Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization

A series of multi-year droughts helped to doom an ancient culture

Larry Peterson, Gerald Haug

Climate in Human History

The ability to combine geological archives with traditional archaeological and historical information provides a powerful means to examine the societal response to climate shifts of the distant past. Although the socioeconomic impacts of recent El Niño events or of the infamous Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s are easy enough to study, climatologists still know relatively little about the consequences of older and longer-period changes in climate. In recent years, however, high-resolution records from ice cores, tree rings, corals and certain deep-sea and lake sediments have begun to provide an increasingly precise record of climate change for the past few millennia.

The coincidence of drought and collapse within the Maya civilization is just one example. In the American Southwest, tree-ring evidence for a prolonged drying of climate between about 1275 and 1300 has long been thought to play a role in the disappearance of the cliff-dwelling Anasazi people. And there are indications that similar changes in climate may have been responsible for other major events in human history as well. The collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia about 4,200 years ago, the decline of the Mochica culture in coastal Peru about 1,500 years ago and the end of the Tiwanaku culture on the Bolivian-Peruvian altiplano some 1,000 years ago have all now been linked to persistent long-term drought in those regions. Before the geological evidence for these ancient droughts became available, each of these cultural collapses, like that of the Maya, had been interpreted solely in terms of human factors—warfare, overpopulation, resource depletion.

The rise and fall of the Classic Maya provides a textbook example of human social evolution. It is therefore significant to discover that the history of the Maya was so closely tied to environmental constraints. If Maya civilization could collapse under the weight of natural climate events, it is of more than academic interest to ponder how modern society will fare in the face of an uncertain climate in the years ahead. An understanding of how ancient cultures responded to climatic changes in the past may thus provide important lessons for humanity in the future.

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