The Great Warming

by Brian Fagan

  Tikal’s water system was huge and complex, a startling contrast to the much less elaborate water systems that sustained small communities. Most villages survived the dry season by using shallow water tanks close to the settlement that held enough water to carry the farmers through one dry season, perhaps a few months more. But Tikal’s vast reservoirs held enough water to reduce the vulnerability of its residents in dramatic ways. Two or three years of little or no rain would not cause problems for Tikal’s water managers, though such a long drought would have drastic consequences for the small villages that held most of the dispersed Maya population. But even Tikal’s water system was inadequate for sustained, multiyear droughts.

  THE HUSHED CROWD in the plaza gazes upward to the temple at the summit of the pyramid. Flickering torches cast deep shadows in the gloom of dawn. Incense smoke drifts across the slopes of the sacred mountain. High above the mob, serried rows of white-clad nobles surround the dark entrance to the shrine. Suddenly, the great lord appears, his hair long, tied above his head with brightly colored feathers that cascade down his back. He is bare-chested, wearing a brilliantly white loincloth, his legs and wrists adorned with deep, blue-green jade beads. A noble in a white cape lays a broad clay bowl holding unmarked paper and a stingray spine before him. The lord squats, pierces the loose flesh of his penis three times, and threads paper strips through the wounds. The tan paper turns bright red as the lord dances himself into a frenzied trance, holding a symbol of the double-headed serpent that symbolizes the path of communication with the gods. Conch shell trumpets sound; a god has been summoned from the Otherworld. The crowds milling in the plaza sway in ecstasy as the drums beat. Brightly dressed nobles dance on a terrace below the lord. The devout gash themselves and spill blood onto cloth bands on their arms and legs.11

  Great Maya lords proclaimed themselves divine rulers, related by carefully crafted genealogies to prominent ancestors and the gods themselves.12 Kingship and the world that defined Maya civilization were closely tied to the experience of the humble villager. Rulers molded their power, and the symbols of that power, from the plants and animals of the forest, from the ancient rhythms of planting and harvest, from the alternation of the dry and rainy seasons. Like their subjects, they looked at the world in the context of things both spiritual and human, ancestral and contemporary, and in the context of realms that were those of lords or of commoners. The bloodletting, the trances, the elaborate ceremonies that surrounded the accession and death of kings, were an integral part of a society that gave lords the right to control the water supplies that came from heaven. And water mountains were the conduits that brought water from the spiritual realm to the earth.

  The Tikal water mountain with its reservoirs and tanks allowed its rulers to control water supplies for large numbers of people at lower elevations. Maya lords promoted themselves as divine leaders with powerful supernatural abilities. But their real power came from their control of key resources such as water, and from the reality that many of their subjects lived in engineered landscapes. Maya life revolved around the seasons of planting, growth, and harvest, each with its ceremonial associations, so water rituals were an essential part of the fabric of daily Maya existence. At Tikal and other cities, the lords manipulated water not through authoritarian rule, but by using ritual to direct and appropriate the labor needed to excavate and operate the system. It was no coincidence that their water mountains were settings for elaborate public ceremonies.

  We know little of these rituals, but we do know that two metaphors defined death for the Maya nobility. One was a fall into a watery underworld, often into the open jaw of an earth monster—a chasm in the surface of the earth. Another was a journey by canoe into the endless waters below the earth. Both metaphors linked lords to water, to the mirrorlike surfaces of the teeming reservoirs that lay close to their pyramid burial places. Whether one lived near a major center or in a remote village with its own water tanks, survival ultimately depended on the sustainability of the large cities—the water mountains. During periods of prolonged drought, farmers from outlying areas would migrate to the edges of the great cities, to the feet of the artificial mountains that were the anchors of Maya water supplies.

  AS MAYA LORDS developed their enormous reservoirs, so the predictability of water supplies increased—up to a point. But the only source of their water was rainfall. Unlike societies that could draw a relatively constant supply of water from rivers or subterranean aquifers, the Maya, for all their engineering prowess, were highly vulnerable to short-term discontinuities of climate.

  They lived in an environment of constant disruptions—years of drought and crop failure, torrential rains and soil erosion, unexpected storms that drowned their crops. They farmed with the simplest of methods, but with a comprehensive knowledge of their forest environment. Like other tropical farmers, they used slash-and-burn methods, cutting down a patch of forest, burning the wood and brush, then working the natural fertilizer of ash and charcoal into the soil. They would plant with the first rains, use the garden for two years, then abandon it, as the soil lost its fertility rapidly. These milpa plots were a patchwork of newly cleared and regenerating land, surrounded by thick forest that vanished progressively in the face of rising populations over the centuries. Cultivating these lands required great experience and infinite patience, for pelting rain and intense tropical sunlight soon hardened the soil. But the lowlands are far from uniform. Fortunately, the Maya lived in a diverse environment, where they could also practice other forms of agriculture. In swampy areas, they built raised-field systems, with narrow rectangular plots raised above swamps or seasonally inundated lands bordering rivers. These productive fields could yield several crops of beans and maize a year. The farmers also terraced steep hillsides, the stone-faced terraces trapping silt that would cascade downslope during torrential downpours.

  Whatever farming methods they used, the Maya were brilliant agriculturalists. They grew a wide variety of crops, suited to a wide diversity of microenvironments, and selected arable land with the utmost care. Everything was a mosaic—of highly productive swamps and raised fields, milpa plots, and terraced hillsides. The Maya managed and manipulated their environment over the centuries, always living in dispersed communities, even close to major centers, for the realities of their homeland would never support large concentrations of people living in one spot. But the population was denser than it appeared. In parts of the southern lowlands, population densities rose as high as 600 per square mile (2.6 square kilometers) over an area so large that people could not move away from their local environments if drought or other disasters came along. The landscape filled up. As urban populations rose, so the Maya ate up their land, at a time when the farmers were supporting a growing nobility and increasing numbers of nonfarmers.

  Maya civilization was never a centralized state like that of the pharaohs or the Babylonians. The decipherment of Maya glyphs during the 1970s, one of the great scientific triumphs of the twentieth century, revealed a landscape of frantically competing city-states governed by ambitious and rapacious lords obsessed with genealogy, warfare, and personal advancement. Tikal, for example, rose to prominence in the first century B.C. By A.D. 219, the lord Xac-Moch-Xoc had founded a brilliant ruling dynasty that conquered its nearest neighbor, Uaxactún. Three centuries later, the dynasty presided over a territory of 965 square miles (2,500 square kilometers). The city was but one of many centers vying for power in a volatile, ever-changing world. Alliances were forged and would then fall apart as a lordly partner died. Rulers would conquer their neighbors, sacrifice their leaders, and cement a new relationship with a timely diplomatic marriage. But, ultimately, this entire landscape of political wheeling and dealing, of warfare, elaborate ritual, and kingship, depended on water from the heavens. When the now well-documented Medieval Warm Period droughts descended on the lowlands, they eroded the foundation of Maya civilization.

  WERE THE DROUGHTS enough to cause the collapse of Maya civil
ization?13 Each planting season, the farmers gambled with their crops, setting seed in the ground with the first rains, then waiting for later storms to moisten the drying soil. Some years the rain would fall. In others, weeks would pass with mounting clouds on the horizon, but no showers except for a few heavy drops. Rain would fall a few miles away, but the dark cloud would bypass other villages. In hundreds of small hamlets and tiny farming communities, people lived from harvest to harvest, just as they did in distant medieval Europe. Everyone experienced episodes of hunger during their lifetimes. To what extent the lords redistributed food to hungry communities as part of their rituals, we do not know.

  In the early centuries of Maya civilization, there was a natural cushion of wild foods that one could rely upon in dry years. But rural populations rose inexorably, and in many places stressed the carrying capacity of the forest; now people ate up the land as they cleared more brush and trees, exposing fragile soils to the harsh sun. The primordial forest vanished, replaced by regenerated growth. Fewer and fewer wild resources remained as famine foods in dry years. The margin between plenty and hunger, between good harvest and poor, narrowed significantly between the seventh and ninth centuries.

  The population growth came during generations when the number of nonfarmers increased, when more and more people aspired to the nobility. Increasing numbers of high officials, traders, and priests now claimed ancestry from noble lineages. Maya society became top-heavy with nobility, with non–food producers, with people keenly aware of the privileges that came with rank.14 The demands on commoners, on rural farmers, in terms of food and tribute, increased steadily from generation to generation. As the rural population ate up the land, deforestation accelerated and agricultural yields reached their limits. Meanwhile, the elite were largely divorced from the harsh realities of aridity and hunger that would descend on their homeland during multiyear droughts.

  Even at the distance of more than a millennium, we can see the demise of Maya civilization in the southern lowlands playing out like a Greek tragedy. The droughts begin in the early ninth century, at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period. After a year or two, villagers are hungry, but still subject to inexorable demands for food and tribute. The water mountains, for example Tikal and another great city, Copán, with its nearby river, still have adequate water reserves, but these reserves are diminishing. The public ceremonies linking great rulers to the smooth mirror of primordial waters still unfold. In this sense, the lords are active participants in the shaping of history, for they bring their own historical consciousness to bear and respond to drought as they always have, by distributing food and appeasing the forces of evil, by ritual, strategic alliances with former enemies, and by warfare. But the drought continues: the reservoirs begin to run dry.

  For generations, the people have considered their lords, the descendants of divine ancestors, to be infallible guardians of the harvest, of Maya life. But now they have feet of clay, are powerless in the face of mocking, cloudless skies, and unrelenting heat. Tikal and Copán and the other cities like them fall apart.15 Social disorder erupts in the face of persistent hunger and water shortages. The commoners rise in protest against the bloated nobility; they desert their leaders and scatter through the countryside, leaving mere handfuls of survivors, some the descendants of great lords, still squatting among the ruins.

  An apocalyptic scenario, perhaps, but entirely plausible, given the vulnerability of Maya civilization to multiyear droughts, of the kind now known from climatological records. The droughts themselves did not destroy Maya civilization, but the economic, political, and social consequences of arid years certainly did. By the late tenth century, the great cities of the Petén and southern Yucatán had imploded as their inhabitants scattered in the face of hunger and chronic water shortages. As had happened thousands of years before in Mesopotamia and along the Nile, drought and famine brought social unrest, rebellion, and the collapse of rigid social orders that were based on doctrines of lordly infallibility.

  Of course the fall of Maya civilization was more complicated than this, for intricate political and social factors came into play. In some places, the elite continued to wage war as they had always done, even at a time when civilization was collapsing around them. The archaeologist Arthur Demarest has spent five years excavating six Maya sites, among them a heavily fortified center, Dos Pilas in the Petexbatun area of northern Guatemala.16 He believes that the raiding form of warfare favored by Maya lords in earlier times gave way to all-out civil war in this area during the eighth century. The center’s rulers became ever more aggressive and conquered their neighbors. Eventually the kingdom became so large that it fragmented into smaller warring chiefdoms, each with its own fortified center. Inevitably, this activity and endemic warfare had adverse effects on the delicate jungle ecology. Dos Pilas has miles of trenches and moats. Demarest’s excavators have found numerous spearheads at the foot of the walls, caches of decapitated skulls, and postholes that mark now vanished palisades and towers. He believes that the effects of all-out war were disastrous, as the violence forced changes in farming methods, causing soil depletion and then widespread crop failure. Concentrated agriculture in strategic locales simply did not work in the Maya environment, especially at a time when multiyear droughts were stressing the already overtaxed water systems. In the end, a nobility obsessed with warfare hastened the demise of one of the Americas’ most dynamic and innovative civilizations.

  AFTER ABOUT 1100, climatic conditions became more humid, but Maya civilization in the southern lowlands never recovered. In the northern Yucatán, large cities and centers continued to flourish, thanks, in large part, to natural sinkholes, cenotes, in the limestone that allowed people to reach the water table. Maya civilization endured, albeit on a reduced scale, until Hernan Cortés and his Spanish conquistadors arrived over the eastern horizon in 1519. But what would have happened if more cyclical, multiyear droughts had afflicted the Maya lowlands? What if warming had continued and the water table had dropped so that the cenotes dried up? Inevitably, there would have been another implosion, this time of cities and kingdoms in the northern parts of the Maya world, where people, once again, would have adopted the only defense available to them: dispersal into small, largely self-sufficient communities. Would, then, have Cortés and his motley band of adventurers ever marched to the heart of Aztec civilization in the highlands? In a different, semiarid environment, would Aztec civilization ever have come into being, founded as it was on conquest, tribute, and an agricultural base of swamp gardens that depended on the swampy lands of the Basin of Mexico? The historical possibilities are intriguing.

  The implosion of lowland Maya civilization is a sobering reminder of what can happen when human societies subsist off unpredictable water sources, and, through their efforts, put more demands on the water supply than it can sustain. They may build water mountains or hundreds of acres of irrigation canals, but, in the final analysis, they are powerless against the forces of drought, flood, and El Niños, especially when their rulers are oblivious or indifferent to the suffering of those who feed them. The analogies to modern-day California, with its aqueducts for water-hungry Los Angeles, or to cities such as Tucson, Arizona, with its shrinking aquifers and falling water table, are irresistible.

  Below the equator, the warm centuries and their epochal droughts also brought powerful climatic shocks.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Lords of Chimor

  The bodies of the kings and lords were venerated by the people as a whole, and not just by their descendants, because they were convinced . . . that in heaven their souls played a great role in helping the people and looking after their needs.

  —Father Bernabé Cobo, Historia general de las

  Indias (1653)1

  MOCHE VALLEY, COASTAL PERU, A.D. 1200. The gloom hovers low over the cliffs, the Pacific calm and oily smooth in the early morning. Fog has lingered for weeks, ebbing and flowing with the daylight. Just the regular beat of the ocean surf
resonates over the low-lying shore, where the reed-matting shelters of the fisherfolk huddle close to the sand. Campfires flicker in the gray; cloaked figures move in and out of the shadows. Piles of reed canoes lie along the beach, well clear of high tide, drying after a few days of use. At the edge of the breakers, young men launch one of the canoes through the crashing swell, leaping nimbly aboard as the curved bows rise to a steep wave. They laugh as they paddle close offshore, watching the seabirds soar and weave overhead. Soon they bear to the left, toward a spot where gulls dive steeply into rippling water alive with hundreds of small fish. The birds shriek and move elsewhere as the men cast light fiber nets and baskets into the teeming mass of anchovies. Quickly, they scoop the hungry fish aboard until their laden canoe floats deep in the water. Then they paddle for the beach, shooting the waves with effortless bravado, landing smoothly on the sand. Waiting men and women lift the reed boat and carry it above the high-tide line. Quickly, they offload the silvery cargo. The young skipper immediately heads out for another load, while the people ashore begin the process of drying and grinding the anchovies into meal.

  Sixty miles (100 kilometers) inshore, fish meal from the coast makes its way inland, wrapped in cloth bundles that are carefully balanced on the backs of a llama caravan. The animals follow a well-maintained road along the fertile river valley, where patches of green maize in carefully tended fields stand out against the buff-colored desert. The llama have traveled for days, from high in the Andes to the coast, bringing oca, potatoes, ullucu, and other carbohydrate-rich foods from the mountains.2 Now they are on the return journey with fish meal and dried seaweed, the latter used to combat the goiter that plagues highland farmers with no source of iodine for their diet. Fish meal, cotton, and seaweed are staples of a trade that has flourished as long as anyone can remember.