Climate, Conflict, Collapse: How Drought Destabilized The Last Major Precolonial Mayan City

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The city of Mayapan 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, Mayapan 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 Mayapan were not inevitable. Instead, they were exacerbated by drought.

[...] Researchers have long suspected that Mayapan 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 Mayapan.

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