ray613•10d ago

I always thought the Maya collapse was a sudden event, but new digs changed my mind

I saw a documentary that showed the before and after at Caracol in Belize over about 200 years. They used LiDAR to map the whole area and found that instead of everyone just leaving at once, the city slowly shrank. People kept living there but stopped building big temples and palaces. The real change was a long drought that made farming really hard, so the big city life just faded away. What other sites show this kind of slow change instead of a big disaster?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_elizabeth10d ago

Yeah, that slow fade makes a lot more sense. You see it at Copan too, in Honduras. The elite areas got abandoned first, but people kept living in the outskirts for centuries, just reusing old stones for simple houses. Same story at some sites in the Yucatan, where the big ceremonial centers got quiet but the smaller villages nearby hung on, adapting to the drier climate. It wasn't an apocalypse, it was more like a long, tough period where the old way of doing things just stopped working.

the_leo10d ago

That "long, tough period" still sounds like a total disaster for the people living through it.

sandra_moore309d ago

Ever feel like the old way just stops working for you too? I had to let go of a plan that wasn't working anymore, and it was rough for a while, just like @the_leo said. Finding a simpler way to do things made all the difference.