Coupling Geometry Case Study V: The Classic Maya, c. 250–950 CE

The Classic Maya collapse is the case Coupling Geometry examined first, and this study returns to it with categories the framework did not then possess. Ten of them are applied — the positional/territorial distinction in material bases, inter-elite factional dynamics, the temporal asymmetry of post-crisis recovery, the materially contingent and non-materially contingent forms of ideology, the identity function, the structural/consumable distinction in buffers, and the competitive and non-competitive paths to criticality — none of which existed when the Maya were first analysed, and all of which were built from Byzantine, Tokugawa and financial-crisis evidence. Each is found consistent with the archaeological record. The findings that carry weight are three. Polities with purely territorial throughput collapsed while those with positional advantages — cenote access independent of rainfall, control of circum-peninsular maritime trade — survived and flourished. Cities dependent on artificial reservoirs, which deplete, failed where cities with permanent groundwater did not, so that the most sophisticated hydraulic engineering in the lowlands proved a consumable buffer rather than a structural one. And obsidian network analysis documents commerce rerouting from the collapsing interior to the surviving coastal periphery, the trade that had sustained the inland centres passing around them. Against those, the study also finds divine kingship abandoned without the existential resistance the framework predicts for constitutive identities — the inverse of the Byzantine result, and a case where the typology committed itself and could have been wrong. What this establishes is bounded, and the paper states the bounds rather than leaving them to be found. This is a portability test, not a predictive one: the derivations were not registered in advance, the Maya record was known in outline before they were framed, and the assessment was made by the author who framed them. No aggregate score is reported. Two of the ten — the factional-dynamics and buffer-depletion claims — are loose enough that almost any record of elite competition and monumental construction would satisfy them, and carry almost nothing. The paper further records that fourteen of the programme's case studies use this format, that twelve return no failure and two do, and that both failures came only when cases were selected adversarially for that purpose. Adversarial examination by sceptical Mayanists is invited, and is the only thing that would settle the matter. Case Study IV: Byzantium, 330–1453 CE – Case Study VI: Ancient Egypt, c. 3000–30 BCE