As modern officials try to assess the risk global warming might present to the American Southwest, they’re paying a lot of attention to what scientists say about how climate changes affected the region’s ancient past.
Archaeologist Kristen Kuckelman has spent many years digging in the ruins of ancient farming villages on the Colorado Plateau and analyzing the artifacts and specimens she takes from them.
The people who lived in these ancient villages, which are known as pueblos, were part of a large culture that thrived for several hundred years in the high desert plain that covers parts of modern Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona. Archaeologists call them Anasazi, or Ancient Pueblo People. One of the best known of their pueblos is in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.
My wife did her honours thesis on how the Anasazi fed themselves. The answer is “poorly.” Even with the unusually favorable climate that enabled population booms and major cultural advances in both North America and Europe at the time of the High Middle Ages, the Southwest was a very fragile environment that could not provide more than marginal nutrition. The large population centers such as Mesa Verde and particularly Chaco Canyon had to import food. When the climate changed as part of the same global phenomenon that nearly cratered European civilization in the fourteenth century, there was not enough food to go around. The social disruption caused by the drought led to the collapse of the Southwestern trade network, aggravating the famine and forcing the abandonment of the major Anasazi sites as their residents moved to areas with more reliable water (and eventually to the Pueblos we see today in New Mexico and Arizona). Another post today shows how fragile civilization has remained–a wet year in 1789 led to high grain prices, famine, and the French Revolution. We are fooling ourselves if we think we are much less vulnerable to the effects of global climate.
Which goes to prove: climate change is cyclical. Receeding glaciers in Switzerland are revealing remains of human civilization existing before the glaciers moved in and took over; ice core samples in Antarctica show tropical plant remains; etc.
It’s happened before, it’s happening now, it will happen in the future. We are NOT causing it, we cannot stop it.
that’s not to say we are not affecting our ENVIRONMENT, which we can regulate, but let’s stop this nonsense of ‘global warming is human caused’ with radical restrictions on things that will have no effect, and focus on what we can realistically do with our resources to make our life better for US and for our children:
better agricultural techniques in developing countries
better water and air quality standards
cheaper methods of harnessing renewable energy
etc.
libraryjim, I concur wholeheartedly! (I just read your comments to my husband and he said, “now there’s a reasonable person!”)
#1- Wait a minute. Today we ARE less vulnerable to the effects of climate than were the Anasazi, who couldn’t sit in their air-conditioned living rooms, pick up their cell phones & order pizzas.
Not that we would be immune to the effects of a prolonged, widespread drought. This would be much harder to cope with than warming per se.
Thanks for the kind words, “Sheepdog”!
Dale, as your wife did her thesis on this culture and age, perhaps she knows if the migration of other groups of native peoples, i.e. Apache, Yaqui & Navajo, had an impact on the Peublo folk as they moved into and through the desert SW?
I have a hunch that they may have.