To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse by David L. Webster (ISBN-10: 0500051135, ISBN-13: 9780500051139).
At this time we have not yet written a review for The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse by David L. Webster (ISBN-10: 0500051135, ISBN-13: 9780500051139). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Ancient Maya civilization thrived in the tropics of Central America for more than a thousand years and produced some of the world's finest architecture and art. Then it mysteriously vanished, leaving a landscape of ruins smothered by forests. The Classic Maya collapse is one of the great puzzles of history, ranking alongside the Fall of Rome as an enigma that has intrigued scholars for generations. Drawing upon recent archaeological research and hieroglyphic decipherments, David Webster evaluates the theories and dispels the myths surrounding this contentious topic. Contrary to popular belief, not all Maya centers were abandoned, and Spanish explorers of the sixteenth century encountered still-vigorous Maya polities. Yet the Maya of the southern lowlands did suffer a calamitous decline beginning in the late eighth century AD. Monuments were no longer carved, royal buildings ceased to be constructed or maintained, and whole populations dwindled or simply moved away. What brought about this collapse? Webster paints a picture of a brittle Late Classic world. Ambitious kings, scheming nobles, and courtly extravagance are set against a backdrop of ever-more destructive wars and an exploding population that led to unsustainable stress on cultivatable land. Without the means to intensify agricultural production, the system simply failed. Professor Webster makes full use of his own and his colleagues' latest discoveries at sites such as Cop n, Tikal, Dos Pilas, and Piedras Negras to reveal the subtle complexity and variety of the collapse across the Maya world.
Non-technical agrarian economies can't escape Malthus' observations
| Customer Rating:  | Webster's book seems as if it was a reaction to downgrade the latest "fad" theory on the demise of the Maya,specifically the "Superdrought" theory and I must admit he succeeds well.First he defines what period of Mayan history he is adressing reminding the reader that anyone attempting to explain "the Ancient Mayans" must be very careful on the use of dates and phases as well as geographic locations since Mayan influence encompassed thousands of square miles with radically different climates.Here's some beef,(which Mayans never ate),according to Webster, the Mayans were comprised of 80% peasantry and their diet about 70-80% maize. The time period that Webster addresses is the aprox. 7-8th centuries AD when the "Ancient" Maya and their warrior/priest hierarchy ,complete with the grandiose building projects,collapsed in a span of about 2 centuries.
The chapter I particularly enjoyed was "Many Kingdoms,Many Fates" where Webster breaks down and analyzes the different Mayan cities and puts them in chronological order.Alot of these ruins are separated by hundreds of years and the evidence shows most of them were in conflict with one another over status and influence.In short,Webster offers no "one theory" explain it all solution,but numerous interconnected reasons for the collapse.
Alot of these Mayan cities reached populations that could have been as high as 20,000 then suddenly became more or less,"ghost towns".So what happened according to Webster. He basically says that Mayan agrarian success set the stage for the collapse.The populations of these cities grew to a point where the agrarian economy could not support the urban and outlying residents.As it was,the Mayan cities were "very fragile economies" and as the population grew,nevermind a megadrought,just a simple one month drought could be devastating.Remember the Mayan did not have the plow,or the wheel,and was strictly labor intensive.Webster invests alot of effort in describing what agrarian technologies the Mayans had and which techniques they were sadly lacking in.If you're looking for a simple one theory explanation,this wouldn't be your book.Simply put the Mayan peasantry lost faith in their warrior/priests and left the cities abandoned as they could no longer support a growing urban population.I take it from reading Websters book that "no tears were shed" in regret as they packed up with their empty bellies.While it doesn't say so in the book,I figure that the ecological refugees took along the "best" of the urban culture,such as the art,medicine,and rituals and discarded alot of practices they disagreed with.Thereby,moving into a new phase.I've heard this same phrase so many times to explain a lost civilization.They're never "lost" but just move into another phase,hopefully a better one! |
Why was Tikal abandoned?
| Customer Rating: | About 800 A.D. the great classical Mayan centers in the Petun region of northern Guatemala and southern Yucatan were suddenly abandoned, never to recover. Maya civilization continued, in a reduced form, in the northern Yucatan which is where the Spanish discovered the Mayas in the early 16th century.
If you're going to name the seven wonders of the world -- as some magazine is doing -- the spectacular Mayan ruin of Tikal should be on the list. The jungles around Tikal, the greatest of all the classical Mayan cities, are uncongenial to a large human population and the mystery has always been how the Maya were able to create a civilization in such an environment and why the civilization after six centuries disappeared suddenly. The author examines about a dozen different theories as to why Tikal, Copan, and other Mayan centers abruptly ceased to be populated.
This is a book that begins slowly and gets better as you progress. I zipped through the first few chapters, which included long definitions of civilization, urbanization, etc. and finally began to get interested with chapter Six (page 178) in which the author finally gets down to discussing what he promised: the decline and fall of Maya civilization. The remainder of the book is good. The author discusses the factors that led to the decline of Tikal, Copan, La Milpa and other centers. I won't reveal his conclusions -- other than to say that he comes down heavily on environmental degradation. That is in accord with current popular and politically-correct wisdom on the subject.
The book is complemented by a number of good photographs drawings and graphs, and ample maps showing the locations of the many, many Mayan ruins in Middle America. Unfortunately, our understanding of the Maya will always be deficient because of the destruction of nearly all their written records and culture by their Spanish overlords. Our assumptions and conclusions regarding this mysterious civilization may be wrong -- and the paucity of solid data gives rein to the most interesting of speculations.
Smallchief |
Mayanism Goes Postmodern
| Customer Rating:  | David Webster is surely one of the most knowledgeable experts on the Maya, and this book is a mostly useful summary of current knowledge on that fascinating culture and its mysterious demise. Actually, the school of archeology that Webster belongs to has found, with convincing evidence, that after the classic age (ending around AD 900) the Maya did not have a sudden doomsday-like catastrophe that wiped them off the face of the Earth. Instead, slow-moving political pressures related to overpopulation and exhaustion of natural resources led to different city-states falling out of influence at different times, as the Maya very slowly transitioned into a less organized form of society. In fact Maya people still live in the area to this day and organized populations even confronted the Spanish conquistadors, but their "glory days" of huge monuments and designed cities were behind them. This is Webster's basic explanation for the "fall," and in any case he is only talking about the classic period of Maya civilization, rather than the nonsensical disappearance of millions of people.
This is all perfectly fascinating from an archeological standpoint, but the book is frustrating due to Webster's attitudes and writing style. He begins with rather condescending complaints about the supposed ignorance of the public on this subject, possibly turning off beginners who might be reading this book out of informed curiosity. Most importantly, Webster's thinking style is pure academic postmodernism, dwelling primarily on obtuse professorial abstractions like reconstructing texts and inventing historical meta-narratives. Webster spends dozens of pages arguing about the semantics of terms like "civilization" and "city," going off on tangents that will have little interest to anyone outside of professorland. And finally, a very large portion of the book consists of Webster rebutting and debunking other theories about the Maya, and his only way of proving his own theories (however believable they may be) is through a process of elimination and sheer force of will. [~doomsdayer520~] |
Not Very Satisfying
| Customer Rating: | The author is an archeological hole-digger who supposes virtually no influence to the great Mayan demise attributed to spiritual matters, in an age of myth-driven superstition, sacrifice, and supplication. He suggests crop decline due to overpopulation lead to the collapse of the Mayan hierarchy. But since when does a shaman or spiritual guide come up short on reasons for things working out differently than expected? Its part of the trade to divert fault. Pacifying peasants through guile, blame, god's will, or brute military force is as much part of the landscape as carved stone.
The evidence of agricultural decline is not well demonstrated. The author devotes more research into refuting other claims than proving his own, particularly agricultural decline in a luxuriant rainforest setting. We see no soil study evidence, no pollen counts by century, no clear evidence of crop decline, little nutritional evidence from human remains. This is a culture that was rotating crops hundreds of years before.
The author laments that some sites lack detailed records of events compared to others, but the reader has little evidence of where this occurs since modest historical information is displayed in any case, other than lists of ambiguous rulers associated with various monuments. Nearly all the written records and books of this early civilization were systematically destroyed by Catholic bishop Diego de Landa, who sought to drive out pagan influences in about 1523. There are few incidents in history were more valuable evidence was lost for posterity. Little remains since possession of books was punished with rather unchristian methods.
Ultimately the author struggles on several levels. His data is mostly repetitious and dull - endless population density claims that ultimately prove little. The academic writing style is tedious; "...the active demand of two or more organisms for the same limited resources..." is as close to a battle scene as you'll get. The assumption is that the reader is well aware of the rich cultural history of the region so we need not bother with general background. And, ultimately, his failure to prove his contention that population growth led to overused agricultural resources to the point of malnutrition, resulting in political destabilization and the collapse of the ruling hierarchy. And yet, while he implies there are as many causes as sites that declined, he offers a single thesis. He mostly holds his own conclusions and opinions until late in the book, to build a story, I guess, but it is ineffective and cumbersome. Overall, this just isn't very satisfying, even if you have a curiosity of what happened to the ancient Mayan. If you are reading this prior to a visit to the region for insight and historical perspective, this is clearly the wrong source. In its favor, it is a recent publication, so the materials are current. And he may be right about all his contentions, but they weren't proven to my satisfaction. Read John L. Stephens for the Indian Jones adventure of it all and don't worry about the bone diggers, the real story isn't ready for release.
|
The Maya Fall ... and Our Own?
| Customer Rating: | | Like many a good scientist, David Webster demythologizes with facts knowing that detailed scientific fact is often more fascinating than myth. Webster tells of the 'Maya myth' growing out of the first discoveries of the mysterious vine-covered ruins, with their "vacant ceremonial centers," ruins that create the eerie impression of a civilization abandoned almost overnight. By the 1940s the Classic Lowland Maya had "become a kind of intellectual Shangri-La for our wishful thinking about the past and about the human condition." A big part of the myth was that of the 'peaceful Maya,' a wishful notion that became awkward to maintain after archeologists inconveniently began to uncover extensive military fortifications. But myth is stubborn. Webster recalls that once on a flight to one of his archeological sites he ran across an airline magazine article with the typical popular emoting, telling how the Maya had 'built palaces with 100 or more rooms, while Europeans lived in mud huts.' The problem is, Webster points out, that while many Europeans lived in mud huts, so did most Maya, and that the advanced civilizations of the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans pre-dated that of the Classic Maya. Political correctness always tends to patronize and diminish those groups it intends to uplift. Surely the Maya achieved enough--the art, the architecture, the hieroglyphics, the socially complex kingdoms, the extensive agricultural economy, all accomplished in an equatorial environment-to make exaggeration unnecessary. (Obviously any new information that might be uncovered showing the Maya more, or less, "advanced" than presently believed should be welcomed as helping to further puzzle out the truth.) It turns out that even the Maya "collapse" is something of a myth. Webster reminds us that the Classic Maya were part of a larger culture that continues today, and that there were several geographically separate kingdoms that experienced "mini-collapses" long before the final fall. Webster also answers PC academicians who charge that the whole concept of societal evolution, of simpler societies evolving into more complex or advanced ones, is really just ethnocentric racist Social Darwinism attempting to excuse the West's exploitation of traditional cultures: "More than a century of archaeological research in many parts of the world has documented something very much like ... cultural evolution." Politically correct politics aside, Webster writes, "Cultural evolution, like biological evolution, is a fact, how ever it happens, whether we like it or not, and despite whatever lessons we wish to learn from it." Webster lists some of the characteristics of collapsing civilizations: Less stratification; less political centralization; less regimentation; decreased exchanges of information and resources; population decline; settlement abandonment; diminished production of Great Tradition components; invasions; diminished confidence in or even rejection of collectively held ideas and values ... (Hmm, last few sound familiar.) Population decline and growth seem particularly tricky. Even when massive population growth is on the eve, historically speaking, of overwhelming a society's natural-resource base, soon to bring about economic, political and population collapse, to those who are experiencing the final "boom," population growth must seem an open-ended blessing. One thinks of today's continual press characterizations of our Third-World-like post-1965 immigration-generated population growth as being merrily "robust." One of the many strengths of this book is that Webster seems to have no ideological ax to grind. He systematically takes his readers through the various past attempts at explaining the Maya collapse, from monument construction being too burdensome on peasants, to the disintegration of trade networks, and shows many of them to be wanting. So what did happen to the Maya? Read this very fine book. Finally, any volume devoted to civilizational collapse, particularly such an outstanding one as this, is doubly interesting to those who are concerned about the decline of our own civilization. A big part of the problem for the Maya was environmental, and the environmental Malthusian warning bells are with us today, in fact, ear-shatteringly so. But what do we make of political elites of European-based nations, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and of course Europe itself, who view their rapid replacement by people of some other cultural, ethnic, or racial stock, through immigration and offspring, as not only acceptable, but as fulfilling some glittering vision of the future, or as one Immigration and Naturalization Commissioner gushed, "a wonderful transformation"? Of course, what happened to the Maya only parallels some of our own dysfunctions, but one seemingly bizarre category of civilizational collapse cataloged separately by Webster catches the eye: a collapse brought about by "ideological pathology." This is illustrated by the case of the African Xhosa. "Late in the summer of 1856 the Xhosa, a Bantu-speaking people of southeast Africa, began to methodically kill their cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and foul. They also consumed or threw away all the grain in their storage bins and stopped preparations to plant crops." These things were not done grudgingly, but in celebration. Why? They had listened to the prophecies of a girl who claimed to hear messages from beyond, telling her that once her people had stripped themselves down to nothing "the world would be reborn." Of course what actually happened was that "untold thousands starved" in one of the "greatest self-inflected immolation in all of history." The case of the Xhosa "shows that under extraordinary circumstances whole societies can virtually will themselves out of existence." |
|
