Social tipping towards revolution? New perspectives for the MayaSim model

When assessing prerequisites for the resilience or collapse of present and future societies in the Anthropocene, computational models of ancient civilizations can provide valuable insights. The Classic Maya are a common example for a civilization that has experienced spectacular growth in population and technology before apparently undergoing catastrophic reorganization. The MayaSim social-ecological model was conceived by Heckbert (2013) to test conflicting theories on these events and has since been further developed and evaluated in several studies (Heckbert et al. 2014, 2019; Kolb 2020). It is the first spatially explicit, agent-based computational model of the ancient Maya, and the first one to incorporate trade. Within the scope of a master thesis, we thoroughly revisited MayaSim on multiple levels. A full technical revision revealed that the model does not inherently produce large scale population collapses. On the aggregate level, the model system will converge to long-term population stability under all tested parameter settings. From what is set up in the model, even a climate forcing could only lead to either full recovery or extinction, which is confirmed by results from previous model versions. Both cases, however, do not apply to the Mayan Classic-to-Post-Classic transition. That transition, despite a significant decrease in population numbers, did not feature a full population collapse, but was mainly characterized by a collapse of the established societal structure and a spatial reorganization from the inland to the coasts of the Yucatán peninsula. Mayan culture, however, continued to flourish and is still present around Yucatán today. Hence, despite an ambitiously comprehensive approach taken in the development of MayaSim, the model does not appear fit to explain the dynamics at hand. For this contribution, the modeling approach that lead to MayaSim is therefore critically reviewed, adopting new perspectives on how the Maya timeline can be insightful for present-day societies. Especially, the role of societal dynamics in the Classic-to-Post-Classic transition is explored, aiming to account for the influence of colonial history and “western” ideas of development on our view of the Classic Maya. How did the societal organization before and after the famous "collapse" differ? Is the Classic era state really a more desirable one, given that it did not persist? And is the concept of social tipping helpful in the interpretation of that transition? Drawing from these perspectives, how could MayaSim 2.0 be re-conceived from scratch? How can dynamics of power, inequality and centralization be explored in a simple, conceptual model? What are further examples of such a hypothesized revolution in human history that this model might apply to?