Moderator:
- What part of the Mayan area did you live in? And how did that affect your life?
- The environment for the people living within the Mayan civilization varied depending on the area. The Mayan homeland is placed in a seasonal tropical forest because there is a rainy season from May to October ( the area could also be considered a seasonal desert because there is a dry season from January to April). Within the Yucatán Peninsula, rainfall varies from 18 inches to 100 inches from north to south. On the contrary, the northern region was lower and closer to the water table and the southern region is higher and further from the water table. This caused the southern regions to experience more water scarcity than the northern regions even though they got more rainfall. This extreme difference in water abundance would affect the people’s lifestyles and how they adapted.
- How did the farming techniques seen in ancient Mayan agriculture affect your lifestyle?
- Mayan society consisted of at least 70% peasants who would all farm about 2 times the amount of food needed to sustain their lifestyle. This would allow for non peasant consumers to live a life without farming their own food. Agriculture in Mayan civilization relied on crops domesticated in Mexico. The most abundant crop would be corn followed by beans. The assumed farming style the Mayans would have used is the slash-and-burn technique but this would not have accounted for the large amount of food needed to sustain cities with approximately 250 to 750 people per square mile. Therefore, farmers used a variety of techniques to increase food production such as terricing of hills, irrigation systems, canals, and raised/drained fields. All of these techniques were labor intensive and time consuming.
- How did you witness your city destroy the surrounding environment? What actions were destroying it the most?
- Agriculture in Mayan civilization caused a large amount of environmental degradation through deforestation and depleting the soil of nutrients through over farming. Other places had caused deforestation through using the wood to create structures and the production of plaster. The deforestation on hillsides also caused erosion of soil which would have significantly changed the landscape and changed the lives of its inhabitants.
- How did Mayan conflict between people groups and cities affect your life?
- The Mayan civilization was previously thought to be a peaceful society but archaeologists now know that Mayan warfare was intense, chronic, and unresolvable. Conflict arose for many different reasons and it sometimes wiped out an entire city and sometimes citizens of a city would revolt and sometimes there would be a civil war.
- What were the likely factors that caused the collapse of your city/area?
- The Mayan civilization experienced a few collapses that were all staggered and all happened in different ways. Some of the areas were wiped out by warfare, others through drought, and others through higher death rate and lower birth rate.
Character 1:
During the year of A. D. 650, the population of the hill slopes in Copán started to rise and farmers became extremely necessary. I worked tirelessly to produce enough food for the soldiers and bureaucrats that I barely had enough to feed myself. Throughout my time working in the slopes, I have noticed that each year brings more infertile soil and less tree coverage. My role as a farmer is progressively becoming useless because it is getting harder and harder to find viable soil. I may even consider heading down south of the hills to see if I can find any useable soil, but I know that the valley farmers are indignant towards us hillsiders.
Brief essay: Environmental damage and Hostile neighbors
The environmental damage within the hillside of Copán became alarmingly visible within my last few years of farming. I watched as the rich pine forest that once protected my soil became a field of stumps. Each tree hauled away either became fuel or plaster, and each structure needed a thicker and thicker layer of plaster to protect it. Something tells me that we are the cause of this drought and not the king “breaking his royal promise” of rain and prosperity. I would never actually have the courage to tell anyone that, but it seems that once the forest was removed, the rain fall became minimal.
Our valley inhabitants now have no access to wood, and there is obvious sediment accumulation on the valley floor. In addition, us hillsiders have moved down to the valley because many of us are dying from malnutrition and disease. The valley farmers now have the burden of feeding for a larger population and there is some tension between the two different residents. Farmers started fighting other farmers for the areas of land that weren’t covered by acidic infertile soil. Fighting between our neighbors didn’t last long because the lack of food disabled us greatly
Character 2: My character is a soldier from the Mayan city of Copán. With only a small minority of kings and noblemen having an elevated status in Mayan society, my character’s role as a soldier makes them a commoner. At this status, my character played a part in harvests alongside other farmers as needed, and also had to go off and fight in the many conflicts that arose between Copán and its neighbors. This likely gave my character a unique dual insight regarding the environmental issues leading to food and water shortages in their society as well as the battles and how this fighting impacted the Mayans as a whole.
Brief essay: I’ve travelled around Copán and beyond a lot throughout my lifetime. Being a soldier that gets sent out to fight and called back to harvest kind of makes being “well-traveled” a given. But with the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if people like me keep living this kind of life for years to come. It’s how things have been for a while already: the vicious cycle of conquering, being conquered, and then the tides shifting back again. All the while I’m breaking my back when I get home to Copán, where I have to help my neighbors harvest corn and beans. But that farming is hard work, there must be something going on with the environment, because there’s not a lot of water and the crop yields keep going down. We don’t have enough water to grow more either, and now people are starting to fight here to find good areas to grow food. Now I’m fighting while I’m away and while I’m back home.
The drought and all the years of harsh farming, hoping for just a bit more output to help feed ourselves and the noblemen we have to feed, definitely started this cycle. It’s the root cause of all this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being the underlying problem that leads to the collapse of Copán. Honestly, these problems will probably be what gets other Mayan cities as well, since a lot of the soldiers I see from other cities look like they’re going through the same things as us. But this warfare with other cities and here at home now too is definitely making it worse for all of us, and could also be another reason why Copán is falling apart. Maybe if I didn’t have to go away and fight so much, I could be around here with all the other farmers and at-home soldiers, and we could figure out a way to manage our water resources a bit better. My neighbors blame the king for that—getting us into all these battles and not focusing on how we’re all going to eat—and for the drought too. There’s a lot of resentment building, and right now all of us commoners are taking it out on each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he ultimately suffers the consequences we’re already dealing with.
Character 3: My role in society is very important in keeping the kingdom alive and strong, I am the beloved King of Copan. I own successfully economical agricultural land in Copan that contains excellent and rich alluvial for growing crops. I also am the connection between the Gods and my people, I seek to please the gods themselves in exchang for bringing forth prosperity, good crops, and rain for our crops. In return, the people show their blessings by erecting statues in my honor. They were so enourmous that they looked like they could touch the heavens themselves! Alas, those times of celebrating were beginning to disappear as the “nobles” began to think far to highly of themselves and create their own palaces. Whats even worst is that these noblemen are interferring with my rule over the peasantry on this land, my own land!
Climate Change and Cultural Response: It is an unforunate time for not only myself, but for my people as well to have to be caught in the middle of a conflicting period of living circumstances with our environment. Deforestation is considered our greatest setback as it has not only impacted the hilly slopes where 41% of my people in Copan who resided and lived in, forcibly were left to leave their homes. No, it has also impacted the valley floor where we grow our precious corn yield crops. The soil from the hilly slopes runs off into the lower fields, covering and disturbing the much richer soil with sediment. This is an unforunate situation because the hills contain much more acidic and unstable soil, that is much harder to grow any reasonable crop on it. In addition with this, because of the loss of trees, there is no feasible way for the rain to come. The trees were gifted to us from the gods, to bless us with rain, in which we would be able to grow our crops. Without it, all has become much more gloomier. As a result, my people are absolutely furious with me with not keeping my word for rain and prosperity. Even I myself am worried of the wary outcomes and even fear of a potential riot that could overthrow both me and further split the kingdom apart. Nonetheless, my family name’s connection to the gods will surely save us from these strange and stressful times . . . right?
Character 4: I am Sacniete, a peasant farmer in a Mayan village. Farming was one of the few ways we could sustain our way of life. My options were to be a farmer, a servant, or a laborer and our family sought to utilize our small parcel of land to produce corn. Every day, we would pray to the gods, acknowledging the seven directions of the earth: east, north, west, south, up, down, and center. Those prayers have carried us through the most unforgiving of seasons, with the gods Itzamna, Ah Mun, and Chac hearing our cries.
It was unfortunate to see that the sun had set on prosperous seasons of bountiful harvests, with the fields growing emptier as the seasons passed. There was no way for Itzamna nor Chac to hear us now, the time had come. All this time, we had believed that Itzamna had wanted us to use the bounty of nature to build temples and monuments in honor of them, as well as expand the communal farms and reservoirs. We took trees in service of honoring the gods and maintaining the empire of Maya, but it seems we had taken too many. Soon after, the weather grew much hotter and the rains became far more sparse. We began to take notice that Chac was not as responsive as he once was, perhaps at the order of Itzamna himself.
Because of this, there were nights where our family would be forced to sleep with an empty stomach. Such devastation was brought to our family to the point where my father wondered whether we would eventually be forced to sell ourselves as slaves. Every day, we still continued to pray, and one day I was called upon by an official serving our local elite lord to assist in building a reservoir for our city-state. In hopes that the gods would see our efforts to preserve the water that we wished to receive, we built a reservoir intending to store at least 18 months worth of water. The gods would not relent, and the people grew angrier. If the drought had not gotten us already, we were sure that our way to the underworld would be from the wrath of our own neighbors.
The fields grew emptier and the graves grew deeper. Not even the nobles nor the monarchs were safe from the chaos that ensued from the droughts. The deforestation, the droughts, the violence, and the competition from kings and nobles to erect monuments to please the gods, led to further conflict and our societal collapse since there was no focus on directly fixing the drought. We had damaged the environment and the climate had forever changed, with violence from our own neighbors and the collapse of the social order held by our kings and nobles. To conclude, it was ultimately our slash-and-burn practices that contributed to the environmental damage, climate change, and hostility within villages, with our cultural response aiding the collapse of our greatly beheld Mayan empire.
Character 5: As a peasant farmer in Maya’s southern region in the Copán river valley, it is my hope that our crops will be responsible for sustaining a truly significant portion of the population in the future. With the inconsistent and unpredictable levels of rainfall from year to year, agricultural practices must be performed and executed meticulously in our region by those with years of knowledgeable expertise. Being at such a high elevation in the southern part of the Yucatán Peninsula, irrigation and drainage systems, canals and raised fields are all structures that I have plenty of experience with and have employed in my own fields year after year. Some of my nearby neighbors inhabiting the hill slopes use more unusual means of managing water such as increased field/crop turnover throughout the year, floodwater farming, and even cultivating more than one crop per field per growing season. Although these seem like innovative ways to increase the production of food beyond sustaining just our own families and close neighbors, I believe it is slightly irresponsible to not consider the long term effects they may have on our lands for future generations and the unpredictable conditions they may face.
Environmental Damage & Climate Change: In my years as a farmer, I have witnessed many environmental hardships at the hand of man-made degradation and natural, unstoppable forces. With such hilly terrain, swidden/slash-and-burn agriculture is a very common practice used to clear land and rejuvenate soil nutrition for farming. However useful this process is, it is also exceptionally harmful in that the deforestation has caused considerable erosion, further leaching the nutrients from the soil. This wash of infertile soil from the hills down to the valleys in turn destroys and acidifys my own soil!
Droughts in particular are responsible for much of our trouble, especially in the way of agricultural processes. The rainy season from May to October is much easier to navigate than the dryer months of January through April but the rain is unpredictable to some degree during each season. My day-to-day life consists of tending to my fields and keeping an eye out for signs of rain as it is very important to maintain the health of my corn crop. I grew up hearing stories of the misery and suffering that has afflicted our people by drought throughout our history. I can only hope that we are not due another recurrence any time soon…