THE VINE APRIL 8, 2008
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George Johnson in The New York Times today takes a look at the ongoing scientific debate surrounding the mysterious 13th-century disappearance of the Anasazi culture around the Four Corners. The consensus has long been that the Anasazi were done in primarily by the severe drought that gripped the Southwest in the late 1200s. Johnson notes, though, that the environmental-determinism argument has come under increasing fire and that lately archaeologists are sounding more like Mark Steyn than Jared Diamond. They emphasize that Anasazi settlements may have come under stress as a result of immigration (why didn't they just build a fence?), and subsequently lost confidence in their long-established ideological culture:
By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. ...
Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues
that it rapidly attracted adherents. ... Excavations
indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture.
An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the
west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the
residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.Other
archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion--the
forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive
on the Hopi and Zuni reservations--appearing in the south and
attracting the rebellious northerners.
The drought likely ended any hope the Anasazi had of a revival, though. Perhaps the lesson is that environmentalists and civilizational declinists should join forces to make sure we don't suffer the same fate.
--Josh Patashnik
5 comments
Hmmm, let's examine the historical parallels: environmental stresses, at least some of them self-inflicted, and a population that increasingly adopts a form of fundamentalist mumbo-jumbo as its chief guide to policy.
Speculative, to be sure, but this sounds a lot like this year's Republican primary season. Maybe we can introduce canibalism at the convention this summer.
- gwcross
April 8, 2008 at 1:26pm
How exactly is this not Jared Diamond? I see nothing in this theory that contradicts gun, germs, and steel. His environmental determinism is not contradicted here in the slightest, and it is curious how the immigrants came from the wetter west. Would this cause stress or more likely create opportunities?
- blackton
April 8, 2008 at 2:56pm
The last few paragraphs of that article completely align with what Jared Diamond outlined in Guns Germs and Steel.
What this article does allude to but doesn't say so is that in certain parts of the world, including here in the U.S. the cultural stubbornness to deny that the environment is changing, both of its own accord and by human impact. What the religious theory does is not refute the impacts of environment on the migration and demise of the Anasazi but underscores a very universal trait of humanity in that we always look outside ourselves to solve the problems that we don't understand and the first "tool" is a new religion or religious fervor that 'explains' why crops are drying up, why growing seasons are shorter, why droughts are lasting longer, coupled with the growing complexity of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle afforded by growing agricultural techniques to supplement the hunter-gatherer traditions.
The key part of that article is this:
"...As Anasazi society became more complex, it also became more fragile.
Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.
When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they had become more dependent on each other.
“You can’t easily peel off a lineage here and a lineage there and have them go their own way,” Dr. Kohler said. “These parts are no longer redundant. They’re part of an integrated whole.” Pull one thread and the whole culture unwinds.
Amid the swirl of competing explanations, one thing is clear: The pueblo people didn’t just dry up and blow away like so much parched corn. They restructured their societies, tried to adapt and when all else failed they moved on."
Environmental determinism is derided by some because they have this unfailing belief that humans adapt and are too 'smart' to just sit there and wait for things to get bad. The reality is we do wait until something goes bad and react afterwards. It's the inherent stubbornness in humans to deny that some problems we exacerbate ourselves and also because of the cultural investment in a particular place even when it cannot sustain us anymore.
Here's an interesting article about how Phoenix is repeating the same path the Hohokam did regarding canal and irrigation pathways but couple that with exploding growth patterns that stress an already fragile desert environment with persistent water shortages and salination of soils and run off that multiply the issues of environmental stress that no amount of human ingenuity can overcome if we maintain status quo standards of low density sprawl, non-arid living practices, etc. all add up to issues that couple and feed into the complexity of how we maintain a certain quality of life for a finite number of people with the smallest impact on the environment as possible.
- singlespeed
April 8, 2008 at 3:33pm
Opps...Forgot the article link...
www.hcn.org/.../hcn.Article
- singlespeed
April 8, 2008 at 3:33pm
Some recent archaeological research....resisted strongly by current Hopi...suggests a good deal of cannibalism in the Anasazi culture. This is not really surprising...this was standard religious practice among most of the Meso-American cultures. Cannibalism, however, is almost bizarrely inefficient as a way to make a living, or even as a hobby: too many casualties, not enough protein, lots of enemies waiting for you to run out of firepower. You'd better be really rich and have a really overwhelming amount of firepower to carry this off (as, of course, the Aztec and Maya did). However, an such a society is inherently under a lot of stress; not surprising that it broke. How many conquistadors did it take to conquer Mexico?
BTW: Dean Ing wrote one hell of a scary short novel suggesting that aliens did it.
- AlanK
April 8, 2008 at 3:35pm