Unit 15
The Fall of Civilizations: Another Lesson from Copán

A common fate of complex societies is that they collapse, or cease to function, in an sudden and often spectacular way. One of the most famous instances of this process is the collapse of the Classic Maya in the eighth-ninth centuries AD. In this unit, we examine the theories that have been proposed to explain this collapse, in the context of the case-study of the Classic Maya site of Copán.

Objectives

After completing this unit, you should be able to

1. describe some of the ways in which cultural failure can occur, and provide examples.
2. describe the events that marked the decline of the Classic Maya Great Tradition.
3. describe the ethnohistoric evidence that indicates the abandonment of the Maya heartland.
4. describe the two parts to the problem of explaining the Classic Maya collapse.
5. discuss the problems with the “peasant revolt,” “foreign invasion,” “disruption of trade,” and “internal warfare” explanations of the Maya collapse.
6. describe the evidence for catastrophic events or epidemic disease.
7. describe the long-term ecological processes that could have affected the Maya.
8. describe and discuss the kinds of evidence from the Copán settlement surveys that relate to the Maya collapse.
9. describe the “synthetic explanation” for the Copán collapse.
10. explain what went wrong with the Maya system, and discuss how it applies to the world today.

After completing the viewing assignment, you should be able to

1. describe the collapse experienced by the Maya society.
2. explain why archaeologists think that Copán experienced a gradual, rather than a sudden, decline.