Climate change, internal conflicts and political collapse: the list of woes could be used to characterize some countries in the 21st century, but it also describes what seems to have happened in the city of Mayapan, the last major metropolis of the Mayan civilization, in the first half of the century. 15 AD, according to a new study.
Combining archaeological, historical and climatological data, the research authors propose that a phase of prolonged droughts would have destabilized the capital’s economy, dividing its 20,000 inhabitants into factions led by noble families and, ultimately, leading to civil war and abandonment. of the city.
It was not the end of the Mayans — the Spanish invaders still found cities of this civilization when they landed in present-day Mexico in the following century — but no political center would be so powerful in the region again after the fall of the metropolis.
The detailed profile of the Mayapan collapse has just appeared in an article in the specialized journal Nature Communications. The work is signed by an international team of researchers led by Douglas Kennett, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Kennett is also the author of an important study on another apocalyptic phase of the Mayan civilization, which unfolded much earlier, around AD 1000, wiping out several cities. “Some similar processes were going on at that time, with regard to the role of drought as something that undermined the Mayan agricultural economy, but the disintegration of the city-states of this period unfolded over hundreds of years, impacting the integration between them in different ways. much more complicated ways”, he compares.
In the case of Mayapan, founded around 1150 (the time of the Crusades in Europe), the researchers relied on two “time machines”: limestone rocks from a cave 12 km from the city and layers of sediment at the bottom of a underground lake 27 km from the old metropolis.
The chemical composition of both types of samples, as well as the degree of salinity of the sediments in the lagoon, indicate that a succession of droughts began to affect the region from 1350 onwards. From 1400 to 1430, according to the researchers’ estimates, dryness became such that a stalagmite in the cave stopped growing. This type of structure, basically a pillar of rock that is established on the floor of the cave, is only formed when moisture from the cave ceiling spills drops of water on the ground, which carry minerals in their composition. Therefore, without rain, stalagmites tend not to form.
To this scenario of prolonged drought, which probably greatly affected the corn crops that were the basis of the economy and food of the Mayans, there are several clues about population shrinkage and conflicts. Data on burials in Mayapan, with accurate dating of skeletons found in the city, indicate that the population began to decline from 1350 onwards (after all, with fewer people living in the city, fewer people were buried there as well).
Among the indications brought by the skeletons, however, there are things much more gloomy than mere individual burials. There are also several cases of mass graves, shallow graves in which dozens of people were thrown together with ceramic fragments, showing signs of violence such as stone knives stuck in ribs, quartering and burning. Again, the dates of these mass graves coincide with the city’s period of crisis and collapse.
“The chemical composition of the remains in the shallow graves is comparable to that of the general population of Mayapan, and we have preliminary DNA evidence indicating that some of the individuals were related to each other, which suggests that they were local families rather than foreigners captured in the war. “, says the American researcher. In the end, famine and massacres would have driven the last inhabitants to abandon the city.
