Media–Power Compatibility Dynamics Collapse as Reconfiguration in the Maya World (760–1697)

The Media–Power Compatibility Dynamics (MPCD) framework (Wang 2026a) identifies three modes of power–media rupture—physical supply-chain rupture, credit bankruptcy, and elimination of knowledge carriers—and traces the complete dynamic cycle: vulnerability exposure → arbitrator awakening → rupturing-force execution (against old-power resistance) → rupture/repair → pathway selection → new steady state, before re-entering the cycle. From this perspective, what archaeologists have long described as "collapse" is not civilizational death but a dimension-specific rupture in the power–media relationship, followed by multi-pathway institutional diversification. This article applies MPCD to the Classic Maya Terminal Classic (760–889 CE) through a cross-site analysis of destruction evidence from eight southern lowland city-states. The Maya case serves as an exemplary showcase: dozens of city-states sharing a unified cognitive model (writing, calendar, kingship) yet producing divergent trajectories, enabling controlled comparison. I argue that sequential, sajal-led uprisings—in which the sajal, a class of secondary lords mediating between the royal elite and commoner populations, acted as structural couplers—overthrew sacred kingship (k'uhul ajaw), and that the diversity of Maya trajectories from the Terminal Classic through the Spanish conquest (c. 760–1697 CE) illustrates all three modes operating within a single civilization across its 1500-year span. As a response to Middleton's (2024) diagnosis that collapse studies lack a unified mechanism, this article demonstrates the explanatory power and unified analytical mechanism that the MPCD framework provides on the foundation of existing scholarship, and specifies falsifiable corollaries at both the case and framework levels.