THE GEOLOGY OF PERSISTENT PLACES (Invited Presentation)

The so-called Maya Collapse is an example of Manichaean view of human-geological relations because what the public knows about the Maya is their Terminal Classic demise (~1000 BP) probably linked to climate change. But this supposed past society emerged through Collapses and still thrives with 27 languages and millions of people today. Another model for the Maya, and many other historical cultures, is to emphasize how long they persisted through numerous geological threats. In our work, we have focused on this model over the last three decades. This model came to be known as ‘persistent places’, or landscapes that have experienced continuity over millennia. There are indeed collapses but overutilizing the collapse model misrepresents human resilience and indeed how extreme an event must be to bring an actual termination. Our work has focused on the geological resources of soil and water and what these tell us about how Maya culture persisted. We have focused on two main forms of food production, terrace and polycultural wetland farming systems that grew crops and provided rich protein sources. Although many geological changes affected these finely adjusted agroecosystems, we provide evidence of their continuity through two periods of climate change at 1800 BP and 1000 BP in the Birds of Paradise Wetland Field Systems. We use multiple geological proxies to show how one particular wetland village persisted through the Maya Terminal Classic Collapse. This lends credence to the persistent place model, but the pandemic caused by European diseases (~500 BP) went much further toward, but still did not reach, a total Collapse.