For centuries, the mystery of the Maya civilization’s rise and fall has captivated explorers and scholars. In one of the first accounts of the region, the American explorer John Lloyd Stephens wrote: “Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations; reached their golden age, and perished, entirely unknown.”
“To us,” he continued in an 1841 travel journal, “it was all a mystery.”
Now, with the help of modern science, part of that mystery is being put to rest. A new analysis of 2,000-year-old stalagmites suggests the role that climate change played in both the Maya civilization’s achievements and in its undoing.
“How do you get so many different centers that are so successful?” said Douglas J. Kennett, a geoarchaeologist at Penn State University and co-author of a new paper in the journal Science, referring to the range of Maya sites. “We think climate played a role in that development, and we also think climate played a role in how that all came apart at the seams.”
Previous research in the region by other scholars has supported the notion that drought was responsible for the Maya’s collapse. Some arrived at this conclusion by examining tree rings, while others studied lake sediment deposits or marine records. But the dating and locations were not closely aligned enough with the ancient Maya to be considered definitive.