Episodes of population loss and cultural change, including the famous Classic Collapse, punctuated the long course of Maya civilization. In many cases, these downturns in the fortunes of individual sites and entire regions included significant environmental components such as droughts or anthropogenic environmental degradation. Some afflicted areas remained depopulated for long periods, whereas others recovered more quickly. We examine the dynamics of growth and decline in several areas in the Maya Lowlands in terms of both environmental and cultural resilience and with a focus on downturns that occurred in the Terminal Preclassic (second century Common Era) and Terminal Classic (9th and 10th centuries CE) periods. This examination of available data indicates that the elevated interior areas of the Yucatán Peninsula were more susceptible to system collapse and less suitable for resilient recovery than adjacent lower-lying areas.

Getting at the Maya Collapse has both temporal and geographic dimensions, because it occurred over centuries and great distances. This requires a wide range of research sites and proxy records, ranging from lake cores to geomorphic evidence, such as stratigraphy and speleothems. This article synthesizes these lines of evidence, together with previously undescribed findings on Maya wetland formation and use in a key region near the heart of the central Maya Lowlands. Growing lines of evidence point to dryer periods in Maya history, which correlate to major periods of transition. The main line of evidence in this paper comes from wetland use and formation studies, which show evidence for both large-scale environmental change and human adaptation or response. Based on multiproxy studies, Maya wetland fields had a long and varied history, but most evidence indicates the start of disuse during or shortly after the Maya Terminal Classic. Hence, the pervasiveness of collapse extended into a range of wetlands, including perennial wetlands, which should have been less responsive to drought as a driver of disuse. A synthesis of the lines of evidence for canal infilling shows no attempts to reclaim them after the Classic Period.

A regional investigation of the ancient Maya settlement patterns of the Puuc suggests that this region was occupied by increasing numbers of people seeking to maximize control over prime agricultural soils during the Late Classic period. During the Late Classic the eastern Puuc region was controlled by numerous autonomous major centers that carried on the Classic Maya tradition of divine kingship. During the late ninth centurya.d., the city of Uxmal briefly emerged as the politically dominant center of the region and was involved in an important relationship with the city of Chichen Itza. Bya.d.950, however, Uxmal and the other major centers of the Puuc had ceased all important elite activities.

This article examines the cultural and ecological history of a single Maya territory from circa 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1100. An ancient Maya territory is defined as an area of land and population under the jurisdiction of a particular capital. In addition to the capital, there are minor centers, household groups, and temporary settlements, which together comprise the population of a territory. Here, the San Bartolo-Xultun territory in the northeastern Department of the Peten, Guatemala is used as a case study. During more than two thousand years of occupation the natural landscape and cultural settlement pattern changed dramatically. This study isolates major factors contributing to broad changes in local culture history by employing data from archaeology, geography, remote sensing, epigraphy, and iconography. It is argued that reconstructing regional culture histories using a conjunctive approach should be a major goal of Maya archaeology in the coming years as we strive for a more holistic understanding of the past.