Climate Calamity Mayan jade plaque of unkown god. From the now defunct Museum of Primitive Art in New York City. Pyramid of the Magician, Uxmal, Mexico. Archeologists, too, think that climate is important, but its influence, they say, is usually but one of many factors that contribute to the ebb and flow of civilizations and culture. Sometime around AD 800, the Classic Maya civilization experienced a rather sudden decline in parts of its jungle heartland.
Speculation includes war, social chaos, unchecked population growth and disease.
Recently, however, fresh evidence that the Classic Maya may have been felled, in part, by a changed climate has been drawn from sediment cores obtained from Lake Chichancanab on the Yucatan Peninsula. The new evidence of a drier climate emerging at the time of the Maya civilization's sudden decline is just one link in the chain of evidence being accumulated by Mayanists, says Sabloff. We're starting to get information that climate plays important roles in the development of culture. That experimental footing is being extended to archeology as a whole. As climatologists and other scientists improve their methods for looking back in time, and as archeologists get better at ferreting out climatological clues in the detritus of ancient peoples, new links in the archeological chain of evidence of climate's influence will be forged.