>>> Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/27/99 12:02PM >> There's a very interesting article by J. Donald Hughes on the Mayan collapse in the March 1999 issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism. (For a journal edited by a "confused old man," CNS is pretty damn sharp.) Well before the arrival of the Europeans, the Mayans were living in cities and massively altering the landscape with irrigation, quarrying, and the manufacture of ceramics. For all the Mayans old reputation of pacifism - derived from pre-1950s archeology, which studied only the upper classes and their mythmaking - they were furious warriors. And apparently they did themselves in by creating an ecological catastrophe - overfarming, excessive waste production, deforestation, extinction of forest species, and energy shortages (because of the increasing scarcity of wood, which they consumed at the rate of one ton per person per year). Starvation and social collapse set in, and by the year 1000, the population had declined by 75-85% from its peak. (((((((((((( Does this article mean to imply that the Mayan working classes were furious warriors and the "upper classes" were more peaceful ? Or that the upper class myth making covered the wars of the upper classes ? Or ? The riddle of the collapse of the Mayan civilization has also been discussed by archeologist Kent V. Flannery and others including ecological-socio-political theories. The city was depopulated, but I don't know that the surrounding gardening and gathering societies were simultaneously depopulated. I wonder if this Hughes has finally answered the riddle. Florescence and decline are widespread themes in archeology. The Mayan calendar was more accurate than the European calendar at the time of contact. Charles Brown
