Why the Southern Cities Were Left

Across the ninth century the great southern lowland cities stopped putting up dated monuments, and within a few generations most were largely empty. That much is established, and it can be dated closely at individual sites because the monuments themselves carry dates. Why it happened is one of the standing open questions of Mesoamerican archaeology. Drought recovered from lake sediment and cave deposits, soil exhaustion, endemic warfare between rival dynasties, overextended elite obligations and the failure of the ideological claim that a king could guarantee rain have all been argued, and the current tendency is to treat them as interacting rather than to choose one. Two corrections are worth making because popular accounts get them wrong.

The Maya did not disappear: millions of Maya people live in the same region today and speak Mayan languages, and the northern cities of Yucatan flourished after the southern ones were abandoned. And the abandonment was not uniform, since some centres declined much earlier and others much later. Coe and Houston set out the evidence and the competing explanations without settling on one, and the atlas records the question as genuinely open rather than as an answer nobody has bothered to look up.