Multiple Collapses In Mesoamerica

Professor Mark Van Stone believes that the Creation-Destruction Myth Cycle peculiar to Mesoamerica reflects its history. He thinks that Great Civilisations were utterly destroyed, then rebuilt better than before, but again spiraling down to destruction. To Dr. Van Stone, this became the Cycle of the Suns; a kind of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Dr. Van Stone believes that the destruction of civilizations in Mesoamerica were largely self-inflicted.

Cultures worldwide suffer rise and fall. But those in Mesoamerica apparently lived in a more fragile environment; when they fell, they fell hard suggests Dr. Van Stone.

He continues by suggesting that, “unlike Rome, Baghdad and other Old World Cities who rebuilt after a collapse, most of the great Mesoamerican capitals were completely abandoned after their respective falls. Middle America swarms with lost cities.

The following is a list and time line of cities and places that collapsed in Mesoamerica:

900 BC – The Early Preclassic Collapse: the major Olmec City of San Lorenzo abandoned. La Venta rose (Gulf Coast)

400 – 300 BC – The Middle Preclassic Collapse snuffed the Olmec Horizon, and fertilized dozens of Late Formative / Late Preclassic city-states (pan-Mesoamerica)

300 BC – 200 AD – Fluorescence of diverse cultures in Chiapas (Isthmian or Epi Olmec), Oaxaca (Zapotec), Soconusco, Maya area, West Coast (e.g. Colima), Valley of Mexico

100 BC – Cuicuilco buried by a volcanic eruption (southern Valley of Mexico); coincides with the rise of Teotihuacan (northern valley of Mexico)

Photo Credit: ancient-code.com

200 AD – Abandonment of great Maya cities in the Mirador Basin marks the boundary between Late Preclassic and Early Classic (Northern Guatemala and neighborhood)

600/650 AD – the burning of Teotihuacan marks the boundary between Early and Late Classic

Teotihuacan, Mexico

600 – 800 AD – The Late Classic was not only a dramatic florescence of Maya and Zapotec Cities, but also the appearance of new civilisations: Remojados and Tajin (Southern Veracruz), Huasteca (Northern Veracruz), Xochicalco (Morelos), Cacaxtla (Puebla)

Zapotec, Monte Alban (credit: aboutworldlanguages.com)

900 AD – The Classic Collapse: Maya, Zapotec, Vercruz, etc. (pan-Mesoamerica)

1100 – 1250 – The rise of the Cholula and Nahua and Mixteca city-states (Puebla, Oaxaca)

1350 – 1450 – The Aztec/Mexica establish an empire in Western Mesoamerica

1500 – 1540 – The conquest: introduce disease; the fall of Tenochtitlan (1521), and then of the rest of the America’s (pan-Mesoamerica)

** Ontogeny (the development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioral feature from the earliest stage to maturity).

** Phylogeny (the evolutionary development and diversification of a species or group of organisms, or of a particular feature of an organism).