its time, this was growth under extractive institutions. For
the Natufian society it was also likely that this type of growth
created deep conflicts over who would control institutions
and the extraction they enabled. For every elite benefiting
from extraction there is a non-elite who would love to
replace him. Sometimes infighting simply replaces one
elite with another. Sometimes it destroys the whole
extractive society, unleashing a process of state and
societal collapse, as the spectacular civilization that Maya
city-states built more than one thousand years ago
experienced.
T HE U NSTABLE E XTRACTION
Farming emerged independently in several places around
the world. In what is now modern Mexico, societies formed
that established states and settlements, and transitioned to
agriculture. As with the Natufians in the Middle East, they
also achieved some degree of economic growth. The Maya
city-states in the area of southern Mexico, Belize,
Guatemala, and Western Honduras in fact built a fairly
sophisticated civilization under their own brand of extractive
institutions. The Maya experience illustrates not only the
possibility of growth under extractive institutions but also
another fundamental limit to this type of growth: the political
instability that emerges and ultimately leads to collapse of
both society and state as different groups and people fight
to become the extractors.
Maya cities first began to develop around 500 BC . These
early cities eventually failed, sometime in the first century
AD . A new political model then emerged, creating the
foundation for the Classic Era, between AD 250 and 900.
This period marked the full flowering of Maya culture and
civilization. But this more sophisticated civilization would
also collapse in the course of the next six hundred years. By
the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early
sixteenth century, the great temples and palaces of such
Maya sites as Tikal, Palenque, and Calakmul had receded
into the forest, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth
century.
The Maya cities never unified into an empire, though
some cities were subservient to others, and they often