Finally, today there are still Maya people living in their ancient homeland
and speaking Maya languages. Because much ancient Maya culture survived
the collapse, early European visitors to the homeland recorded information
about contemporary Maya society that played a vital role in our understanding
ancient Maya society. The first Maya contact with Europeans came
already in 1502, just 10 years after Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of
the New World, when Columbus on the last of his four voyages captured a
trading canoe that may have been Maya. In 1527 the Spanish began in
earnest to conquer the Maya, but it was not until 1697 that they subdued
the last principality. Thus, the Spanish had opportunities to observe independent
Maya societies for a period of nearly two centuries. Especially important,
both for bad and for good, was the bishop Diego de Landa, who
resided in the Yucatan Peninsula for most of the years from 1549 to 1578.
On the one hand, in one of history's worst acts of cultural vandalism, he
burned all Maya manuscripts that he could locate in his effort to eliminate
"paganism," so that only four survive today. On the other hand, he wrote a
detailed account of Maya society, and he obtained from an informant a garbled
explanation of Maya writing that eventually, nearly four centuries later,
turned out to offer clues to its decipherment.
A further reason for our devoting a chapter to the Maya is to provide an
antidote to our other chapters on past societies, which consist disproportionately
of small societies in somewhat fragile and geographically isolated
environments, and behind the cutting edge of contemporary technology
and culture. The Maya were none of those things. Instead, they were culturally
the most advanced society (or among the most advanced ones) in the
pre-Columbian New World, the only one with extensive preserved writing,
and located within one of the two heartlands of New World civilization
(Mesoamerica). While their environment did present some problems associated
with its karst terrain and unpredictably fluctuating rainfall, it does
not rank as notably fragile by world standards, and it was certainly less fragile
than the environments of ancient Easter Island, the Anasazi area, Greenland,
or modern Australia. Lest one be misled into thinking that crashes are
a risk only for small peripheral societies in fragile areas, the Maya warn us
that crashes can also befall the most advanced and creative societies.
From the perspective of our five-point framework for understanding societal
collapses, the Maya illustrate four of our points. They did damage
their environment, especially by deforestation and erosion. Climate changes
(droughts) did contribute to the Maya collapse, probably repeatedly. Hostilities
among the Maya themselves did play a large role. Finally, political/