The Great Warming

by Brian Fagan

  15. Moreau Maxwell, The Prehistory of the Eastern Arctic (New York: Academic Press, 1985), p. 222.

  16. Heather Pringle, “New Respect for Metal’s Role in Ancient Arctic Cultures,” Science, vol. 277 (1997), pp. 766–67.

  17. Therkel Mathiassen, “Archaeology of the Central Eskimos, the Thule Culture and Its Position Within the Eskimo Culture,” Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921–1924 (Copenhagen: Glygenclalski Boghandel, Nordisk Forlang, 1927).

  18. Discussion in McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, p. 121ff.

  19. Robert McGhee, “Contact Between Native North Americans and the Medieval Norse: A Review of Evidence,” American Antiquity, vol. 49 (1984), pp. 4–26.

  20. On the Skraelings, see McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, p. 93.

  21. This section is based on Seaver, The Frozen Echo.

  22. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (New York: Basic Books, 2000), chapter 1.

  Chapter 6: The Megadrought Epoch

  1. Malcolm Margolin, ed., The Way We Lived (Berkeley: California Historical Society and Heyday Books, 1993), p. 125.

  2. Scott Stine, “Extreme and Persistent Drought in California and Patagonia During Mediaeval Time,” Nature, vol. 369 (1994), pp. 546–49.

  3. Celine Herweijer et al., “North American Droughts of the Last Millennium from a Gridded Network of Tree-Ring Data,” Journal of Climate, vol. 20, no. 7 (2007), pp. 1353–76. This important paper summarizes the evidence for drought over a wide area. I drew heavily on it here.

  4. Ibid.

  5. A sidebar on ENSO, El Niños, and La Niñas appears in chapter 9.

  6. A summary of Great Basin archaeology will be found in Brian Fagan, Ancient North America, 4th ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), chapter 12. See also Donald L. Grayson, A Natural History of the Great Basin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). For the impact of Medieval Warm Period drought, see Terry L. Jones et al., “Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered: Demographic Crises in Western North America During the Medieval Climatic Anomaly,” Current Anthropology, vol. 40, no. 2 (1999), pp. 137–70.

  7. C. Melville Aikens, Hogup Cave. University of Utah Anthropologial Papers, vol. 92, (1970).

  8. Summarized in Kurt Repamshek, “Shelter from the Prehistoric Storm,” American Archaeology, vol. 11, no. 1 (2007), pp. 26–32.

  9. For Great Basin native American groups, see William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 11: Great Basin, ed. Warren L. d’Azevedo (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1986).

  10. See http://danr.ucop.edu/ihrmp/oak27.htm.

  11. See Lowell J. Bean, Mukat’s People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

  Chapter 7: Acorns and Pueblos

  1. Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1925), p. 524.

  2. Travis Hudson, Jan Timbrook, and M. Rempe, Tomol: Chumash Watercraft as Described in the Ethnographic Notes of John P. Harrington (Los Altos and Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ballena Press and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 1978), p. 22.

  3. A useful summary of the impact of acorns: Mark A. Basgall, “Resource Intensification Among Hunter-Gatherers: Acorn Economies in Prehistoric California,” Research in Economic Anthropology, vol. 9 (1987), pp. 21–52.

  4. Sarah Mason, “Acorntopia? Determining the Role of Acorns in Past Human Subsistence.” In John Wilkins, David Harvey, and Michael Dobson, eds., Food in Antiquity (Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press, 1995), pp. 112–36.

  5. Beverly R. Ortiz, as told to Julia Parker, It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Acorn Preparation (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1991). See also, Walter Goldschmidt, “Nomlaki Ethnography,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 42, no. 4 (1951): 303–443.

  6. Pat Mikkelsen, William Hildebrandt, and Deborah Jones, “Toolstone Procurement and Lithic Production Technology, California.” In Michael Moratto, ed., Archaeological Investigations PGT–PG&E Pipeline Expansion Project, Idaho, Washington, and California. Vol. 4 (Report Submitted to the Pacific Gas Transmission Company, Portland, Oregon, 1994), chapter 8. For California trade generally, see Brian Fagan, Before California (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), chapter 7.

  7. See http://danr.ucop.edu/ihrmp/oak27.htm.

  8. Elizabeth Weiss, “Drought-Related Changes in Two Hunter-Gatherer California Populations,” Quaternary Research, vol. 58 (2002), pp. 393–96.

  9. Section based on Douglas J. Kennett, Behavioral Ecology and the Evolution of Hunter-Gatherer Societies on the Northern Channel Islands, California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

  10. Douglas J. Kennett and James P. Kennett, “Competitive and Cooperative Responses to Climatic Instability in Coastal Southern California,” American Antiquity, vol. 65 (2000), pp. 379–95.

  11. Summary in Fagan, Before California, chapter 14.

  12. Jeanne Arnold, ed., Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), is a fundamental source on Santa Cruz Island.

  13. Patricia M. Lambert and Phillip L. Walker, “Physical Anthropological Evidence for the Evolution of Social Complexity in Coastal Southern California,” Antiquity, vol. 65 (1991), pp. 963–73.

  14. Drills described by Arnold, Origins.

  15. Tessie Naranjo, “Thoughts on Migration by Santa Clara Pueblo,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, vol. 14 (1995), pp. 247–50.

  16. An enormous literature surrounds Chaco Canyon. For a popular account, see Brian Fagan, Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore the Lives of an Ancient Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Steve Lekson, ed., The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Regional Center (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2006).

  17. Gwinn Vivian, Chacoan Prehistory of the San Juan Basin (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990), p. 432ff.

  18. Gwinn Vivian, “Chaco Roads: Morphology,” Kiva, vol. 63, no. 1 (1997), pp. 7–34, and “Chaco Roads: Function,” Kiva, vol. 63, no. 1 (1997), pp. 35–67.

  19. This section is based on Mark D. Varien and Richard H. Wilshusen, eds., Seeking the Center Place: Archaeology and Ancient Communities in the Mesa Verde Region (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002).

  Chapter 8: Lords of the Water Mountains

  1. Dennis Tedlock, trans., Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 71. The Popol Vuh, or “Council Book,” is a book of creation originally written in Maya glyphs, and one of the masterpieces of native American literature. The Quiché Maya live in the Guatemalan highlands.

  2. Gerald H. Haug et al., “Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization,” Science, vol. 299 (2003): 1731–35.

  3. David A. Hodell et al., “Possible Role of Climate in the Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization,” Nature, vol. 375 (1995), pp. 391–94.

  4. Tedlock, Popol Vuh, p. 64.

  5. Accounts of Maya civilization abound. The most widely read: Michael D. Coe, The Maya, 7th ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

  6. This section is based on Vernon L. Scarborough, “Ecology and Ritual: Water Management and the Maya,” Latin American Antiquity, vol. 9, no. 2 (1998), pp. 135–59. See also the same author’s more general work The Flow of Power: Ancient Water Systems and Landscapes (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2003).

  7. For El Mirador, see Ray Matheny, El Mirador, Petén: An Interim Report (Provo, Ut.: New World Archaeological Foundation Papers, 1980).

  8. R. T. Matheny et al., Investigations at Edzná, Campeche, Mexico. Vol 1, Part 1: The Hydraulic System (Provo, Ut.: New World Archaeological Foundation Papers, 1983).

  9. For Tikal, see P. D. Harrison, The Lords of Tikal: Rulers of an Ancient Maya City (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999). A popular, but sometimes controversial, account of Maya civilization based on archaeology and glyphs: Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings (New York: William Morrow, 1990).

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nbsp; 10. The estimate of 210 acres (85 hectares) is based on calculations from a study of modern irrigation at Chilac, near Tehuacán. G. C. Wilken, Good Farmers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

  11. Scenario based on Schele and Freidel, Forest, pp. 280–81.

  12. Patricia McAnany, Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

  13. A huge literature surrounds the collapse of ancient Maya civilization. An excellent summary will be found in David Webster, The Fall of the Ancient Maya (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002).

  14. Schele and Freidel, Forest, chapter 8.

  15. An excellent summary of Copán and its end will be found in David L. Webster et al., Copán: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom (New York: Wadsworth, 1999), and E. Wyllis Andrews IV and William L. Fash, Copán (New York: James Currey, 2005).

  16. The Petexbatun project and Maya civilization generally: Arthur Demarest, The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  Chapter 9: The Lords of Chimor

  1. Father Bernabé Cobo (1580–1657) was a Jesuit missionary and scholar who spent sixty-one years in Peru. His main work was Historia general de las Indias, completed in 1653. Only the first half survives. Cobo was a perceptive observer. His work is a primary source on early Peru and its peoples. Quote from his Inca Religion and Customs, Roland Hamilton, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 123. Cobo’s observations on Inca royal mummies can equally be applied to those of the lords of Chimor.

  2. Oca, Oxalis tuberosa, is a root vegetable with a starchy, edible tuber, widely grown in the Andes in a wide variety of colors. It grows in the same environments as ullucu (Ullucus tuberosus), a cool-climate tuber. Both were frozen or dried and widely traded.

  3. Ephraim Squier, Travels in Peru (New York: Harpers, 1888), p. 110.

  4. L.Thompson et al., “A 1,500-Year Tropical Ice Core Record of Climate: Potential Relations to Man in the Andes,” Science, vol. 234 (1986), pp. 361–64.

  5. Alan Kolata, “Environmental Thresholds and the ‘Natural History’ of an Andean Civilization.” In Garth Bawdon and Richard Martin Reycraft, eds., Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response (Albuquerque: Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, 2000), pp. 195–212.

  6. A summary of the Tiwanaku drought will also be found in Brian Fagan, The Long Summer (New York: Basic Books, 2004), chapter 12.

  7. Scott Stine, “Extreme and Persistent Drought in California and Patagonia in Mediaeval Time,” Nature, vol. 369 (1994), pp. 546–49.

  8. Scott Stine and M. Stine, “A Record from Lake Cardiel of Climate Change in Southern South America,” Nature, vol. 345 (1990), pp. 705–8.

  9. Michael Glantz, Currents of Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), offers a widely read account of El Niño. See also Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Collapse of Civilizations (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

  10. The literature is summarized in Mary Van Buren, “The Archaeology of El Niño Events and Other ‘Natural’ Disasters,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 8, no. 2 (2001), pp. 129–49.

  11. B. Rein et al., “A Major Holocene ENSO Anomaly During the Medieval Period,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 31, no. 10 (2004), p. L17211. On Ecuador, see Christopher M. May et al., “Variability of El Niño: Southern Oscillation Activity at Millennial Timescales During the Holocene Epoch,” Nature, vol. 470 (2002), pp. 162–65.

  12. A hypothetical scenario, but the details reflect the spectacular regalia of two Moche lords buried at Sipán in the lower Lambayeque Valley in about A.D. 400. Walter Alva and Christopher Donnan, The Royal Tombs of Sipán (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1993).

  13. The best general summary of Andean archaeology and history is Michael Moseley, The Incas and Their Ancestors, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000).

  14. Michael Moseley and Kent C. Day, eds., Chan Chan: Andean Desert City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), is the authoritative report.

  15. Figure from Moseley, Incas, p. 256.

  16. This section is based on Van Buren, “Archaeology,” and more specialist references.

  Chapter 10: Bucking the Trades

  1. T. Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 87.

  2. An account of the collapse of Rapa Nui can be found in Jared Diamond, Collapse (New York: Viking, 2005), chapter 2. A summary of Easter Island archaeology: Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island, Earth Island (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992).

  3. Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 3.

  4. Edwin Clark et al., “Evidence for a ‘Medieval Warm Period’ in a 1,100-Year Tree-Ring Reconstruction of Past Austral Summer Temperatures in New Zealand,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 29, no. 14 (2002), pp. 12(1)–12(4).

  5. Patrick D. Nunn, “Environmental Catastrophe in the Pacific Islands Around A.D. 1300,” Geoarchaeology, vol. 16, no. 7 (2000), pp. 715–40.

  6. Kim M. Cobb et al., “El Niño/Southern Oscillation and Tropical Pacific Climate During the Last Millennium,” Nature, vol. 724 (2003), pp. 271–75. Also see Kim M. Cobb, Christopher D. Charles, and David E. Hunter, “A Central Tropical Pacific Coral Demonstrates Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Decadal Connections,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 18, no. 11 (2001), pp. 2209–12.

  7. See B. Rein et al., “A Major Holocene ENSO Anomaly During the Medieval Period,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 31, no. 10 (2004), p. L172211, and Christopher M. May et al., “Variability of El Niño: Southern Oscillation Activity at Millennial Timescales During the Holocene Epoch,” Nature, vol. 470 (2002), pp. 162–165.

  8. James Beaglehole, Captain James Cook: A Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 178.

  9. James Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery (London: Hakluyt Society, 1968), p. 354.

  10. Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), describes Lapita and the archaeology of the Pacific generally.

  11. Discussion in Finney, Voyage, chapter 3.

  12. Beaglehole, Journals, p. 154n.

  13. See Finney, Voyage, for extended discussions, upon which I drew here.

  14. Terry L. Hunt and Carl P. Lipo, “Late Colonization of Easter Island,” Science, vol. 311 (2006), pp. 1603–6. See also: Atholl Anderson et al., “Prehistoric Maritime Migration in the Pacific Islands: An Hypothesis of ENSO Forcing,” The Holocene, vol. 16, no. 1 (2006), p. 1–6.

  Chapter 11: The Flying Fish Ocean

  1. Louis Klopsch of the Christian Herald, 1900. Quoted by Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2001), p. 170. Davis provides a brilliant and devastating analysis of late nineteenth-century tropical famines, which I drew on for this section of the chapter.

  2. J. E. Scott, In Famine Land (New York: Harper Brothers, 1904), pp. 2–3.

  3. Julian Hawthorne, The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, Edited by His Wife, Edith Garrigues Hawthorne (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 295. Reuter’s special famine commissioner, Francis Merewether, who was in the famine areas a few months before Hawthorne, shocked the reading public of the day with his graphic descriptions of the victims in his A Tour Through the Famine Districts of India (London: A. D. Innes, 1898).

  4. Quotes from Julian Hawthorne, “India Starving,” Cosmopolitan, vol. 23, no. 4 (1897), pp. 379–82.

  5. The word “Nilometer” probably originated with early nineteenth-century French scholars on the Napoleonic expedition of 1798.

  6. See William Popper, The Cairo Nilometer: Studies in Ibn Taghri Bardi’s Chronicles of Egypt. Vol 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). The Nilometer is well worth a visit, but is off the regular tourist beat. It is easily accessible by taxi f
rom Cairo.

  7. Fekri Hassan, “Environmental Perception and Human Responses in History and Prehistory.” In Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, and Susan Keech McIntosh, eds. The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 121–40. Also, more controversially, R. S. Herring, “Hydrology and Chronology: The Rodah Nilometer as an Aid in Dating Interlacustrine History.” In J. B. Webster, ed., Chronology, Migration and Drought in Interlacustrine Africa (New York: Africana, 1979).

  8. D. Verschuren, K. R. Laird, and B. F. Cumming, “Rainfall and Drought in Equatorial East Africa During the Past 11,000 years,” Nature, vol. 403 (2000), pp. 410–14.

  9. Graham Connah, African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Chapter 6 offers an authoritative perspective on the East African coast.

  10. W. H. Schoff, ed., The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Trade and Travel in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (New York: Longmans Green, 1912), section 57. Hippalus, a Greek skipper from Alexandria, voyaged from Arabia to India and back in a single season in the first century B.C. He sailed along the Arabian coast, then “by observing the position of the ports and the character of the sea, discovered a route across the ocean.” Soon the southwesterly monsoon became known as the Hippalus wind.

  11. Revelation 21:10.

  12. Discussed at length in Ian Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001).

  13. Ibid., p. 127.

  14. Quoted in Ralph Abercromby, Weather: A Popular Exposition of the Nature of Weather Changes from Day to Day (London: Kegan Paul, 1887), p. 234. The Subandhu quote that immediately follows can be found in Khushwant Singh, “The Indian Monsoon in Literature.” In Jay. S Fein and Pamela L. Stephens, eds., Monsoons (New York: John Wiley, 1987), p. 45.

  15. For a discussion of the changing landscape and agriculture, see Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India 1200–1991 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chapter 2. Quote from W. H. Sykes, “Special Reports on the Statistics of the Four Collectorates of the Dukhun,” Reports of the Seventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1837), p. 226.