How Did The Mayans Disappear

Damien Juarez

ANTH 201 - 1001
Professor Hughes
April 6, 2013
Mayan Research paper The Mayan civilization is all but a dull one. Mathematical geniuses, engineering wizards, an abundance of food, water, resources, and the nicest weather of the earth shines down on their native land in an almost perfect utopia. Yet, the majority of their population at the time seems to have mysteriously disappeared out of nowhere. However, the Mayan people are anything but extinct with their overall headcount around ten million (Coe). That’s right. Ten million of the once almost extinct Maya people roam the earth today. However, at one point in time (approximately 1000 A.D.) the population had dropped to about 30,000 (Coe). How could this have happened?
They were almost perfect at everything they did from farming to building. Then out of nowhere the Maya people just vanished. Could it have been cultivation? Did they strip all of the land’s nutrients down to nothing? Or was it the Spanish. With their thirst for conquest they could have easily of been the ones to annihilate over 50% of the Maya population. They had superior military power, battle experience and strategy, and the element of surprise. Could religion have played a role in this mystery? They made human sacrifices to the gods, but if they felt the gods weren’t pleased then they offered more. An eclipse could have been mistaken as an angry god and the kings of the counties could have declared a massive sacrifice. Let’s talk about the Maya people and their culture to get a better understanding of what could have caused an almost complete wipeout. The beginning of the Pre-classic period (or formative period) was at around 1800 B.C. (Coe). These Maya were agricultural, and grew crops like squash, beans, and maize (Webster). The middle of the preclassic period lasted until 300 B.C. (Webster). At this point in time the farmers began to expand from high to low elevation. With the middle of the Pre-classic period brought one of the greatest Mesoamerican civilizations which were the Olmecs. The Maya weren’t the only ones who obtained quite a few cultrural as well as religious traits from the Olmec. The Zapotec, Aztec, and Totonac did, too. Not only traits but their number system and great calendar, as well (Webster). On top of agriculture, the Maya of the Pre-classic period also presented superior cultural traits like construction of the pyramids. They also had superior stone monument inscribing and construction of the city which were taken from the Olmecs. One of the greatest cities ever constructed in the central Americas was the city of Mirador, located in the northern part of the central land (Webster). Its size was nothing compared to the Classic Maya capital of Tikal, and it just comes to show that the Maya wandered the land many years, possibly centuries before the Classic Period. No matter how hard it was raining or how hot it was, it didn’t stop the Maya from building and expanding. Ancestors thrived in drier climates, where irrigation played a key role in supplying water for the people of the city (Webster). Irrigation was then passed on to several cities to keep a good management of water resources. The Teotihuacán were one of the first to adapt a successful irrigation system. However, the irrigation system could not be used for cities in the lowlands, but weren’t needed because of the abundance of rivers. The Maya were also quite good at making the most of what was at hand. When foreign invaders came in and saw nothing but water and food, they were disappointed, but if they would have taken a closer look then they might have seen the limestone being used by the natives for construction or the volcanic rock used to make weapons and tools. Other precious materials were jade, quetzal feathers from the bird that represented the communicator between the Maya and the gods, and marine shells used as trumpets (Coe).
The Mayans were an indigenous people. They lived in Mesoamerica and expanded to what are now El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize (Santly). They practiced the “slash and burn” technique which involves cutting down and burning the plants of the land in order to create fields (Santly). Their diet consisted of cornmeal beans, mangos, plantains, other sorts of fruits, meat from livestock, maize and squash (Santly). The soil is no good without trees so the slash and burn also involved shifting cultivation. However, with cities growing larger and larger and farms becoming farther and farther away, it became more and more of a trouble to feed the some odd 200,000 people of one city (Webster). Could this have been the downfall of the Mayan civilization? And if it indeed was, where are the hundreds of thousands of skeletons that should have been unearthed by now?
The Classic Period began at 250 A.D. to about 900 A.D. This was a prime time for the Mayan people (Webster). The culture had manifested and grew to about 43 cities and held a population any where from 5,000 to 50,000 bodies (Santly). At its best, the Maya population reached at a point of about two million (Proskouriakoff). When excavations were made, basketball courts were uncovered, temples and palaces were unearthed, and pyramids brought up to see daylight again. Surrounding the cities were what appeared to be farmers. They practiced the slash and burn technique as well as terracing and irrigating. Planets, were they just circles in the sky or something more? The planets weren’t just orbs in the sky to the Mayan people, they were gods. The moon, Venus, Earth and the Sun were all viewed as gods and the Sun was the greatest of them all (Santly). They made sacrificial ceremonies to please the gods. Kings would go out to battle other domains and bring back a prisoner as the sacrifice (Santly). The sacrifice would be brought to the top of the temple and his or her blood would be shed (Santly). Was this enough? How did the people know that their god was satisfied with the sacrifice given? What would the “Gods” do if they were unsatisfied? Then again, what better sacrifice than the biggest one of all; an entire civilization. What if the Mayan people sacrificed themselves and were buried inside of the giant temples? Then again, that idea does sound absurd. The people of Mesoamerica were anything but ignorant. They built aqueducts through cities to have a direct water source. They made calendars predicting when certain planets would align, eclipses, and figured out that a year was three hundred sixty five days (Proskouriakoff). Even the pyramids were ingenious beyond height and longevity. The temple of Chichen Itza is more than a sacrificial pyramid; it contains 4 sets of stairs each containing 91 steps, each step representing a day in the year, 365 in total (Proskouriakoff). You may be thinking that’s simple math but it gets better. When a person claps towards a set of stairs it imitates the sound of the quetzal bird, a colorful bird of tropical land that was seen as the messenger of the gods (Proskouriakoff). Between the late eighth and ninth century a mystery struck the Mayan people and sent several crumbling into nothing.
Slowly but surely, cities in the lowlands started to become abandoned but with no sign of struggle. By the time 900 A.D. came around the lowlands had collapsed (Proskouriakoff). For so long it has been a mystery as to why these peoples of genius just disappeared. Scholars have come up with several different theories as to why this has happened. Was it starvation of the land? If this was the case then wouldn’t they have just moved to another location where food was abundant or change their diet? The city-states were always at a constant war with each other and this could have disturbed the order of trade and caused one superior city to stomp out the rest. This is also very unlikely. The last theory is that a huge dramatic environmental change occurred and wiped out the people. Could an earthquake send over half of a population into nothing? A giant dust cloud is what shut out the sun and killed off the dinosaurs, right? An extreme drought could have dried out a city like Tikal that depended on rainwater for farming and drinking. So with the stripping of the land and lack of water to keep alive whatever was left of the land, the Maya must have decided to move and from not being able to find a close enough stable environment to supply them with drinkable water, they “vanished”. Also with the occasional Spaniard coming over to join and learn the ways of the native, he/she must have passed off a disease that the Maya were not familiar with, wiping out a large number of the total head count. The survivors of preclassic period moved onto the Post-classic period and what a coincidence that all of the survivors were inhabitants of the highlands where rainwater was a weekly if not daily visitor. That is my proposal to the disappearance of the great Mayan people of
Mesoamerica.

Works Cited
Coe, M. D. The Maya. 8. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011. Print.
Webster, D. L. The fall of the ancient maya, solving the mystery of the maya collapse. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Print.
Proskouriakoff, Tatiana. Maya History. Vol. 1. Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1993. Print.
(Santly), Robert. Journal of Anthropological research. Vol. 42 (Summer, 1986) Print.

"The Rise and Fall of the Maya Empire — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts." History.com — History Made Every Day — American & World History. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2013. .
Thompson, J E. S. Maya History and Religion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Print.
George, Charles, and Linda George. Maya Civilization. Detroit: Lucent Books, 2010. Print.