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The Mayan
Numbering System
Palenque
People of the Sun
Road to Collapse
The Maya and 2012
The Mayan Calendar
The Mayan Collapse
Venus
Who Were The Maya?
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The Mayan Collapse
Hundreds of years ago in what is now modern Honduras, Copan was a thriving
civilization and was the heartbeat of a Mayan culture which stretched from
Mexico to El Salvador. Despite its political importance, Copan went into decline
around 1500 BCE. Across the expanse of the ancient Maya civilization, other
city states began to crack under political and economic strain
How this happened has remained somewhat of a mystery. The history of
human civilization has been marked by patterns of growth and decline. Some
social and economic declines, such as that of the Roman Empire, have been gradual,
occurring over centuries. Others have been rapid, occurring over the course
of a few years... or even overnight!
War, famine, natural disasters, plague, overpopulation and economic crisis
can alone or in combination bring about the collapse of a culture's civilization.
Sometimes domestic political mismanagement such as civil war or over-farming
can compound these issues, and can put a society on a slippery slope from which
it cannot recover. But what does this mean for modern civilizations? What can be
learned from the collapse of the Maya?
The Maya civilization produced incredible temples and pyramids without the use
of advanced technologies. They also perfected the Mesoamerican "long-count" calendar
into the most complex and accurate measurements of lunar, stellar and solar events
ever seen! They also created an advanced system of writing and mathematics, which
all combined to knit together the spiritual and political fabric of their society.
Considering the impressive remains of the ancient Maya civilization, it's hard to
imagine how such a society could collapse.
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