Massive drought
His love affair with the Maya started back in 1968 when he visited Chichen Itza in Southern Mexico while on holiday. The Mayan ruins, he says, really touched him. He resolved to solve the riddle of the Maya collapse - but he still had a banking career to pursue.
In the early 1980s, fate stepped in with a Texas banking crisis. The family bank collapsed, and Gill was suddenly out of work and free to follow his dream. He went to college to study anthropology and archaeology.
His realisation of what might have caused the Maya collapse came in a brainwave - it was an explanation that didn't come from books and study, but directly from his own childhood. Gill remembered the devastating droughts in Texas in the 1950s, when farmland was parched and fires raged. The hot, sunny days seemed interminable, and he was left with an emotional understanding of the power of drought.
'His work led him to a dramatic conclusion - that the Maya civilisation consisted of millions of people who had died very suddenly.'
He felt sure the Maya had faced a huge drought, but he had no evidence to back up his theory - so he set out to search for clues. One of the first people he turned to was archaeologist Dr Fred Valdez.
Valdez, from the University of Texas, worked deep in the jungles of Belize. He counted Maya farmsteads in order to estimate the likely total population. Fragments of pottery told him when the area was occupied and his work led him to a dramatic conclusion - that the Maya civilisation consisted of millions of people who had died very suddenly. Gill knew few factors could account for this - but one of them was drought.
In Gill's eyes, this strengthened his theory, but he still needed direct evidence. It was time to trawl the archives. National records held in Mexico City revealed that, at the start of the 20th century, a drought in the Maya region had lasted three years. Here was evidence that drought could, in fact, occur in this region.
He then stumbled upon older, colonial records from the Spanish authorities in the Yucatan province of Mexico, telling of repeated drought. 'I found this plea for help', he says. 'The crops had been very bad in the year 1795 - they were running out of grain and they were afraid that the terrible death they had seen so often in the past was going to repeat itself again, so they asked for help.'
Gill now had proof of devastating droughts in the past, but not in the key ninth century. Then he discovered an extraordinary coincidence. He'd studied hundreds of papers on meteorology before he stumbled on one entitled 'Dendrochronology, mass balance and glacier front fluctuations in northern Sweden'.
It had been extremely cold in northern Europe at just the time of the Maya collapse, but what could possibly be the link? Gill went back to the meteorological records, and found that one of the high pressure systems in the north Atlantic had moved towards Central America at the start of the 20th century. This was a time of both drought in the Maya areas and extreme cold in northern Europe.
Published: 01-04-2001
Bookmark with:
What are these?