What earlier scholars were perceiving was not, however, a complete misperception of a “decline” or “fall” of Classic Maya civilization comparable to that of Rome. Rather, their oft-cited comparisons to the “fall” of the Roman Empire were not inaccurate; it was their stereotyped vision of the Roman decline that was incorrect! We now know that the decline and disappearance of Roman civilization was a complex and regionally highly variable process spanning several centuries (see, for example, Bowerstock 1988; Eisenstadt 1967; Gunderson 1976; Jones 1964; Tainter 1988). It was also never complete, with most aspects of Roman religion, writing, and political institutions (and even calendrics) surviving in the varied polities of Europe. The political disintegration of the western empire was marked by violence, invasions, and a rapid drop in levels of both population and political complexity. Recovery there was slow and delayed but the political landscape of western Europe was itself a highly variable mosaic of polities in the fifth to eighth centuries, some of which held closely to forms of “Roman” civilization. Meanwhile, in the east, Byzantine civilization flourished for many centuries, adapting and slowly transforming Roman concepts and institutions.
The papers in this volume demonstrate that the processes of decline, survival, and transformation of Classic Maya civilization were no less complex and variable. As with Rome, the western collapse (in this case, the southwestern collapse) was the earliest. After an interval of experimentation and failure, the great Classic-period cities of western Peten were replaced by rainforest with only scattered Postclassic occupations with little public architecture and no major centers. In stark contrast, the centers of the northern lowlands may have been politically and demographically bolstered by the southwestern collapse, and they experienced florescence and transformation. Meanwhile, in eastern Peten, Belize, and western Honduras, processes and events, yet poorly understood, appear to form a crazy quilt of continuities and discontinuities—rapid collapses, gradual declines, smooth transitions, or striking transformations. Recent revisions of our views on warfare (e. g., Demarest, Chapter 6; Webster 1993), political organization (e. g.. Rice and Rice, Chapter 7; P. Rice 2004), ideology (e. g., McAnany 1990), and other aspects of Maya society have provided us with a much wider range of interpretive devices to understand and explain both the continuities and the changes in the lowland Terminal Classic landscape. The degree to which the perceived variability in Terminal Classic continuity or change reflects actual culture-history or methodological, theoretical, or interpretive disagreement is for the reader—and the future—to judge. What is certain, however, is that global theories of prime movers as the cause of a general, contemporaneous, and rapid collapse of the lowland cities no longer have explanatory force, because such a uniform general event never took place.
The term “collapse” or “fall” of a civilization is a colorful, but misleading, term. Unlike poetic metaphors that guide our colloquial descriptions of the trajectory of cultural traditions, civilizations do not “die.” These anthropomorphic descriptions and organic models ignore the fact that a civilization is a complex configuration of institutions built upon a foundation of shared religious, political, and economic ideas and concepts. Even after major catastrophes, traumas, and declines, these elements can continue and be transformed into subsequent new configurations.
Beginning as early as the eighth century. Classic Maya kingdoms began to disintegrate into chaos (as with the Petexbatun), fragment into smaller units (as with the Copan Valley), or reinvent themselves with modified forms of the k’uhul ajaw institution of rulership (as with Seibal and Caracol). Refugees from collapsing western and southern political systems may have moved to the east, causing population increase in parts of Belize and Yucatan. In the north, the shift of southern trade routes to the north and Gulf Coast and an influx of southern populations may have initially provided preliminary advantages for innovative leadership, helping stimulate the Puuc florescence and the Chich’en Itza apogee. Anthropogenic or climatological deterioration may have been a factor in some subregions.
Yet note that most of the lowland evidence reported in this volume does not support theories of an ecologically driven pan-lowland collapse. The chronological ordering of changes at the end of the Classic period (as described in most chapters) occurred in a staggered sequence beginning with the western riverine kingdoms in areas of high rainfall with no evidence of climatic change, increased malnutrition, demographic stress, or reduced health. The sequence of events, the wealth of detailed historical and archaeological evidence, as well as regionally variable paleoecological findings, pose great problems for any simplistic theory. There is no shortcut, no way to avoid the sustained effort of the region-by-region construction and linking of culture-histories. The subsequent interpretation of these culture-histories must take into account the economic shifts, changing ideologies, political dynamics, population movements, and other complexities of the variable Late Classic to Postclassic landscape.
The Postclassic political and economic hegemonies that began to emerge in the eleventh century were distinct from Classic Maya civilization in the geographic distribution of their centers and populations, their trade networks, their involvement in international commodity economies, their artifactual assemblages, sculpture, and architecture. Tossing aside the outmoded debate over evaluative terms such as “decline” or “collapse,” the ninth to eleventh centuries did mark a major change in archaeologically visible aspects of the lowland political and economic system, as well as population levels and distributions.
Most notable to generations of Mayanists, and to most of the descriptions in this volume, was the population decline or abandonment of many southern lowland centers, particularly in the western and far northern Peten. In the same period, the elaborate artifacts and architecture of the divine lords, the k’uhul ajaw, also disappeared throughout the entire Maya world. It is not correct to describe this change as a collapse or decline of the Maya cultural tradition or of “Maya civilization.” What disappeared was the Late Preclassic - to Classic-period political system based on divine kingship and the extravagant symbolic system that it generated—and that later seduced two centuries of Mayanists with its elegant imagery of political legitimation.
The Maya tradition continued and flourished, but the distinctive configuration of features at the centers of the Classic-period lowland Maya had, indeed, “terminated.” The details of this process, and especially its linkages to events and processes in the rest of Mesoamerica, remain uncertain—as seen in the debates and disagreements within this volume. Yet, finally, here we may have begun to perceive dimly the complex patterns of the continuities and the disjunctions of this Classic to Postclassic transition in the history of Maya civilization. The “mystery” is disappearing, but the hard work has just begun.
World History
