Societal resilience and interaction with the environment

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With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Cameron L. McNeil will lead an international team of scholars investigating the role of environmental factors in the collapse of ancient Maya city-states. The collapse, which occurred within lowland regions of the Maya area between AD 790 and 950, has been the focus of extensive debate. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain it, including warfare, climate change, top-heavy political systems, and natural disasters. But in particular, environmental degradation, or deforestation, has found widespread support as an explanation for the collapse. Archaeological and environmental data from the Copan Valley in Honduras are frequently invoked to argue that the ancient Maya destroyed their environment and precipitated the collapse of their society. According to this view, population pressure drove the Maya to deforest their lands and thereby instigate large-scale erosion, contributing to the political and demographic collapse. This project will use research techniques from a variety of scientific disciplines to generate new data on human-environmental interaction in the Copan Valley, which will shed new light on the environmental degradation theory of the collapse. The project will also addresses a contrasting hypothesis: that at the peak of their civilization the Maya actually implemented sustainable land-use practices, implying that deforestation was not a major factor in the collapse. The majority of the data collection will be centered on the archaeological site of Río Amarillo, an ancient Maya town in the Copan Valley, and the alluvial plain to its west. The goal of the research is to collect a variety of independent and complementary data sets amenable to the analysis of past human-environmental interactions. In particular, the project will undertake the analysis of pollen and phytoliths from sediment cores extracted from a body of water; starch and phytolith analysis from ground stones, lithics, and ceramics; the identification of charred macroremains recovered from archaeological excavations; stable carbon isotopes and phytoliths to determine the vegetative histories of the fields around the site; ground penetrating radar (GPR) to uncover signs of drainage networks; 3D imaging of the landscape with near-infrared sensors to look for field modifications; and recording modern pollen rain to assist in interpreting ancient pollen signatures. Each of these forms of data has the potential to provide indications of the extent of environmental degradation created by human populations over time. Results from this research will complement the analysis of artifacts and settlement plans acquired from archaeological excavations, providing a detailed record of human-environmental interaction in this area. The project will provide new data and new insights concerning the state of the landscape in the Copan Valley at the time of the collapse.