Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 13:22:40 -0500 (EST)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Mayans 



I finally uncovered the article I was looking for that discusses the fall 
of the Mayan civilization ("1,000 Years of Resistance," *Wildcat* No. 17, 
Spring 1994). It says that, although much about the Meso-American 
civilizations remains little known, most archaeologists have tended to 
accept the view that the decisive reason for the collapse and abandonment 
of the Olmec and Maya city-states was rebellion of the lower classes. The 
article is not precisely as I remembered it (in my last post on this 
subject I did overstate it somewhat); the civilization didn't fall literally 
overnight, but the decline was swift enough. Written dates and monuments 
came to an end between A.D. 790 and 890.
	The article also says that the previously held consensus among 
archaeologists is now coming under attack because class struggle is no 
longer in vogue in academia. It cites *A Forest of Kings* by Linda Schele 
and David Freidel (Morrow, New York, 1990) as an example of the new trend in 
Meso-American studies 
that tries to portray the Mayan civilization as a unified "community" 
rather than a class-riven society. The (multiple) explanations offered 
for the collapse include dense population, malnutrition & sickness, 
barbarian takeover of trade routes, ecological catastrophe, and (I think 
this is the one Steve Keen mentioned) economic crisis. The authors of the 
article object to these narratives because they all in one way or another 
reduce the oppressed to passive objects of crisis. For them the mystery 
is not why the civilization collapsed but why it took so long for the 
peasants to wreck it. Their explanation seems rather like the Italian 
autonomists' claim that capitalist crisis today is caused by the 
resistance of the proletariat and not (or not so much) by objective 
movements in the economy.
	Another interesting point brought up in the *Wildcat* article, 
though it may be speculation, concerns a possible Chinese influence on (or 
even origin of) the Maya culture! The source cited is *The Maya* by M. 
Coe (Thames & Hudson, London, 1993).
	Anyway, my whole point in bringing up the case of the Mayans had 
to do with the stages-of-production thread of discussion several weeks 
ago; I was trying to show that the marxist schema of a necessary progression
in modes of production as a prerequisite for communism doesn't necessarily 
hold. The revolt of the lower classes in Meso-America did not result in a 
higher stage of civilization but in its abandonment, not in a higher mode 
of production but in the virtual abandonment of production (some farming 
was still done post collapse, but for the most part they returned to the 
rain forest to gather and hunt).
	I seem to recall, from last summer, that there was at least one 
actual anthropologist on the list. Are there any actual archaeologists 
here, too? If so, it would be interesting to hear them chime in on this.

--AT



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