaco area had built up their society. The reason is that the initial conditions of abundant nearby trees, high groundwater levels, and a smooth floodplain without arroyos had disappeared.

That type of conclusion is likely to apply to many other collapses of past societies (including the Maya to be considered in the next chapter), and to our own destiny today. All of us moderns—house-owners, investors, politicians, university administrators, and others—can get away with a lot of waste when the economy is good. We forget that conditions fluctuate, and we may not be able to anticipate when conditions will change. By that time, we may already have become attached to an expensive lifestyle, leaving an enforced diminished lifestyle or bankruptcy as the sole outs.

CHAPTER 5

The Maya Collapses

Mysteries of lost cities ■ The Maya environment ■ Maya agriculture ■ Maya history ■ Copán ■ Complexities of collapses ■ Wars and droughts ■ Collapse in the southern lowlands ■ The Maya message ■

By now, millions of modern tourists have visited ruins of the ancient Maya civilization that collapsed over a thousand years ago in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central America. All of us love a romantic mystery, and the Maya offer us one at our doorstep, almost as close for Americans as the Anasazi ruins. To visit a former Maya city, we need only board a direct flight from the U.S. to the modern Mexican state capital city of Mérida, jump into a rental car or minibus, and drive an hour on a paved highway (map, p. 161).

Today, many Maya ruins, with their great temples and monuments, still lie surrounded by jungle, far from current human settlement (Plate 12). Yet they were once the sites of the New World’s most advanced Native American civilization before European arrival, and the only one with extensive deciphered written texts. How could ancient peoples have supported urban societies in areas where few farmers eke out a living today? The Maya cities impress us not only with that mystery and with their beauty, but also because they are “pure” archaeological sites. That is, their locations became depopulated, so they were not covered up by later buildings as were so many other ancient cities, like the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (now buried under modern Mexico City) and Rome.

Maya cities remained deserted, hidden by trees, and virtually unknown to the outside world until rediscovered in 1839 by a rich American lawyer named