Category Archives: NORTH AMERICA

BELIZE, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists unearth a 1,000-year-old Maya settlement in central Belize

Archaeologists unearth a 1,000-year-old Maya settlement in central Belize

A site first highlighted by a farming community in Belize is enabling archaeologists to piece together what life was like for Mayans living centuries ago.

Archaeologists unearth a 1,000-year-old Maya settlement in central Belize
Anthropology graduate students Rachel Gill and Yifan Wang study the remains of an ancient Maya neighbourhood in central Belize. This is an aerial photo of the archaeological site facing east. The white smudges are ancestral Maya mounds.

Modern archaeology is less often about finding big monuments and more about understanding how people lived. For anthropology graduate students Rachel Gill and Yifan Wang, that’s exactly what this site means.

“We stand in the open fields of Spanish Lookout, a modernized Mennonite farming community in Central Belize, looking at what remains of ancestral Maya homes after years of ploughing,” the two archaeologists write for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“White mounds, the remnants of these houses, pock the landscape as far as the eye can see, a stark reminder of what existed more than 1,000 years ago. The collapsed buildings look like smudges on an aerial photograph, but as archaeologists, we get to see them up close. With enough excavation and interpretation, we can eventually make sense of how these dwellings functioned in the deep human past,” they add.

Of course, analyzing an archaeological site first starts with finding it. These days, this is rarely done by going out and digging and hoping for the best — archaeologists have an array of remote sensing tools at their disposal that allow them to peer through the thick jungle and sometimes, even catch a glimpse of what might lie underneath the surface.

But when you have the site in your sights, you still have to analyze it, and this is what Gill and Wang are working on.

Oftentimes, us laypeople at least, focus too much on the imposing structures and cool artefacts found at archaeological sites. But if you want to truly understand a culture like the Maya, you have to look deeper.

Incised ceramic sherds were excavated from an ancestral Maya building.

The mundane realities of many Mayans aren’t captured in the imposing Maya pyramids or their worshipping complex, but they can be captured in things like pots and tools.

At the Maya site, the two archaeologists are looking at a collection of domestic vessels found for cooking, serving, and storage. The shapes and styles of this pottery enable the archaeologists to date it — one particular neighbourhood was dated to 250-600 AD. In addition, they found several agricultural tools made from chert — an uncrystallized rock with similar chemistry to quartz.

The houses in this neighbourhood would have had walls and plastered floors, as well as several vessels they would have used regularly. Regular Mayans would have used the chert tools to grind maize into flour. They complimented their diets by hunting animals in the forest.

Grinding tools typical of ancestral Maya farmsteads include, from left, a metate fragment, a round stone and a mano fragment. Metates and manos were used to grind maize.

But not everything is clear. For instance, one Maya building uses uniform stones and a different type of plaster than the others, and it’s not exactly clear why.

This building also has fewer artefacts and seems to be “cleaner” than the others. This suggests it would have been not a residential, but a community building. What type of community building, however, is not clear. It could have been a meeting place, a ritual site, or maybe even a recreation centre, but it’s not clear yet.

“We also partially exposed a substantial platform mound that had four structures at its summit. The structures surrounded a plaza or courtyard. It is clear that an elite family lived here. This mound would have been secluded, sectioned off from the rest of the neighbourhood, like the large house at the end of a cul-de-sac where, if you were lucky, you got invited for a pool party, much different from the community building,” the archaeologists explain.

Unfortunately, agriculture is also affecting some of the findings. As local farmers worked the land generation after generation, they dislodged and damaged some of the artefacts and structures. But nevertheless, the signs of the local community are still there. After over a thousand years, their houses, their streets, and the places where they would gather can still tell us stories if we know how to read them.

“The ghosts of those who lived on the land before walk between us, using what remains of their homes to whisper, ‘Remember me.’,” the archaeologists concluded.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Traces of Native American Village Found in Florida

Traces of Native American Village Found in Florida

An archaeological bonanza is being unearthed in St. Augustine. This dig is revealing that a Native American village could be bigger — or at least in a different place — than previously imagined. 

That same site would later become one of the state’s first commercial orange groves. Some people may be familiar with the site on Bridge Street, where an old blue house stands crumbling and vegetation has taken over. 

However, in the last few months, the house has been sold and is being restored. 

According to a First Coast News report, St. Augustine city archaeologist Andrea White and her colleagues have found pottery and postholes from Palica, a Native American village, under a nineteenth-century house in St. Augustine’s Lincolnville neighbourhood.

What most people these days don’t see are the archaeologists on the site. They’ve been working in the backyard and even under the house. 

“It’s one of the first opportunities any archaeologists have had to work at this location,” said Andrea White, St. Augustine City Archaeologist.

She and St. Augustine Research and Collections Archaeologist Katherine Sims, along with some archaeology volunteers, have been carefully studying the site.

The house restoration and archaeological dig are revealing some surprises. One of those surprises is the mission site of the Native American village called Palica.

“It was only mapped once,” Sims said. 

That was in the 1700s. 

Later, archaeologists compiled maps and thought Palica was elsewhere in St. Augustine’s Lincolnville neighbourhood.

“When we started this project, we didn’t anticipate finding deposits from Palica on this property,” Sims said. “Once we started work, we immediately realized there is definitely Palica material here! Yes, it was a huge surprise.”

Before the house was built, Native Americans lived here on a Catholic mission site in the early 1700s. Archaeologists have found pottery, but the big find was under the floor of the house where archaeologists found post holes. 

Those are basically evidence of a Native American building, and that’s a big deal.

“These all date to Palica,” White said. “We are 100 per cent confident about the age of these. We’re really excited!”

Archaeologists believe the Palica mission was abandoned in the mid-1700s and 50 to 100 years later, the first part of this house was built. It was part of the Yallaha plantation which was one of Florida’s first commercial orange groves.

Some of the original structure is still part of the house. That original portion date to the early 1800s. The house is being restored, but old parts are being salvaged such as roof shingles that are stamped “Florida” on the underside from the 1800s.

Because the house was built a couple of feet above the ground, the house became a protector of the archaeological artefacts on the ground.

“What’s great about a historic structure is that normally people don’t’ go built something under a house, so it helps preserve everything,” White said.

That includes another surprise under the floor. Archaeologists found a donkey burial, estimated to be from the late 1700s before the house was built.

Laid with respect, not just tossed into the ground, it’s easy to think the animal was possibly someone’s hard-working farm animal during the land’s agricultural time period. 

And so this house and this land are still relinquishing secrets about a story hundreds of years old.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Eerie ‘yellow brick road’ to Atlantis was discovered atop an ancient undersea mountain

Eerie ‘yellow brick road’ to Atlantis was discovered atop an ancient undersea mountain

A team of marine biologists realized they definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore after discovering what appeared to be a yellow brick road on top of an undersea mountain near Hawaii.

“The yellow brick road?” a scientist mused in a YouTube video of the discovery.

Others remarked that the rocks were reminiscent of a very different fictional world: “It’s the road to Atlantis,” one researcher said. 

The yellow rocks, divided from each other at neat 90-degree angles, form a narrow strip and look like they were carved and arranged by human hands.  However, the seemingly paved roadway was simply the natural result of ancient volcanic activity thousands of feet below the water’s surface, the researchers said in a description below the video.

“At the summit of Nootka Seamount, the team spotted a ‘dried lake bed’ formation, now IDed as a fractured flow of hyaloclastite rock (a volcanic rock formed in high-energy eruptions where many rock fragments settle to the seabed),” the researchers wrote.

Eerie 'yellow brick road' to Atlantis was discovered atop an ancient undersea mountain

The remarkably brick-like divisions between the rocks are likely the coincidental result of heating and cooling stresses from multiple volcanic eruptions over millions of years, the team added.

The researchers took a detour down this eerie undersea road while piloting a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) around the Papahānaumokuakea Marine National Monument, a protected conservation area encompassing about 582,578 square miles (1,508,870 square kilometres) of the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii.

The expedition is part of the Ocean Exploration Trust’s Nautilus Exploration Program and aims to investigate the ancient seamounts near Liliʻuokalani Ridge, at the monument’s western edge.

One of the team’s main goals is to collect geological samples from the area’s seamounts — underwater mountains formed by volcanic activity — to better understand their ages and origins.

Learning this may also yield new insights into the formation of the Hawaiian Islands, the researchers wrote on the Nautilus website. The team will also collect microbial samples, to study what kinds of oddball organisms have managed to thrive near the deep, underwater volcanoes of the Pacific.

“Our exploration of this never-before-surveyed area is helping researchers take a deeper look at life on and within the rocky slopes of these deep, ancient seamounts,” the researchers added.

Previous expeditions aboard the Nautilus research vessel have turned up plenty of unnerving marine oddities. During a 2018 excursion to the Papahānaumokuakea Marine National Monument, researchers were dumbfounded by a wriggling, googly-eyed creature that seemed to change shape while in front of the camera.

Researchers later identified the creature as a gulper eel (Eurypharynx pelecanoides), an incredibly big-mouthed fish that can unhinge its massive jaw to swallow prey even larger than itself.

The researchers controlling the ROV during that expedition also responded to the strange sight before them with a cultural reference.

“Looks like a Muppet,” one researcher said.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

36,000-year-old Meat of a Mummified Bison was used for a Stew

36,000-year-old Meat of a Mummified Bison was used for a Stew

One Night in 1984,  A handful of lucky guests gathered at the Alaska home of palaeontologist Dale Guthrie to eat stew crafted from a once-in-a-lifetime delicacy: the neck meat of an ancient, recently-discovered bison nicknamed Blue Babe.

The dinner party fit Alaska tradition: Since state law bans the buying, bartering, and selling of game meats, you can’t find local favourites such as caribou stew at restaurants. Those dishes are enjoyed when hunters host a gathering. But their meat source is usually the moose population—not a preserved piece of biological history.

Blue Babe had been discovered just five years earlier by gold miners, who noticed that a hydraulic mining hose melted part of the gunk that had kept the bison frozen. They reported their findings to the nearby University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Concerned that it would decompose, Guthrie—then a professor and researcher at the university—opted to dig out Blue Babe immediately. But the icy, impenetrable surroundings made that challenging. So he cut off what he could, refroze it, and waited for the head and neck to thaw.

Archaeology curator Josh Reuther and University of Arizona’s François B. Lanoë draw a sample from Blue Babe for the ongoing redating project.

Soon, Guthrie and his team had Blue Babe on campus and started learning more about the ancient animal. They knew that it had perished about 36,000 years ago, thanks to radiocarbon dating. (Though new research shows that Blue Babe is at least 50,000 years old, according to the university’s Curator of Archaeology, Josh Reuther.) Tooth marks and claw marks also suggested that the bison was killed by an ancestor of the lion, the Panthera leoatrox.

Blue Babe froze rapidly following its death—perhaps the result of a wintertime demise. Researchers were amazed to find that Blue Babe had frozen so well that its muscle tissue retained a texture, not unlike beef jerky. Its fatty skin and bone marrow remained intact, too, even after thousands of years. So why not try eating part of it?

It had been done before. “All of us working on this thing had heard the tales of the Russians [who] excavated things like bison and mammoth in the Far North [that] were frozen enough to eat,” Guthrie says of several infamous meals. “So we decided, ‘You know what we can do? Make a meal using this bison.’”

Guthrie decided to host the special dinner when taxidermist Eirik Granqvist completed his work on Blue Babe and the late Björn Kurtén was in town to give a guest lecture. “Making neck steak didn’t sound like a very good idea,” Guthrie recalls. “But you know, what we could do is put a lot of vegetables and spices, and it wouldn’t be too bad.”

Eirik Granqvist working on the taxidermy of Blue Babe.

To make the stew for roughly eight people, Guthrie cut off a small part of the bison’s neck, where the meat had frozen while fresh. “When it thawed, it gave off an unmistakable beef aroma, not unpleasantly mixed with a faint smell of the earth in which it was found, with a touch of mushroom,” he once wrote.

They then added a generous amount of garlic and onions, along with carrots and potatoes, to the aged meat. Couple that with wine, and it became a full-fledged dinner.

Guthrie, who is a hunter, says he wasn’t deterred by the thousands of years the bison had aged, nor the prospect of getting sick. “That would take a very special kind of microorganism [to make me sick],” he says. “And I eat frozen meat all the time, of animals that I kill or my neighbours kill. And they do get kind of old after three years in the freezer.”

Blue Babe is on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

Thankfully, everyone present lived to tell the tale (and the bison remains on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North). The Blue Babe stew wasn’t unpalatable, either, according to Guthrie. “It tasted a little bit like what I would have expected, with a little bit of wringing of mud,” he says. “But it wasn’t that bad. Not so bad that we couldn’t each have a bowl.” He can’t remember if anyone present had seconds, though.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

1,300-Year-Old Corn God Statue Shows How the Maya Worshipped Maize

1,300-Year-Old Corn God Statue Shows How the Maya Worshipped Maize

1,300-Year-Old Corn God Statue Shows How the Maya Worshipped Maize
The depiction of a young Maya maize god is consistent with other portrayals of beheaded Maya deities.

While excavating a section of the ancient Maya city of Palenque last summer, archaeologists in Mexico were surprised to see the tip of a large nose emerging from underneath the dirt.

As they carefully brushed away more debris at El Palacio, nostrils, a chin and the parted lips of a half-open mouth appeared.

Now, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has revealed that the ancient face was part of a 1,300-year-old stucco head depicting a young Hun Hunahpu, the Maya’s maize god.

The find is the first of its kind at the Palenque archaeological site, which is located in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

“The discovery of the deposit allows us to understand how the ancient Maya of Palenque constantly revived the mythical passage on the birth, death and resurrection of the maize god,” Arnoldo González Cruz, an archaeologist who was part of the find, says in a statement.

The face emerged from an archaeological dig in Mexico. National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)

The nine-inch-tall head had an east-west orientation that archaeologists believe represents the emergence of the maize plant at dawn, per INAH. They say Palenque’s Maya residents likely placed the large stone sculpture over a pond to symbolize the entrance to the underworld.

The sculpture was intended to depict a beheaded figure, echoing other Maya art depicting various headless gods.

Maize, or corn, was not only an important source of food for the Maya—it also played a fundamental role in their beliefs. According to the Popol Vuh, the Maya’s K’iche’-language creation story, gods created humans out of yellow and white corn.

As such, the Maya worshipped Hun Hunahpu, whom they believed was decapitated every fall around harvest time, then reborn the following spring at the start of the new growing season, as Ariella Marsden reports for the Jerusalem Post. Because of this pattern, the Maya also associated Hun Hunahpu with the cycle of human life and the changing seasons.

First domesticated about 9,000 years ago in what is now Mexico, maize played an important role in both Mesoamerican culture and the history of archaeology. As author Charles C. Mann writes in Maize for the Gods: Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Corn, cobs of ancient maize discovered in New Mexico “were among the first archaeological finds ever carbon-dated.”

The head of a young Maya maize god was made of stucco and buried in a pond archaeologists think was once used for stargazing.

Archaeologists dated the stucco statue to the Late Classic Period of roughly 700 to 850 B.C.E. They believe it represents a youthful maize god because of the figure’s “tonsured,” partially-shaven haircut, which looks like ripe maize. This depiction of the deity was common at the time, per the Dallas Museum of Art, and symbolized “mature and fertile” corn.

When they first built the maize god’s pond, the Maya likely peered into it to study the reflection of the night sky. Later, researchers say, they symbolically shuttered the pond by breaking down some of the stucco and filling it in with shells, carved bone fragments, pieces of ceramics, obsidian arrowheads, beads, vegetables and the remains of animals, including quail, river turtles, whitefish and dog.

They topped the pond with a limestone slab, then surrounded it with three short walls and filled everything in with loose stones and soil.

Because it was preserved in a humid environment for such a long time, the divine head must now undergo a drying process, undertaken by INAH’s National Coordination for the Cultural Heritage Conservation, to preserve it. After more than a thousand years underground, the stone sculpture is being reborn—just like the beloved deity it depicts.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Dinosaur tracks revealed in Texas as severe drought dries up the river

Dinosaur tracks revealed in Texas as severe drought dries up the river

Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas has unearthed an exciting discovery after extreme drought conditions dried up a river – giant dinosaur footprints that date back to 113 million years ago.

The tracks were uncovered in the Paluxy River as its water level receded due to the major drought that has parched parts of northern Texas this summer, the park announced last week. The park is located near Glen Rose, southwest of Dallas.

“Due to the excessive drought conditions this past summer, the river dried up completely in most locations, allowing for more tracks to be uncovered here in the park,” the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.

“Under normal river conditions, these newer tracks are underwater and are commonly filled in with sediment, making them buried and not as visible.”

Most dinosaur tracks at the park belong to two different species: a theropod called Acrocanthosaurus and a sauropod called Sauroposeidon, according to the park.

The park said that the tracks will likely get buried under sediment and water once it begins to rain.

The newly unearthed footprints in the river belong to the Acrocanthosaurus, what officials described as a dinosaur that stood about 15 feet tall and weighed close to seven tons as an adult. 

Meanwhile, they said an adult Sauroposeidon stood about 60 feet tall and weighed about 44 tons.

The park shared photos online showing volunteers helping to clean out and shore up the dino tracks.

The park said the tracks belong to the Acrocanthosaurus and date back to 113 million years ago.

However, with rain in the coming forecasts, the parks said it is likely the prehistoric tracks will soon be buried again beneath the river water.

On Monday, residents of north Texas woke up to flash flooding brought on by as much as 10 inches of rain in some areas. 

The park said that the layers of sediment that will once again cover the footprints will help to protect the tracks from natural weathering and erosion.

“While these newer dinosaur tracks were visible for a brief amount of time, it brought the wonder and excitement about finding new dinosaur tracks at the park,” the state parks department said.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Earthen Mound in Louisiana Dated to 11,000 Years Ago

Earthen Mound in Louisiana Dated to 11,000 Years Ago

New research reveals more information about the Louisiana State University (LSU) Campus Mounds, including the discovery of thousands of years old charred mammal bone fragments and a coordinated alignment of both mounds toward one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

Earthen Mound in Louisiana Dated to 11,000 Years Ago
The Louisiana State University (LSU) Campus Mounds pictured here are the oldest known man-made structures in North America.

This new information offers more insight into the oldest known man-made structures in North America.

The two large, grassy mounds that are about 20 feet tall, on LSU’s campus, are among the more than 800 man-made, hill-like mounds in Louisiana, built by ancient indigenous people. While many mounds in the region have been destroyed, the LSU Campus Mounds have been preserved and are listed on the National Register for Historic Places.

“There’s nothing known that is man-made and this old still in existence today in North America, except the mounds,” said LSU Department of Geology & Geophysics Professor Emeritus Brooks Ellwood, who led this study, published in the American Journal of Science by Yale University.

He and colleagues collected sediment cores from the two mounds that are located on LSU’s campus along Dalrymple Drive to learn more about them. The cores revealed layers of ash from burned reed and cane plants, as well as the burned osteons.

Radiocarbon dating of the layers of material indicates the mounds were built over thousands of years. These findings show that people began to build the first mound about 11,000 years ago.

The scientists think that sediment for the southern mound, which they’ve named “Mound B,” was taken from a location immediately behind LSU’s Hill Memorial Library because there is a large depression in the ground there. The mound was built up over a few thousand years, layer by layer, to about half of its current height.

The layers of ash and charred microscopic bone fragments may indicate the mound was used for ceremonial purposes, which included burning reed and cane plants to make large, hot fires that would have been too hot for cooking.

The scientists do not know what type of mammals were cremated or why. However, they found many microscopic, charred bone fragments, known as osteons, the building blocks of large mammal bones, in the ash beds in both LSU Campus Mounds.

Then, around 8,200 years ago, the southern Mound B was abandoned. Tree roots found in the 8,200-year-old sediment layer indicate that the mound was not used for about 1,000 years.

Also around 8,200 years ago, the northern hemisphere experienced a major climate event with temperatures suddenly dropping on average by about 35 degrees Fahrenheit, which lasted about 160 years.

“We don’t know why they abandoned the mounds around 8,200 years ago, but we do know their environment changed suddenly and dramatically, which may have affected many aspects of their daily life,” Ellwood said.

Then, around 7,500 years ago, the indigenous people began to build a new mound just to the north of the first mound. However, this time, they took mud from the floodplain where the entrance to LSU’s Tiger Stadium is currently located, which at that time was an estuary. With this mud, they built the second mound, “Mound A,” layer by layer, to about half of its current height.

Mound A contains mud that is saturated with water, which liquefies when agitated. As a result, Mound A is unstable and degrading, which is why it is critical to stay off the mounds to preserve them.

According to the new analyses of the sediment layers and their ages, it looks like indigenous people cleared the abandoned first-built Mound B and began to build it up to its current height before completing Mound A.

Both mounds were completed around 6,000 years ago and are similar in height.

The crests of both mounds are aligned along an azimuth that is about 8.5 degrees east of true north.

According to LSU astronomer and study coauthor Geoffrey Clayton, about 6,000 years ago, the red giant star Arcturus would rise about 8.5 degrees east of north in the night sky, which means it would have aligned along the crests of both LSU Campus Mounds. Arcturus is one of the brightest stars that can be seen from Earth.

“The people who constructed the mounds, at about 6,000 years ago, coordinated the structures’ orientation to align with Arcturus, seen in the night sky at that time,” Ellwood said.

Still, there is more to learn and discover about these archaeological treasures on LSU’s campus.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Periods of Drought May Be Linked to Fall of Maya Capital

Periods of Drought May Be Linked to Fall of Maya Capital

Periods of Drought May Be Linked to Fall of Maya Capital
Ruins of the monumental centre of Mayapan.

Prolonged drought likely helped to fuel civil conflict and the eventual political collapse of Mayapan, the ancient capital city of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, suggests a new study in Nature Communications that was published with the help of a University at Albany archaeologist.

Mayapan served as the capital to some 20,000 Maya people in the 13th through mid-15th centuries but collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family. Extensive historical records date this collapse to sometime between 1441 and 1461.

But new evidence shows the drought in the century prior may have played a larger role in the city’s demise than was previously known. The study authors note this is relevant today as humans grapple with a future of increased climate change.

Marilyn Masson, an archaeologist and professor and chair of UAlbany’s Department of Anthropology, helped design and is a co-author of the study, which was assisted by an international team of interdisciplinary researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from that area and time period for signs of traumatic injury.

Map of the ancient Mayapan settlement site.

Masson, who serves as principal investigator for the Proyecto Económico de Mayapan, said she and the team found shallow mass graves and evidence of the brutal massacre at monumental structures across the city.

“Some were laid out with knives in their pelvis and rib cages, and other skeletal remains were chopped up and burned,” she said. “Not only did they smash and burn the bodies, but they also smashed and burned the effigies of their gods. It’s a form of double desecration basically.”

But that was hardly the most shocking discovery for the researchers.

That came when Douglas Kennett, the lead study author with the University of California Santa Barbara’s anthropology department, dated the skeletons using accelerator mass spectrometry, an advanced form of radiocarbon dating technology and found they dated some 50 to 100 years earlier than the city’s storied mid-15th century downfall.

“So then we started asking why? Because this is a case where archaeology reveals something that’s not told in history,” Masson said.

Plenty of ethnohistorical records exist to support the city’s violent downfall and abandonment around 1458, she said. But the new evidence of massacre up to 100 years earlier, together with climate data that found prolonged drought around that time, led the team to suspect environmental factors may have played a role. 

Paleoclimate scientists were able to calculate annual rainfall levels from that period using a dating process that relied on calcite deposits in nearby caves and found evidence of a drying trend throughout the 1300s. In particular, researchers found a significant relationship between a period of drought and substantial population decline from 1350 to 1430.

The Maya depended heavily on rain-fed maize but lacked any centralized long-term grain storage. The impacts of rainfall levels on food production, then, are believed to be linked to human migration, population decline, warfare and shifts in political power, the study states. 

“It’s not that droughts cause social conflict, but they create the conditions whereby violence can occur,” Masson said. 

The study authors suggest the Xiu, who launched the ultimate fatal attacks on the Cocom, used the droughts and ensuing famines to foment the unrest and rebellion that led to the mass deaths and outmigration from Mayapan in the 1300s.

“I think the lesson is that hardship can become politicized in the worst kind of way,” Masson said. “It creates opportunities for ruthlessness and can cause people to turn on one another violently.”

Following this period of drought and unrest, however, the city appears to have bounced back briefly with the help of healthy rainfall levels around 1400, the authors wrote. 

“Mayapan was able to bend pretty far and then bounce back before the droughts returned by the 1420s, but it was too soon,” Masson said. “They didn’t have enough time to recover, and the tensions were still there and the city’s government just couldn’t survive another bout like that. But it almost did.”

As food insecurity, social unrest and drought-driven migration in parts of the world continue to be of great concern, Masson said there are lessons in how other empires have handled environmental hardships. The Aztecs, for example, survived the infamous “Famine of One Rabbit,” which had been fueled by a catastrophic drought in the year 1454.

The emperor emptied out stores of food from the capital to feed citizens and when that ran out, encouraged them to flee, Masson said. Many sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf Coast where conditions were better but eventually bought their way out, returned to the capital, and the empire was stronger than ever.

This strategy enacted by the Aztec imperial regime is likely what allowed for their recovery, Masson said.

“Overall, we argue that human responses to drought on the Yucatan Peninsula…were complex,” the study concludes. “On the one hand, drought stimulated civil conflict and institutional failure at Mayapan. However, even after Mayapan fell, despite decentralization, intervals of mobility, temporary impacts on trade, and continuing military conflict, a resilient network of small Maya states persisted that were encountered by Europeans in the early 16th century. These complexities are important as we attempt to evaluate the potential success or failure of modern state institutions designed to maintain internal order and peace in the face of future climate change.”