Maya

I just felt compelled to share this passage with everyone.
It's from the book Collapse, in the chapter on the fall of the Maya.

"Maya kings fought to take one another captive, one of the unfortunate losers being Copan's King 18 Rabbit. Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming off the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating (sometimes severl years later) in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways (such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple)."

I guess when your culture thrives on warfare, because of such a densely packed population (5 million people in an area the size of Colorado), sacrificing is a good way to limit population growth. And with increased sacrifices and torture, comes more practice and inventiveness on increasingly painful ways to mutilate and kill.

(You might say 5 million isn't that much, but these people were all self-sufficient in terms of food. No outside sources were brought in.)

As for the overall view of the book, I may have already mentioned it, but it seems that there are 2.5 major resources that, when depleted, lead to collapse.

1) water - drought's a big killer of crops and people
2) forests - deforestation leads to change in environment
2.5) soil - once the trees are gone, so leaves the rich topsoil.

funny how it comes down to the basic amenities.
i guess, however, in our post-industrial society, we'd also be rather fucked if we ran out of oil without any comparable alternative in sight.