The Old Gods and the New
Exploring the Collapse of the Maya so that we may avert the worst of our own.
Sunlight is the lifeblood of all civilizations both ancient and modern. It is the source of wind, rain and the reason plants can convert small elements into large molecules. Our Modern industrial nations owe their continued existence to ancient sunlight that was stored in geological formation in the form of fossil fuels. Ancient civilizations developed around river valleys and required sunlight to develop as regional agricultural powerhouses. The momentum of Industrial Nations is screeching to an inevitable halt at the speed of rust as that incredible wealth of ancient sunlight wanes decade over decade. The remnants of these people and nations will have to once again depend on the annual energy flows of sunlight and agricultural wealth, much of which will depend the next limiting factor, rainfall.
In this post we are going to explore a classic example of collapse with the Ancient Maya civilization. The goal of my entire project behind this Newsletter is not to prevent the collapse of industrial civilization, that is baked in at this point, but to stop the complete collapse of agriculture itself. We have an immense amount of knowledge about the patterns of collapse present in different ancient civilizations. We can combine that knowledge with ecology, hydrology and the modern sciences. I am going to show that destabilization caused by deforestation was the keystone step that cemented the collapse of Late Classical Maya Civilization.
The Maya people started out as a tribe of hunter gatherers in the tropical regions of central America near the Yucatan peninsula. Over thousands of years of trial and error, like many other hunter-gatherers, they started to become master manipulators of the plants around them. One plant whose impact on the world cannot be overstated was Maize. The predecessors of the Ancient Maya had found a plant call Teosinte, which was domesticated into Maize in Southern Mexico over 9000 years ago. This plant was manipulated for thousands of years before this domestication event to have larger amounts of sweeter grain in easier to gather forms. Maize would form the basis of the all the well known central American civilizations. This would be the key for the Maya to capture the sunlight.
The Rainforest environment of ancient Central America was not well suited to agriculture. Soils in tropical rainforest areas are very poor and infertile. Most of the nutrients in ecosystem are held in the huge diversity of trees and shrubs that live there. This is part of why the Maya arc of rise and collapse was so accelerated vs areas like Mesopotamia and Egypt. This is also why they make a great case study on collapse. The Maya predecessors with their new divine crop of Maize figured out a way around this problem. They operated off of a “Swidden” system of agriculture. The Swidden system involves cutting down and burning an area of jungle. This somewhat restores some of the fertility of the soil from the deposited ash and minerals. Often a plot of land would be cut and burned and then farmed for a few years. Meanwhile a previous plot of land would be left fallow for up to 15 years, allowing the forest to retake this plot. Within, certain boundaries this kept land use in the forest somewhat sustainable. These were the predecessors of the Maya and had not yet developed into heavily centralized population centers.
There are many details I have to leave out to keep this focused and concise. The era before the Maya is dominated by the Olmecs, Zapotec and others. The general story arc for these smaller less centralized follows the same pattern of the one that follows, the Late Classic Maya. It is not exactly known why the Maya or other civilizations started to intensify their agricultural pursuits. There are a few likely candidates; expanding population pressure, intensified competition between tribal groups, and ecosystem destabilization. Following Howard Odum’s Maximum Power Principle, “He suggested that systems prevail that develop designs that maximize the flow of useful (for maintenance and growth) energy.” The competing tribes that start intensifying agriculture first, will support more people, win more wars and outcompete other tribes. These feedback loops of competition favoring abandoning more sustainable farming for what provides more food here and now, gave birth to the agricultural practices that would lead to the rise of Mayan Civilization.
In lieu of the painfully slow progress of the swidden system the Maya developed increasingly complex agriculture. The remains of raised bed farming are still visible today via lidar and satellite imagery. Raised bed farming took more labor but was more productive than the previous swidden systems, providing for increased population. By the end of late classical Maya era, impressive cities had developed showing off the Maya’s mastery of water. agricultural areas had irrigation and cities had aqueducts and even pressurized water around the same time as Rome had taken over most of the Mediterranean. The important part of this is a regime of gradually intensifying agriculture and a highly complex and specialized society that had developed.
While the Mayans were mastering metallurgy, engineering, astronomy and agriculture, the discipline they seem to have neglected was ecology. The complexity of Mayan civilization was ecologically creaking under its weight, forest were being cleared not just to make room for crops anymore, but the Mayan’s required wood to burn for the refining of metals, cooking of grains, and building of housing and great monuments. This sudden increase in deforestation to drive metallurgy, cooking for an increased population and building materials would start the beginning of the end of the Maya. With each tree cut down the Maya were digging themselves a bigger and bigger hole. The feedback loops of erosion in clear-cut area’s would lead to immense mudslide and flooding events as hillsides were destabilized. The little relatively infertile tropical soil would wash away. As large area’s were removed it started wreaking havoc with area’s hydrologic cycle leading to times of too much or too little rain compared to the more stable patterns of an intact rainforest. Other civilizations in reaction to this pattern, deal with droughts by trying to slow the flow of water across the land. Terraced agriculture intends to do just this by slowing erosion of hillsides and keeping water and moisture in the soil. The Maya did just this by intensifying their agriculture even further by taking advantage of the denuded hillsides.
The full weight of the Maya on their already fragile ecosystem had resulted in a massive decrease in the diversity of their diet. During the collapse phase of Maya society the only things available to eat were their at this point their heavily irrigated and artificially maintained “three sisters” agricultural system of corn, beans and squash. During the later years, droughts were making most Mayans heavily malnourished. We know this because of skeletons with lesions on the skull caused by porotic hyperostosis. This is caused by a type of anemia due to malnutrition of folate and b12. The predecessor of the Maya did not have these deficiencies because they had an intact rainforest ecosystems with an abundance of fish and mammals to hunt and eat. By the late classical period the Maya not longer had meaningful access to the variety of this ecosystem. The land could no longer support forest or the animals associated with it. It was largely a hugely simplified ecosystem of corn kept on life support via irrigation and huge amounts of labor.
It is important to realize that all the intensification of agriculture, competition and deforestation are all interconnected. However, it is my view that the deforestation decision step is what ultimately led to the cities and areas of the Mayan Empire to become almost uninhabitable. The breaking of the hydrologic cycle of consistent rainfall leading to drought is so devastating to the ecosystem that it set up the Maya and many other civilizations to fail. This is the step from which there was no return for the Maya. The vast almost lifeless deserts of Mesopotamia and the Middle East stand as an example to us all. These desert were not always so, even Saudi Arabia used to be a an oasis of lush vegetation as little as 7000 years ago. It is said Forest precede us and deserts follow us, perhaps it was the poor rainforest soil accelerating the Mayan Collapse, that kept the Yucatan from becoming a desert.
The Mayan world started with many gods. They even had a rain God named Chaac who is depicted with an axe (interesting the Maya noticed a relationship between trees, axes and rain.) Even in the western world most hunter gatherers started out as “pagans” worshiping nature gods associated with rain, the sun, the moon, large predators. As those tribes settled down into agricultural life, much like the Maya they started to become mostly obsessed with gods of death, sacrifice and the underworld. It is a pet theory of mine, that humans tend to worship what they see around them, starting with familiar stories of nature gods and as civilizations collapse proceeds they turn to gods of death and sacrifice.
I can’t get to the next part of our story without discussing the most common religion in the western world. You might have guessed Christianity, but you would be dead wrong. The god of the most the western world is Progress. It has its holy priest in academia where you must listen to the “science.” It has its holy trinity of progress, technology and economic growth. Technology is the messiah which will solve all our problems. Have you ever wondered why we know more about our solar system than the depths of the ocean? Have you ever wondered why 1/3rd of Americans would take a suicidal one way trip to Mars? Are these people fantasizing of a new life in a place less hospitable than even the most lifeless deserts? At least you can breath, not simultaneously freeze to death and die of radiation in earths most lifeless deserts. Next week we will be discussing The Biotic Pump, the trap which most ancient civilization fell into that lead to their destruction.
Join me next time in exploring The Chicken and the Egg