Ancient Rome & Classic Maya

When Edward Gibbon wrote his “General Observations On The Fall Of The Roman Empire In The West”, he assumed a general trend to the rise and fall of civilisations. According to his argument, the empire’s decline was a natural sequel to its “immoderate greatness.”1 The pertinent question was not why a given civilization collapsed, but how it had survived in the first place. Gibbon had the idea that once great civilisations—societies with complex sociopolitical systems and distinct cultural traditions2—achieve a certain level of sophistication, they must inevitably decline and fall. This theory is attractive for its similarity to the pattern of human life and death. However, unlike the singular reason usually given for human death, the causes of collapse are extremely diverse. They are complicated by the fact that the collapse of some great civilisations may occur over decades or even centuries, such as that of the Roman Empire or the Classic Maya. In such cases, “collapse” may take the form of gradual transformation of one sociopolitical system to another, such as the transference of Mayan culture from the southern to the northern Yucatan, or from the Classical to the Postclassical period.3

To avoid equating “collapse” with “transformation”, the collapse of a civilisation should be defined as a process in which political institutions cease to function, cultural expressions either disappear or lose coherence, and social systems disintegrate so that only the most basic structures remain.4 Cultural and social deterioration follow political demise and are the true expressions of collapse. Aspects of deterioration, including human suffering, depopulation, abandonment of homesteads, and loss of complex cultural expression, are the manifestations by which collapse can be evaluated. By such standards, civilisations such as the Western Roman Empire and the Classic Maya did collapse, in the fifth and seventh to ninth centuries respectively.

This essay argues that a civilisation collapses due to the depletion of one of its most essential resources, a resource which, when depleted and not quickly resupplied, leads to collapse. If a civilisation’s survival is dependent on agricultural production, environmental resources may be considered an essential resource, as in the case of the Classic Maya. Military strength may be considered such a resource if a civilisation’s survival is dependent on its success over hostile neighbours or in civil war, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire and the Classic Maya collapsed because they did not or could not replenish their exhausted essential resources at a sustainable rate. For the Western Roman Empire, downsizing the military was impossible due to the necessity of defence; the alternative, replenishment, was equally impossible due to lack of manpower and funding. The Classic Maya likewise failed to lower their usage of environmental resources due to the necessity of agricultural production in support of a burgeoning population, while replenishment was hampered by environmental damage, possible climate change, and allocation of resources to unproductive construction programs.5

Classic Maya

The Classic Maya lived in the southern Yucatan and were at the height of their civilization around 600 AD.6 Like the Romans, they had an agrarian economy. Unlike the Romans, who replenished their resources more through expansion than production, the Maya’s essential resource was agricultural production. It provided sustenance for the large workforce required for agricultural practices and the building of monuments, as well as the royal and warrior classes.7 Like the churchmen of the later Roman Empire, the Maya elite were economically unproductive—they took war spoils, which did not seem to have contributed to the overall Maya economy8—but nevertheless demanded ‘luxury goods’ such as exotic materials from tribute or trade, as well as monuments built by the lower classes.9

A common theory suggests the Classic Maya collapsed as a result of an increasing population demanding an increase in production yet disabling it through environmental damage. Population growth, especially amongst the elite classes, led to an increase in the number of unproductive individuals who had to be supported by an agricultural surplus. To meet the demand, the Maya deforested the lowlands to create space for agriculture.10 Deforestation, however, led to soil erosion, which damaged the irrigation system further. The land itself was infertile, made up of shallow clay soils that were difficult to cultivate.11 The problem may have been exacerbated by construction programs, which increased the demand for sustenance but could not contribute to agricultural productivity.12 All these factors meant that the growing population could not be adequately supported; the population had exceeded the carrying capacity allowed for by the current agricultural system and natural conditions. Depletion of agricultural resources resulted in depopulation, abandonment of homesteads, deterioration of social structures, and, ultimately, the disappearance of Classic Maya culture in the southern Yucatan.13

Western Roman Empire

Since the political and social stability of the empire depended upon its ability to defend itself, military power was the empire’s essential resource. Roman expansion of territory in Central Europe often meant a significant intake of economic resources which strengthened the army, but “the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest.”14 A long border brought the Romans into more frequent contact with their Germanic neighbours and thus increased the demand for constant military presence. As a result, more soldiers were needed, but by the fifth century, there were not enough troops to adequately protect the frontier and fight major campaigns against internal and external enemies at the same time.15  The decline in Roman military power may be attributed to a shortage of trained recruits,16 lack of funding, as well as the growing power of Rome’s enemies.
Despite Rome’s numerous conquests in earlier centuries, its army was by no means invincible, as exemplified by the Varian Disaster and the Roman defeat at Hadrianopolis some three centuries later, both at the hands of Germanic tribes.17 The causes of Roman defeat in the fourth and fifth centuries can partially be attributed to the Germans’ newfound unity. Disunity and infighting weakened the Germans,18 but Seneca had warned that if the tribes were united into a large army, they would pose a great threat to the empire,19 as indeed they did. Growing unity amongst these tribes during the late empire drove the Roman need for greater military strength, which was in turn dependent on immediately taxable wealth for its maintenance. Consequently, the army was also vulnerable to economic situations which damaged the tax base. 

Such damage came from various sources. For one thing, the late empire had its fair share of economically unproductive aristocrats, civil servants, churchmen, and monastic establishments, who fed on the wealth that could otherwise have nourished the army or some other economically useful institution.20 For another, although the length of the Western empire’s northern frontier was more than twice that of the Eastern empire, the former only produced 1/3 of the two empires’ total revenue.21 To exacerbate this, continuous Germanic invasions weakened the tax base precisely at a time when taxes were needed to bolster the military, resulting in a dramatic fall in imperial tax revenue in the fifth century.22 The Western empire desperately needed to fund an army that would be strong enough to quell the Germanic invasions on its long border and the civil wars that erupted as a consequence of its failure to defeat the Germans, but these wars seriously undermined the tax base, leading to a destructive cycle which eventually pushed the empire to total chaos.

The Western empire fell due to the insufficiency of its most important resource—military power, which in turn was dependent upon other resources such as the length of the empire’s border, its economic productivity, and the power of its Germanic enemies. The empire’s political demise led to the disintegration of society and cultural traditions. Sophistication in material culture vanished, as evidenced by the sixth- and seventh-century disappearance of almost all aesthetic elements from pottery and tableware, the extreme simplification of products that were previously produced in myriads of shapes and sizes, and the significant reduction in the production of basic goods in what had once been the Western Roman Empire.23