Credit: Penn State Douglas Kennett, of anthropology at Penn State
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. The role of climate change in the development and demise of classic Maya civilization, ranging from AD 300 to 1000, has been controversial for decades because of a lack of well-dated climate and archaeological evidence. But an international team of archaeologists and earth science researchers has compiled a precisely dated, high-resolution climate record of 2,000 years that shows how Maya political systems developed and disintegrated in response to climate change. In an article published Nov. 9 , the researchers outlined how they reconstructed rainfall records from stalagmite samples collected from Yok Balum Cave, located nearly three miles from ancient city of Uxbenka, in the tropical Maya Lowlands in southern Belize. They compared their findings to the rich political histories carved on stone monuments at Maya cities throughout the region. "Unusually high amounts of rainfall favored an increase in food production and an explosion in the population between AD 450 and 660," said Douglas Kennett, lead author and professor of anthropology at Penn State.
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