Atrocitology. Matthew White
could have done to prevent it.
Other explanations are occasionally floated but easily shot down. Perhaps a new disease killed off all of the Mayans—but, as we will see in later chapters, the Western Hemisphere was unfamiliar with pandemic diseases before the Europeans brought them. Or maybe the Mayans were wiped out by foreign invaders—but there has been no evidence of an abrupt, widespread appearance of foreign artifacts in any of the sites. How about a volcano or earthquake? No, the collapse wasn’t quick enough; it took almost a century to unfold. This is a classic locked-room mystery.
This is also a classic Rorschach test. With such sketchy evidence, the temptation is to pick whatever scenario supports one’s underlying worldview. Do you want to demonstrate that humans are forever at the mercy of nature? Then the Mayans succumbed to drought. Want to teach us to manage our resources better? Then the Mayans carelessly destroyed their environment. Want a backstory for your novel about dreadful supernatural forces? Then the Mayans meddled in occult matters and unleashed demonic forces from the darkening void. I bet you can guess which one I’m going with.
Most scholars don’t pick one explanation to the exclusion of the others. Several destructive forces were obviously wearing away at Mayan civilization, but in keeping with the theme of this book, we will focus on war.
War to End All Wars
Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University is the major proponent of war as the agent of the Mayan collapse. According to his scenario, the rivalry between cities spun out of control in the middle of the eighth century. Excavations show that the Mayan kings built greater palaces, demanded more pomp and ritual, and displayed flashier adornment to amaze and awe their competitors. Unfortunately, their escalating ambition may have removed the limits that had kept earlier wars from becoming too destructive. War shifted from ritualistic contests of honor and prestige to wholesale butchery and robbery. It chewed up resources and distracted the Mayans from more productive activities, such as trade and farming.
Through much of the Classic Period, Mayan communities were laid out in a lazy sprawl, and the peasants farmed the best land available. Then Mayan cities in the Late Classic Period showed signs of trouble. The settlements pulled back and concentrated into easily defended hills surrounded by palisades. These were not always near the most productive farmland, so harvests suffered. War intensified, as indicated by archaeological evidence of a more violent society.
In the ruined city of Cancuen, Guatemala, Demarest found thirty-one skeletons of men, children, and women (two of them pregnant) dismembered and dumped into a cistern around 800 CE. Jewelry of jade, jaguar teeth, and Pacific shells indicates that these people were nobility, killed for some reason other than robbery. In a shallow grave nearby were skeletons of the last king and queen of the city. Demarest also found unfinished defensive walls, scattered spearheads, and another dozen skeletons here and there with markings of spear and ax wounds. This was the end of Cancuen. Nothing later than this massacre has been found in the ruins.1
The most interesting feature in the ruins of Chunchucmil is a stone wall encircling the center of the site and visible in aerial photos. Dating to sometime in the Late Classic Period, the wall was constructed over every road, plaza, and building in its path, using stones plundered from nearby structures. It appears to have been built urgently to keep something out, without regard to aesthetics or architectural preservation. Unfinished and C-shaped, the wall was apparently the last feature built at the site, but the builders never closed the circle. Something interrupted the construction, and that was the end of Chunchucmil.
Although evidence varies from site to site, archaeologists often come up empty when looking for an alternative, purely natural explanation of the Mayan collapse. In the Petexbatun region of the Southern Lowlands, Lori Wright (Texas A&M) examined Mayan bones from the end of the Classic Period, but found that the people were well nourished. Nick Dunning (University of Cincinnati) studied soil core samples but found no evidence of climate change. These findings tend to point away from drought and famine as the primary cause of the disappearance; however, excavations have uncovered evidence of growing poverty in the land: less imported pottery and a lower quality of artifacts.2
We can track the collapse of the Mayan civilization with eerie precision. At abandoned cities all across the Mayan homeland, monumental inscriptions fizzle out as the ninth century progresses. They don’t stop in mid-sentence with an “arrgh” and a splash of blood, but at each site, there comes a point where nothing new is added to the generally mundane inscriptions from before the final crisis hit. The last dates recorded at Pomona and Aguateca correspond to our 790 CE. Over the next decade, Palenque, Bonampak, and Yaxha fell silent. In the first quarter of the 800s, seven more notable cities stopped inscribing their history; five more stopped in the second quarter. Another eight fell silent by 889. The last date chiseled at Chichen Itza was in 898. Uxmal kept going until 907, but after Tonina stopped recording in 909, the Classic Mayans had nothing more to say.
Death Toll
Even though we aren’t sure whether chronic warfare was the primary cause of the collapse, we’re pretty sure it was the result. Whether a specific scenario begins with a bad harvest, a volcanic cloud, or failed rains, it always seems to end up with the Mayans fighting over dwindling resources.
How many died as a direct consequence of war? For the entire civilization to disappear, the body count must have been substantial. Throughout this book, cultures have been able to bounce back even after losing as much as one-fourth of their people, so it was probably more than that.
Of course, no one knows what the population of the Mayans was at the classic peak of their civilization, but estimates run anywhere from 3 to 14 million.3 On top of that, no one is sure how many were left after the worst had happened. B. L. Turner II estimated that an original population of almost 3 million in 800 dropped to less than 1 million by 1000. Richard E. W. Adams estimated that the population peaked at 12 to 14 million and crashed to 1.8 million afterward.4
For the sake of ranking, I’m being conservative and assuming that one-third of the minimum population was killed in their final conflicts. This comes to an even million.
| THE CRUSADES |
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Death toll: 3 million1
Rank: 30
Type: holy war
Broad dividing line: West Christians (“Franks”) vs. Muslims (“Saracens”) vs. East Christians (“Greeks”)
Time frame: 1095–1291
Location: Levant
Who usually gets the most blame: definitely not Richard the Lionheart and Saladin
Truce of God
When Arab conquerors overran the Middle East in the seventh century, they ended up controlling the birthplace of the Christian faith. These new overlords usually let their Christian subjects live in peace and allowed Christian pilgrims easy access to their holy sites, but every now and then a new Muslim king or dynasty burning with an extra dose of fanaticism would launch a persecution. It