Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (33 page)

The area most affected by the Classic collapse was the southern lowlands,
probably for the two reasons already mentioned: it was the area with the densest population, and it may also have had the most severe water prob
lems because it lay too high above the water table for water to be obtained
from cenotes or wells when the rains failed. The southern lowlands lost
more than 99% of their population in the course of the Classic collapse. For
example, the population of the Central Peten at the peak of the Classic
Maya period is variously estimated at between 3,000,000 and 14,000,000
people, but there were only about 30,000 people there at the time that the Spanish arrived. When Cortes and his Spanish army passed through the
Central Peten in 1524 and 1525, they nearly starved because they encoun
tered so few villages from which to acquire corn. Cortes passed within a few
miles of the ruins of the great Classic cities of Tikal and Palenque, but he
heard or saw nothing of them because they were covered by jungle and al
most nobody was living in the vicinity.

How did such a huge population of millions of people disappear? We
asked ourselves that same question about the disappearance of Chaco
Canyon's (admittedly smaller) Anasazi population in Chapter 4. By analogy
with the cases of the Anasazi and of subsequent Pueblo Indian societies during droughts in the U.S. Southwest, we infer that some people from the southern Maya lowlands survived by fleeing to areas of the northern Yu
catan endowed with cenotes or wells, where a rapid population increase
took place around the time of the Maya collapse. But there is no sign of all
those millions of southern lowland inhabitants surviving to be accommodated as immigrants in the north, just as there is no sign of thousands of
Anasazi refugees being received as immigrants into surviving pueblos. As in
the U.S. Southwest during droughts, some of that Maya population de
crease surely involved people dying of starvation or thirst, or killing each
other in struggles over increasingly scarce resources. The other part of the
decrease may reflect a slower decrease in the birthrate or child survival rate
over the course of many decades. That is, depopulation probably involved
both a higher death rate and a lower birth rate.

In the Maya area as elsewhere, the past is a lesson for the present. From
the time of Spanish arrival, the Central Peten's population declined further to about 3,000 in
a.d.
1714, as a result of deaths from diseases and other
causes associated with Spanish occupation. By the 1960s, the Central Peten's
population had risen back only to 25,000, still less than 1% of what it had
been at the Classic Maya peak. Thereafter, however, immigrants flooded

into the Central Peten, building up its population to about 300,000 in the
1980s, and ushering in a new era of deforestation and erosion. Today, half of
the Peten is once again deforested and ecologically degraded. One-quarter
of all the forests of Honduras were destroyed between 1964 and 1989.

To summarize the Classic Maya collapse, we can tentatively identify five
strands. I acknowledge, however, that Maya archaeologists still disagree vig
orously among themselves
—in part, because the different strands evidently varied in importance among different parts of the Maya realm; because de
tailed archaeological studies are available for only some Maya sites; and because it remains puzzling why most of the Maya heartland remained nearly
empty of population and failed to recover after the collapse and after re-
growth of forests.

With those caveats, it appears to me that one strand consisted of popula
tion growth outstripping available resources: a dilemma similar to the one
foreseen by Thomas Malthus in 1798 and being played out today in Rwanda
(Chapter 10), Haiti (Chapter 11), and elsewhere. As the archaeologist David
Webster succinctly puts it, "Too many farmers grew too many crops on too
much of the landscape." Compounding that mismatch between population
and resources was the second strand: the effects of deforestation and hillside
erosion, which caused a decrease in the amount of useable farmland at a
time when more rather than less farmland was needed, and possibly exacer
bated by an anthropogenic drought resulting from deforestation, by soil nu
trient depletion and other soil problems, and by the struggle to prevent
bracken ferns from overrunning the fields.

The third strand consisted of increased fighting, as more and more peo
ple fought over fewer resources. Maya warfare, already endemic, peaked just
before the collapse. That is not surprising when one reflects that at least
5,000,000 people, perhaps many more, were crammed into an area smaller
than the state of Colorado (104,000 square miles). That warfare would have
decreased further the amount of land available for agriculture, by creating no-man's lands between principalities where it was now unsafe to farm.
Bringing matters to a head was the strand of climate change. The drought at
the time of the Classic collapse was not the first drought that the Maya had lived through, but it was the most severe. At the time of previous droughts,
there were still uninhabited parts of the Maya landscape, and people at a site affected by drought could save themselves by moving to another site. How
ever, by the time of the Classic collapse the landscape was now full, there

was no useful unoccupied land in the vicinity on which to begin anew, and the whole population could not be accommodated in the few areas that continued to have reliable water supplies.

As our fifth strand, we have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them. We shall return to this theme in Chapter 14.

Finally, while we still have some other past societies to consider in this book before we switch our attention to the modern world, we must already be struck by some parallels between the Maya and the past societies discussed in Chapters 2-4. As on Easter Island, Mangareva, and among the Anasazi, Maya environmental and population problems led to increasing warfare and civil strife. As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan's inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster
—reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels.

The Viking Prelude and Fugues

Experiments in the Atlantic
■ The Viking explosion
m
Autocatalysis ■

Viking agriculture
■ Iron ■ Viking chiefs ■ Viking religion ■

Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes a Iceland's environment
■

Iceland's history
■ Iceland in context ■¦ Vinland
■

w

hen moviegoers of my generation hear the word "Vikings," we picture chieftain Kirk Douglas, star of the unforgettable 1958 epic
film
The Vikings,
clad in his nail-studded leather shirt as he leads
his bearded barbarians on voyages of raiding, raping, and killing. Nearly
half a century after watching that film on a date with a college girlfriend, I
can still replay in my imagination the opening scene in which Viking warriors batter down a castle gate while its unsuspecting occupants carouse in
side, the occupants scream as the Vikings burst in and slaughter them, and
Kirk Douglas begs his beautiful captive Janet Leigh to heighten his pleasure
by vainly attempting to resist him. There is much truth to those gory im
ages: the Vikings did indeed terrorize medieval Europe for several centuries.
In their own language (Old Norse), even the word
vikingar
meant "raiders."
But other parts of the Viking story are equally romantic and more rele
vant to this book. Besides being feared pirates, the Vikings were farmers,
traders, colonizers, and the first European explorers of the North Atlantic. The settlements that they founded met very different fates. Viking settlers of Continental Europe and the British Isles eventually merged with local
populations and played a role in forming several nation-states, notably Russia, England, and France. The Vinland colony, representing Europeans' first
attempt to settle North America, was quickly abandoned; the Greenland
colony, for 450 years the most remote outpost of European society, finally
vanished; the Iceland colony struggled for many centuries through poverty
and political difficulties, to emerge in recent times as one of the world's
most affluent societies; and the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe colonies sur
vived with little difficulty. All of those Viking colonies were derived from the
same ancestral society: their differing fates were transparently related to the
different environments in which the colonists found themselves.

Thus, the Viking expansion westwards across the North Atlantic offers
us an instructive natural experiment, just as does the Polynesian expansion
eastwards across the Pacific (map, pp. 182-183). Nested within this large
natural experiment, Greenland offers us a smaller one: the Vikings met another people there, the Inuit, whose solutions to Greenland's environmental
problems were very different from those of the Vikings. When that smaller experiment ended five centuries later, Greenland's Vikings had all perished,
leaving Greenland uncontested in the hands of the Inuit. The tragedy of the
Greenland Norse (Greenland Scandinavians) thus carries a hopeful mes
sage: even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not in
evitable; it depends on how people respond.

The environmentally triggered collapse of Viking Greenland and the struggles of Iceland have parallels with the environmentally triggered col
lapses of Easter Island, Mangareva, the Anasazi, the Maya, and many other
pre-industrial societies. However, we enjoy advantages in understanding
Greenland's collapse and Iceland's troubles. For Greenland's and especially Iceland's history, we possess contemporary written accounts from those so
cieties as well as from their trade partners
—accounts that are frustratingly
fragmentary, but still much better than our complete lack of written eye
witness records for those other pre-industrial societies. The Anasazi died
or scattered, and the society of the few surviving Easter Islanders became
transformed by outsiders, but most modern Icelanders are still the direct
descendants of the Viking men and their Celtic wives who were Iceland's first settlers. In particular, medieval European Christian societies, such as those of Iceland and Norse Greenland, that evolved directly into modern European Christian societies. Hence we know what the church ruins, pre
served art, and archaeologically excavated tools meant, whereas much
guesswork is required to interpret archaeological remains of those other
societies. For instance, when I stood within an opening in the west wall
of the well-preserved stone building erected around
a.d.
1300 at Hvalsey
in Greenland, I knew by comparison with Christian churches elsewhere that this building too was a Christian church, that this particular one was
an almost exact replica of a church at Eidfjord in Norway, and that the
opening in the west wall was the main entrance as in other Christian
churches (Plate 15). In contrast, we can't hope to understand the signifi
cance of Easter Island's stone statues in such detail.

The fates of Viking Iceland and Greenland tell an even more complex,
hence more richly instructive, story than do the fates of Easter Island, Man-gareva's neighbors, the Anasazi, and the Maya. All five sets of factors that I