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A Fractured History
Las Noticias Central, Science Desk
June 3rd 2050

As the cleanup continues after the devastating Merida quake, a team of scientists from the Instituto Geológico are trying to figure out when the Merida faultline appeared, and if the seismic shift was a sign of things to come, or a forgotten history.

Their research has not been limited to the Yucatan. In their quest for answers they have sought archeological societies as far north as the Texas Independence and as far south as Honduras. The answers they were seeking turned up at the Lamanai Archaeological Project in Belize. The team uncovered ancient Mayan records of several earthquakes in the region, with the most recent one being in the mid 13th century. 

Researchers at the Lamanai Project studied scores of tablet inscriptions from their extensive library and discovered reference to a series of catastrophic population declines that occurred in the Yucatan between 800 and 1300 CE. Until the Merida quake, these population fluctuations were assumed to be related to the frequent outbreaks of disease in the region. 

Now, with the context of the newly discovered fault line it seems like the ancient Mayan scribes were giving us more information than we knew. While disease is still almost certainly the reason for the massive drop in Mayan population during the 9th century, the cause of the disease is now much clearer. Earthquakes.

Earthquakes are not a major cause of casualties in the ancient world. Structures were too small and the population were too widely dispersed to inflict mass casualties even from the most powerful of quakes. It is the famine and disease, and the hardship which follows that claims the most number of lives. There have been man¬=AÍ:

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