Explorers of the Maya lowlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discovered carved, dated stone monuments at southern sites, simultaneously noting that their erection ceased in the late ninth century a. d. Along with cessation of the stelae-altar complex and hieroglyphic texts, there was also a decline of polychrome ceramics, sumptuous burials, and apparent abandonment of many of the Classic southern cities. And at about the same time, they noted, occupation began to flourish at new and different sites in the northern lowlands.
In these early years, archaeological and anthropological thinking on cultural change was relatively unsophisticated, and explanations tended to be couched in terms of fairly dramatic scenarios of rises and falls of empires, or collapses of civilizations (see Yoffee and Cowgill 1988; Cowgill 1988). Probably only the fall of the Western Roman Empire has been discussed more often than the Maya as an example of the decline of a civilization. One result of this thinking was the notion of the collapse of lowland Maya civilization, that is, the “Old Empire” of the south, followed by the establishment of a “New Empire” in the north (Morley 1946; Thompson 1954). And thus was established a holy grail for subsequent archaeological research: If this was the collapse of Classic-period civilization, now we must discover its causes.
By the mid-twentieth century, numerous causes had been proposed to explain the decline and collapse of what had been envisioned as a ruling priestly hierarchy at the southern sites. These causes included (Morley and Brainerd 1956: 69-73; see also Adams 1973a): earthquake activity, climatic change (drought), epidemic diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, foreign conquest, “cultural decadence,” agricultural (soil) exhaustion, and revolt of the lower classes. The last was viewed as the most plausible.
The Notion of the Terminal Classic
The concept of a lowland Maya “Terminal Classic” period was formally introduced into the archaeological lexicon at the 1965 Maya Lowland Ceramic Conference in Guatemala City, Guatemala (Willey, Culbert, and Adams 1967). This meeting was held for the purpose of discussing and visually comparing ceramic complexes, particularly to compare chronologies, as published ceramic data were not widely available. The focus was primarily on relatively large sites where major research projects had earlier been carried out.
The Terminal Classic concept was intended primarily as a mechanism for separating and marking the Classic to Postclassic transition (Culbert 1973b: 1618) in the lowlands, and was initially defined on the basis of its ceramic content. Its name, Tepeu 3, was borrowed from the Uaxactun ceramic sequence, although the sphere designation, Eznab, is drawn from that of Tikal. The Terminal Classic thus referred to both a time period (roughly a. d. 830-950) and a particular set of cultural circumstances: specifically, cessation of the cultural practices that characterized the Classic pinnacle of Maya civilization. Although the term was adopted “in the hope that it [would] connote both the continuity and the destruction of previous patterns. . .” (Culbert 1973b: 17), emphasis has more often been on their endings than their continuities. The Terminal Classic concept was always inseparably connected to the termination of Maya “Classicism”—its collapse and the attendant abandonment of the southern and central lowlands.
Participants in the 1965 ceramic conference also identified the Terminal Classic as an archaeological “horizon.” A horizon is characterized as “a spatial continuum represented by the wide distribution” of recognizable artifacts, styles, or practices, defined most saliently by “its relatively limited time dimension and its significant geographic spread” (Phillips and Willey 1953: 625; Willey and Phillips 1955: 723, 1958: 38). Choice of the horizon label for the lowland Maya Terminal Classic was dictated not by the widespread prominence of a distinctive artifact style, then and now the most common basis for defining archaeological horizons (D. Rice 1993a), but rather by the perception that the lowland Late Classic period ended everywhere with a societal collapse so widespread that it constituted a bona fide cultural horizon. As T. Patrick Culbert (1973b: 16) later noted, the Tepeu 3 horizon was “the period during which the processes of the downfall worked their course.”
World History
