The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context

Case Studies in Resilience and Vulnerability

Gyles Iannone

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781607322795
• eBook ISBN: 9781607322801
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

In The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, contributors reject the popularized link between societal collapse and drought in Maya civilization, arguing that a series of periodic "collapses," including the infamous Terminal Classic collapse (AD 750–1050), were not caused solely by climate change–related droughts but by a combination of other social, political, and environmental factors. New and senior scholars of archaeology and environmental science explore the timing and intensity of droughts and provide a nuanced understanding of socio-ecological dynamics, with specific reference to what makes communities resilient or vulnerable when faced with environmental change.Contributors recognize the existence of four droughts that correlate with periods of demographic and political decline and identify a variety of concurrent political and social issues. They argue that these primary underlying factors were exacerbated by drought conditions and ultimately led to societal transitions that were by no means uniform across various sites and subregions. They also deconstruct the concept of "collapse" itself—although the line of Maya kings ended with the Terminal Classic collapse, the Maya people and their civilization survived.

The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context offers new insights into the complicated series of events that impacted the decline of Maya civilization. This significant contribution to our increasingly comprehensive understanding of ancient Maya culture will be of interest to students and scholars of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.

1
Introduction

Resilience, Vulnerability, and the Study of Socioecological Dynamics

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GYLES IANNONE

This volume examines the developmental trajectory of ancient Maya civilization, with particular emphasis on two themes: climate change, specifically droughts, and what are deemed to have been a series of periodic “collapses,” including the infamous Terminal Classic collapse (AD 750–1050). The principal goal is to critical assess the drought-induced collapse models that have become increasingly popular of late—both within and outside of Maya studies—in light of our ever-more-comprehensive understanding of ancient Maya culture history. The aim is not to challenge the idea that severe droughts periodically impacted ancient Maya communities—this seems irrefutable given the multitude of data sets generated over the past three decades—but rather to better understand the timing and intensity of these droughts, and to provide a more nuanced understanding of socioecological dynamics, with specific reference to what makes communities resilient or vulnerable when faced with environmental change.

In order to achieve the aforementioned goal, the contributors to this volume strive to generate a better understanding of a number of issues, including the following: How useful is the concept of “collapse” and how can it be applied consistently in our studies of past societies? How severe was a purported drought episode in terms of duration, decline in rainfall, availability of potable water, impact on agricultural production, or shock to the economy? How do we accurately assess the effects of a particular drought given the range of climate change proxies that are currently available? How do we effectively articulate the environmental and cultural sequences so as to generate a better understanding of how droughts and the suggested periods of “collapse” correlate with each other? How vulnerable were ancient Maya communities to climate change, given their long-term adaptation to fluctuating environmental conditions? How much regional, subregional, and microregional variation is there in terms of the purported collapse sequences? Did a specific drought affect all segments of a community similarly? Is there evidence to suggest that other factors played a role in the various demographic and/or political downturns recognized by archaeologists? What can we learn from the past that will help us model the potential future implications of how we currently interact with our environment, construed in the broadest sense to include climate, landscape, and resources?

The purpose of this introductory chapter is twofold. To begin, I discuss some of the concepts that facilitate the study of socioecological dynamics from an archaeological perspective. This is followed by a brief summary of some of the more salient issues that emerge from the various chapters in the volume.

Resilience Theory and Coupled Socioecological Systems

In recent years there has been a growing concern with how climate change, declining resources, landscape modifications, food security, and the increasingly interconnected nature of the world economy might impact global society during the twenty-first century. This has stimulated ever-more-sophisticated research aimed at examining the reciprocal, coevolutionary relationship between societies and their environments (e.g., Bennett, Cumming, and Peterson 2005; Berkes and Folke 1998a; Berkes and Folke 2003; Gual and Norgaard 2010; Gunderson and Holling 2002; Janssen et al. 2006; Liu et al. 2007; Mainwaring, Giegengack, and Vita-Finizi 2010; Rosen 2007; Scheffer 2009; Turner 2011; Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty 2003; Walker and Salt 2006; Walker et al. 2004; Walker, Anderies, et al. 2006; Walker, Gunderson, et al. 2006; Weisz et al. 2001; Whitehead and Richerson 2009; Zhang et al. 2011). The expressed goal of this rapidly expanding research program is to model the potential outcomes of our contemporary actions, or inactions, as they relate to issues surrounding sustainability (Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007; Costanza et al. 2007; Dearing et al. 2007; Walker and Salt 2006:38), defined here as “the use of environment and resources to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs . . . Sustainability is a process, rather than an end-product” (Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003:2–4); it “is achieved in a long-term trial and error process and maintained by constant adjustment” (Winiwarter 2003:93). One result of this new emphasis has been a refocusing of the natural and social sciences toward transdisciplinary research efforts aimed at exploring, in detail, the dynamic nature of coupled socioecological systems (Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007a; Costanza et al. 2007; Turner 2010).

The concept of resilience has become a key conceptual framework within this new research program. “Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance; to undergo change and still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks” (Walker and Salt 2006:32; see also Berkes and Folke 1998b:6; Scheffer 2009:357). According to Charles Redman et al. (2007:118), resilience is fundamentally about the “the capacity of an institution to adjust to perturbations . . . [It is not about] stability around a single state, but rather the possibility of multiple socioecological states that maintain the primary functional relationships of the socioecological system.” The complexities inherent in the concepts of sustainability and resilience are readily apparent when one considers that resiliency is not always desirable, particularly if the system is currently in a stable, and highly resilient regime, but one that is unwanted; for example, a political regime that is firmly entrenched and totalitarian in operation may be highly resilient, but undesirable to the vast majority of the population (Walker and Salt 2006:37).

As indicated above, systems, from the perspective of resilience theory, differ in a number of subtle, but significant, ways from how they were viewed in some early archaeological applications (e.g., Binford 1965, 1972:106; cf. Weisz et al. 2001:121). For example, whereas the latter tended to emphasize “stability at a presumed steady-state, and . . . resistance to a disturbance and the speed of return to an equilibrium point”—which was an approach that was linear, tied to cause-and-effect relationships, and facilitated “predictive science”—the former focuses more on the capacity to absorb disturbance without flipping into an alternative regime, and assumes the existence of complex adaptive systems in which the nature of change is difficult to predict (Berkes and Folke 1998b:12; Redman et al. 2007:119). The “capacity . . . to manage resilience . . . to avoid crossing into an undesirable system regime or to succeed in crossing into a desirable one” is referred to as “adaptability” (Walker and Salt 2006:163).

Resilience Theory, Archaeology, and Importance of the “Long Term”

Although archaeologists have made some significant contributions to the study of long-term patterns of exploitation and overexploitation, generally referred to as global change archaeology (Benzing and Herrman 2003; Fisher, Hill, and Feinman 2009; Jacobsen and Firor. 1992; Redman 1999; Redman et al. 2004a, 2004b), resilience theory has not figured prominently in archaeology to date. Nevertheless, its potential was hinted at in some early discussions of the subject (Robert Adams 1978), and in recent years there has been a growing acceptance of the efficacy of the framework on the part of archaeologists studying in various parts of the world (e.g., Adams 2001; Blanton 2010; Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007a; Costanza et al. 2007; Dearing 2008; Delcourt and Delcourt 2004; Fisher, Hill, and Feinman 2009; Gabler 2009; Guttmann-Bond 2010; Hegmon et al. 2008; Janssen 2010; Kirch 2007; McAnany and Yoffee 2010a; Nelson et al. 2006; Peeples et al. 2006; Redman 2005; Redman and Kinzig 2003; Redman, Nelson, and Kinzig 2009; Tainter 2006), including the Maya subarea (Alexander 2010; Lucero, Gunn, and Scarborough 2011; McAnany and Gallareta Negrón 2010; Scarborough 2000, 2008, 2009a, 2009b; Scarborough and Burnside 2010a, 2010b; Scarborough and Lucero 2010). This call to arms has been encouraged by numerous scholars working within the new transdisciplinary framework, both inside and outside of archaeology, who have come to appreciate the crucial role that the discipline has to play in the future-looking modeling process, particularly with respect to examining issues of resilience and vulnerability over the long term (e.g., Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007a; Costanza et al. 2007; Guttmann-Bond 2010; O’Sullivan 2008; Redman 2005; Scheffer 2009:250–51; Smith 2010; Turchin 2008; van der Leeuw and Redman 2002; Wisner 2010; cf. Nash 2011). These researchers underscore the importance of archaeology’s unique ability to generate and critically assess parallel or integrated histories for specific coupled socioecological systems (Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007:4–5; Kohler and van der Leeuw 2007; Wisner 2010:135). The importance of archaeology to this endeavor should be clear; given “its insight into tens of thousands of years of human activities in all parts of the globe, [it] is a tantalizing source of information on human-environmental relations” (Redman 1999:3–4). “Archaeologists, as purveyors of the past, are well equipped to bring this long-term perspective to bear on contemporary issues. Moreover, we are also trained to work in multiple scales of time and space as well as with scientists from various disciplines” (van der Leeuw and Redman 2002:597; see also Shryock and Smail 2011).

These detailed developmental sequences are required for the future-looking modeling exercise because (1) our models need to be broadly informed, and inclusive of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Resilience, Vulnerability, and the Study of Socioecological Dynamics
• Chapter 2: The Dynamics of Ancient Maya Developmental History
• Chapter 3: Assessing the Great Maya Droughts: Some Critical Issues
• Chapter 4: Agricultural Landscapes, Deforestation, and Drought Severity
• Chapter 5: Climate Change in the Ancient Maya Forest: Resilience and Adaptive Management across Millennia
• Chapter 6: The End of the Beginning: Drought, Environmental Change, and the Preclassic to Classic Transition in the East-Central Maya Lowlands
• Chapter 7: A Tale of Three Cities: Effects of the AD 536 Event in the Lowland Maya Heartland
• Chapter 8: Collapse without Drought: Warfare, Settlement, Ecology, and Site Abandonment in the Middle Pasion Region
• Chapter 9: The Classic Maya Collapse, Water, and Economic Change in Mesoamerica: Critique and Alternatives from the "Wet Zone"
• Chapter 10: Water in the West: Chronology and Collapse of the Classic Maya River Kingdoms
• Chapter 11: Oxygen Isotopes from Maya Archaeological Deer Remains: Experiments in Tracing Droughts Using Bones
• Chapter 12: The Prehistoric Maya of Northern Belize: Issues of Drought and Cultural Transformations
• Chapter 13: An Archaeological Consideration of Long-Term Socioecological Dynamics on the Vaca Plateau, Belize
• Chapter 14: Tracking Climate Change in the Ancient Maya World through Zooarchaeological Habitat Analyses
• Chapter 15: Maya Drought and Niche Inheritance
• References
• Index