New clues about how and why the Maya culture collapsed
Climate change has been called the existential threat of our age. But it isn’t the first time a civilization has come into conflict with a shift in the natural world. 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. 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. Delivering the Gordon R. 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. Elements of this theory have been around for a long time. As early as 1912, archaeologists were theorizing that climate change had contributed to the decline of the Maya, and...