About this Event
By 800 CE, the Classic Maya had scaled remarkable cultural heights. Their refined art-style and precocious intellectual achievements were to be found in dozens of major cities, spread across a landscape that was home to millions of people. Never politically unified, those lands were divided into well over a hundred separate and competing kingdoms. Yet by 900 CE, all those governments had disappeared, and the population had plummeted by 90% or more. Almost every one of their cities had been abandoned and were soon to be reclaimed by a rejuvenated forest.
The extent of this societal and demographic collapse has few, if any, rivals elsewhere in the world and the question of what caused it has both fascinated and frustrated scholars for well over a century. The search for understanding has cycled through a good number of potential solutions, often reflecting the social currents of their time. Today environmental and social explanations stand as competing poles in the debate, but neither side has yet produced the evidence that takes us to a definitive answer.
This talk describes new epigraphic, iconographic, and archaeological data bearing on this question, venturing into a terrain of ideas that has fallen so far from favor that it can be considered controversial. It contends that we have been missing an important piece of the puzzle, one that casts the process of collapse into new light and will be relevant no matter what the root causes of the catastrophe turn out to be.
Simon Martin gained his PhD at University College London and is currently an Associate Curator and Keeper at Penn Museum and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a political anthropologist and specialist in Maya hieroglyphic writing, with a particular interest in the history, politics, and religious beliefs of the Classic Period (150-900 CE). He has numerous publications to his name and his most recent book, Ancient Maya Politics (Cambridge University Press), won major prizes from the Association of American Publishers and the American Historical Association.
Image and Image Caption: The city of Tikal as it may have looked shortly after it was abandoned in the ninth century CE (©Penn Museum and Russell Hoover).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Oak Room, 1700 Wisconsin Ave NW, Washington, United States
USD 0.00
