THE FALL OF THE MAYAN CITIES

When our world is headed for an ecological disaster of global proportions is interesting to look back at this little Mesoamerican people, the Maya, who at one time in history also suffered the devastating consequences of the overexploitation of natural resources.

We had risen to the highest pyramid in Tikal, Temple IV, and watched the dense jungle around us. A young German near us exclaimed: How could the Maya live in this jungle??

No, mein freund, no. The priest or the god-king who from this height executed their rites or sacrifices never saw this landscape we now enjoy. What they saw was an immense succession of fields of corn, squash, beans, cocoa ... interrupted by other temples and stone buildings, large villages of huts, roads and so on. Think Tikal's population became more than 100,000. The deforestation led to soil erosion and soil impoverishment. The lack of rain over a long period, natural or motivated by the same deforestation, came to complicate things. Hunger, the great engine of history, caused riots, confidence loss in the established hierarchical system and the Mayan civilization collapsed.

It was the tenth century of our era and the major Mayan cities were abandoned altogether