How Did The Mayan Collapse

Throughout time there have been many civilizations and complex societies that have come and gone, disease, human impact on the environment, warfare and environmental change all have been used by historians and archaeologist to explain the collapse of these civilizations. In this paper I will focus on two of these complex societies the Mesa Verde region and the Maya, and exam the causes and the evidence for their collapse, and also what happened to the people that inhabited these areas after the complex societies they lived in collapsed.

Mesa Verde The Mesa Verde region is located on the Colorado plateau in the Four Corners region of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico and is characterized by the large number of spectacular well-preserved

The people of Mesa Verde were made up of farming families that depended on crops of corn, beans, and squash. Studies of past climate patterns have shown two different possible changes in the climate that would have affected the traditional farming practices. The first is an extended period of drought from 1276-1299 that coincides with the area being abandoned. This information was gathered by using tree ring dating technology, the sites at Mesa Verde are some of the best dated archaeological sites in the world due to the arid climate of the region and many of the sites being sheltered under overhanging rocks and cliffs. Another possible environmental change scenario for the abandonment made possible by tree ring dating is a bimodal precipitation pattern. Famers counted on snowfall in the winter and rain in the summer to continually keep their crops nourished. Dendrochronology records show that between about 1250 and 1450 this pattern of precipitation stopped. Both of these environmental changes would have caused uncertainty about future harvests and caused the people to leave the

This area was initially inhabited by the Maya people around 2000 BCE and their life in complex Mayan cities continued until the conquest of the last Maya kingdoms in the Petén Basin in 1694 by the Spanish. The Maya civilization did not incur just one major civilization collapse like the people of the Mesa Verde region, but several throughout the ensuing years after their establishment. The first known collapse was in the 1st century CE with the abandonment of many major cities and the cause of this collapse is unknown. Around the 9th century CE the complex Maya region suffered another major collapse, highlighted by the abandonment of cities and a migration away from densely populated city centers. There is no one centrally agreed upon theory, but as we have seen in other civilizations that have collapsed it is most likely contributed to a combination of factors. One variable that has often been considered as a cause for this has been a deterioration of the surrounding environment by an increased population density that outgrew the production limit of the land that was used to grow food, this deforestation is also thought to increase the aridification of the land and possibly reducing rainfall. This in combination with a drought beginning around 800 CE made it difficult to find the food to support the large population. These