Born Then800–950
Life during the Classic Maya collapse
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Between about 800 and 950 the great Classic Maya cities of the southern lowlands, such as Tikal and Copán, stopped building and were largely abandoned. Lake sediments show severe droughts; endemic war between cities and over-farming probably made them worse. Maya cities in the northern Yucatán carried on.
Deaths: the southern lowlands lost most of their population over about a century; how much was death and how much migration is unknown.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from archaeology.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Abbasid prosperity (Islamic Golden Age) 786–1000
- Viking raids 793–1066
- Classic Maya collapse 800–950
- Norse settlement of Iceland 874–930
- Song dynasty commercial revolution 960–1270