All societies collapse. The question is not if our current order will end, but what policies might delay the inevitable. To ask this question we have taken a longue duree and institutional theory perspective to investigate how another complex society, the Classic Maya, both succeeded to avoid collapse and yet centuries later failed to prevent their own doomsday. Integrating new highly detailed archaeological and palaeoecological data with institutional theory paradigms we develop case studies of managerial and policy responses just prior to the final Classic Maya collapse and one some 600 years earlier in which institutional entrepreneurship was used to avoid a collapse. We draw four policy directives from our case studies regarding (i) acceptance of potential imminent collapse, (ii) vulnerabilities now confronting our institutions and logics, (iii) the razor's edge of transformative institutional entrepreneurship, and (iv) the threats of "status-rivalry" spirals. We finally take the risky step of examining our contemporary situation. Here, we observe that two of our central institutions, democracy and capitalism have become our greatest weaknesses driving cycles of short-term decision making, hypercoherence, and inequality. We suggest that without significant yet very careful modification of institutions and logics this will lead our apogee into our collapse, as those central institutions may become destabilized and delegitimatized.

In Chapter 13, Demarest and collaborators present evidence from the southwestern frontier Classic Maya port city of Cancuen that can help explain the nature of the southern lowlands’ economic decline by contrasting it with Cancuen’s late eighth century economic transformations and meteoric florescence; while other western Petén dynasties disintegrated, Cancuen flourished. One element of this apogee was the creation of new forms of monumental and ritual settings to recruit and maintain non-Maya economic exchange partners. This “innovation network” came to control critical routes and resources leading to changes in management, production, and economic power. However, as with many high-risk “innovation partnership networks,” success was truncated by abrupt network failure. Evaluation of this phenomenon by economists provides insights into ancient Maya economy and the role of monumentality in both its legitimation and transformation.

This chapter presents a critique of factors inhibiting progress in Maya economic studies, an introduction to approaches that avoid those pitfalls and examples of successful applications of strategic management theory and sociological organization studies. Some errors identified in current studies include shifts in terminology from relative to absolute; huge spatial and temporal frames of reference obscuring patterns and creating continuities, thus minimizing the degree of change; arguments unacceptable in logical and scientific discourse to criticize alternative interpretations, and other fallacies. Strategic management analysis can be applied to specific features of economies, avoiding such errors and overly broad typological concepts (e.g., “market economy,” “redistribution,” “barter,” “inalienable property”). Instead specific aspects of those and other parts of economies are studied as sets composed of variable elements each of which can be evaluated on relative scales. Successful recent applications to Maya economy are summarized, guiding to a vast literature in the sociology organization and of strategic management on “embeddedness,” manipulation of the “biographies of things,” “economic cultures,” “Trust,” innovation legitimation, vertical integration, institutional agency, and hopefully, providing a new direction in the study of Maya economies.

AbstractExcavations at the Late Classic Maya site of Cancuen (Petén Department, Guatemala) uncovered a small-scale hydraulic system including stone-lined canals and reservoirs within the architectural core of the site. The abundance of other nearby potable water sources along with the elaborate form of the system demonstrate that it served an ideological rather than practical function. Artifacts deposited in the reservoirs support this interpretation. Moreover, the reservoir located in front of the site's royal palace contained the remains of at least 30 individuals who may represent members of the royal court massacred during the site's collapse. This paper reports the animal remains found within the site's reservoirs to further explore the nature and extent of ritual and disposal activities within these aquatic contexts. Inter- and intrasite comparisons are used to contextualize the results within broader discussions of how we identify ritual activity in the zooarchaeological record, and the role of water in ancient Maya ideological and political systems.

The cities of the Pasion trade route had the earliest and most violent collapses beginning before AD 740. Dos Pilas, Aguateca, other cities, hilltop fortresses, and even small villages were completely destroyed with minimal or no evidence of ritual. In contrast, the international port center of Cancuen, strategic head of navigation for the entire system, was completely "ritually terminated" with great care and respect including the mass execution of its royalty and nobles. Here we discuss the nature and possible reasons for variability in the violent demise of the western cities, the stages of the seventh to ninth century collapse process in global perspective, and implications for theories of the root causes of the Classic Maya collapse.