Thanks to Hollywood movies showing the
first North Americans as wandering hunters grunting to each other,
Westerners may perhaps be forgiven for failing to appreciate the
urban civilizations that arose in the New World long before
Europeans arrived.
Now, moviegoers have a chance to
correct this oversight by seeing “Apocalypto,” Mel Gibson’s
gruesome depiction of the Maya, who dominated Mexico’s Yucatan
peninsula for nearly 1,000 years. Although the movie suffers from
the excesses audiences have come to expect from Gibson’s work, it
represents a welcome excursion into an unexplored corner of
history.
Unfortunately, the film does a poor job of
revealing the most likely reasons for the collapse of Mayan
civilization, which developed advanced capabilities in art, science
and technology before vanishing. These reasons, most likely
overpopulation, environmental degradation and climate change, merit
our understanding for they have direct relevance today. And perhaps
nowhere are they more relevant than in the semi-arid American West,
where some of the nation’s most rapid population growth — Arizona,
for example, leads the nation — is occurring in places vulnerable
to drought and resource depletion.
If we have at least
heard of the Incan, Aztec and Mayan civilizations, it is because
they scattered spectacular stone structures across Central and
South America. But few are familiar with the older New World
civilizations, such as the Moche, Chimu, Wari, Nazca, Olmec and
Toltec. Closer to home, relatively few Americans are aware that
this continent had its own counterparts to the monument-building
civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes.
In Missouri,
for example, the Gateway Arch on the St. Louis waterfront is within
view of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, location of the largest
pre-Columbian settlement in North America. At its height, between
1100 and 1200 A.D., this great city covered nearly six square miles
and had as many as 20,000 residents. Cahokia’s people erected
steep-sided platforms to support ceremonial buildings and
residences. The largest rises in four terraces to a height of 100
feet and contains 22 million cubic feet of earth.
The
silent stone ruins and cliff dwellings scattered about the mesas
and canyons of the desert Southwest give further evidence that
there’s more to Native American prehistory than bows, arrows and
buffalo robes. But for sheer romantic mystery, it’s hard to top the
lost cities of the Maya. Archaeological evidence indicates the Maya
had begun building huge structures as early as 500 B.C., with the
most elaborate monuments showing up 750 years later. From A.D. 250
on, the population grew rapidly, as numerous city-states rose to
power, accumulated wealth and waged war against each other. The
entire area suffered decay and depopulation after A.D. 800, and by
the time the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century, which
roughly coincides with the period depicted in “Apocalypto,” the
population had fallen to about 10 percent of its peak.
There have been many attempts to explain the Mayan collapse, and
the movie is not clear on this point, focusing so much on the
cruelty and greed of the Mayan ruling class that it seems this is
what the filmmakers had in mind when they chose to open with a
quote from historian Will Durant: “A great civilization is not
conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
But moral and spiritual decay are less effective than
starvation as an engine of social collapse. The likely explanation
for the Mayan mystery is more disturbing than an obsession with
conquest, displays of wealth and human sacrifice: The Maya outgrew
the capacity of their soil, water supply and agricultural
technology to provide food. They made things worse by stripping the
fragile hillsides of trees for building materials and fuel,
accelerating erosion and compromising cropland. Then they were
dealt a knockout blow by a drying climate, which spawned a
succession of severe droughts that caused repeated crop failure.
I think this is the lesson of the Mayan collapse: Vast
disparities of wealth and power are disruptive to a society, as is
a liking for unnecessary war. And even a technologically
sophisticated civilization can find itself vulnerable to climate
change and depleted resources, particularly if it fails to admit
what is happening.
John Krist is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a
senior reporter for the Ventura County Star in
California.
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