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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The city of Mayapán was the largest Mayan city from approximately 1200 to 1450 AD. It was an important political, economic and religious center, and the capital of a large state that controlled much of northwestern Yucatan in present day Mexico.
When the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s, Mayapán was fondly remembered and Mayans proudly claimed descent from its former citizens. But inherent instability meant that it was doomed to fail.
Or so the story went. This narrative has influenced views of this important city, and this period of Mayan civilization more broadly, for some time.
In a new study, my collaborators and I show that warfare, collapse and abandonment at Mayapán were not inevitable. Instead, they were exacerbated by drought.
[...] Researchers have long suspected that Mayapán collapsed violently, based on early colonial documents. These records describe a revolt led by the noble Xiu family that resulted in the massacre of the ruling Cocom family.
[...] To find out when this conflict occurred, and how it related to changes in climate, required a large number of high-precision radiocarbon dates and paleoclimate data from the vicinity of Mayapán.
[...] These analyses revealed that episodes of violence became more common later in the site's history, corresponding with evidence of drought that began in the late 1300s and continued into the 1400s.
One mass grave in particular, recovered in Mayapán's most sacred precinct at the foot of the temple of Kukulkan, appeared to date to around the time of the city's purported collapse in the mid-1400s. Remarkably, this was confirmed through radiocarbon analyses, corroborating historical accounts of the site's violent overthrow at this time.
[...] Radiocarbon dating also provided the surprising result that Mayapán's population started falling after approximately 1350 AD. Indeed, the city was already largely abandoned by the time of its famous collapse in the mid 1400s.
[...] Mayapán's people migrated away from the city to cope with the change in climate. While migration may be less of a solution in the face of today's climate change, due to global population levels, climate refugees are expected to rapidly grow in number without significant action by governments and citizenry alike.
Journal Reference:
Kennett, D.J., Masson, M., Lope, C.P. et al. Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya [open]. Nat Commun 13, 3911 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31522-x
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2022, @09:30PM (5 children)
...because of all those SUVs they were driving.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Wednesday July 27 2022, @10:26PM (4 children)
This should put things in perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000+_year_global_temperature_including_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_-_Ed_Hawkins.svg [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2022, @05:01AM (3 children)
Yeah that graph is obviously bullshit. The medieval warm period was 1 to 2 degrees warmer than usual, not the 0.2 degrees they show. They've also expanded the vertical scale so they can make the slight warming at the end look like a massive spike. It's not labelled, but if the grey is their error bars, then their uncertainty is larger than the range of their data.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday July 28 2022, @06:19AM (1 child)
I'm not disagreeing with you, but have you got a source for that information readily to hand?
My searches all seem to lead me back to the same Wiki page.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by deimtee on Thursday July 28 2022, @09:21AM
https://www.britannica.com/science/medieval-warm-period [britannica.com]
Britannica has a better article than wikipolitipedia. They say estimates vary up to 2C.
Interesting that they attribute the warming to a lack of aerosols. I wonder how much of the current warming is due to cleaning up air pollution. Localised areas like chinese cities aside, most of the world has improved their air quality significantly over the last half a century.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday July 28 2022, @07:42AM
I thought it's obvious but it's showing temperature anomalies...
Here's the source paper if you want the full breakdown: http://tankona.free.fr/pages2k19.pdf [tankona.free.fr]
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday July 27 2022, @10:56PM (1 child)
Would be good to learn as much as possible about what went down. Were the rulers greedy drooling idiots who ignored problems until it was too late? Or, were they victims who, lacking the knowledge we have now, never had a chance to understand the problems they faced any more than the dinosaurs could have seen the asteroid coming?
I have never read entirely satisfactory answers to questions of why civilizations collapse and why wars happen. The rational view is that people only turn to fighting when their backs are to the wall. But some people have a desire to fight that borders on suicidal. The best documented wars are the most recent, of course, and there, we see that propaganda to scare people into believing there is some threat, or to demonize another group, plays a large role. Likely, there is no simple answer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2022, @10:07AM
Profit. In the modern era it's short term and often backfires on the leader, but in the past when life was slower it seemed like a better bet. I tend to look at the Roman Empire that way. When the RE was expanding it was in growth mode, but then it became too big to manage. The "backfires on the leader" thing was still a problem sometimes, as emperors had fairly high mortality due to assassinations, but the RE as a whole did well if you look at it as a corporation. It was only when it became too big to manage that it ran in to real problems. They even tried a voluntary break up in to 4 "companies", but they were trapped by something like the innovator's dilemma. Up and coming barbarians, vikings, Mongols, etc. That was all she wrote. They became the Kodak of countries, a shadow of their former selves but with a name that's remembered and to which people still lay claim on occasion.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Thursday July 28 2022, @11:50PM
This is about the same period as the construction of Arizona's hanging canals, adding credence to the hypothesis of long-term regional drought and its affect on local populations.