The Central Acropolis, apparently the residential and administrative hub of Tikal's elite over much of the city's history, seems to have become crowded in the end, as the ruling elites grew more and more numerous. Here, a cluster of buildings barely has the space necessary for stairs that allowed access to them. Supporting these economically unproductive and ever-enlarging elites must have made Late Classic Maya society top-heavy and probably placed an additional burden on an already strained system at a time when deforestation had reached alarming proportions and the arable land had become scarce and insufficient.