Prudence M. Rice, Arthur A. Demurest, and Don S. Rice
He alluringly alliterative notions of the “mysterious Maya” and the “mysterious Maya collapse” have been enduring icons since the very beginnings of archaeology in the Maya lowlands. A century and a half of exploration and public interest in Maya archaeology was spurred by the vision of towering temples and palaces suddenly abandoned, swallowed by the jungle as their inhabitants fled for parts unknown. Despite more than a century of scholarship and accelerated archaeological investigation, the engaging “mystery” of the Maya collapse has not succumbed to the brutal truths of cold, hard, scientific fact. Even by the turn of the millennium, we still had not come to any agreement on what caused the Maya collapse or precisely how to integrate the vast amount of data, often contradictory, that pertain to this issue.
Part of the problem might have been that we were asking new questions about the Maya collapse, but our attempts to answer them were bound to outmoded concepts that no longer yield useful insights and explanations. Here we introduce the contributions to this volume by revisiting some of these time-honored concepts, like “collapse,” that have guided thinking over the decades. We offer a varied set of perspectives—not necessarily right or wrong, but simply varied— on the Maya Temunal Classic period, the collapse, and related issues, to establish the deep background within which the research reported in these chapters was carried out.
Although the contributions in this volume do not resolve the many controversies, they do indicate that the discussion of the Classic to Postclassic transition
Has moved to a new level of detail in culture-history and of sophistication in concepts and approaches. Some scholars here still think in terms of a general collapse of Classic Maya civilization and of one or two “global” causes of this alleged cataclysm. Yet the editors and most scholars in this volume now reject such notions of uniformity of the nature or the causes of Classic - to Postclassic-period changes. Instead, we see this volume as the beginning of a more sophisticated process of reconstructing, region by region, the changes that occurred between a. d. 750 and 1050 and led, through varying paths, to the different societies and settlement distributions of the Postclassic period. The broader patterns and linkages that emerge in these regional sequences are discussed in our concluding chapter.
Be forewarned, however, that the variability and complexity of this Classic to Postclassic transition have increased with our greater knowledge of the archaeological and historical evidence. The plotting of these changes will tell us a great deal about the culture and political systems of both the Classic - and Postclassic-period kingdoms of the ancient Maya. Sadly, however, this volume also ushers in a new period in the archaeological study of this transition: the mundane and difficult work of building and linking regional histories that we have begun here will replace the romantic search for the “secret” to a presumed uniform and simultaneous catastrophe that never occurred.
World History
