Book traces the fall of Mayan civilization

NEW YORK, July 11 (UPI) -- The fall of the Roman and Egyptian civilizations and most other great cultures of the past have been slow, historically documented processes, but the precipitate demise of the Mayan civilization has never been explained -- until now!

Pennsylvania University anthropologist David Webster in his new book, "The Fall of the Ancient Maya" (Thames & Hudson, 368 pages, $34.95) has come up with a convincing theory, bolstered by recent archaeological and epigraphical expertise, as to why the Mayan empire collapsed in a matter of 200 years after its cultural vitality peaked around 800 A.D.

Webster argues that abandonment of much of the Colorado-size Mayan region occupying parts of modern Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and Mexico was due to the exhaustion of fertile soil by over-farming necessary to feed a swelling population and a serious erosion problem resulting from deforestation. This, combined with strife between rival states for arable land, led to endemic warfare and political breakdown.

Not all Mayans disappeared from the region, but the population was greatly reduced by hunger.

Many fled to the Yucatan peninsula in the north and the Guatemalan highlands to the south. There were thriving Mayan cities in Yucatan when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 16th century, and the Mayans who survive today in the southeastern highlands of Mexico and adjacent highlands of Guatemala still have their own language, spoken by an estimated 5 million people.

The civilization that collapsed was known as Classic Maya. It emerged in the jungle lowlands of southeastern Mexico and the lands beyond about 250 A.D. with the establishment of the first dynasties of Maya kings. They imposed an elite culture on a foundation of traditions stretching back to the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer some seven millennia earlier.

Webster could not have written a cogent solution to the mystery of the Maya if it had not been for progress in deciphering the abundance of Maya hieroglyphs found in books called codices and also carved and painted on stone monument, ceramic vessels, and other objects. By the 1960s most of these were quite readable and since they were dated, information could be firmly anchored in time.

"Inscriptions provide us almost with an embarrassment of riches, and have begun to drive the archaeological enterprise in a manner scarcely imaginable 20 years ago," Webster writes.

Historians have enough information now to discard such earlier theories about the Mayas that had them wiped out by an extended drought or by epidemic disease, although Webster does not completely disregard these as possible contributing factors to the Maya decline. But his theory is firmly rooted in archaeological surveys of crop-growing practices, particularly at Copan in Honduras, one of the sites where the author has worked.

Webster makes a case history of Copan, giving it a 31-page chapter that is one of the best reads in the book. The author has a felicitous style of prose that makes the highly specialized science of archaeology clear to the non-specialist without robbing the subject of the excitement inherent in detective work. And he can be amusing, too, when he sums up the cause of Copan's slow death: "It's the agrarian economy, stupid."

"In the end, neither society nor the sacred order held against the demands of a growing population, environmental deterioration, inept management, elite status rivalries, and the politics of maize (the basis of the Maya diet)," he writes.

"One overarching cause seems clearly implicated in the Copan collapse - too many people on a landscape deteriorating through overuse of humans...consistent with the evidence for erosion and deforestation, but also with reduced biological well-being, diminished (human) fertility, internal conflict, ideological fatigue, and the dynamics of growth and decline...We now know that Copan declined not with a bang, but with a whimper."

There is a perception on reading this book that it has an important lesson for society today. There are those predicting the decline of Western civilization and others who say it has already begun.

Was the Mayan experience just a preview of what could happen to an overpopulated world subject to environmental degradation, power struggles and cultural conflicts? Webster goes a long way toward answering this question, and for that reason his book should be of interest to a much wider audience than readers fascinated by archaeology's revelations concerning the distant past.