Among the examples of general projections of local evidence are arguments based on local environmental deterioration in the Copan Valley (e. g., Webster, Freter, and Gonlin 2000), a steep river valley with an environment unlike any other in the Maya world. Given its susceptibility to erosion and attendant problems and its uncertain culture-history, evidence from this zone does not project to other regions. On the other hand, many collapse models are myopically focused on local events without properly addressing other zones. Examples of this tendency include recent global projections of Yucatan drought (e. g., Gunn and Folan, 1981; Gill 2000), the proposed “moral” collapse at Piedras Negras (Houston et al. 2001), the alleged lack of significant change at some Belizean centers (e. g.. Chase and Chase, Chapter 2; Pendergast 1985), and the purely trade-based models appropriate for some coastal areas (e. g., Sabloff and Rathje 1975a, 1975b). While culture-historical reconstructions should focus first on local evidence, scholars also should strive to discover the linkages between processes and events in a region or subregions and then compare them with adjacent areas.
For example, the collapse at Piedras Negras is almost simultaneous with the decline or abandonment of most major Pasion/Usumacinta-area sites (e. g., Yaxchilan, Palenque, Dos Pilas, Aguateca, and Cancuen). This collapse is probably part of a linked decline of the river trade system, perhaps caused by warfare and the rise of militaristic enclaves at Seibal and Altar breaking the exchange system in highland exotics (Demarest, Chapter 6; Demarest and Fahsen 2003). Conversely, the argument that there was no particularly significant change from the Classic to Postclassic period should not be based on continuity in some important centers in Belize, when other centers and zones nearby experienced notable depopulation, decline, or abandonment (e. g., compare Chase and Chase, Chapter 2; Adams et al.. Chapter 15; Ashmore et al.. Chapter 14; and Hammond and Tourtellot, Chapter 13).
Scholars should now be engaged in the process of comparing and linking the culture-histories of the centers in their regions, looking beyond their own sites and their preferred theories for explaining the historical sequence of changes and events. Comparison between regions can discern impact or effects between areas, be these through trade, war, migration, or stimulus diffusion. We hope that this volume will help instigate systematic region-by-region comparison, alignment, and culture-historical reconstruction. Only through such careful reconstruction will Maya archaeology advance beyond romantic befiiddlement, myopic site focus, and/or leapfrogging from locally appropriate models to global projections of the explanation of the “Classic Maya collapse.”
In this regard, some recent interpretations of (literally) global climatological change as “a drought-based explanation for the Classic Maya collapse” (Robichaux 2002) represent a retrogression to simplistic characterizations of both the nature of the Classic to Postclassic transition and the highly variable sequences of regional and subregional events, processes, changes, and continuities between a. d. 700 and 1100. This revival of catastrophism builds upon a fundamental misperception of the unity and nature of the Classic to Postclassic transition: e. g., “Between about a. d. 750 and 950 the Maya experienced a demographic disaster as profound as any other in human history” (Haug et al. 2003). As the chapters in this volume attest, the actual, detailed picture of events in the Terminal Classic could not be more variable and less susceptible to such broad characterizations.
Mischaracterizations of the complex nature and long duration (in some areas) of the Terminal Classic transition again result from global projection of local models and an incomplete understanding of the culture-historical record. It is not surprising that the chapters in this volume (9 and 15) and other recent publications (e. g., Dahlin 2002; Gunn and Adams 1981; Gunn and Folan 1981; Hansen et al. 2002) that propose drought/famine catastrophism are advanced by archaeologists working in a specific series of sites at the base of the Yucatan peninsula, an area highly susceptible to drought conditions. Global projection of models that might be appropriate to that poorly understood and sampled zone ignores the fact that the nature, timing, and specific evidence of Late and Terminal Classic change in other zones do not fit this proposed model (e. g., Demarest, Chapter 6; Masson and Mock, Chapter 17; Carmean et al.. Chapter 19; Cobos, Chapter 22; see also Dahlin 2002, Robichaux 2002 for efforts at aligning drought evidence with a few other regions).
Note that these models also hypothesize two earlier uniform Terminal Preclassic and “Hiatus” (sixth-century) Maya lowland drought/famine catastrophes (e. g., Adams et al., Chapter 15; Gill 2000; Hansen et al. 2002), and tend to stereotype those variable periods and phenomena. Initial Classic declines did not occur in some areas, were a methodological creation of ceramic typologies in others (e. g., Lincoln 1985), and in the best-studied zones have been shown to be associated with anthropogenic (not climatological) environmental change resulting from massive Late Preclassic forest-clearing (Dunning et al. 1997; Dunning et al. 1998; Abrams and Rue 1988; Rue et al. 2002). Similarly, the presumed “hiatus collapse” might be primarily a political decline limited to Tikal and its alliance of centers due to their sixth-century military and political domination by the Calakmul hegemony (e. g., Martin and Grube 1994, 1995, 2000).
The lesson of these earlier disappearing “uniform catastrophes” is that panlowland hypotheses cannot precede the empirical compilation of reasonably complete regional culture-histories and the work of careful interregional comparisons of evidence on the sequence of events. This fundamental sequence of effort in constructing the history of any civilization cannot be avoided by site-focused isolationism, nor bypassed through the global projection of local events or the deus ex machina of catastrophism. Instead, we must systematically compare and link site sequences to understand subregional processes and variability, compare these to adjacent zones to reconstruct regional patterns, and then compare regions to begin reconstructing pan-lowland histories and correlating these to other zones in Mesoamerica.
At the time of the 1973 Maya collapse volume (Culbert 1973a), such systematic comparative efforts were premature, and the free-for-all of alternative theorizing on the collapse continued. This volume demonstrates, we believe, that the time has come to demand such systematic comparison in reconstructions of the Terminal Classic. In some zones, such as the Pasion and Usumacinta region and the Puuc area, we can already perceive linkages in local culture-histories (e. g., Demarest, Chapter 6; Carmean et al.. Chapter 19). Yet in other regions, such as Belize and the Copan Valley, the reconstructions of different projects scarcely appear to reflect communication at all (cf. Chase and Chase, Chapters 2, 16; Ashmore et al.. Chapter 14; Adams et al.. Chapter 15; Masson and Mock, Chapter 17; Webster et al.. Chapter 11; Fash et al.. Chapter 12).
Nonetheless, the amount and quality of the last three decades of lowland excavation and regional studies make such systematic intersite and interregional comparison possible, and should be a prerequisite for future “collapse” or “transition” theorizing. It is our hope that the uneven efforts in this volume will initiate a new phase in studies of the Terminal Classic problem—a period of careful region-by-region communication, correlation, comparison, and, only then, synthesis.
World History
