The collapse of Late Classic Maya civilization involved more than the disintegration of political structure. It involved a total system failure in which both centers and dependent villages were abandoned by elites and commoners alike. The lowland rainforest habitat where Maya civilization developed was not significantly reoccupied until comparatively recent times. The collapse was differential, in that centers in coastal areas or drier regions such as northern Yucatan were not depopulated to the same degree. The collapse of many Maya centers in the forested interior is here attributed to three interacting sets of variables: (1) nutritional stress, disease, and demographic instability; (2) agricultural intensification, monocropping, and degradation of the agrarian landscape; and (3) the relative absence of macroregional resource extraction structures. These factors had little impact on Maya populations living near the coast or in lowland areas not originally covered by tropical rainforests. BETWEEN A.D. 300 AND 800 the ancient Maya developed a complex, hierarchically organized society in an environment we know today to be highly susceptible to environmental degradation and characterized by slow natural regeneration (R. E.W. Adams 1977; Culbert 1973; Gomez-Pompa and Vasquez-Yanez 1981; Rice and Rice 1984; Wilkerson 1985). In the Late Classic period (A. D. 600-800) substantial parts of the Maya Lowlands were densely occupied by populations of peasant farmers. Because most cultivable sections of the Peten and adjacent regions already had been brought under intensive cultivation, these farming populations made great demands on their tropical rainforest habitat. Classic populations combined dense settlement and intense agricultural production in physiographic regions as diverse as the Pasion and Usumacinta river drainages, the bajos and lakes of the central Peten, slopelands in the Rio Bec region, the river valleys and wetlands of Belize, and the drier regions in the northern section of the Yucatan Peninsula (Figure 1). It now seems likely that the very success of the Classic Maya at settling and developing the Lowland forest laid the foundation for the collapse of southern Lowland Maya civilization at the end of the Late Classic period. The growth and rapid decline of Maya civilization in the southern Lowlands provide a sharp contrast with other areas where ancient civilizations developed. In semiarid regions such as Central Mexico, the Andes, and greater Mesopotamia, periods of relatively sustained growth and development, separated by phases of political fragmentation, appear to be the norm throughout the prehistoric sequence. The sociopolitical systems of these areas all faced the problem of provisioning increasingly larger populations on circumscribed agricultural landscapes. The trajectory of cultural development in the Maya Lowlands, however, was different. The fluorescence of Classic period Maya civilization in the Peten and adjacent areas was followed not by periods of balkanization 123 124 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOL...
This paper examines one assemblage of texts from southern India, stone inscriptions of the ldjayanagara period, and considers both how these texts have been studied and how that history of research has structured our understanding of the past. We ask how these texts might be interpreted differently, (1) under different conditions of sampling and recovery, with a specific focus on in-field locations of inscriptions, and (2) as sources of information combined with archaeological data. We suggest that traditional source-side criticism of texts might be profitably expanded routinely to include contextual analysis, such as archaeologists apply to studies of artifacts.
The eponymous capital of Vijayanagara was largely abandoned following the defeat of the imperial army at Talikota in 1565. The city was burned and looted and its monumental temple complexes, gateways, and images left in ruins. Despite large-scale damage to architecture in the city, however, the level and focus of destruction was strikingly variable. In this paper, we draw on the material record of late Vijayanagara temple complexes and other archaeological evidence to examine patterns of differentially distributed political violence. We suggest that these patterns may be understood, in part, in terms of the contemporary politics of sovereignty, incorporation, and reconstitution of elite authority. Drawing on these observations, we discuss the role of commemorative destruction as well as post-1565 temple rededications and abandonments in the afterlife of Vijayanagara as a social space. In particular, we examine the potential of monumental violence to act as a symbol or to index social memory through a creative and fluid process of instituting claims about the past, heritage, authenticity, and the nature of the present.
Archaeologists and historians of South Asia have long emphasized the significance of large‐scale irrigation reservoirs to historical developments and precolonial land use. However, comparatively little attention has been directed at an extensive corpus of small‐scale water‐retention features, such as culturally modified weathering pans and rock pools. In this contribution, we provide the first geoarchaeological evidence from such features in southern India. Geochronological assessments, depositional models, and sediment and micromorphological analyses from two sites in northern Karnataka indicate that inhabitants used and modified these features in at least the first millennium BCE. Throughout later historical periods, even after the development of large‐scale, primarily elite‐sponsored, irrigation reservoirs, inhabitants continued to rely on small, dispersed water‐retention features. Our findings have implications for current debates concerning the introduction of water‐management practices in southern India, which appear to begin in association with dispersed land‐use practices rather than intensive irrigated agriculture, and also corroborate the importance of decentralized water management to historical processes more globally.
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