This engaging study surveys the impact of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly of A.D. 800-1300 in North and Central America. The Medieval Climatic Anomaly was a worldwide phenomenon that is best known in Europe for warming temperatures that allowed farmers to expand production, and that affected cultural patterns and reshaped European history. This volume argues it also happened in North and Central America.
The author, Timothy Pauketat, is an archaeologist at the University of Illinois and a leading scholar of the Mississippian culture of the Mississippi River Valley. He says this book is a travel guide to “the most consequential period of history in North America,” when climate change helped alter the course of human history. He ignores political modern borders, especially the modern Mexican-United States border, to focus on the interaction of various Native polities over the course of this 500-year period.
Each chapter focuses on some of the major entities of North America like the Maya and various Mesoamerican empires including the Toltecs and Aztecs. Moving north, he examines the rise of the Puebloan cultures of the Southwest including Chaco Canyon as well as the Hohokam and others. The southern Great Plains and the Middle Mississippi River Valley with the metropolis of Cahokia complete the tour.
The narrative concentrates on the human events and climatological impacts on the cultural development – or decline. One unifying theme is the presence everywhere of powerful rain gods, originating in Mesoamerica, that reflect the importance of weather on culture and the environment. A warmer climate brought great agricultural productivity, but more intense storms as well.
Unlike in Europe there is no written record to guide students of the era in North and Central America. Scholars must make use of archaeology, ethnology, cosmology, and Native accounts to coax out the story; and that is what this author does as he synthesizes information from many sources into a readable narrative. An added feature is a brief description at the end of each chapter of the archaeological sites discussed therein.
Much of the material in this volume is controversial and many scholars will challenge this author’s storyline and conclusions. But it will challenge archaeologists to take a look at the bigger picture as this study does and reach for new insights into the development of Native cultures in North and South America and to how they are interconnected.
