Much Ado About Drought

Despite all our hard work, Demarest (2001) states that decades of investigation have shown that diseases and foreign invasion are increasingly unlikely to be the cause of collapse.

So we need to look further – the remaining hypothesis surrounding this collapse is climate change.

There has been much debate over the timings and duration of climate change over the Classic and Terminal Classic period. I’ll just briefly outline the changes in understanding, to provide a basis for exploring arguments proposing climate change as a cause which will be covered over the next few posts.

Disagreements over drought. Source: Goose

Hodell (1995) presented evidence from lake sediment ‘implying’ (Hodell et al (2005) that a ‘mega-drought’ had occurred over the Terminal Classic Period which had great spatial extent and lasted between 50 - 208 years.

Several authors (including Carleton et al, (2014) and Lane et al (2014) whose arguments will be looked into in my next post) discount this theory with the support of independent palaeoclimatic evidence.

However recently Hodell et al (2005) has claimed that this work was misinterpreted and now presents evidence that the Yucatan Peninsula experienced multiple drought-wet cycles, which agrees with other academics’ work.

So stay tuned – I’ll be covering the aforementioned authors’ arguments over the next few posts!