For submission:

 Similar to our exercise with Drews, identify the merits and general idea behind each
explanation for collapse, and then identify the primary problems for each. As you proceed,
consider whether you take issue with any of Webster's interpretations.
◦ Peasant Revolts
▪ The peak of Mayan building seems to coincide with the time where certain areas began
to show signs of collapse. The idea goes that the rulers demanded too much of their
subjects, and this inspired revolt.
▪ The issues with this idea center on a. The lack of explanation for the absence of Mayan
people in the lowlands following elite collapse (even if it took centuries), and b. Recent
evidence suggests that building these plazas and pyramids was not as labor and time
intensive as previously thought, and so an unreasonable demand for labor seems less
than substantive.
◦ Internal Warfare
▪ There is a lot of evidence for wars being common, that primarily being in the written
evidence, of which many words have war related meanings.
▪ However, the issues with this idea are many, including the lack of reasoning for why the
major time period of collapse (8th and 9th centuries) had different wars in some way to
the wars of the past as to produce only losers, not winners.
▪ As well, evidence of destructive warfare is not evenly spread about, appearing in large
quantities in some places, but not much at all in others.
▪ And lastly, there is little to no evidence in history of millions of deaths from
preindustrial warfare like would have to have happened were internal warfare the
primary cause of the collapse.
◦ Foreign Invasion
▪ Foreign invasion was a source of external pressure that exacerbated internal problems,
until catastrophic consequences emerged.
▪ The issues are primarily two: what invasion? and what consequences? There is
insufficient evidence for either, with no known foreign elements invading around this
time, nor any explicit problem that occurred because of the invasion that has been
agreed upon by supporters of this cause.
◦ Disruption/Collapse of Trade Networks
▪ There is an idea that Maya was part of a trade network with Teotihuacan. When
Teotihuacan collapsed, Maya couldn’t handle the economic disruption, and the
subsequent trade done near and about Teotihuacan didn’t include Maya because of
ideological differences, and so Maya collapsed a century or so later, as kings lost
authority and subjects dispersed to other regions.
▪ However, Teotihuacan seems to have actually fell in power and influence a century
earlier, inflating the necessary temporal range any possible influence on the Mayan
collapse it may have had, and is increasingly hard to consider.
▪ As well, what trade there was seems to be primarily in exotic goods over necessities
(although not exclusively), and the trade itself does not seem to be as far reaching or
terribly important, giving the relative silence on it in the written word.
◦ Ideological Pathology
▪ The idea goes that after experiencing stress after stress from wars and more, the Mayans,
used to a cyclical calendar and having a negative association with certain dates, simply
accepted their collapse at the turn of the stars.
 ▪ The primary issue here is the way that the collapse, in a very real sense, did not happen
all at once, but rather over a very long period of time in different places, making a
calendar related reason for the collapse seem unlikely.
◦ Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Volcanic Eruptions
▪ These disasters caused destruction such that society could not continue.
▪ The evidence not only does not support such a wave of disasters, but as well such
disasters were unlikely to actually severely reduce the Mayan’s capacity to grow food.
◦ Climatic Change (Drought)
▪ The Mayan Lowlands already experience seasonal droughts, so a megadrought (a
drought lasting many years, even centuries) could be quite deadly to Mayan society, not
just in the direct results of famine and thirst, but also every other form of destruction
that could arise from a sustained lack of water. There does seem to be evidence that
during the Mayan collapse there was a large amount of drastic climate change.
▪ Webster sees issues here in that the evidence is circumstantial/indirect. We do not have
clear records of weather patterns of the Mayan Lowlands during this time frame, and so
this theory does not have the foundation that it needs to support such a claim to the
exclusion of all other possible causes.
▪ As well, there are lakes and rivers in the lowlands, such as Lake Chichancacab, and yet
settlements near these were abandoned as well, which seems counter-intuitive to the
drought model. In general, there is not a unified trend in the settlements that seemed to
be the most dry being abandoned earlier than the settlements that had more access to
water, and so explanations are necessary to explain each exception until there does not
seem to be a rule at all.
◦ Epidemic Diseases of Humans
▪ Diseases could be responsible for the collapse of society, as well as the lack of
rebuilding and repopulating in the region for many years after, which is a danger that
diseases can cause for many years after.
▪ However, we don’t have much evidence we can look to to find diseases, what with a
lack of soft tissues and other such places that evidence of disease could exist. As well,
such a disease would have to be similar to measles or small-pox, which, in general, did
not exist in the new world by 1492, and so the idea that Maya had developed such a
disease, which then ran its course and then died out, seems hard to substantiate.
◦ Degradation of the agricultural landscape through human activity
▪ Exactly what it says on the tin, that the Mayans were not managing their environment
sustainably, and so the society collapsed as famine arose and lead to disaster.
▪ While there is a good amount of evidence that the humid tropics of the Mayan Lowlands
are fragile and could easily be degraded over time from over farming, similar to climatic
change above, we simply don’t have much direct evidence here that this environmental
degradation did happen (although Webster and I disagree here).
▪ As well, although Webster doesn’t address this part in much detail, this argument
doesn’t explain why people stayed out of the lowlands so completely for so long,
especially because the collapse began as many of the polities were at the height of
prominence and construction, so while a collapse could have conceivably happened, the
idea of environmental degradation as explained here is that it happened gradually, until
population growth overshot the lowering carrying capacity, but that shouldn’t, on its
own at least, lead to such a complete collapse in the environment that nobody could live
there anymore.