There's another theory of the collapse of the Mayan empire:
Disease.
When the Spaniards came to the Americas in the 1500's, they brought with them successive waves of plagues that decimated vast populations.
There's a fascinating article about it in the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/mann
Here's a paragraph about the Incas;
Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
The article goes on to say that the collapse brought on by the plagues fueled the fires of war which finished off the culture.
The article says that the combined plagues in such a short time took out about 95 - 98 % of the native American populations.
The article says that if the same type of collapse hit New York City today, only about 56,000 survivors would be left -- not enough to fill Yankee stadium. If that hit America as a whole, whoever was left would be knocked back to the Stone Age in about a generation or two.
So the answer to the vanished Maya (and Inca): Us. Or more precisely: our many plagues and diseases, never before seen on this continent.
Disease.
When the Spaniards came to the Americas in the 1500's, they brought with them successive waves of plagues that decimated vast populations.
There's a fascinating article about it in the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/mann
Here's a paragraph about the Incas;
Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
The article goes on to say that the collapse brought on by the plagues fueled the fires of war which finished off the culture.
The article says that the combined plagues in such a short time took out about 95 - 98 % of the native American populations.
The article says that if the same type of collapse hit New York City today, only about 56,000 survivors would be left -- not enough to fill Yankee stadium. If that hit America as a whole, whoever was left would be knocked back to the Stone Age in about a generation or two.
So the answer to the vanished Maya (and Inca): Us. Or more precisely: our many plagues and diseases, never before seen on this continent.