Drought ended Mayan civilisation
2003-03-14 11:32
Washington - Decades of declining rainfall, marked by three serious droughts, may have played a key role in the collapse of the Mayan civilisation, a team of Swiss and American researchers said in a study published on Thursday.
Swiss geologist Gerald Haug and his team examined layers of sediment in the Cariaco Basin in northern Venezuela.
They identified changes in the levels of titanium in the sediment - an indication of annual rainfall.
Three major droughts occurred around the years 810, 860 and 910 -- years that archaeologists say were periods of decline for the Maya.
"A century-scale decline in rainfall put a general strain on resources in the region, which was then exacerbated by abrupt drought events, contributing to the social stresses that led to the Maya demise," the researchers wrote in the journal Science.
The Maya depended upon regular rains for their survival. They built reservoirs, canals and other systems to collect rainwater.
Until now, data on climatic conditions of that period was not precise enough to allow researchers to study the correlation between drought and the mysterious collapse of the Maya civilisation, which flourished in the ninth and 10th centuries in Central America.