by David Keys
From the Nihon shoki.
This murder is described in the Nihon shoki, volume 2, xxi, 5 and 6.
This was in fact a very rare event, for women seldom sat on the Japanese throne.
CHAPTER 23
Much of the survey data was published in The Basin of Mexico, by W. Sanders, J. Parsons, and R. Santley, Academic Press, 1979.
There is some academic debate as to whether Quetzalcoatl was a full-fledged deity or simply a divine symbol of fertility, immortality, wealth, and power.
Quoted on page 90 of Mexico, by Michael Coe, Thames and Hudson, 1962.
Article by Curtis et al. in the journal Quaternary Research, volume 46, pages 37–47.
Article by Hodell et al. in Nature, volume 375, 1995, pages 391–394.
The new Rio-Cisne data has been gathered over the past two years by the tree-ring laboratory in Mendoza, Argentina. The Lenca material was published by A. Lara and R. Villalba in an article on pages 1104–1106 of volume 260 of Science.
Now renamed the Byrd Polar Research Center.
Bulletin of the Gold Museum, Bogotá, 1988, article by Plazas et al.
Erdkunde, volume 46, 1992, pages 252–256, article by T. Van der Hamman and A. M. Cleef.
Academics have redated the end of Teotihuacan as a result of recent ceramic studies, supported by some radiocarbon dates (usually plus or minus 50 years or so), and to a much lesser extent by some dates produced by an even less exact system known as obsidian hydration dating. The evidence for the carbon 14 and obsidian hydration dates is published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica (number 7, autumn, 1996) in an article by Linda Manzanilla, Claudia Lopez, and AnnCorinne Freter titled “Dating Results from Excavations in Quarry Tunnels behind the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.” An American pre-Columbianist, George Cowgill, published data that suggests that the fall of Teotihuacan took place around 600, give or take several decades. The key information is in a chronological chart in an article in The Annual Review of Anthropology, 1997.
Several dozen different hieroglyphic symbols have been discovered so far at Teotihuacan, but up till now, none of these have ever been found strung together to make sentences. Three is the maximum that have been discovered in a group. The glyphs are always related to religious matters and very briefly describe the qualities of deities or the nature of a particular ritual.
The data obtained from these 150 skeletons is published in Rebecca Storey’s Life and Death in the Ancient City of Teotihuacan, published by the University of Alabama Press, 1992.
This was first proposed by Rene Millon in “The Last Years of Teotihuacan,” a chapter in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilisations, edited by Norman Yoffe and George Cowgill, 1988. It has by far the best description (to which I am indebted) of the violent end of Teotihuacan. However, although the fall of Teotihuacan was a predominantly drought- and famine-driven internal affair, other peoples in climatically vulnerable parts of Mesoamerica were of course also affected by the drought. Among these other peoples was almost certainly a group of nomads referred to by archaeologists as the Coyatlatelco. They lived in the region 50–100 miles to the north of Teotihuacan and migrated toward the great city, probably as a result of the drought. Although they were not responsible for the fall of Teotihuacan, their presence in the Teotihuacan area no doubt complicated the political and cultural situation and helped in destabilizing the status quo.
The excavations were carried out in 1980–82 by the Mexican archaeologists Anna Maria Jaraquin and Enrique Martinez.
At Coatlinchan, near the city of Texcoco.
The idol now stands in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
CHAPTER 24
Sky Witness is the name given to the ruler of Calakmul by modern scholars, because his name features the Maya glyphs for “sky” and “eye.” Back in the sixth century he may well therefore have been called something like “Sky Eye” or “Watcher of the Sky.” Animal Skull is the name given by modern scholars to the puppet ruler Sky Witness put on the throne in Tikal. The hieroglyphic signs making up his name have been only partially translated. One translates as “Great Sun,” while the other consists of the head of a reptile. His real name may well therefore have been something like “Great Sun Reptile Head.”
Double Bird is the name awarded this ruler by modern scholars. Much of his real name is unknown, because the glyph comprising its second part is damaged. However, his name appears to have begun with the words “Great Sun.”
For guidance regarding Maya dates in this chapter, I am indebted to the British Maya epigrapher Simon Martin.
CHAPTER 26
These dates have been deduced by archaeologists by surveying surface pottery types and frequencies, making iconographic comparisons, and utilizing several scientific dating techniques.
An idea proposed by the British pre-Columbianist David Browne.
David Browne.
Described in Nueva Cronica y Buen Gobierno, written in c. 1600 by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and published in 1987 in Madrid in Historia 16, Cronicas de America, volume 29.
Including David Browne’s expedition, 1989.
Directed by David Browne.
Carried out by the U.S. anthropologist John Verano.
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Carried out by Steve Bourget, University of East Anglia, England.
This “flood-to-sand-dunes” mechanism to explain aspects of Moche decline was first proposed by archaeologist Michael Mosley and is outlined in his book The Incas and Their Ancestors, published by Thames and Hudson, 1992.
Traditionally, the coastal-plain economy had long been based on irrigation, agriculture, and fishing—and had involved the construction of urban centers with monumental architecture. This contrasted with the mountainous interior with its predominantly agro-pastoral alpaca- and llama-herding economy.
The political fragmentation of the Moche civilization seems to have occurred as a result of the sixth-century climatic crisis. Some time—perhaps many decades—after that fragmentation had started, highland peoples, especially the Huari, seem to have taken advantage of the situation to increase their influence on the coastal plain, thus completing the process of geopolitical change.
At some late provincial Moche sites (but not at Moche itself) ceramic art ultimately changed and became far more color-oriented. The iconography changed, too, and began to include a deity holding a staff and wearing a rayed headdress. Settlement patterns shifted and burial practices altered dramatically (from extended to highly flexed, fetal-style positions for corpses). Certainly the more multicolored style of ceramic decoration and the introduction of the staffed deity suggest influence from an Andean highland state called Huari. The burial practice change may also have betrayed Huari influence, or may merely indicate that traditional Moche burial customs were disappearing and being replaced with a tradition that had already been common elsewhere in Peru (including Huari) for many centuries.
Galindo and Pampa Grande both appear to have been established during the great sixth-century drought—and their construction was probably the response to it. They were both built on sites with easy access to good water supplies, a fact that suggests that populations were being forced by the drought to move to such locations.
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Archaeologists are divided as to the nature of the Huari state. Some see it as an empire, or, at the very least, a state exercising political control over a wider area beyond its borders. Others see it as a significant, but smaller, polity that exercised cultural and probably some political influence over that same wider territory.
CHAPTER 29
This was its name before the Inca conquest, according to a Spanish cleric, Bernabe Cobo, writing in 1653. Although it means “stone in the center” in the local Aymara language, it is obviously not possible to know for sure what the Tiwanakans themselves called the city because, first, there are no written records and second, it is not known whether they spoke Aymara. The “stone in the center” concept is
discussed by Mexican archaeologist Linda Manzanilla in Akapana: Una Piramide en el Centro del Mundo, UNAM, Mexico, 1992.
San Pedro de Atacama in Chile in c. A.D. 300 and Nino Corin on the eastern slopes of the Andes in the Bolivian province of Charasani in c. 375, according to Ethnological Studies 32, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1972.
These features are described by Mexican archaeologist Linda Manzanilla in Akapana: Una Piramide en el Centro del Mundo, and by Alan Kolata in his book, Tiwanaku: Portrait of an Andean Civilization.
According to Alan Kolata, The Tiwanaku.
Article by H. J. Carney et al. in Nature, 364-6433, 1993, pages 131–133.
D. D. Biesboer’s unpublished data are referred to in Quaternary Research, 47, 1997, page 237; an article by D. D. Biesboer et al. in Bio Tropica, 1998.
Doctoral dissertation by Sanchez de Lozada, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1996.
Alan Kolata, The Tiwanaku: Portrait of an Andean Civilization, page 185.
Kolata, The Tiwanaku, page 187.
Kolata, The Tiwanaku, page 194.
Kolata, The Tiwanaku, pages 189–190.
Known today as the Kalasasaya, it is the complex in which the famous great monolithic Gateway of the Sun and the impressive Ponce Stela statue are located.
Suggested by Alan Kolata in The Tiwanaku.
Kolata, The Tiwanaku.
The valleys of the Tambo, Moquegua, Lucumba, Sama, Caplina, Azapa, Lluta, Camarones, and Loa.
Doctoral dissertation by Martin Giesso, University of Chicago, 1999.
Fitzroya conifers.
CHAPTER 30
Text of John of Ephesus as recorded in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, 9, 296, translated by Chabot and quoted in an article titled “Volcanic Eruptions in the Mediterranean Before A.D. 630 from Written and Archaeological Sources,” by R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino, Journal of Geophysical Research 88, 1983, pages 6357–6371.
Procopius, Wars, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard, 4, 14.5 (H. B. Dewing).
All the figures in this chapter pertaining to asteroids and comets were calculated specially for this book by the astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen’s University, Belfast.
Because of their irregular shape, the half-mile measurement refers to the notional diameter of a spherical object with the same mass and density.
The data from this ice-core operation—the Byrd core—is published in “50,000 Years of Recorded Global Volcanism,” by C. U. Hammer, H. B. Clausen, and C. C. Langway, in the journal Climatic Change, volume 35, 1997.
Although a volcanic eruption (or possibly two eruptions) almost certainly triggered the climatic problems of the mid–sixth century, tree-ring and ice-core evidence suggest that there were additional background reasons that made the crisis worse and longer lasting. First, the 535 volcanic event occurred during a longer cold period—at least as far as Northern Hemisphere high latitudes were concerned. Tree-ring evidence from Scandinavia and Russia suggests that at least in these higher latitudes it occurred during the second longest cold spell of the past 2,000 years. Thus the 535 volcanic event seems to have pushed a poor climatic situation into becoming a disastrous one. But not only did a volcanic event transform a potentially normal cold period into a climatic catastrophe, it may also have helped create or at least lengthen the cold spell itself. It is perhaps significant that the two longest-lasting Northern Hemisphere high-latitude cold periods of the past 2,000 years contain within them two of the three most volcanically active periods of the past two millennia. Indeed, the sixth century is the only period of the past 2,000 years for which the GRIP and Dye 3 Greenland ice cores both display evidence for record numbers of volcanic eruptions. The GRIP core for the sixth century records four eruptions (yielding 5.8 years’ worth of high volcanic acid precipitation). The nearest rival in that core in terms of the number of volcanic events is the seventeenth century with 5.6 years of high acid precipitation. In the Dye 3 core there are five volcanic acid precipitation events (totaling 6.5 years of high acid precipitation). The nearest rival to that, in terms of number of events in that core, is in the fifteenth century (totaling 5.9 years’ worth of high acid precipitation). The ice-core information above is derived from data published in an article by H. Clausen et al. in the Journal of Geophysical Research, volume 102, no. C12, 1997, pages 26,707–26,723.
CHAPTER 31
This manuscript is housed in the Sasana Pustaka Library of the Karaton (Royal Palace) in Surakarta (central Java). The passages quoted in the last few paragraphs were translated from the Javanese into English for this book by an American scholar of Javanese literature, Nancy Florida of the University of Michigan.
Translated from the Javanese original by a Dutchman, Mr. C. Baumgarten of Batavia (modern Jakarta), whose account was then quoted in a letter written by Professor Judd of the London-based Royal Society to the scientific journal Nature and published in that journal on 15 August 1889.
The name Ranggawarsita, loosely translated, means “teacher of senior courtly rank.” He lived from 1802 to 1873.
Information derived from discussions with volcanologist Ken Wohletz of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
CHAPTER 32
See page 366 and note below.
The remains of just such a massive pyroclastic flow at Krakatoa were examined in early 1999 by the Icelandic volcanologist Professor Haraldur Sigurdsson of the University of Rhode Island. His expedition there was financed by U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 Television in order to gather evidence for the Channel 4 documentary on this book (first broadcast in the U.K. July 27 and August 3, 1999). The calibrated C14 dates and stratigraphic evidence obtained during that expedition combine to suggest a first millenium A.D. date for the eruption that produced that pyroclastic flow. The C14 dates (A.D. 1215–1300 and 6600 B.C. respectively) were obtained from charcoal samples from (a) the strata immediately above and (b) the fifth strata beneath the remains of the pyroclastic flow. Although theoretically this could date the flow at anything betwen 6600 B.C. and A.D. 1300, the stratigraphy (i.e., the five stratae beneath the event) strongly suggests a date much nearer to the thirteenth-century A.D. than to 6600 B.C. The A.D. 1–1200 period is probably the most likely time frame during which this eruption of Krakatoa took place, even if one only takes the C14 and stratigraphic evidence into account. This new data is therefore consistent with the historical and other evidence.
Up until now, most geologists have assumed that the seaway between Java and Sumatra, the Sunda Straits, had been formed exclusively by tectonic action—i.e, by very gradual changes in land level over millions of years. However, research for this book carried out by volcanologist Alain Gourgaud of the University of Blaise Pascal, Clermont Ferrand, France, has revealed that it is at least theoretically possible that the straits were fully or partially created by a massive volcanic caldera collapse. Mr. Gourgaud, who has studied the remnants of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption in the field and the underwater (bathemetric) charts of the straits, has concluded that there have been massive caldera collapses there in the past. He proposes three possible sites in the straits for ancient calderas, with approximate diameters of around 35 miles, 20 miles, and 30 miles, respectively.
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Centered in Pozzuoli near Naples.
Quite apart from the massive eruptions that will most certainly occur at some stage in the future at each of these locations, smaller eruptions will also take place—but much more frequently.
The latter calibrated age is derived from a new series of high-precision dates obtained from radiocarbon tests carried out at Queen’s University, Belfast, but not yet published.
Includes repeat attempts.
In its recent publication, World Disasters Report 1999, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies suggests that current climate change may be responsible for an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. Global warming may now be “responsible for harsher and more frequent El Niño/La Niña phenomena” a
nd for “more hurricanes, more droughts and more floods,” says the report.
“While climate change is regarded as a gradual phenomenon, it will largely manifest itself in the changing frequency of extreme meteorological events—unexpected droughts and floods, record heat waves and snowstorms—that will trigger human disasters.”
The report suggests that El Niños have become “more intense and frequent in the past twenty years” and that there is “some evidence to suggest that this may be a consequence” of current climate change.
The sixth-century data (see pages 218–219 of this book) certainly confirms that acute climate change seems to trigger increased El Niño frequency.
El Niños and other extreme weather events have been affecting much of the world.
The year 1998 was a record year for recorded climate disasters. Nine typhoons killed 500 and affected 5 million in the Philippines, floods killed 4,150 and affected 180 million people in China; killed 400 and affected almost 200,000 in Korea; killed 1,000 and affected 25,000 in Pakistan; killed 1,400 and affected almost 340,000 in India; killed 25 and affected 12,000 in Romania; killed 55 and affected 11,000 in Slovakia; killed 20 and affected 360,000 in Argentina. Monsoon rains and tropical cyclones killed 1,300 and affected 31 million in Bangladesh (140,000 had died just seven years earlier). An exceptionally heavy monsoon killed 3,250 and affected 36 million in northern India and Nepal; and two hurricanes killed a total of 14,000 and affected around 7 million people in the Caribbean and Central American region. In late 1997 and 1998, floods made 500,000 people homeless in Peru. Ecuador was also severely hit. Droughts triggered by El Niño caused huge forest fires in Brazil (37,000 square kilometers destroyed), Peru, Florida, Sardinia, Indonesia, China, Kazakhstan, and Australia. Five million hectares burned in Borneo and Sumatra. Air pollution worsened dramatically—and 40,000 Indonesians had to be treated at hospitals for smoke inhalation, says the Red Cross. Overall, 70,000 people were affected. In Tibet hundreds froze to death in the worst snowstorm for half a century. Economic losses due to climate disasters in 1998 were also massive—$16 billion in Central America/Caribbean, $2.5 billion in Argentina, $868 million in Korea, $223 million in Bangladesh, and $150 million in Romania.
