The great house, Pueblo Bonito, stands gaunt and silent, nestling under the precipitous cliff, the serried rooms open to the gray sky. A chill wind scatters dead leaves and delicate snowflakes across the empty plaza on this bleak, winter day. Clouds hang low over the cliffs of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, swirling in the gusts of the January storm. The silence is complete.
A thousand years ago, Pueblo Bonito was a sacred place, which echoed to spectacular dances at the summer solstice. Visitors from miles around flocked to this, perhaps the greatest of all Southwestern pueblos. Then, in A.D. 1130, fifty years of drought sank over Chaco Canyon. Maize yields plummeted. Within a few years, Pueblo Bonito emptied. Half a century later, Chaco Canyon was virtually deserted. After many centuries within the canyon walls, the Ancestral Pueblo had moved away and settled with relatives living in bettered watered areas.
This winter day, no ghosts of a thousand years ago rise to haunt my imagination and excite my consciousness. The past is dead, long vanished into oblivion. I’m reminded of Shelley’s Ozymandias, King of Kings, his deeds forgotten, his palaces reduced to crumbling ruins.
In A.D. 1118, a decade before the great drought arrived at Chaco, the Khmer god-king Suryavarman II ascended to the throne of Angkor on Cambodia’s Tonle Sap in Southeast Asia. Almost immediately, he began building his masterpiece, Angkor Wat. Thousands of his subjects labored on his palace and temple, a vast replica of the Hindu universe, complete with sacred mountains. Nothing mattered but to serve the god-king. Suryavarman and his successors created a centripetal religious utopia erected on a foundation of intensive rice cultivation, irrigated with canals, reservoirs and flooded paddies nourished by the summer flood.
Angkor Wat no longer boasts of gilded towers and brilliantly painted temples. But it still mesmerizes, with its maze of stairways and long, echoing galleries adorned with yard upon yard of royal processions, armies on the march, and sinuous dancing girls promising the delights of paradise. Then you realize that the place is lifeless, a moment frozen in time, abandoned by its builders when in full magnificence, in part because drought dried up their rice paddies and they went hungry.
Again, Ozymandias comes to mind. Angkor Wat leaves you with a sense of futility and despair.
Chaco Canyon and Angkor Wat are silent testimony to the power of climate to affect human society, for better or worse.
Soon after Suryavarman’s loyal subjects labored on Angkor Wat, Notre Dame de Chartres cathedral rose in northern France. Built in a mere quarter century around A.D. 1195, the Gothic cathedral was the sixth church on the site, a miracle in stone and glass. Like Angkor Wat, Chartres is a masterpiece, but this one’s still part of the fabric of human life, a place where masses are celebrated and psalms chanted. Here the infinite becomes a miracle in stone and glass. Chartres is all windows, set among soaring beams and graceful arches. Gemlike sunlight shines through them, creating transcendental effects. The setting still brings heaven to earth and links the secular and the spiritual, just as it did a thousand years ago. Here the past is still alive.
Chartres was built at a time when Europe basked under warmer climate and a long series of good harvests. Those who benefited thanked God and the unknown powers of the cosmos for their bounty. They built a cathedral in gratitude.
The world of a thousand years ago was a vibrant, diverse place, much of it a tapestry of volatile civilizations, great lords, and endemic warfare. Camel caravans, the Great Silk Road, and monsoon winds now connected much of the Old World in the first iteration of a truly global economy. However, most humans still lived in small hunting bands or as subsistence farmers, surviving from harvest-to-harvest, eking a living from the soil. We have long known of this world from archaeology, from excavations into great cities, into caves and humble shell mounds, and from scatters of Norse iron nails in the High Arctic, from historical documents and oral traditions. But it’s only now that we’re learning just how profoundly the warmer climate of the day affected humanity. This book is the story of five centuries of changing climate—in fact, of a global warming--between A.D. 800 and 1300 and their impact on the world of a millennium ago. As in our own time, climate change did not plot a straight line from year to year, and varied from place to place. But its peaks and valleys followed a trend that we can clearly make out in retrospect. We have much to learn from this story about power of climate change to affect our own future.
