Dr Adrian Chase

speaker

354 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Adrian Chase’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · The Fall of the Ancient Maya · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

Yeah, so one of the interesting things is people really like to talk about the Maya collapse.

And often there's a lot of different lenses to look at it.

So a really common one is to look at climate collapse.

Before that, people have looked at...

foreign invasions.

They'd looked at internal revolution in sort of a Marxist model.

You've had people talk about a breakdown in elite power, too much war.

So there are many different models.

One of the key things is that it's not like a snap of your finger and it's collapsed.

It's a slow process.

So some of the first cities that start declining and disappearing happen by 700, and the full collapse doesn't occur until after 900.

So you have this 200-year period where you see a cessation of monumental writing, you see an end to monumental construction like building up Kana at Karakol, and you sometimes see violence at some sites right at the end.

So it's likely that it's a mix of factors.

For some places, it's environmental.

For others, as you lose certain sites on the trade network, it makes trade a lot more difficult, and there seems to be a breakdown between east-west trade and a shift toward coastal trade.

At the same time, it's not like everybody stays put.

So you actually have people leaving, and they're probably migrating north.

in helping establish the cities that flourished during the post-classic.

So another way to think of this collapse is a transformation of society, where people are choosing what they want to keep, what they want to abandon, and one of the things they give up is they give up cities of 100,000 people, they focus on smaller settlements of tens of thousands, and they give up the divine kingship.

So you start to see in the post-classic a separation between the high priest and sort of the executive role, the war leader.

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