It came out in March, but I hadn't heard it until it came out as part of the BBC documentaries podcast series this past week, but the Radio 4 Museum of Lost Objects is excellent.

I suppose it might more accurately be described as "What's Newly Lost in History" as it tries to document a few of the objects that have been destroyed as a result of the civil conflict in Iraq and Syria. What it does incredibly well however is to document the human cost of that loss as well. There have been criticisms of the attention paid to, say, the destruction of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra as opposed to the overall death toll of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria. But I think what these episodes do so brilliantly is to connect these objects with the humans who lived with and among them and who studied them.

In other words, quite a lot of people like the users of /r/askhistorians: history lovers, academics, archaeologists, historians, preservationists.

It's a profoundly emotional story. They interview the daughter of Khaled al-Assad who was the chief of antiquities at Palmyra and refused to leave the beloved city of his birth when ISIS took over. He named his daughter "Zenobia" after the Palmyrene queen. Khaled was decapitated by ISIS shortly after they took the city. I went from holding back tears of sorrow, to holding back tears of joy to hear the story of Father Jacques Mourad who had been the Prior for the now-destroyed Monastery of Mar Elian, was imprisoned by ISIS, held in captivity with a small group of other priests for months, was returned to his parishioners (who were also effectively in captivity) and eventually escaped with the help of a Muslim friend because he knew that if he didn't people would stay behind with him and face almost certain death.

Very much worth a listen.

There is a press release floating around the web and getting picked up by pop-sci outlets about how the Maya collapsed because of a lack of water/poor water management. I disagree that it is a simple as that.

Based on the press release, these researchers keep pushing this idea of a collapse and not a localized abandonment, which is what it was. They have failed to mention thriving Classic period city-states (Caracol, Chichen Itza, Uxmal), the creation and expansion of Postclassic city-states (Mayapan, Q'umarkaj, Mixco Viejo, and Nojpeten which fell to the Spanish in 1697), the effects of deforestation (need wood for construction, tool making, cooking fires, and making plaster), the effects of changing trade routes (more coastal trade, Lowland cities could not tap into these networks easily), different water management strategies (not everyone used cenotes or built reservoirs) and effects of internal dynamics after the defeat of powerful city-states like Calakmul (the abandonment started around the same time), or a shift in sociopolitical power from a god-king to just a king that is sometimes supplemented with a council of lords.

Without seeing more than a press release I cannot say anything more about possible issues. Perhaps in the paper the researchers address all these issues, but I doubt they did or addressed them adequately. Whenever I read something on the abandonment, people tend to focus on just one cause rather than multiple. No model is going to be perfect and every model will need reassessment when new data emerges. That’s part of the science of archaeology. I’m just annoyed that pop-sci outlets are going to latch onto this to further push the idea that the Maya were some kind of ancient hippy jungle people who lived as one with nature and mysteriously disappeared into the jungle leaving us to wonder what happened, an idea that keeps popping up like a bad villain in a TV show.

Parallels can be drawn to the area I study in West Mexico. Drought certainly played a role in the abandonment of Teuchitlan culture sites. Records in lake sediments in Nayarit as well as archaeology surveys and geomorphology work in the Magdalena Lake Basin have confirmed this drought. This is the same drought that would have affected the Bajio and Teotihuacan to the east. But whether or not drought is the key factor is yet to be determined. Instead it may well be the "straw that broke the camel's back" with other underlying issues bubbling to the surface. Because at the end of the 6th century we don't just see the abandonment of settlements, we see the abandonment of everything. They stop burying their dead in shaft tombs, they stop building guachimontones, they stop producing the same ceramic styles and forms, they start producing different stone tools, they stop producing hollow and solid ceramic figures which the region is known for, they start building tiered platforms and u-shaped elite residential structures, they even stop living near Classic period settlements and instead opt to live in completely different areas with no previous occupation. They turned their back on 800 years of cultural practices and tradition and I doubt that drought was sole reason.

/rant