On the Maya Collapse

The collapse of Late Classic Maya civilization involved more than the disintegration of political structure. It involved a total system failure in which both centers and dependent villages were abandoned by elites and commoners alike. The lowland rainforest habitat where Maya civilization developed was not significantly reoccupied until comparatively recent times. The collapse was differential, in that centers in coastal areas or drier regions such as northern Yucatan were not depopulated to the same degree. The collapse of many Maya centers in the forested interior is here attributed to three interacting sets of variables: (1) nutritional stress, disease, and demographic instability; (2) agricultural intensification, monocropping, and degradation of the agrarian landscape; and (3) the relative absence of macroregional resource extraction structures. These factors had little impact on Maya populations living near the coast or in lowland areas not originally covered by tropical rainforests.