The Rise and Fall of Ancient Civilizations

Essay Assignment #3

Multicausal Hypotheses about the Maya Collapse
Essay #3 deals with explanations for the collapse of Classic Maya civilization in the southern lowlands. This essay builds upon the critical thinking skills you've been developing in the previous assignments, but it introduces more complex arguments and requires more rigorous analysis of those arguments.

Key concerns in Essay #3 are the distinction between theories and hypotheses, the testing of hypotheses, and multicausal hypotheses.
 

Theories and Hypotheses
Up until this point I've been using the word "theory" loosely, as archaeologists and other social scientists often do. I've called general intellectual frameworks, like the conflict and integration positions, theories. However, I've also used "theory" as a label for much more specific arguments, like Wittfogel's or Carneiro's explanation of the rise of Sumerian civilization.

In social and historical analysis, theory is more properly used for the first kind of idea: the intellectual framework within which a researcher works. That is, a theory is a set of overall statements about how human cultures operate and the most important factors that shape them. Conflict theory, integration theory, and cultural evolution are all theories in this stricter sense of the term.

We'll return to theories later. For now we're more concerned with hypotheses, which can be described as tentative answers to specific questions. That is, a hypothesis is a more limited argument created within the overall intellectual framework of a theory--an "educated guess," if you will. A hypothesis proposes cause-and-effect relationships between two or more factors and offers those relationships as the answer to the question under investigation.

In this stricter sense, the seven so-called "theories" in Essay #2 were actually hypotheses. They were arguments designed to explain the rise of Sumerian civilization in terms of specific cause-and-effect relationships. (The demands of large-scale irrigation caused centralized authority to arise; environmental circumscription caused warfare over limited agricultural land; the lack of certain necessary resources caused the development of trade networks; etc.) The interpretation you developed yourself in Part II was yet another hypothesis.
 

Testing Hypotheses
A hypothesis is a statement designed to account for all the known facts (and, ideally, to predict facts that have not yet been discovered). We test a hypothesis by attempting to determine how well it accounts for all the observed facts--including new data as they come in. As I mentioned in discussing Essay #2, many archaeological hypotheses were consistent with the facts available when they were first proposed but were later disproved when they failed to account for newly discovered data.

We can rarely, if ever, test a hypothesis itself directly. It is usually too general a statement, and the factors named in its cause-and-effect relationships are often not directly preserved in the archaeological record. For example, we cannot directly test the hypothesis "warfare caused civilization." First we are going to have to say what we mean by those terms; then we are going to have to ask how they might be reflected in the archaeological record. Warfare is a set of activities, and activities are not preserved archaeologically. What are preserved are objects used in or associated with activities. We cannot excavate warfare, but we can excavate artifacts associated with warfare.

Therefore, we do not test hypotheses themselves. Instead, we test their implications--their logical consequences. We do this by developing a series of if...then statements that can be compared to the data observed in the real world. We cannot directly test the hypothesis "warfare caused civilization," but we can test its implications. For example, if warfare caused civilization, then warfare must have begun before civilization arose. If warfare began before civilization arose, then we should expect to find that artifacts associated with warfare--weapons and fortifications, say--appeared before the artifacts that we treat as the hallmarks of civilization. Is that what we see in the archaeological record? If so, there is some support for the hypothesis that warfare caused civilization. If not, the hypothesis is contradicted, and we'll discard it. (For some other examples of if...then implication statements, see the instructions for Essay #1.)

Note that while we can prove a hypothesis is false if its test implications are contradicted by the data, we cannot prove that a hypothesis is true. In practical terms, all we can do is show that its test implications are not contradicted by any known data. There is always the possibility that the implications will be contradicted by new data in the future. Also, in the real world, there are usually alternative hypotheses whose test implications are equally consistent with the data.

For these reasons, an archaeological research project often starts with a series of alternative hypotheses that are equally valid at present. The archaeologist tries to determine what set of test implications would show that only one of those hypotheses is not demonstrably false. Once those test implications have been identified, the archaeologist looks for a site or sites likely to provide the kinds of data needed for testing the implications.
 

Multicausal Hypotheses
For the most part, the hypotheses discussed in Essay #2 were monocausal, or single-cause. They identified a single factor--irrigation, for example--as the "prime mover," the most important factor that determined all the others and triggered the rise of civilization. The different hypotheses chose different prime movers, but they were all alike in pointing to a single primary cause. (Childe's hypothesis was the one that came closest to emphasizing multiple causes.)

Most of you expressed some uneasiness with monocausal explanations, and in Part II many of you tried to develop explanations that emphasized more than one cause. You probably didn't realize it at the time, but you were already looking ahead to Essay #3, which is concerned with multicausal hypotheses.

Basically, there are two kinds of multicausal hypotheses. The first kind looks at some phenomenon--the rise of Sumerian civilization, for instance--and says that there were multiple primary factors involved; no single prime mover is sufficient to explain what happened. (For example, irrigation and warfare together caused the rise of centralized authority; both were required, because neither alone created problems that could not be resolved at the local level.) The second kind of multicausal hypothesis looks at different examples of the same phenomenon--the rise of several civilizations, for instance--and says that some causal factors are shared by all of the cases, while others differ from case to case. The two kinds are not mutually exclusive.

Testing a multicausal hypothesis is a bit more complicated than testing a monocausal hypothesis, but the basic process is the same. The key element is still to develop test implications that can be compared to the data observed in the real world. You simply have to break the multicausal hypothesis down into several statements about cause-and-effect relationships, develop test implications for each of those statements, and compare them to the data. This is what Essay #3 asks you to do.
 

Assignment
Read all three of the following articles about the Classic Maya collapse; copies are on reserve at the Main Library. Don't be put off by the title of Puleston's paper; the article itself is much more readable than the title might suggest.

Demarest, Arthur A. 1993 The violent saga of a Maya kingdom. National Geographic, vol. 183, no. 2 (February 1993), pp. 94-111.

Puleston, Dennis E. 1979 An epistemological pathology and the collapse, or why the Maya kept the short count. In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, pp. 63-71.

Wright, Lori E. 1997. Biological perspectives on the collapse of the Pasion Maya. Ancient Mesoamerica, vol. 8, pp. 267-273.

After you have read all three articles, pick one of them and answer the following two questions.

I. What is the author's (or authors') hypothesis about the causes of the Maya collapse? That is, restate the hypothesis in your own words (much as I did for the various hypotheses in Essay #2). What are the primary causal factors involved, and what are the cause-and-effect relationships between the primary factors and other, secondary ones? [1 to 2 pages]

II. Having restated the hypothesis, test it. Develop test implications for each of the cause-and-effect relationships proposed in the article, and then test those implications against data from your textbook, lectures, discussion sections, and the other articles if applicable. [2 to 3 pages]
 

Requirements


 

Advice

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Last updated: 22 January 2002
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