Our Fall Semester Session will begin September 24th at 3:30 in the CASE Chancellor’s Auditorium (4th Floor) as we welcome our new retirees. We will begin this fall with a wonderful speaker, Payson Sheets, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology.  Before his talk, we will have a reception to welcome our new retirees and an opportunity to sign up for different interest groups, and scholarly activities.

September 24th, 2025 | 3:30 PM | CASE Chancellor’s Auditorium (4th Floor)

Please register to attend here: https://forms.office.com/r/am7Wkddaz3 

Comparing the successes in achieving sustainability for millennia of two different societies in the tropical environments of Central America, and why both eventually failed... or did they?

A virtual attendance option will be available  

Join us as we start with the ancient Maya, focusing on Tikal and environs in the middle of the Guatemalan rainforest, where they were successful for about 2000 years, but factors including population growth, warfare, and a severe climatic downturn led to the demise of only Tikal. Then, we will move south to Costa Rica, where egalitarian societies maintained sustainable adaptations for five millennia, and could well have continued had the Spanish not brought New World diseases along with firearms and attack dogs. The sudden “Multi-Mega Pandemic” caused by plague, measles, smallpox, and typhus eliminated 90% of the population. 

Speaker Bio, Dr. Payson Sheets, Anthropology:   
“My research focuses on the ancient societies of Mesoamerica and lower Central America.  I am particularly interested in how societies, from egalitarian to complex, react to the sudden massive stresses of explosive volcanic eruptions. And I am exploring commoner agency, as Maya at Ceren led their rich lives largely beyond elite control. And the Arenal area residents, members of egalitarian societies, inadvertently entrenched the paths that connected villages with cemeteries, which became a valued cultural standard. As both Ceren in El Salvador and Arenal in Costa Rica are deeply buried by volcanic ash layers, we have been developing remote sensing techniques from aircraft and satellites, and geophysical techniques for exploring many meters below the present ground surface. Recently we have discovered that the Maya were cultivating a root crop, manioc, which outproduces maize by about 15 times, in carbohydrates per unit area”.