We are not the first society to suffer decline. For all of the recent technological advances, our problems are the same ones that confronted the ancient Maya, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Romans, Aztecs, Incas, and others. Scholars used to search for the fatal flaw in each of these communities, hoping that their collapse was caused by a single problem because we are good at addressing discrete threats to our way of life. Archaeologists, however, have reached a consensus: complex societies depend on complex systems. The environment, agriculture, economy, social organization, and resilience of these societies are interrelated, and if one changes, the others are affected. No single solution could have preserved these societies. In much the same way, addressing our current problems piecemeal will not stop systemic collapse.
In the popular imagination, the ancient Maya lived in jungle metropolises that rivaled contemporaneous Roman cities. The Maya had a stratified society led by divine rulers, a complex trade network that stretched from the U.S. Southwest through northern South America, a complete writing system, and the world’s most advanced astronomers of the time. Although archaeologists are quick to point out that millions of their descendants still reside in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador, many people believe that the Maya disappeared 1000 years ago, shortly after their society collapsed.
I cannot stress strongly enough that environmental change is not what caused the so-called Maya collapse, but instead it was the failure to react to changes in local conditions, both environmental and social. The Maya, like every society, flourished at the intersection of social organization, trade, subsistence, unexpected catastrophes, and the environment. A change in any of these domains affects the others and society as a whole. In this case, environmental change coincided with stressed agricultural systems and an inflexible social organization.
All societies with dense urban settlements depend on sources of fresh water. Most ancient societies, such as the Egyptians, Romans, Indus, Mesopotamians, and Chinese, were river dependent. The Maya, though, were located within the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a band of intense seasonal rains along the equator; the same force that is responsible for the monsoon in Asia. Much of the Maya’s water came from collected rain, lakes, and the many small rivers that snake through Latin America. Although the collapse of Maya cities began at a time of severe droughts between 760 and 910 CE followed by two centuries of increased aridity, lack of rainfall was only one causal factor. The divine kings and noble elites were supported by the agricultural surplus of his (or, sometimes, her) subjects, but as crops failed due drought conditions and poor soil maintenance, the system supporting the top of the social pyramid collapsed. Trade in elite luxuries declined while the market for functional itemsfor commoners continued. Large cities were abandoned, populations declined, and warfare linked to famine or other economic concerns became more common than the previous ideological conflicts.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see the interconnected failures of the Late and Terminal Classic Maya system. You may have already thought of solutions, such as more careful field management to reduce nutrient depletion and erosion, less-concentrated population centers to spread the stress over a wider area, and so on. You must, however, put yourself in the shoes, or rather sandals, of the Late Classic Maya ruler.
Imagine for a moment that you are the k’uhul ajaw, the “holy ruler,” of a large city of 50,000 subjects. Your family has ruled this city for 500 years. Over that time, farmers from the area had provided food for the citizens through a combination of slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting and gathering, and raised fields to take advantage of swampy areas. Your city has grown, with both large civic architectural projects and thousands of family compounds and houses. Your subjects render you tribute and labor to support the kingdom and you ensure the gods continue to provide sustenance. Trade from across the known world passes through your city, providing you with artisan products and finery. Your city has prospered and grown for half a millennium by following this social system. In the last few years, though, the rains have failed. Droughts in the past had only lasted a year or two, but now they are much longer. In this situation, it is no surprise that rulers would try to maintain thesystem that has worked for so long. Increase the number of fields. Grow more crops on the fields we have. Appeal to the gods by building larger temples and giving greater sacrifices. Their system rewarded stability, but it is hard to maintain production if the inputs (water and soil fertility) are decreasing due to uncontrollable environmental changes and human-induced degradation. We can empathize and understand the frustration these rulers and subjects felt, “We have done things this way for generations! Why isn’t it working now?” It was hubris on the part of the Classic Maya to assume that their system could continue without adapting to meet the needs of a changing world. Indeed it was only those that did accept that their world was no longer the same could adapt. In the southern jungles, those that survived had abandoned the large cities.
One Maya region that did not suffer collapse by the end of the first millennium was the Northern Maya Lowlands. Perhaps the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula fared better than their southern cousins because they were used to dealing with a lack of rainfall: droughts and aridity were endemic to the north before the period of collapse and communities had developed solutions to overcome them. The northern Maya built rain-catchment reservoirs known as chultuns, which consisted of an inward-sloping, paved area with an underground tank. Many sites channeled water running off their large, paved plazas into municipal reservoirs. The Yucatec Maya distributed water to their crops plant-by-plant and avoided less efficient forms of irrigation such as flooding. Furthermore, their region was dotted with cenotes, natural limestone wells that reached the water table even during the most severe droughts. Any visitor to the site of Chichen Itza is obligated to see the “Cenote of Sacrifice,” a 65-meter-widecircular hole in the limestone bedrock, whose sheer walls drop 14 meters to the water table. Archaeologists dredged this natural well and recovered thousands of sacrificial artifacts. Wells like this dot the landscape of Yucatan, Mexico, and most ancient cities and towns had at least one of these perennial water sources. Northern sites also share a reverence for the Maya rain god, chaak, whose elephant-trunk-like hooked nose make him a conspicuous decorative motif on many building façades. From a scientific perspective, we know that increased religious activity and sacrifice would have had no effect on the droughts. Although we do not know that the Classic rulers with failing rains doubled down on their religious practices or that their subjects blamed them personally for these failings, the evidence we do have shows that large cities in the south were abandoned and, in the flourishing cities of the north, the rain god, Chaahk, and water motifs were the most popular decorative elementsin civic architecture.
We now have a vast amount of information describing the state of the Maya before, during, and after this transitional period. I use the term “transition” instead of “collapse” because it more accurately reflects the change in society witnessed at this time. “Collapse” implies a rapid and complete fall from a better state to a worse one. It suggests great upheaval and the catastrophic ending of a once-great and complex civilization. In fact, the change was none of these things. First, we must make a subjective argument about what constitutes a better or worse way of life, something beyond the scope of this short essay. Second, while individual cities may have been abandoned in a short time and warfare, disease, and population declines were present, it took centuries for all of the large cities to be abandoned, and in the Northern Lowlands a few large cities existed until the arrival of the Spanish 500 years later. Finally, many of the hallmarks of civilization and social complexitycontinued on, although in admittedly simpler fashion. The so-called collapse was instead a “transition” from a complex society centered in dense, urban cities headed by divine kings, to one of dispersed towns and villages where power was held by traders.
The difficulty for the ancient Maya, and all societies faced with a changing world, is knowing when the time has come to drastically modify their system, especially when their way of life had been successful for so long. Societies are generally conservative and seek to maintain a basic status quo to provide for the comfortable survival of its members. The Maya, like many complex societies, were blinded by their faith that the old ways would see them through the unprecedented change in their world.
Our world faces many problems, but it is worth reconsidering them in light of the longue durée of human history. Every complex society has dealt with similar problems. The overall system is the same, but the particulars are specific to each community. The environment is a significant driver of the challenges we face, but it is rising temperatures’ impact on our subsistence, trade, social structure, and ability to withstand catastrophes that will wreak the greatest havoc on our future. How we react is just as important as the changes themselves.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fifth assessment of our changing environment in October 2014. This report forecast increased variability, aridity, and heat in our near future. With “high” or “very high confidence,” the world’s top climate scientists predict increased coastal and river flooding, rising sea levels, stronger storms, and longer droughts. Ecological zones will shift towards the poles as temperatures increase, and those already at the top and bottom of the Earth disappear. In all, our Earth is slated to warm between 1 and 4° C by 2100.
While some policy makers may try to ignore this report, what cannot be ignored is the problem of drought. Even those who do not accept the scientific consensus that supports climate change must concede that drought, a recurrent problem, is now affecting large sections of the world. We are not the first or last society to deal with drought, and archaeological findings, such as those from the northern Maya, can indicate specific coping strategies that have proved successful in previous social experiments. For example, the modern equivalent of individual plant watering is drip irrigation, which minimizes the waste inherent in broadcast (sprinkler) irrigation and is the most efficient way to use finite water resources in growing foods. Furthermore, the northern Maya’s preoccupation with a rain deity suggests that they did not take rainfall for granted, something that we should consider more carefully. The big lesson that should be gleaned from the Maya example, however, is that ourtransition depends on how we react to changing conditions. When faced with a challenge, the Maya and many other large-scale ancient societies doubled down on failing policies and refused to make proactive changes. If they could have had the humility to admit that their system was flawed, they could have orchestrated a more gentle transition to a sustainable way of life that did not include as much warfare, disease, or population decline.
Hubris is excessive pride or arrogance. The hubris of any society will prove to be its downfall. Today, many believe that life will go on much as it has for the past fifty years: greater prosperity, longer lives, and technological innovation. Politicians are proud to say that America, for example, will endure forever. Egyptian Pharaohs said the same thing. As did the Romans. This hubris causes otherwise intelligent individuals to ignore warning signs and has pushed the Earth beyond its ability to sustain the anthropocentric system we have built. We have already seen how hubris held back Maya rulers until it was too late. It is difficult to critically and objectively evaluate our own way of life, but it must be done.
In his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998:4), James C. Scott describes high modernism as:
a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technological progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”
High modernism is not science. It is unwavering belief that science will be able to overcome all problems. The largest implementation of high modernism may have been the Soviet and Maoist agricultural reforms of the 1930s and 1950s, respectively, but we have seen the same ideology driving industrial agriculture since the green revolution of the 1960s. Even neo-Malthusians, such as Paul Ehrlich (Population Bomb, 1968) and Julian Cribb (The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It, 2010), cite technological innovation as one way to stave off their predicted famines. High Modernism’s influence has spread far beyond our food system, though. We all have friends and loved ones who are unworried by a changing climate because of the conviction that scientists will innovate our way out of the coming crisis. “We’ll be able to synthesize food, energy, and the baubles that make life worth living,” they say. “We’ll build seawalls to protect New York, London, and otherlow-lying metropolises, and crank up the air conditioners when Canada and Northern Europe heat up.” And who can blame them? The Romans, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Maya, proudly looked around their cities and felt invincible under the protection of benevolent gods, kings, and priests: “Have faith! The gods will save us!” We cannot dismiss their beliefs as mere superstition since our own confidence in the infinite power of our technology blinds us to the problems we have created: “Science will save us!”
A recent video making the rounds on the internet showed what happened when food was unfairly distributed between two Capuchin monkeys. Each monkey was asked to perform a task and, upon completion, was given a slice of cucumber. Both monkeys were content. In the next round, one was paid in grapes, while the other continued to receive cucumber slices. The monkey getting shorted first threw a fit and then threw the cucumber back at the handler. Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives and with whom we share 98 percent of our DNA, also have a keen eye for the distribution of food: high status corresponds to better eats. Today, with the overproduction of food, our society has found new ways to distinguish the top apes. What indicates our status better than spending vast sums of money on things not necessary for survival? From a primatologist’s point of view, over-consumption is just costly signaling of our evolutionary fitness, that is, we are saying, “my immediate needs are met, and thisjust shows how much extra resources I command.”
We humans, though, are set apart from other animals by our ability to think and, specifically, our ability to think about thinking, or metacognition. As children, we react to our environment. We observe our parents’ behaviors and try to emulate them. It is not until we are older that we can begin to critically evaluate our actions beyond simple cause and effect. Over-consumption, or, as anthropologists would call it, conspicuous consumption, is a learned behavior but it is based in hardwired tendencies found in all primates. Because of metacognition, we can recognize that it is a destructive, superfluous practice, and put a stop to it. Unfortunately most people in industrial societies are not asked to look critically at their own behavior, and few move beyond the fetishization of things they learn as children.
All large-scale, complex societies thrived for a while and then collapsed, and I do not believe that today’s interconnected world is unique. It is not a question of “if,” but “how and when” our society will be forced to simplify itself. We have a choice to make in the coming years. We can accept our place as one of many species on a planet with finite resources and act accordingly, or continue to pretend that the world has a never-ending supply of minerals, plants, and animals just waiting to be used by humans. By admitting our hubris now, we can plan for a safer, saner future instead of crossing our fingers in hopes that the inevitable will never come.
Dr. Scott Johnson is an archaeologist and has recently completed a book describing the collapse of complex societies across the ancient world, due out soon with Left Coast Press.