by David Keys
Over the same period, Calakmul’s population also rose by 200 percent (from around twenty thousand to about sixty thousand). Copan too saw its population begin to increase rapidly in the late sixth century. Even Tikal recovered, and its population rose substantially as well.
It is highly likely that the urban population increases of the late sixth and seventh centuries resulted directly from the freeing up of the political and economic environment following the evaporation of Teotihuacan’s semicolonial presence in the mid–sixth century—symbolized by the fall of Tikal in 562. Tragically, however, by the mid–eighth century, population expansion led to land exhaustion, food shortages, and interstate and internal conflict—and ultimately to political and demographic collapse, thus ending the great classic era of Maya civilization.
The sequence of Mesoamerican events had run its course following the Teotihuacano drought of the mid–sixth century. But north of Mexico, the climatic catastrophe may have triggered cultural developments that still affect America to this day.
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N O R T H A M E R I C A N
M Y S T E R Y
The United States’ oldest surviving urban culture can be found in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, where thirty-seven thousand Pueblo Indians still live in thirty-one exclusively Pueblo towns—the oldest of which was founded nine hundred years ago. Through a combination of strong community values and intense cultural conservatism, they have been more successful than any other American Indian people at preserving their identity.
Their medieval ancestors, now usually called the Anasazi, developed an extraordinary civilization—building towns from A.D. 1000 onward, large dams and reservoirs, up to five hundred miles of thirty-foot-wide roads, and a rapid communications system operated through a complex of signal stations. They were the first Indians north of Mexico to use looms, weaving cotton cloth as early as A.D. 750. But perhaps the most intriguing aspects of the Anasazi civilization’s past are the nature and date of its origins, for in that respect, Anasazi history echoes that of so much of the rest of the world.
It’s known that the climatic chaos of the mid– to late sixth century did affect what is now the western United States, but the evidence is patchy. The only definitive data comes from tree rings obtained from bristlecone pines growing at relatively high altitude in California and Nevada; low-altitude tree-ring data, including that for New Mexico and Arizona, show no evidence of climatic problems in the years or decades following 535. And yet the archaeological evidence tells a different story—one of relatively sudden cultural change and perhaps even of geopolitical stress.
Prior to the sixth century, the Anasazi did not tend to live in villages, had an economy that was only 40 to 50 percent agricultural, and used spears for hunting. Pottery manufacture was practiced in half of the Anasazi territory but was not commonplace. Stone tool technology was relatively primitive.
Then in the mid– to late sixth century, for no apparent reason, the Anasazi totally changed their economy. They became 80 percent agricultural, and yet (in common with other Indian peoples at the time) they also improved their hunting technology by abandoning spears and adopting the bow and arrow. Settlement sizes began to increase, and the first villages appeared. Sophisticated stone axes (suitable for agricultural use) were developed, and pottery became much more widespread. Within just a few decades the foundations had been laid on which Anasazi urban culture would later develop.
The sudden transformation of Anasazi society—a virtual technological and cultural revolution—is a riddle. But there are four clues as to what might have generated the change.
First, one of the key aspects—the adoption of the bow and arrow—was shared by many other Indian peoples in the sixth century and was therefore part of a wider North American phenomenon. Second, in the northeast fringe of Anasazi territory there is archaeological evidence of mid- to late-sixth-century structures—specifically stockades. Once again this may have been part of a more general sixth-century North American phenomenon, namely, an increase in warfare. Third and most intriguing is that there is ceramic evidence of cultural contact in that period between the Anasazi and another rapidly evolving Indian culture, known as the Late Woodland, seven hundred miles to the east on the other side of the Great Plains, in the Mississippi Valley. The fourth potential clue is that all these took place at a time of increased climatic stress in most areas of the world.
So even if, for local climatic reasons, the Anasazi were not directly hit by severe drought, it is quite possible that they were put under demographic or competitive pressure or threat by peoples in other regions who were hit. Certainly the appearance of pottery styles borrowed from seven hundred miles to the east suggests that something unusual was happening in the area in between, that is, on the plains. Either population movement was increasing or trans–Great Plains cultural contact was made possible by a hitherto unsuspected thinning out of Plains Indians populations. Certainly in the Mississippi Valley, the mid– to late sixth century saw the total collapse of the old way of life and the old geopolitical arrangements.
The late-sixth-century Mississippi Valley ceramic connection with the Anasazi is particularly intriguing. The changes the Mississippi Valley experienced came at exactly the same time as the Anasazi were being transformed—and with identical long-term consequences: the bow and arrow replaced the spear, finer pottery was developed, settlement numbers began to increase, and the food economy changed with the introduction of large-scale wild-rice gathering. By 700 monumental earth-mound effigies of sacred birds were being built, and by 1000 the first Mississippi Valley towns were being constructed—at virtually the same time that witnessed the first signs of urbanism far to the west in the Anasazi region. Indeed, both areas reached their urban peaks in the thirteenth century A.D., with populations of three thousand and twenty thousand respectively for the largest Anasazi and Mississippian towns.
Thus North America’s two medieval urban cultures north of Mexico had very similar developmental trajectories in technological and chronological terms. Both were born in the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D. but had been conceived in the mid– to late sixth century—the very period that witnessed so much change elsewhere in the world. In other regions of the planet, the changes in the mid– to late sixth century were quite clearly climate-driven in the last analysis. The North American changes probably were, too, but in the absence of any written record, the case there has to remain unproven.
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F R O M A R T T O
O B L I V I O N
Scattered across one of the world’s driest and most barren deserts are the largest works of art on earth. Etched on the desert floor in southern Peru are some 1,300 extraordinary drawings—everything from giant birds (some almost a thousand feet long) and killer whales, to abstract designs resembling the spokes of giant wheels and single straight lines, some of which can be up to thirty miles in length.
Discovered by Peruvian airline pilots back in the 1920s, this complex of vast drawings—spread over nearly two hundred square miles of desert—became, in the popular imagination, one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries. Explanations of their origins and purpose have been almost as numerous as the drawings themselves, and have even included suggestions—from the literary, rather than the archaeological, world—that they were made by aliens from outer space!
There are six main types of drawing: figurative biomorphs (animals, humans, plants, etc.); huge spirals; giant trapezoids; parallel line systems; ray systems; and single straight lines. The available archaeological evidence suggests that nearly all were made between 400 B.C. and A.D. 600 by local people who, up until approximately the time of Christ, are referred to by archaeologists as the Paracas culture and who thereafter are known to the archaeological world as the Nasca culture. Their real names have been long lost in the mists of time.¹
The fifty nonabstract drawings include a 261-foot capuchin monkey with a long curly tail, a 152-foot spider (possibly a black widow), ten humans
, a desert fox, a 1,620-foot lizard, and three killer whales—including one 89-foot specimen holding a severed human head. There are also eighteen birds, including a pelican, a condor, a frigate, two hummingbirds, and a huge 947-foot-long marsh bird.
It is possible that the spirals—around thirty of them—may also be biomorphs. Some archaeologists think that these drawings, which range from 30 to 170 feet in length, could be highly stylized images of seashells, some real examples of which appear to have been featured in ancient Nascan rituals and have been found scattered on the desert floor.
The third category of desert drawing, the so-called trapezoids, are by far the most common. There are around a thousand of these usually long wedge-shaped features. Varying between 65 and 5,300 feet in length and 16 and 200 feet in width, they may have been constructed as symbolic representations of valleys.² A substantially rarer linear feature, parallel lines, can be even longer—up to 1.5 miles in length and yet only around 23 feet wide.
There are approximately a hundred of the so-called ray systems, and because of their vast size and clarity they tend to dominate much of the Nascan landscape—from the air, that is. Each system consists of between five and twenty-five absolutely straight rays, each up to 2.5 miles long. In virtually all cases, the rays converge on little hills up to 65 feet high that stand out from the largely flat desert floor. Again, archaeologists have suggested that the little hills have symbolic topographic significance, this time as proxy mountains.³
By far the largest Nasca drawings are the massive single lines. Totally straight, and anything from 30 feet to 30 miles long, they appear to the modern eye to go from absolutely nowhere to absolutely nowhere! Indeed, they appear to be distributed almost randomly.
The mystery of the Nasca drawings has long puzzled scholars. But embedded within them is evidence that not only can shed light on the purpose of the lines but also can help us discover the ultimate fate of the people who built them.
The drawings were almost certainly seen cumulatively as a sort of cosmic map by the ancient Nasca. Every element symbolically represents either a real feature in the Nascan cosmos or a means of getting to it. The little hills, trapezoids, and animals were proxy representatives of, respectively, real mountains, real valleys, and possibly, totemic ancestors or animal spirits. The straight lines—either on their own or in the ray systems—were dual-purpose “ducts” through the cosmos. In real life they could be used for ritual processions, but in a sense they could also be “flown” along by priests in trance.
Although, of course, none of the ancient Nascan shamans actually ever saw the whole “map” or even bits of it from the air, the shamans would have been able to “fly” along those cosmic ducts in their mind’s eye while under the influence of local hallucinogens.
Shamanism was almost certainly the main form that religious belief took in the Americas in pre-Columbian times. In parts of Peru (the north and the east) it still survives today. The hallucinogenic plant used by modern Peruvian shamans to go into trance, the San Pedro cactus, was almost certainly used by Nascan shamans, as that very cactus is one of the plants that feature as motifs on their pottery.
Throughout parts of Asia and in a few places in the Americas (including eastern Peru) shamanic flying (sometimes known as “soul flight”) is still an important feature of shamanic religious practice. And anthropologists have collected evidence showing that soul flight in some Amerindian cultures is (and presumably was) seen as being conducted along perfectly straight “flight paths.”
The purpose of shamanic flight in Amerindian society today is to maintain contact with long-dead ancestors. Using hallucinogens, the shaman goes into a trance and imagines that his soul (or in some cases also his physical body) is flying through the cosmos from the world of the living to that of the dead, and then back again. In eastern Peru, modern shamans, having actually “seen” the cosmic landscape, have drawn cosmic maps so as to more graphically describe to anthropologists what they have witnessed.
But if ancient Nascan shamans were using the straight desert lines as “flight paths” to reach their long-dead ancestors, we must try to understand why they would wish to do so. The reason lies in the Nascan environment—and in their economy. The terrain is unremittingly dry (less than an inch of water per century in the most arid areas). And the Nascan economy (probably mainly maize cultivation) relied totally upon the water that flowed down from the mountains along ten mainly seasonal river courses. There was no rainfall and there were no natural springs. The water from the Andean peaks, just forty miles away, that flowed down the vital Nascan valleys was the only source of life for the Nasca. Its denial meant famine and death.
Thus it was that shamanic contact with the ancestors or the gods—or both—via soul flight would have been so important. It was a means of direct access to the powers behind their water supply. Interestingly, a much later Inca straight-line ray system was also associated with securing water sources. Dust from the rays was collected and ritually dumped into rivers, which delivered it to the ancestors as a sort of “payment” for water—a form of divine water tax.4
There is evidence that the real-life processions along the Nasca straight lines—which would have retraced the shamanic soul flight journeys—featured the playing of panpipes whose sound specifically represented the sound of running water, according to surviving Peruvian folklore. In recent years, several expeditions actually found ancient panpipes on the lines themselves.5
Furthermore, on the summits of the small hills—the proxy mountains—at the centers of the ray systems, archaeologists have found evidence of religious ritual activity that was almost certainly designed to secure water from the real mountains forty miles to the east.
Just as the Teotihuacan empire of Mexico was ultimately dependent economically, religiously, and politically on water, so were the Nasca tribal chieftaincies. And just as Teotihuacan declined when drought struck, so did Nasca in the face of the same mid-sixth-century global climatic crisis. Evidence obtained from an ice core extracted from Peru’s Quelccaya glacier—just 230 miles east of Nasca—shows that Peru was hit by a massive thirty-year drought that started around 540 and ended around 570 (see Chapter 23).
The exact details of the epic story of how the Nasca waged and ultimately lost their battle to survive will never be known, as the Nasca left no written record. Yet by piecing together the archaeological evidence, it is still possible to reconstruct the probable mechanisms that led to their demise.
Tattooed, resplendent in his great fan-shaped red, blue, and yellow feather headdress, his shoulder-length jet-black hair swirling from side to side, the shaman shuddered and shook to the beat of drums and the rhythmic clatter of rattles.
Trembling, screeching, arms outstretched—as if a bird in flight—the shaman in his mind’s eye flew fast as a condor and straight as a dart over the Nasca wasteland, across his people’s proxy cosmos, to the ancestors and the spirits in the Andean mountains to the east.
His eyes were glazed, and small streams of mucus oozed from his flared nostrils—a side effect of the herbal drugs that had helped send him into trance. His short-sleeved black-and-white knee-length tunic was heavy with pungent sweat, and his great embroidered cape stretched out on either side of him like wings. A dark pink necklace made of seashells bounced rhythmically up and down upon the checkerboard design of his tunic. The great round eyes of a falcon painted on his face began to smudge and run as beads of sweat trickled from his forehead to his mustache and small goatee.
Around him, as dusk began to fall, people chanted and stared and even collapsed on the floor of the great plaza where the shaman had gone into trance. As it began to clip the horizon, the huge orange sphere of the desert sun bathed the scene—and groups of strange “buildings” around the plaza—in a warm red glow.
This was the Nascan capital, a vast city without citizens, a place reserved for priests, pilgrims, and the Nascan equivalent of prayer—soul-flight communication with the next world. Known to m
odern archaeologists as Cahuachi (its original name remains a complete mystery), it had an architectural style that was a bizarre blend of natural and manmade elements. Although the city covers 375 acres, technically it had virtually no true buildings, for almost all the forty structures in Cahuachi (all of them step pyramids) were to an extent never actually built. Instead, they were sculpted out of the living rock and then given further shape through the addition of quantities of mud bricks. The largest had six tiers and were some 50 feet high.
In the plaza, the shaman continued to shake and shudder, arms outstretched in trance. His altered state of consciousness was lasting longer, the crowds were bigger, and the mixture of despair and hope etched on people’s faces was more intense than normal, for on this occasion the shaman’s mission was one of life or death. A great drought had struck the Nasca valleys and brought famine and death in its wake, and the traditional shamanic soul flight journey across the cosmos to secure water was, on that occasion, more crucial than it had ever been before.
The scenes above, or something very like them, probably did occur, although the actual details have had to be re-created from images on Nasca pottery and textiles, from anthropological accounts of the behavior associated with surviving Peruvian shamanic traditions, and from the archaeological evidence that Cahuachi was a city of religious ritual, not of citizens.
