{"id":4557,"date":"2015-01-14T20:34:49","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T01:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4557"},"modified":"2015-01-14T20:34:49","modified_gmt":"2015-01-15T01:34:49","slug":"senecas-pyramids-how-fast-did-the-mayan-civilization-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4557","title":{"rendered":"Seneca’s pyramids: how fast did the Mayan civilization fall?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seneca’s pyramids: how fast did the Mayan civilization fall?<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Monument building cycle of the Mayan civilization. From “Sylvanus G. Morley and George W. Brainerd, The Ancient Maya, Third Edition (Stanford University Press, 1956), page 66.”. Courtesy of Diego Mantilla.<\/i><\/div>\n

Once you give a name to a phenomenon, you can focus your attention on it and learn more and more about it. So, the “Seneca Cliff<\/a>” idea turns out to be a fruitful one. It tells us that, in several cases, the cycle of exploitation of a natural resource follows a forward skewed curve, where decline is much faster than growth. This is consistent with what the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote: “increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.<\/i>” With some\u00a0mathematical tricks<\/a>, the result is the following curve:<\/p>\n

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This curve describes the behavior of several complex systems, including entire civilizations which experienced an abrupt collapse after a long period of relatively slow growth.\u00a0In my first post<\/a>\u00a0on the seneca cliff, I already discussed the collapse of the Mayan Civilization (*)<\/div>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seneca’s pyramids: how fast did the Mayan civilization fall? Monument building cycle of the Mayan civilization. From “Sylvanus G. Morley and George W. Brainerd, The Ancient Maya, Third Edition (Stanford University Press, 1956), page 66.”. Courtesy of Diego Mantilla. Once you give a name to a phenomenon, you can focus your attention on it and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[139,511,2691,1776,2692],"class_list":["post-4557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-civilization","tag-maya","tag-mayan-civilisation","tag-seneca-cliff","tag-ugo-bardi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4558,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557\/revisions\/4558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}