For example, mineral deposits at the bottom of Lake Chichancanab show evidence of what Turner called “a megadrought,” prolonged periods of significantly less precipitation. However, recent studies using new techniques have not only located evidentiary sources that come directly from the Maya heartland but that also can be definitively dated. Finally, signs of precipitation on the actual peninsula - or the lack thereof - were not definitive or exact. Second, the evidence had not yet been pinned down enough in time, lacking what Turner called the specific temporal baselines of narrow five- or 10-year time periods. The first was that much of the evidence of climate change, or even climate variability, was inferred by teleconnection - records of droughts in nearby regions, for example, which were not necessarily accurate for the Yucatan. However, said Turner, researchers still faced three major problems that made their conclusions somewhat speculative. By the 1990s, evidence was pointing in the other direction - that lack of water had triggered the slide.

The first theories, presented by Ellsworth Huntington in 1912, suggested that increasing precipitation had also increased disease. Why this happened, however, is more complicated. Within a few hundred years, the forest had taken over once again. White Professor of Environment and Society, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and the School of Sustainability at Arizona State. Following a long period of population growth, this area of dense farmland and cities “was virtually abandoned,” said Turner, the Regents Professor and the first Gilbert F. Much can be found in the archaeological record. to empty the elevated interior (or interior uplands) of the Yucatan peninsula, which had been, he said, the Mayan “heartland.” However, recent evidence across disciplines goes a long way to explaining not only how but when the problems began - raising more questions along the way.Ī human-environmental scientist, “working at the intersection of the social and the environmental,” Turner championed this interdisciplinary approach to understanding what may have happened between roughly 8 A.D. As early as 1912, archaeologists were theorizing that climate change had contributed to the decline of the Maya, and by the 1970s, it was largely accepted that Maya lands had been densely populated and developed. Elements of this theory have been around for a long time. Willey lecture, Turner detailed evidence that two major droughts resulted in the decline and depopulation of a culture that not only had monumental architecture but also a sophisticated understanding of mathematics and astronomy. Turner II discussed how climate change - likely made worse by unchecked development - brought low one of the great civilizations of our hemisphere over a thousand years ago.ĭelivering the Gordon R. Speaking on “ The Ancient Maya Response to Climate Change: A Cautionary Tale” at the Peabody Museum on Thursday evening, Arizona State University Professor Billie L.

But it isn’t the first time a civilization has come into conflict with a shift in the natural world. Climate change has been called the existential threat of our age.

Maya civilization