Book Review: The Maya and Climate Change

Review of Seligson, Kenneth E. The Maya and Climate Change: Human-Environmental Relationships in the Classic Period Lowlands. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Premodern Societies and Environments series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN (hardcover) 9780197652923.

By Vernon L. Scarborough, University of Cincinnati

The House the Maya Built

Since the early-sixteenth century entradas by Cortez and his peninsular kingdom, the ancestral Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula have confounded early scholarship while exciting numerous sensationalists. It was not until a couple of decades prior to our Great Civil War of the mid-nineteenth century, that a broad public was introduced to a more accurate set of snapshots of what Maya civilization may have looked like. Nevertheless, since those popular volumes by Stephens and Catherwood, much in the way of media assessment continues to couch the Maya in an aura of mystery and intrigue. Kenneth Selgison has crafted a well-written and thoughtful synthesis of what contemporary archaeology has now come to understand about this resilient and complex society through time and within their varied mosaic of managed environments.

Although the volume spends time on what happened to Maya civilization during its great fragmentation following more than 700 years of growth and accomplishment, the focus of attention is clearly the Classic Period (200–800 AC). He suggests that a continuous fascination by the popular press on the ancestral Maya as mysterious and exceptional can result in an overly romantic image of whom they were and what they achieved with even exoticism the takeaway. Perhaps the emphasis placed on the ninth- and tenth-century “collapse” of the Classic Maya, a highly significant downturn critically reviewed by much of the recent past and current scientific literature, has overshadowed both the practical and highly innovative ways that the Maya sustained themselves in coping with a subtropical landscape. The author incorporates an approach to assessing the nonlinear arrival, colonization, establishment, and curtailment of aspects of their civilization, a more generalized model now employed by both the sciences and the social sciences—“resilience theory”—in best explaining the changes impacting the society and its biophysical environs.

At the outset, he shows that the pace and locations of transition differed at the local and regional level in emphasizing society’s complexity. Although not developed here, the rapid organic “turnovers” in a seasonally constrained, “wet-dry” forested setting, a condition found in much of the Maya Lowlands, made human alteration of the landscape tricky. Nevertheless, by drawing on lesson learned during times of resource overexploitation, longevity and resilience prevailed. By the Late Preclassic Period (300 BCE–200 AC), considerable colonization efforts had already resulted in the establishment of long-lived Maya socioecological institutions. However, with the advent of drought-like conditions and overuse of resources associated with spiking population growth, several large communities were significantly abandoned or were forced to reorient their consumption practices. This learning curve was institutionally internalized resulting in a set of Classic Period landscape management approaches emphasizing the notion of “harvesting” rather than” exploiting” (my language, not necessarily the author’s). Innovative Late Preclassic intensification practices were clearly continued, but more closely monitored. The role of raised planting beds in proximity to sizable wetlands—internally draining “bajos”—or near low-lying, slow-moving stream systems were widely expanded during the Classic Period, as were the erosional control and field plots of terraced hillside surfaces. The harvesting of conserved and domesticated plant varieties as well as non-domesticated animal populations was thoughtfully controlled at the household level, knowledge passed from generation to generation. Even today, the durability of these engineered landscapes continues to reflect decisions made by the ancestral Maya, but now incorporated into contemporary lifeways alongside modern technologies. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is alive and well, with methods and techniques worthy of reintroduction and assessment where overexploitation and climate change impacts are challenging our global food supplies.

Throughout the volume, the degree of stability and instability inherent in climatic assessments is interwoven. The capricious amount and distribution of precipitation seasonally as well as through deep time is a fundamental force in the kinds of decisions made by the Maya. Sometimes called a “green desert,” the mosaic of environments occupied required significant alterations to accommodate the projected 10 million souls living there by the late Classic Period. Because five months of the year were frequently without rainfall, cities as large as Tikal, Calakmul, and Caracol, each approaching populations of perhaps 100,000, to the smallest hamlet of a half-dozen house mounds, required water storage facilities. Although in the more arid northern peninsular settings, the freshwater table was frequently elevated with the natural formation of limestone sinks—cenotes—providing year-round potable water access, this was seldom the case in the southern Maya Lowlands. Water-management urban hubs like Tikal or Caracol are shown to reflect archetypical gravity-flow reservoir catchment systems infilled from seasonal runoff over elevated and well-maintained plaster surfaces. Dubbed “convex micro-watersheds,” these cities provided their immediate urban residential core as well as visiting dignitaries, merchants, and pilgrims potable water shed from sizable public plazas as well as the several central precinct pyramids, acropolises and ballcourts identified from within the larger Classic Period centers. Recent studies further indicate the role of water filtering functions given the “open-air” catchment surfaces recharging these storage tanks. At both the lower margins of the largest centers as well as in proximity to small farmsteads, proportionally scaled reservoirs were used to irrigate fields systems during the driest periods of the year.

The book provides the reader clear descriptions of the methods and techniques used by current archaeology for assessing how and why we know what we know about the “house the ancient Maya built.” From the pivotal role of lime production derived from the limestone bedrock for all things paved and architectural to the breakthrough technology of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) in mapping through the jungle canopy, the author’s explanations summarize many of the recent scientific advances now driving archaeological interpretations nearly everywhere. That said, the focus for the volume remains clearly in the realm of the subtropics.

This is a fine contribution to our greater understanding of the ancestral Maya. For several recent decades, seminal studies have worked to decipher what the preserved, carved, and painted record of their ancient past is now telling us. Much has been revealed by way of elite worldview from the epigraphic and iconographic remains. Today, and perhaps during the last two decades, a complementary engagement with the biophysical world is now revealing another level of fundamental knowledge institutionalized at the socio-environmental level. Without the use of the wheel or the pulley, functional metal tools, beasts of burden or even the likely use of the navigational sail, the Maya engineered a resilient and sustainable landscape that warrants thoughtful reflection. Given their societal longevity, and in the context of our own uncertain futures, Kenneth Seligson’s synthesis allows for another way of looking at our now struggling blue-green planet.