Here was evidence that drought could, in fact, occur in this region. National records held in Mexico City revealed that, at the start of the 20th century, a drought in the Maya region had lasted three years. In Gill's eyes, this strengthened his theory, but he still needed direct evidence. Gill knew few factors could account for this - but one of them was drought. Fragments of pottery told him when the area was occupied and his work led him to a dramatic conclusion - that the Maya civilisation consisted of millions of people who had died very suddenly. He counted Maya farmsteads in order to estimate the likely total population. Valdez, from the University of Texas, worked deep in the jungles of Belize.
One of the first people he turned to was archaeologist Dr Fred Valdez. He felt sure the Maya had faced a huge drought, but he had no evidence to back up his theory - so he set out to search for clues. The hot, sunny days seemed interminable, and he was left with an emotional understanding of the power of drought. Gill remembered the devastating droughts in Texas in the 1950s, when farmland was parched and fires raged. His realisation of what might have caused the Maya collapse came in a brainwave - it was an explanation that didn't come from books and study, but directly from his own childhood. He went to college to study anthropology and archaeology.
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The family bank collapsed, and Gill was suddenly out of work and free to follow his dream. In the early 1980s, fate stepped in with a Texas banking crisis. He resolved to solve the riddle of the Maya collapse - but he still had a banking career to pursue. The Mayan ruins, he says, really touched him. His love affair with the Maya started back in 1968 when he visited Chichen Itza in Southern Mexico while on holiday. When he started his hunt for clues, he was actually a banker. Reconstruction of Mayan drought devastationĭick Gill was a most unusual person to put forward a bold new theory explaining the collapse of Mayan civilisation.
However, drought as the only explanation of the Maya collapse was highly controversial. He believed that what had devastated the Maya was drought. Many think the truth may lie with a combination of these and other factors.īut none of the conventional theories were good enough for Dick Gill. Many theories have been put forward, ranging from warfare and invasion to migration, disease and over-farming. Only a fraction of the Maya people survived to face the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.įor decades, archaeologists have been searching for an explanation of the Maya collapse. When they too left, Tikal was abandoned forever, and the Mayan civilisation never recovered. The sacred temples and palaces briefly became home to a few squatters, who left household rubbish in the once pristine buildings. Many of the great centres like Tikal were deserted. In the ninth century, the Maya world was turned upside down. The elite also tortured themselves - male Maya rulers perforated the foreskins of their penises and the women their tongues, apparently in the hope of providing nourishment for the gods who required human blood. Humans were sacrificed to appease the gods.
It was strictly hierarchical and deeply spiritual. Mayan society was vibrant, but it could also be brutal. Their civilisation was so stable and established, they even had a word for a 400-year time period. They also had their own system of writing. They developed their own mathematics, using a base number of 20, and had a concept of zero. From observatories, like the one at Chichen Itza, they tracked the progress of the war star, Venus. They tracked a solar year of 365 days and one of the few surviving ancient Maya books contains tables of eclipses. Without the use of the cartwheel or metal tools, they built massive stone structures.
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