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- But then, by around 1000 CE, Mayan civilization dramatically contracted and new buildings all but ceased in certain areas. Why?
- this most recent article on the Mayan drought and particularly how it has subsequently been reported tell us just the opposite - that STEM needs more humanities and social science.
Most people don't think of the Americas when they think of the "medieval" (or "Middle Ages") but that's beginning to change. The Mayan civilization, for example, flourished for over 700 years between roughly 200-900 CE - from the heyday of the Roman Empire past the fall of the Carolingians. Most people know of the Maya from current popular tourist destinations, such as Tikal in Guatemala or Chichen Itza in modern-day Mexico, but this linked system of city-states stretched across most of Central America. Some centers, such as Caracol in modern Belize, could have held as many as 100,000 residents at their height.
A new article in Science thinks it has the answer: radical climate change. The study by a cluster of climate researchers at the University of Cambridge and geologists at the University of Florida concluded that a massive drought, with a decrease in annual precipitation of between 41-54%, occurred at the end of the classical period (ca. the 9th century CE), devastating crops and making the land all but uninhabitable.
But we already knew that.
Dr. David S. Anderson, a trained archeologist at Radford University who specializes in Mesoamerica and who also works to debunk pseudoarcheology, told me via email that scholars have known about the collapse of Mayan Civilization for about 100 years. "Since then," he continued:
"we’ve learned more and more about this period with additional excavations and paleo climate data. So, the collapse is now seen as an extended phenomena that seems to begin ca. 800 CE and continues in some places until about 1000 CE. Evidence has been building for about 20 years to suggest there were significant droughts during this period, so this new study supports those who want to point to drought as the primary mover in the collapse."
But it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know, or "it's better resolution on a phenomena that we already had good evidence to say occurred." According to Dr. Anderson, by focusing exclusively on "proving" there was a severe drought this article doesn't account for the problems in linking the drought to a prolonged 200-year decline - a period that's far too long for just 1 thing to be the cause. Most likely, it was a number of factors that caused the decline, with the environment being only 1 of them.
And this is what can happen when STEM fields ignore the humanities and social sciences. They too often "rediscover" something that other scholars have known for some time.
Maybe more importantly though, STEM also sometimes forgets context, which can lead to misunderstandings. Without context - without situating the importance of these findings within what we already know about the decline of the Maya - allows others to leap to unwarranted (and problematic) conclusions.
How people wrote about the past in the past still haunts us today and this holds true here as well. Dr. Anderson explains:
"Discover ran an piece [since corrected but see the original here] claiming we finally know why the Maya 'disappeared.' But that's a loaded word here. To say the Maya 'disappeared' is a 19th-century claim that says the contemporary indigenous inhabitants of Central America couldn't possibly be related to such crafty and industrious people who could build such architecture. It's also just not true. Not only did the Maya not disappear, but they rebounded. There were large-scale Maya political entities when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century and the conquest of the last independent Maya kingdom didn't happen until the 18th century. Today, millions of people live throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize who are the direct biological descendants of the ancient Maya, many of whom still speak one of the 30 or so Maya languages as their native tongue."
Discover has corrected their post (although it still claims the Maya "vanished") and Dr. Anderson is sure that the authors of the original Science article would likely be horrified to see their work being used in such a way, yet here we are. After all, you have to be aware of those assumptions and where they come from in order to fight against them.
In the end, some in the public sphere might repeatedly call for humanists and social scientists to get more STEM, but if anything, this most recent article on the Mayan drought and particularly how it has subsequently been reported tell us just the opposite - that STEM needs more humanities and social science.
