On the north staircase of the pyramid with the temple of the god K'uk'ulkan lay nine corpses, seven of them children.

Archaeologists found their skulls and severed limbs under rubble.

They died violently between 1440 and 1460 and were all related to each other through the maternal line, according to analyzes of their mitochondrial DNA.

They were probably members of the House of Cocom, the ruling family of Mayapán.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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With up to 20,000 inhabitants and a city wall more than nine kilometers long, Mayapán was the last major center of the post-classic Maya culture.

These had established themselves on the Yucatán peninsula in the south-east of present-day Mexico after the classical Maya culture that flourished further south had perished around the year 900 AD.

The postclassic period survived until the arrival of the Spaniards, more than 60 years after the fall of Mayapán, but no longer in such a centralized display of power and splendor.

This may have brought a violent end to a series of droughts.

This is suggested by findings that the anthropologist Douglas Kennett from the University of California at Santa Barbara and co-authors have now published in "Nature Communications".

The anthropologists, archaeologists and geoscientists had examined and dated a total of 205 human skeletons from burials and mass graves in Mayapán and reconstructed the climatic conditions using several indicators - all for the years between 1100, before Mayapán rose to the center, and 1500.

victims of civil unrest

According to this, more than half of the people buried in the city after 1400 were victims of civil unrest, which must have started around 1420 and reached its peak between 1440 and 1460, while the population had begun to dwindle a hundred years earlier - and it rained less and less.

"The results show," the authors write, "that both drier climates and depopulation or emigration towards the end of Mayapán settlement were accompanied by a dramatic increase in internal conflicts."

Finally, an uprising by the rival noble family of the Xiu against the Cocom, which is also mentioned in written sources from the early colonial period, resulted in a massacre and the end of the state and city.

Now, demise due to climate change was already a popular hypothesis in the eyes of the classical Maya - not coincidentally, since the current global warming became a permanent political and media issue.

But in the meantime it looks more like a reverse causality: As a result of a long-term conflict between the two great powers Tikal and Calakmul, the political system collapsed, which resulted in the neglect of the irrigation infrastructure.

Only then did dry phases become an existential problem for the classical Maya.

Climate change and the question of chicken and egg

The end of the Imperial Postclassic cannot be explained in this way, says Douglas Kennett.

“Mayapán wasn't in a place where you could use water management systems.

The farmers who fed the city were therefore always dependent on rain.” But the lack of rain alone did not bring down a functioning state in ancient America.

The droughts between 1440 and 1460 also brought severe famine to the Aztec Empire in central Mexico, without even preventing it from expanding under its ruler Motēuczōma I.

In fact, the Maya expert Nikolai Grube from the University of Bonn sees Mayapán only indirectly as a drought victim, even according to Kennett's findings.

"Basically, the question of the chicken and the egg arises in the article," he says.

"An already ailing political system may not have been able to come up with innovative responses to the droughts." Indeed, both historical sources and on-site evidence provide evidence of struggles between competing noble houses long before a drought trend began.

"These facts probably contributed to the fact that Mayapán was particularly vulnerable," says Grube.

"I see the climate and lack of rainfall here as a contributing factor rather than a cause of the city's decline."