What’s Behind The Sudden Demise Of The Mayans?
The Mayan civilization has fascinated people for eons. Whether that curiosity was sparked by how incredibly advanced the Mayans were for their time, or because of their great stone cities, their intriguing artwork, monuments and hieroglyphs, or their inexplicable disappearance, is hard to say. Perhaps most famous is Mayan mathematics, which included the early use of the numeral zero, and the complex Mayan calendar system which was based on a 365-day year.
While the Maya people still exist today in modern day Mexico, the ancient civilization began developing between 7000 and 2000 B.C., and had largely collapsed by 900 – 1000 A.D. The ancient Mayan civilization encompassed the modern day lands of the Yucatan, Campeche, Tabasco, Quintana Roo, and Chiapas in Mexico, and other countries including Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras. The Maya took their name from the Mayan capitol city Mayapan, located in the Yucatan.
The Mayans didn’t exactly vanish as is largely understood. The Mayan civilization sprawled over a huge area and had a population that may have reached 2 million at its peak. The Mayan decline began regionally. The eventual collapse began in the southern lowlands when the Mayan people began abandoning their cities. Construction in the great Maya city of Tikal was halted around 870 A.D., and the city was abandoned roughly thirty years later. By 900 A.D., most of the lowland cities had been abandoned, though the Mayan cities in the northern Yucatan would persist for another century. A smattering of Mayan cities clung to life for another half of a millennium, leaving enough Mayans to successfully fight off the Spanish conquistadors for a time. Eventually, the mass exodus, Spanish explorers with their new diseases, and religious fervor such as that exhibited by Diego de Landa, who burned most of the Mayan religious iconography and documentation, along with torturing and killing many Mayan people, resulted in the large scale disappearance of the Mayans. What caused the abandonment of the highly advanced cities remained a mystery until recently.
Off the coast of Belize – once part of the ancient Mayan civilization – is a reef system second only to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Incorporated into this reef is a breathtaking submarine sinkhole known as the Great Blue Hole. André Droxler, an earth scientist from Houston’s Rice University, led a team that analyzed the sediment found in the Hole and the surrounding reefs. As reported by the Inquisitr, the results seem to confirm one of the theories pertaining to the Mayan collapse; a massive, multi-century drought is the most likely culprit. The sediment shows a mineral imbalance that indicates much lower rainfall and runoff. A drought – a slow, sad lack of water dried up the Mayans, one of the greatest of the ancient civilizations.
