The Classic Maya Collapse: A Review of Evidence and Interpretations Page: 97

                                
97

felled trees remained in piles, and crops could not be
planted, leading to a wholesale agricultural disaster coupled
with the aforementioned deterioration of a once healthful
climate.
What is especially curious is Huntington's correlation of
epochs of Maya history, according to Morley's chronology, with
his proposed cycles of increased and decreased precipitation.
These cycles were documented in the North by observing the
variations in the width of California Sequoia tree rings in
trees ranging in age from 250 to 3250 years. The years of
drought revealed barely perceptible growth, while years of
heavy precipitation produced a much wider annual ring. Even
J. Eric Thompson and Thomas Gann commented briefly on the
"curious coincidence between Huntingdon's (sic) alternating
favorable and unfavorable climatic conditions, and the periods
of progress and retrogression in the Maya civilization. "59
Indeed Huntington's graph of climatic change in California
from 100 B.C. to 1800 A.D. lends remarkable circumstantial
support to his thesis when compared to his table of Maya his-
tory of the same period.60 Most notable is that period of
extreme scarcity of dated monuments in the latter half of the
59. Ibid, p. 158; Thomas W. F. Gann and J. Eric S. Thompson,
The History of the Maya (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1937) , pp. 64-65.
60.  Huntington, The Climatic Factor, p. 231.