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Ancient Mayan Drought

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1) The city states of the ancient Mayan empire flourished in southern Mexico and northern Central America for about six centuries. Then, around A.D. 900 Mayan civilization disintegrated. Scientists have found that drought played a key role. The Mayans appear to have exacerbated the problem by cutting down the jungle canopy to make way for cities and crops, according to researchers who used climate-model simulations to see how much deforestation aggravated the drought. The earliest Mayans were growing crops such as maize, beans, squash and manioc. They developed an agriculturally intensive, city-centered empire comprising numerous independent city-states. The ancient Maya had diverse and sophisticated methods of food production. It was formerly believed that slash and burn agriculture provided most of their food. …show more content…

Contemporary Mayan people still practice many of these traditional forms of agriculture, although they are dynamic systems and evolve with changing population pressures, cultures, economic systems, climate changes, and the availability of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The drought does explain a substantial portion of the overall drying that is thought to have occurred, but this is just one contributing factor to their

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